Iron Shoes

My parents, Olive, and I arrive at Uncle Don’s Memorial cookout after a day spent laying flowers at graves. The extended family here is alive. I’m the youngest by a generation; Olive, the oldest. I volunteer to watch her as I have all month, stuck between one year of college and the next, back in a place where people use God as an excuse.

Olive offers no excuses, her thoughts ungraspable. I guide her wheelchair down paved garden paths in search of Uncle Don’s prize-winning peonies. Olive loved them once; now she jolts when she catches sight of the first blooms.

Uncle Don doesn’t believe in pets, though I advance slowly, used to stray cats underfoot. Dad collects them, I name them, and Mom worries we have five too many.

Last night I went dancing just to disappear from the past self my parents still believe in. Today, I hurt like I’m eighty. I stretch my body into an F, a K, a Y, balancing against Olive’s wheelchair and searching for pockets of pain.

Olive doesn’t dance, doesn’t move enough to get sore. She peers into the moon pool at the koi. Koi aren’t pets, Uncle Don would say. They’re ornamental. Olive calls them swimming carrots.

I wheel her around the picnic table and dish out enough seven-layer salad for two. Olive would rather sing old standards than follow new conversations, and her voice warbles with age, as if her vibrato has developed a vibrato. Memorial Day brings out “God Bless America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She slurs the refrains—Glory! Glory! becomes Gory! Gory! and I alone appreciate the satire.

We make it to Uncle Don’s pineapple upside-down cake before Olive’s face sours. My parents share a look and agree to take her home.

I asked Dad once, What goes on in Olive’s head? He said, Believe whatever thing seems nicest.

Nothing I believe about Olive is particularly nice: that the family comes back to her but only in flashes; that she is a muddle of a human being; that one day we’ll give up treating her like one of us, if we haven’t already.

Sometimes, running a comb through her thinning hair, I tell her everything I keep from Mom and Dad. She sees me, reflected in her dresser mirror, vulnerable and twitchy, like a koi on dry land.

But only for a moment.

I hope she loves us even when we aren’t feeding her, though it seems too much to ask.

Our motion light clicks on when we arrive home, though the sun’s only just set. Eyes flash in the tall grass beyond the driveway. Our next stray, should we choose. Last night, I made the mistake of feeding him: an invitation already sent and accepted.

I maneuver the wheelchair from the van and wait for Mom to shoo him away. She gambles instead, sings, Here, kitty kitty! into the twilight.

Olive turns her head.

Leigh Ann Ruggiero is a novelist, playwright, and Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University Billings. Their debut novel, Unfollowers, won the Juniper Prize for Fiction in 2021 and went on to win the National Indie Excellence Award for Multicultural Fiction and the Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Literary Fiction. Leigh Ann’s short plays have been selected for the Last Chance New Play Fest in Helena, MT, and, in 2023, Tetrachromacy won the festival’s Playwright Award.