..... Eddie and Jolene had learned to fight like adults. To argue. Reasonable like. No raised voices. Nothing thrown. None of that anymore. Just two people sitting on either side of the kitchen table, talking evenly and in measured tones about a burned oven mat with fairy tale mushrooms on it. They could just be drinking iced tea over Eddie's lunch break and talking about whatever's on the television in the living room. They're that calm. That calm looking.
..... The oven mat's there between them, singed black, wet around the mushrooms still.
..... Jolene sets her tea glass on the table and holds it down with both hand and looks at Eddie. She breathes deep once, twice, three times like she knows to, and, when she's rehearsed what's she's intending to say here, she says it: "You know that was my momma's from when-you know that it was her favorite."
..... She nods her head down to the oven mat.
..... "And you know it's just supposed to hang there on the wall. That's all. That's its complete and total job. It's got its own tack, even. You could have used a rag to get your lasagna. Anything else."
..... Below the table Eddie's wringing at the front tail of his shirt. Between the range hood and the water heater closet there's a charred strip of paneling where the oven mat used to hang. The oven mat got hung there because of that charred place, even, to hide where he had finally buried his favorite steak knife a few weeks ago, just shy of Jolene's face. What he hadn't know until exactly that moment, though, was that some past fool had stapled the two-twenty extension to the backside of the paneling right there. To keep it away from the heat of breakfast, maybe. Or a thousand dinners.
..... The current had thrown him across the kitchen, landed him smoking and blind by the table, the melted metal toes of his boots glowing in the dark for moments after.
..... His gums still bleed from it sometimes, and he blames Jolene.
..... The shirt tail in his hands tears some now so his hands start to wring on each other.
..... "It was gonna burn, though," he says, and neither look at his lasagna sitting cold and black by the sink from its twenty minutes spent alone in the kitchen, the twenty prescribed minutes it was supposed to take for each of them to go to opposite ends of the trailer and talk themselves down.
..... "If I hadn't dunked it, the whole place, poof," he says. "That lasagna pan was already melting, even."
..... Jolene takes the oven mat with her right hand, holds it front of her face, out to him, so he can see the damage.
..... "It was my momma's," she says. "Dammit, Eddie, it was my-"
..... Eddie looks away and swings his hand through the air in grand defeat.
..... "No curse words," he says, careful to keep his own voice even, careful not to be the one who starts it all again. "Jolene, you know that." He gets up and walks heavy across the linoleum floor and places his forehead against the refrigerator. "Can't you remember nothing he told us?"
..... Jolene holds the oven mat to her mouth to hide her chin trembling. She's still hearing Eddie's footsteps like thunder lost in the deadspace below the trailer, and she realizes they always come to the kitchen to fight because of that, because when they walk they walk with the sound of gods, so then things like burned oven mats and forgotten inspection stickers and missing cigarettes can really matter, can really mean something, can become something the gods themselves might kill one another over if the air conditioner just quit working one day and never came back on.
..... She doesn't tell Eddie any of this, of course. She apologizes as she's supposed to, and he doesn't look up from the deep white of the refrigerator, and because she can feel her eyes growing full and wet, she directs them out the window into the yard, because the doctor said that just as much as curse words, crying is another first step, a signpost, a warning, and nobody wants to go to the hospital anymore, right?
..... Through the window pane that's really a two-liter Coke bottle slit down the side, opened up and taped across a ten inch square of space, Jolene studies the dual tracks of the ambulance. They're pressed deep into the yard, still holding pale caliche water for the waterbugs to dance across like nothing's wrong in this world. She finally looks back when she hears Eddie going at the cold lasagna.
..... She turns her whole body to him, gives him her full attention.
..... "We're not finished here," she says. "We can't stop until we're finished."
..... Eddie cuts a rough square off the lasagna corner, and since it's cold it stays together on the way to his mouth and he's cutting another when Jolene says it again, calmly, that they're not finished.
..... He swallows hard and spreads his fingers wide and drops the plastic pan of lasagna into the dishwater. The pan floats for a moment and then the three kinds of heavy cheese force it under and the water thickens, the grease rising to the surface in dime-sized lenses.
..... "I got to be back before one," he says. "One." He stares at Jolene who's seen the rotary clock on the oven. It reads 12:42, but it's off by a few minutes one way or the other, she never can remember.