Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht

meanings.
    Their mother said very little on these road trips, napping and looking out the window, flipping through a plant catalog, while their father played cassettes of Larry Blevins’s Town and Country Christmas Bluegrass Jamboree . “Where should we stop for lunch, y’all?” their father, trying to be upbeat, would ask after they’d gone through Fort Worth and were approaching Arlington, the Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and water slides of the big amusement parks taunting them on both sides of the highway. Molly pressed her forehead against the window glass until the passing structures were nothing but blurs of primary colors.
    â€œDairy Queen,” said Flannery, flipping her long braid back and forth. Flannery always knew what she wanted. They weren’t normally allowed fast food, but Flannery’s tone of voice implied they deserved it, that this was a shitty way to have to spend a weekend, and that lunch at Dairy Queen was the least their parents could do.
    Molly didn’t remember their mother smiling on these trips. Was it because she knew her smile was slowly becoming a grimace? That gummy snarl that eventually claimed all the faces of people with Huntington’s? Or was there just no reason to?
    Back then, when they were alone, Molly begged Flan to retell stories of their mother before. Her older sister claimed their mother used to star in plays at the local theater, which was in the round with big gray bleacher seats. This impressed Molly because Abilene washer whole world, and this theater, where they sometimes went to see pageants and musicals at Christmas, the apex of local sophistication and grandeur. Flannery claimed their mother had sometimes taken them along to a performance, allowing them to sit backstage and eat sandwiches, and that the other actors doted on them, teaching them dance steps and painting their faces with stage makeup. Molly had no memory of these events, but she believed Flan. She believed her sister that the golden age of their family had passed.
    When Molly opened the door to her house, a stucco bungalow covered by a tin roof that didn’t match but was too expensive to replace, Brandon was sitting at the kitchen table looking intently into a dirt-encrusted cardboard box as the last of dusk light filtered through the miniblinds.
    â€œWhat do you suppose this is?” he asked, holding up an oddly shaped orange-and-green gourdlike vegetable from the box.
    â€œMagic pumpkin.” She dropped her keys into the ceramic bowl on top of the antique secretary desk.
    He tilted his head, considering it. “Sautéing it in butter wouldn’t cook off any of the enchantment?”
    â€œNo way.”
    When they received their weekly box of produce from Steven’s farm—Molly and Brandon owned a small community share—it was often filled with exotic varieties of vegetables that they didn’t really know what to do with.
    â€œSmothering it in cheese might not hurt, either.”
    Santiago was coming to dinner, and they had a few hours to kill before Lucinda Williams took the stage at La Zona Rosa. As Brandon washed and put away the vegetables, Molly slipped down into the rocking chair. Out the window, she watched her neighbor across the street soap up his sedan, suds overflowing out of the drivewayand running down the street, a green garden hose snaked around his feet. There was a sycamore tree in the man’s front yard that reminded Molly of her childhood home, of the two sycamores she and Flannery used to climb until eventually both trees died from a fungal disease when she was a freshman in high school, leaving the front yard empty and burdened with sun. When they’d climbed the trees as girls, she on one and Flan on the other, they pretended to be inside fairy castles, draping gold blankets over themselves like capes and smuggling their parents’ champagne flutes to use as wands. Flannery always wanted to be the good