Little Labors

In Flagstaff, one

I am outside with the young chicken, in front of our conspicuously nice rental in Flagstaff, Arizona. The rental is an assemblage of shipping containers, insulated by a special ecologically sound paint, and oriented just so to the sun, etc., and on the sidewalk in the distance, I see a woman approaching with her two young daughters, who are dressed beautifully. There’s also a man, a few paces behind her, carrying an open cardboard box of canned and boxed goods. The man waves, somehow too soon, from too far away, and too familiarly. It’s weird. It makes him seem drunk or high. I wave back. A short time later, the woman waves too, as do the children, who, as they near, approach the young chicken with interest; the young chicken is shy with them. The older girl kneels down to be on a level with the young chicken; she asks her mother if she can give the little girl one of her gummy bears; the mother tells me that the gummy bears are organic; the chicken doesn’t take the gummy bear, and the mother tells her daughters not to worry about it, that not everyone likes gummy bears. The girls are Kaysia and Shalia, the mother says, they are three and seven. The man is standing a few feet off, grinning widely. The mother asks me if I live around here and I say that I don’t, and then I ask her if she lives around here and she says that it’s complicated. The children, along with the chicken, have wandered about ten feet away, to the driveway of our rental, and their mother is explaining to me that although she was born in Pennsylvania, she was kidnapped by her mom when she was eleven months old, after which they lived in Canada, in Mexico, eventually in Los Angeles, until, when she was three and a half years old, the authorities caught up with them. “My brother thought my dad was a ghost,” she tells me, laughing. Then they returned to Pennsylvania, lived with their dad. Her mother was in jail in Pennsylvania, so they could visit her. I didn’t know what to say. I asked the woman, How were things now with her parents, did she get along with them? She said that in the past year her dad had died, and that her mom is in Phoenix, dying of cancer, she is taking care of her, it has been a difficult year; she said that the father of her youngest was suing her for $10,000 in court, and she couldn’t afford that, she is still a university student, studying to be a math teacher, she loves math, always has, she lives in Phoenix now, not here, she is just in Flagstaff to visit her old friend, Ray; at this, she gestured to the man with the box who was still standing a few feet away. He was still grinning, and he still didn’t approach. The mother is an unusually pretty woman. Somehow we are still standing there, together. The chemical equation between us seems to be off, as if atoms are going to shift from one side to the other, because that is the law. It has to balance out. She’s still chatting and chatting. Then I hear my daughter crying. She is lying on her back on the pavement of the driveway. The two young girls are looking at their mother, and at me. The older girl says, We were trying to help her stand up again and that was when she fell over.