Page 37 of Where You're Planted

“Jesus, have you never eaten a taco before?”

She swatted at his hand reaching to—well, he didn’t know what. He’d simply reacted with his usual inappropriate sense of urgency, as if some spilled lettuce and cheese were a crisis. He put his hands back on his own side of the table but grumbled, “Turn your face instead of the taco.”

“Don’t tell me how to eat.”

“Like this, Mom,” Briar piped up, turning to chomp into her own hard shell with minimal casualties, all while keeping her eyes glued to the book open on the picnic table beside her plate.

“Now you’ve turned my kid against me,” she told Jack, but she said it with a good-natured laugh. She glanced down at Briar’s book, which was open to an illustration of a cicada nymph mid-transformation into its adult form. “Yikes. What is that?”

“Cicada,” Briar mumbled, pausing to wipe her mouth.

Tansy shot a squeamish grimace at Jack but said to Briar, “Pretty cool.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know you can catch them in the summer and watch them molt?” Jack asked.

Briar peeled her eyes from the page, interested.

“When they come up out of the ground, their first instinct is to climb. I used to catch them when I was a kid and hook their feet onto my window screen. It happens pretty fast after that. Their exoskeleton cracks open, and they kind of trust-fall out of their shell. They’re soft and squishy, and their wings are curled up until a fluid pumps into them and they expand and harden. The whole thing is pretty…” He was going to saymiraculous. Especially since he’d witnessed several transitions gone wrong—cicadas not making it out of their exoskeleton quickly enough and their wings hardening too soon, deformed and flightless, or wind blowing them to the ground to be swarmed by fire ants. But instead, he cleared his throat and finished, “Pretty interesting.”

“Cool,” Briar said reverently. “Mom, can we—”

“Put alien bugs on our window screens all summer?” She laughed, shooting Jack a silent look that said,Thanks a lot, asshole. “Sure.”

But again, there was something softer in it now. Jack wanted more of these private looks from her. They seemed to signal a shift from them beingenemiestoquote-unquote enemies, like on some level they wereplayingat it now.

What he wanted to tell them—what always struck him about cicadas—was that if they survived the transition, they would hang around their empty shell for a while, like they needed time to recover from the whole violent and sudden ordeal. They would sit with what they’d just been, where they’d come from, until they were ready to move on.

But Briar was already back to her book, and instead of making the conversation weird with his profound cicada thoughts, Jack said to Tansy, “No wonder we don’t get along. I don’t read, and you hate the outdoors.”

“We don’t get along because youknowthat, yet you brought me to an entirely outdoor restaurant.”

“Maybe you’d like nature better if you didn’t insist on seeing it as your enemy.” He hadn’t meant it the way it sounded, like he was talking about himself.

One curious eyebrow arched, and she took a bite of her taco, mulling it over, spilling more lettuce. “I heard something today.”

He waited.

“I heard your budget is frozen.”

“Ah.”

Jack peered past the kids to where the ground sloped down toward the creek. The water wasn’t visible from here, only the wide break in the trees where it passed through.

“Given thegrandreopening,” she said, with emphasis, “I assumed you guys had your recovery handed to you.”

Jack scoffed, and she raised her palms to ward off his protest.

“I realize now that’s not true. And I guess I get why you might not want extra people in your space, using such prime real estate as the…bathroom-adjacent shed.”

He nodded slowly.

She looked completely earnest, but he felt he must have missed some undercurrent, some thinly veiled criticism. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but instead she nudged Briar’s half-empty plate. “You done? You want to go play?”

Briar didn’t look up from her book. “I don’t know.”

“You can read any time, but you can’t always play with your friends.”

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