Back Seat

In the front seat, the driver and her sister keep up a meaningless chat, trying not to overhear but hoping, yes, please, to overhear. 

In the back seat, their eighty-two-year-old mother cuddles and whispers with her new beau as dusk descends. They have all spent the day in Florida’s Everglades, where they kept a watchful eye on crocodiles lurking near the surface of the brackish wetlands.   

Now, steering through the softening twilight on the hour-long trip back to Boca Raton, the driver glances in the rearview mirror at her mother and the sweetheart, their gray heads touching.  

Widowed for six years, the mother is soon to marry again. She and her eighty-six-year-old fiancé know about the gossip swirling around them, the smirks hiding behind the well-wishes. Friends have issued blunt challenges to the woman, heedless of the hurt their words might cause.   

You’re desecrating your dead husband’s memory. 

A lot of women wouldn’t marry an eighty-six-year-old man.  

Why not just keep it a friendship?  

But now, in the back seat, they talk about their happiness. And then one word rises above the murmurs.  

“Orgasm.” 

The sisters’ conversation skids to a stop, and they share a sideways glance. Their mother said that word.  

The driver keeps her eyes on the darkening highway ahead. She thinks about a Saturday morning when she was fourteen and helping her mother change the sheets.  

“What’s a French kiss?” she asked. 

By then the daughter had had her first kiss, a memorable meeting of lips but no more. Probably she had heard the term at school and had some inkling of its fun naughtiness. Now she was pushing, testing to see what her mother, who had told her nothing about the exquisite intimacy of bodies, might share.  

Her mother stroked the crease of the sheet, folding it just so over the top of the blanket.  

“You don’t need to know that,” she said. 

Sheri Venema’s nonfiction has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Emerge Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, Art in the Time of Covid-19 (San Fedele Press), and Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids (Eerdmans Publishing). Her travel writing and feature stories have been published in Baltimore Magazine and The Washington Post. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and a dog named Raven. Find her on Facebook at facebook.com/sheri.venema.   

This essay is a Short Reads original.