By Kathleen Fields
It’s dark in the Rosebud. Garnet-red carpet, low ceilings, gold-plated chandeliers—this place is really not fancy, just an aging Chicago joint. A sun-bleached picture of Daley hangs above the bar, and every table has a small, glittering, artificial rose. The heavy fabric of the wallpaper, white napkins, and tablecloths swallow up much of the restaurant’s sound, creating a hushed reverence like we are standing in the back of a busy funeral parlor or walking through Elvis’s Graceland.
It’s been a hard year. We even admit that it’s been a hard year. Bernadette is talking about the stupid questions people ask her about what happened. Eggplant salad comes out, and Noreen says balsamic wrong. Ball-saaam-ick, ball-sall-mick, forget it. I never say that word right. The blush of laughter floats across our table from a wedding shower, and we start laughing, thinking of our own wedding showers. What if we started a new line of Precious Moments called Depressive Moments? The Unemployed Spouse. The In Vitro Fertilization Loop. The Alcoholic. The Boss Who Jumped. The Sick Kid. The Dropped Dead. We could give them to brides at their wedding showers—a petite porcelain preview of what’s to come or like little Patron Saint statues. Guests go off the registry anyway. Rita gave me a subscription to the Smithsonian Magazine. Not on my registry. My aunt gave me a card that said, “Our presence is your present.”
We are laughing pretty hard. We are laughing so hard that tears start streaming down
Bernadette’s face, Noreen’s face, and my face. We know that laughter is what carries us through. We know that laughter is our sonic friendship necklace. Life might give us more than we can handle, but that’s why we practice being brave together. Our sides start to hurt, and the bride at the luncheon table looks over, wishing she were in on the joke.
Kathleen Fields (She/Her/They) lives in Chicago. Her honors include a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet & Author Fellowship, Midwest Writing Center’s Iron Pen prize for poetry and a Kankakee One Act Fest prize for playwriting. Fields is a three time National Endowment for the Humanities teacher fellow. Her poems, creative nonfiction and academic writing appear in literary magazines such as Belt Magazine, The Platform Review, The New York Times, and Terra Foundation for the Arts. She is a poetry reader at Iron Oak Editions and a founding poetry editor of Pine Row Press. She holds an M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University.
