HOME

In her mind, Mona had this frosted pick meringue-covered picture of home. A circle of a cake house two tiers tall, with those perfect little sugar rosebuds pressed lovingly down into the top icing.

Her real home was the back seat of a faded green Dodge Dart parked at the end of a dirt track in the desert. The meringue she dreamed of would have melted.

But when she lay down in the back seat of her car at night with all the windows opened and listened to the coyote’s talk she could close her eyes and see that cakey home.

Although it changed colors in her head it was always pastels. She’d never seen a real house painted those colors or made in that shape. Real houses here were all the palette shades of sand or, in some parts of town, bright pink or blue or orange. And they were all boxy: square, rectangles, dominoes, geometrically opposed to her circle.

The inside of her Dodge was boxy too. The only circles inside it were the steering wheel which had lost its function when she couldn’t buy gas anymore, and the springs under the thinning gray upholstery of the back seat that were digging into her shoulder and hip. She shut her eyes again but it was no use. She squirmed. The back seat was too short for her lanky body, and she needed to stretch out. She popped open the door by her pillow and hung her head out, then her arms.

She flopped over onto her belly, and let her ands rest in the dirt outside the door. The cake fantasy wasn’t working; maybe she’d just go with the shape. She smoothed the dirt with the flat of her hand and built a circle with the pebbles she’d moved. She peopled it with used toothpicks off the floor of the Dodge. A whole family of nice people, not like what she’d had, not like what she’d lost.

The good thing about toothpick people is that you could make them anything you wanted.
Tomorrow she’d walk to the Senior Center, it was free bread day. They were nice to her there, called her by name, “Hi Mona”, invited her to lunch. They accepted who she was, who anybody was: fat, old, thin, rich, or poor enough to have to live in your car. Also the front of the building was round; the lunch tables were round, even the receptionist’s face was round. It was a homey kind of place.

If they invited her for lunch again she’d stay.

They might have desert after lunch, maybe they’d have cake.