“Hey, you said you needed a bow, right? I brought one from home.” Rita tossed the store-bought, stick-on bow onto the kitchen table. The bow was green and cheap and plasticky and Sara had to press her lips tight to keep from screaming, because Rita didn’t understand anything and never would.
“Sara?” Rita said. “It’s okay, I’ve got a whole bag of them left over from Christmas and--”
“I said I’d make one.” Sara pulled the bottle of cologne out of the shopping bag and flicked a finger at the green bow. “Those are crap.” Even unopened and still in its box, the chemical scent of the cologne was enough to make her blink. Then blink some more, rapidly, to hold back a sudden onslaught of tears. Not now. Not in front of Rita.
“Hey, language,” Rita said in her prissy way, but with so little heat Sara felt obligated to ignore her. “Not like that cologne is super high-quality either,” Rita added under her breath.
Sara rolled her eyes as she closed them in disdain, a maneuver that had always brought an immediate call-out from her mother. Rita seemed annoyed by it, too, but she was still the newcomer, which meant Sara could use it at will. And did.
It’s not that Sara hated Rita. Rita was…fine. Not great, but fine. She didn’t know anything about quilting, or sewing, or anything crafty, really. Sara’s mother had once welded together a steampunk hoop dress and embedded Arduino-controlled LEDs into the fabric, all over two weekends of work. Last week Rita had shown Sara a macrame potholder she’d made that looked slightly worse that the one Sara had done eight years ago. In kindergarten.
Sara’s dad raved about Rita’s cooking, making a big show about it, and yes, she could do fancy food. But every meal had quinoa or some other fancy ingredient, and her macaroni and cheese used stinky cheeses and was too gooey. So try-hard.
But it was fine, because Rita was temporary and there was no reason to hate temporary. Sara already had a vague idea of the woman that her father would eventually marry (or remarry), a woman who looked and acted more or less exactly like her mother. Or at least the way her mother had been, before all the surgeries.
Rita was not that woman.
Of course, Sara was glad to see her dad happy again, in a way that wasn’t just him trying to be happy for her sake. But that didn’t mean he could just forget. Or that Sara could.
“I need ribbon,” Sara said.
Rita dug through the plastic grocery bag she’d pulled the green bow from. “I think I’ve got like a spool or something in here—”
“No.” Another eye-roll-and-close, then Sara spun on her socked heel and stomped out of the kitchen, heading for her mother’s crafting room. When her hand touched the doorknob, her body froze on its own and she recoiled slightly, feeling the sadness that had kept her away from the room for the last year. Then, brow furrowed, she pushed the door open.
Her mother’s craft table was still a junkyard of cards and the last couple of vases topped with thin sticks that used to be flowers. The scent of the daffodils—her mother’s favorite—was long gone, replaced by the ghostly, but still comforting, smell of glue and paint. A part of Sara was relieved; at the funeral the scent of daffodils had been everywhere.
She heard Rita enter the room behind her, footsteps clicking on the tiled floor because she’d forgotten—again—that this was a shoes-off house. How could you get to be thirty or forty or whatever Rita was and still be so clueless?
Out of the corner of her eye, Sara could see Rita touch the dead daffodils, then stop when Sara’s body stiffened. “We should get some new flowers, yes?” Rita asked. Sara pretended she hadn’t heard.
Then she saw it, poking out from under the cards. “See?” she said, pulling it out carefully, then brandishing at Rita’s face. “We use a real, two-sided ribbon like this. One side is pretty, the other isn’t.” The familiarity of the texture on her fingertips, alternating smooth and rough, was like an electric shock.
Rita nodded, but Sara thought she caught a little tilt to her head, like whatever. “You can tie that into a bow like this one?” Rita asked, holding up the green monstrosity.
“Better than that.” Sara found the center of the ribbon’s length and cross-tied it over the little box of cologne. The weight of the bottle shifted slightly inside. “It has to be really fancy.”
“Of course it does,” Rita muttered.
Ears burning, Sara continued. “Then, you start the loops.” She began folding the ribbon, holding the ends in her fingertips. But the loops looked wrong, too floppy and messy. Even before the finishing knot, the bow was clearly too poofy and misshapen to salvage.
“Wait, let me try that again.” Using the same base knot, she started the loops again. This time the loops were too long, and she ran out of ribbon too early.
There was a trick to this, she remembered. Was it that the ribbon had to have little indentations, to show you where the final wrapping loop went?
Suddenly the sound of Rita breathing behind her was incredibly loud. Sara took a few steps away from her and started the knot over. With the knot loosened, the box slipped out of the ribbon and Sara just barely managed to catch it before it hit the tiled floor.
“You want to do that on the table?” Rita asked. “I can clear a nice spot for you.” Sara shot her a look and took a step further away from the table.
“Okay,” Rita said. “Hey, we’ve still got a few hours until your dad gets home. We could go pick up some ribbon. And I was thinking, that razor I bought him has a matching mustache grooming set, maybe you could get that and return the--"
“I’ve got it,” Sara said, through her teeth. She closed her eyes, trying to see her mother’s hands again. The way her fingers would dance with the ribbon, making it something more than it should have been.
But all she could remember was her mother’s face.
A sudden blast of music behind her almost made her drop the box again. “Oops! Sorry,” Rita said, holding up her phone. “I was looking on YouTube for a video. I found one called How to Tie the Perfect Bow, and it looks pretty—"
“I know what to do.” She turned to open the closet, which had always been crammed full of her mother’s crafts supplies, squirreled away into plastic bins and drawers. There was an entire drawer for ribbons. “There’s a special ribbon that has indentations--"
The closet was empty.
Sara’s skin went tingly and numb, like her entire body had fallen asleep, and for a weird, wild moment she thought they’d been robbed. That somehow, some kind of criminal had crept in and stolen her mom’s crafts supplies.
“Oh.” Rita’s voice came from behind her. Then: “Oh.”
“What did you do?” Sara whirled to face Rita, her skin hot and full, blood thudding in her ears. The adrenaline rush of her outrage uncoiled in her like an animal, and it was horrible yet comforting, because it felt almost like doing something. Like not being helpless.
“Your dad and I—your dad said it was time to—” Rita stopped, took a breath. “Your dad needs a home office. And you—”
“What!” Rita’s eyes ducked away from the fury of Sara’s glare, and the part of Sara that had felt beaten down the last year rejoiced.
“—you stopped doing crafts stuff, for a long time now, so we—"
The blood rushing in Sara’s ears drowned out the rest of those pointless words. Her fists clenched, and dimly she felt the cardboard of the cologne box crush under her grip, fingers conforming to the hard curve of the bottle inside.
“Shit!” Sara screamed. Rita took a step backward, face twisted at the shout and the profanity, and the sight of her displeasure unfolded a little blossom of joy in Sara’s chest.
“Hey!” Rita said, a little firmer now. “Do not use that tone or language with me.” Because Rita was Chief of the Propriety Police, enforcer of stupid rules that didn’t matter. “It’s just a decoration, there’s no need to get upset.”
“It’s a joke!” Shaking the bottle and its crushed box at Rita’s face. “I picked out that shitty cologne for my dad when I was seven, and my mom always made a really fancy bow with a really fancy ribbon for it, even after I knew how shitty the cologne was, because it’s a joke! The fancy bow is what makes the joke funny!” She snatched the battered floof from Rita’s hand. “This stupid, cheap-ass bow just makes it sad!”
Face pale, eyes wide, Rita backed away. “I didn’t know—”
“Because it’s not your joke!” And with a growl of frustration, Sara raised her right hand high over her head and savagely threw the box onto the tile floor. The cheap glass bottle inside shattered, and to Sara’s ears it was like a bomb exploding at her feet.
The stench of cheap cologne rose like a fog, cloying and pervasive. Sara could taste its chemical tang, coating her tongue. They both began coughing, eyes burning.
She ran past Rita, out the door and down the hall into her own bedroom, slamming the door, hoping the smell of the cheap cologne made Rita sick, made her stay out of her mother’s room forever.
#
About an hour later there was a soft knock on the door. Sara, sitting on the floor by her bed, head against her bent knees, was too tired to respond or even react when Rita gently opened the door, walked to where Sara was sitting on the carpet, and joined her, back against the bed, legs outstretched. She was not wearing shoes. The cloud of cologne that surrounded Rita settled over them both, and Sara coughed weakly, unwillingly.
“So, I watched that video.” Rita held up the object in her hand. “What do you think?”
Rita had unspooled the green plastic bow ribbons and combined them with the ribbon from the desk. There were loops of different sizes, some of them twisted, some flat, some poofy, and more knots than appeared necessary. More of a tangle than a bow, like the little bits that her mother used to sweep off the floor at the end of the day.
"Oh,” Sara said. She opened her mouth to say more, then closed it.
“I’m sorry.” A long, ragged sigh came out of Rita’s exhausted mouth. “I guess we—I—should have asked you about the closet.” Shock jolted across Sara’s skin when she saw tears in Rita’s eyes. Shame suddenly turned her guts cold and hard.
“I couldn’t remember how to tie that bow.” Sara spoke into her knees, voice trembling just slightly. “My mom taught me.” She turned to face Rita, eyes red. “My mom taught me and I forgot.”
Rita nodded. Then she cleared her throat and said, “I’m not a mother. But I was a daughter. And I don’t think your mother meant for you to remember everything she ever taught you. Just the important stuff.” She leaned her shoulder over to nudge Sara’s. "And you remember the important stuff, don’t you?”
Sara nodded, a move that was almost imperceptible but felt enormous. “I hope so.”
After a moment, Rita clapped her hands against her thighs. “So what do you say? Should we go get your dad another bottle of cologne before he gets back?” She held up the monster bow. “Maybe a better bow?”
“It’s not so bad,” Sara said.
They stared at the mass of ribbon in Rita’s hand.
“It looks like shit,” Rita said.
Shocked laughter shot a blob of snot out of Sara’s nose. It sailed through the air and plopped onto the bow. Rita let out a long, boisterous laugh, almost doubling over, culminating in a loud fart.
“Oh my God,” Rita gasped, “That cologne stinks!” And then they were both rolling on the floor, laughing and coughing from the smell of cheap cologne.
By the time the laughter finally trickled away, Sara thought she might just buy that mustache grooming kit Rita had mentioned.
Tom Vandermolen is an award-winning author of (mostly) horror and science fiction stories. His story "Nonzero," was a winner of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in the long-running contest's 40th anthology. A retired US Navy officer and current data scientist, Tom lives in Seattle with his wife. You can find him at https://tomvandermolen.com. "How to Tie a Perfect Bow" is his first non-genre, "literary" Short Story..
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