When Janny's father takes his first swig off a cup of coffee, it's always a big one, no matter how hot the coffee is. He tilts his head back and swallows it fast, before he can even really taste it. "Like stepping into a cold shower," he says. "Wakes you up."
       Janny is thinking about this when her father tells her, "Make me a cup of coffee, sweetheart, while I go outside and shovel the snow. You know how I like it."
       Early November. Rockford, Illinois. The stereo is playing Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Even though it's a CD, the music sounds scratchy and old-fashioned music, like a black and white movie. The cover shows the Duke smiling, thin mustache, hair greased back, a polka-dotted coat and striped tie. Lately, Janny has become sick of her father's jazz, but she hesitates to turn it off for fear he'll scold her when he comes inside.
 

"It's an easy drive to anywhere," Janny's father's new boss had told him, and he tells it in turn to his family as they drive across Nebraska in June with the air conditioner on. Although she is only ten, Janny, in the backseat, is doing a crossword puzzle for teenagers. She is having trouble with the long words.
       "Chicago," says her father. "Madison, Milwaukee, the Quad Cities."
       "What are the `Quad Cities'?" Janny's mother asks.
       "I don't know. Bettentown, Cedar Falls, Iowa City." He pauses. "Dubuque. Something like that."
       "I seriously doubt it," says Janny's mother as they pass vast fields of wheat, sugar beets and corn.
       "What's an eleven-letter word for confusion?" Janny asks, but neither of her parents knows.
 

"Rockford is the second largest city in the state," Janny's blowzy orange-haired teacher tells the class during social studies. "But a distant second."
 

When Janny wakes up at seven, the snow is coming down in big swooping swirls. The wind whistles around the corner of their two-story house. This must be a blizzard, Janny thinks, though it's not. Janny has seen and touched snow once before, when her family drove up for a Christmas vacation from La Jolla to Lake Tahoe. However, this is the first time she has ever seen it falling from the sky. It is much quieter than she expected.
       By noon the sun has come out and when Janny cracks open the front door she can hear, all up and down the street, the scrape of plastic shovels against concrete.
 

Before Janny's mother moved back to California in September, Janny's father took them to a jazz concert at a Chicago nightclub. They sat near the stage at a tiny table. The waitress served Janny a five dollar Coke that tasted both watery and too sweet.
       "Are you telling me that a decent chemist can't find work anywhere in San Diego?" her mother had asked before the show began.
       "Things aren't the way they used to be. You know that. Read the papers."
       "Do you realize how much I loved our house?"
       Janny's father looks down at the beer in his hand.
       "I spent the better part of our marriage making that house exactly what I wanted it to be. And then you sell it. You hardly even looked for another job. You just let them transfer you."
       Janny's father turns, his eyes suddenly bright, as though he has an explanation which will finally satisfy his wife, but at that moment the six musicians troop on stage. The audience applauds and the musicians begin playing. The pieces are long and difficult, and Janny falls asleep with her arms folded on the tabletop.
 

"Your father seems to be a very nice man," Janny's teacher, her hair recently redyed a deep Tangier ocher, says to Janny after the parent-teacher conference.
       Janny shrugs.
 

Janny looks out the front window. Her father is helping the old man across the street shovel snow from his driveway. Janny reads the back of the small plastic container in her hand. "Use to prepare pickles made from vegetables and watermelon rind. Dissolve in water and soak, then rinse before canning." The front of the jar shows two unhealthy-looking pickles.
       Janny's father could tell her some other things about alum. It's a double sulfate of a univalent metal, aluminum potassium sulfate, to be exact. AlK(SO4)2 • 12H2O. Topical astringent and styptic.
       The alum, immaculate white with scattered lumps, looks like nothing so much as the snow outside. Janny wets her little finger, dips it into the alum and touches it to her tongue. "Ahhhch," she blenches from the sourness, spitting and spitting into the sink.
 

"Uh, ladies and gentleman, we have had many requests for Rex Stewart to do a trumpet concerto that has become quite popular through the years," the Duke is saying as Janny's father opens the front door, his tennis shoes covered with snow.
       "Oh, pumpkin," he says, "I wish you would have put the CD on pause." He hangs up his coat, sits down in the living room. "Coffee ready yet?" he calls.
       Of all the things she blames her father for, by far the most heinous is that somehow, inexplicably, he convinced her mother to leave Janny behind in Illinois. "Just a second, Daddy." Janny scoops two tablespoons of powdered alum into a big mug showing the Carmel coast. Then she pours the coffee, stirs in a splash of milk and a big pinch of sugar, just the way he likes it, and brings it to her father, his eyes shut, head nodding to a slow suggestive blues in which a muted trumpet tussles with an equally muted trombone.  

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about the author:
I teach in the MFA program at Antioch University-Los Angeles and at Santa Barbara City College, and I am the author of a textbook, Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (NTC, 1999), as well as several collections of poems from small presses, most recently Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest, and David Starkey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002). My short fiction appears in American Literary Review, BlackWater Review, Rhino, Rio Grande Review, and Sou’wester. I co-edit King Log, the online poetry journal.
E-mail: starkey_d (at) hotmail (dot) com
Website: King Log  

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