/ Flash /
“I have a plan to get the new hen to start laying eggs,” Eddie said, interrupting Ada’s assigned reading for her night class.
Ada looked over the pages of Women of Greek Literature to her husband on the other side of their front lawn. Eddie stood outside the large chicken pen, fingers looped through the wire. Four hens pecked and rested in the shade of their coop. She tucked her pencil behind her ear.
Eddie pulled something small and white from his pocket.
Ada squinted over her sunglasses and sat up on her lawn chair. “What’s that?” she asked.
He tossed it up and caught it a few times before answering. “A golf ball.”
“I’m not following, hon.”
“You put the golf ball in the nesting box and the hen will think it’s an egg,” he answered, slipping the ball back into his pocket. “It’ll encourage it to lay more.”
“That’s the plan?”
“It’s a concept of a plan.”
She returned to her reclined reading position and dove back into the story of Ariadne, adding an asterisk next to the part where Theseus abandons her on an island after she helps him escape the Minotaur. Her sunny lawn chair, her book, and a glass of iced tea had been singing their siren’s song to her all Saturday. While she wasn’t too fond of sharing the yard with the overwhelming stench of chicken shit, their busy clucks and flapping wings had grown on her.
“We get five eggs a week from the Austra, four from the Plymouth, three from the Wyandotte,” Eddie complained. “The Black Star should give us another five but it won’t lay.”
Ada nodded absently.
“That’s about seventeen a week and we’re only at twelve.”
“Isn’t a dozen enough?”
“It’s rejecting the nesting box. Something’s wrong with it,” he muttered. “We’re better off eating it.”
“Why don’t you name them?” Ada asked, circling a footnote about Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter. “You know, validate their existence?”
“They’re investments, not pets.”
Ada shrugged. “I read somewhere that names make animals more productive.”
“I don’t see how that’d help.”
“I don’t see how it’d hurt.”
Eddie walked to the yard’s edge to take his usual place along the fence.
“What’d you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. What makes them unique?”
He scanned the flock and pointed at the Wyandotte. “This one’s the prettiest, I think.”
“Easy,” Ada said, tapping the book. “Helen: the chick that launched a thousand ships.”
“OK,” he said, then nodded toward the striped one. “The Plymouth Rock is the most consistent with eggs.”
“Reliable, faithful—Penelope.” Ada smiled to herself. Maybe she was more prepared for her exam than she thought. “What about the white one?”
“The Austra?” he asked, twisting his face. “I don’t know. It used to be pretty broody.”
“Brooding?”
“Broody. It wanted to mother and hatch the eggs.”
Ada’s mind drew a blank. She almost suggested Niobe, but naming her after a bereaved mother and then eating her eggs was too bleak to stomach.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“It’s probably the fastest runner of the group,” Eddie answered. “Always finds pests the quickest.”
“Ah, that’s the huntress Atalanta.”
Eddie looked at the last hen with disdain. Ada felt a little bad for her. “That was supposed to be the most productive and it’s given us nothing. So what name means ‘useless?’” he asked.
Ada held her tongue and sipped her iced tea.
“It ate the only eggs it ever laid,” he added, plucking a yellow dandelion from its roots.
“Sounds like Medea to me.”
Eddie watched the Sullivans drive by. “I can’t remember all these.”
“How do you think I feel?” Ada pointed at her book. “I have twenty to worry about for tonight—you have four.”
Silence fell. A breeze blew Ada’s hair over her shoulders, carrying the smell of slow-cooked tomato sauce from Mrs. Agosti’s kitchen next door. A few houses down, the Wilsons’ sprinkler system went off. Eddie leaned over the fence and scowled. “I’m sick of those going off so early.”
Ada rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“I’m gonna talk to Michael again.”
“Eddie, it’s not our yard. Leave it alone.”
“They’re supposed to go off at ten.”
“You know Melinda works evenings.”
“So he can’t water his lawn right because she stays out late?”
“She doesn’t ‘stay out late.’ She’s working at the hospital,” she replied. “He doesn’t want her to walk through them or slip when she gets home.”
Eddie stared.
Ada rubbed her bruised knee. “He cares about her. It’s nice.”
“She shouldn’t be out late working in the first place,” he grumbled.
Ada flipped to the page with an illustration of Deianira dressing her husband in a poisoned tunic. The poison was so painful he threw himself into a fire. “Out late or out working?”
Eddie’s glare was interrupted by a series of whimpers from the baby monitor on the table beside Ada’s lawn chair. Its lights pulsed from green to red, illuminating a drop of condensation as it slipped down her glass.
Ada held her breath and fixed her eyes on her book. Eddie turned his back to her and practiced his golf swing with an imaginary driver. He shaded his eyes from the afternoon sun and watched the hypothetical ball sail over the neighborhood.
She wondered if, in his mind, it went on forever or if he had planned its limits, too.
A wail rang from the monitor. Ada sank, pretending to write in the margin.
“Hon,” Eddie said, eyeing her over his shoulder. He was still holding the imaginary club.
“My exam—”
“Our baby.”
Ada unzipped the backs of her thighs from the plastic chair and picked up her book and her tea before heading inside.
There was a time when she could have left her things on that chair. She brushed her feet on the welcome mat and shut the screen door behind her, catching a glimpse of Medea flying to the opposite side of the pen.