Jordan Dilley

Prognosticating the Walnuts

In 1963, Dr. Sam Beckett was beating himself up in the Parkland Hospital over his failure to save JFK. In 1998, I would have settled for getting my stepfather out of bed and into a clean shirt. If I’d had someone like Al whispering advice and truisms in my ear, I would have put up with the serial lechery. But Al was a hologram, whereas the tobacco stains down the front of Richard’s Angels jersey were tactile and smelly.

He spent the afternoons sprawled out on the bed he shared with my mom, the electric flash of an old CRT TV squashing the peachy afternoon light as the cable station churned out reruns that weren’t yet vintage, just sad. He rarely spoke, eyes fixed on the screen as if enthralled, though he’d already seen every episode. If he was feeling loquacious, he’d grunt as he slung his legs over the bedspread on his way to the bathroom. Eventually, I could interpret those grunts like a first language, shifting through intonations like a miner, each sparkling fleck an indicator of a change in his emotional state. I became a human barometer and a Scott Bakula fangirl in the span of one summer.

My mother, sensing this tenuous affiliation (to my stepfather, not Scott Bakula), did her own mining, substituting the backdrop of a 90s anachronistic sitcom for aggressive feather dusting.

Swishswishswish; Is Richard still in bed?

Where else would he be?

Lemon polish. Spritzzzzz, spritzspritz: What do you two talk about?

Nothing. We just watch TV.

Feather duster falls, wooden handle clatters against the hardwood. At least he could change that dirty jersey. I swear to God, I’m going to burn that thing one day.

She delivered this promise to the living room, gaze bouncing from the black TV screen to the oak side table, looking for a morsel of unmolested dust. Finding none she glanced at me, daring me to say something. She should have known better; I would never object to passive-aggressive arson even if the Angels were 20-12 that season. Brown ostrich feathers waved me out of the room.

I drifted into the courtyard where Gigi, an appellation given to her by my stepfather even though she wasn’t his grandmother, was cracking walnuts. Empty shells were scattered around her on the stone terrace, their gnarled grooves complementing the ones in her own brown feet. She didn’t acknowledge me, she rarely did. On the special occasions when she noticed me sitting across from her at the dinner table, or next to her on the couch, she recoiled as if from a spark of electricity. Mom and Richard called it dementia, tossing the word around like a hot potato as if they agreed whoever was caught holding it when the timer went off had to finally cave and call the nursing facility.  

“Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay, Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay,” Gigi warbled. She looked at me and patted the spot next to her on the bench.

I sat down, wary of such easy acknowledgment. She began the ditty again, her feet tapping out the rhythm. When she got to the second verse, she nudged me.

“Come on,” she said, “you know this one.”

I didn’t. I’m not sure who she thought I was, but I’m not someone who knows the second verse of this Victorian dance hall ditty.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “But I don’t know the words.”

“But you do, I taught them to you!” She said, throwing an uncracked walnut behind her shoulder where it landed in an empty birdbath.

“Sorry, but—"

“You never pay attention,” she whined, her face scrunching until wrinkles competed for standing room.

“I’m not sure who you think—”

“You never listen. Not when I teach you songs, not when we learned our catechism, not when I stayed up helping you with algebra so you could graduate!”

She’s crying, flakes of walnut shell mixing with tears as she smashed her balled-up fists into her eyes. I looked toward the house, wondering if I’d be blamed for upsetting her.

“Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay,” I began, trying to match the melody.

Gigi’s hands dropped from her eyes and her face morphed into a happy moon as she picked up the tune. We sat there, legs dangling above the bleached stone, repeating the same line, close to, but never attaining harmony. Walnut tree branches and leaves shifted in the afternoon breeze, dappling our faces with shadow and light.

Raised voices crashed into us from the house. A door slammed, and then another. I looked at Gigi. She was cracking walnuts even though she already had enough for a feast. I crept toward the house, pockets swinging full of Gigi’s provisions. I patted them as if they contained guidance and protection, a protein-rich talisman or medicine bag. I looked back at Gigi, wishing there were pearls of wisdom lurking in the hollow walnut shells at her feet or the curls of gray hair that covered her head. But there was none.


The vacuum cleaner is running full blast in the living room. Couch cushions lay scattered on the brown carpet. My mother is lost in the vacuum’s vibrations. Dust and dirt are sucked up, more and more until the bag is bursting, and still, she keeps pushing the vacuum across the carpet. Her Walkman is clipped to the belt loop of her jeans, the din of whatever cassette silent in the pursuit of cleanliness. The whites of her knuckles are my cue to retreat.

Halfway down the hall I vacillate, tempted by my room where a stack of library books waits unread, or Scott Bakula. For reasons I’ll only understand after two separate bouts of therapy, I choose Scott Bakula.

As usual, the TV’s blue flash illuminates the curtained room. Ads for diamonds, car insurance, and turbaned psychic readings preamble my favorite time-jumping scientist. Richard looks up as I enter and I notice his Angels jersey is gone, replaced by a green t-shirt he wears when he mows the lawn.

“Your mom said if I didn’t change my shirt, she’d stick it in the gas tank of my truck.”

I guess that’s one way to commit arson.

“She’s never appreciated baseball, not like we do,” he says, the green light of a car insurance gecko bathing his face. He smiles, face dripping in self-pity.

My insides squirm. I want to tell him he’s wrong, I’m no more his ally than I am Mom’s or Gigi’s. But here I am, sitting at the foot of their bed, instead of vacuuming or cracking walnuts. I’m grateful when Sam appears on screen in a montage of him looking in the mirror not recognizing the person whose body he inhabits.

An hour later, Mom walks into the room and tells me I’m coming with her and Gigi to Wendy’s. If she notices Richard lying there, not bothering to look up, she’s good at hiding it. She doesn’t bother extending the invitation, only the most necessary reasons get Richard to leave the house; burgers and Frosties don’t make the cut.

I sit up front in our Cadillac sedan, an inheritance from a family friend who died after making it big in the oil fields. The asphalt glimmers and my skin bakes in the heat that radiates from the beige velour seats. The metal seatbelt buckles are unforgiving and the old towel we use to protect our hands when we strap in does little today. The vents on the dashboard are going full blast, but it isn’t enough to prevent Mom from glancing in the rearview mirror at every stoplight to make sure Gigi isn’t overheating. But Gigi is oblivious as she passes her tongue back and forth across her teeth in anticipation of the burgers and fries, or perhaps just because she likes the feel of enamel against her tongue.

Despite the heat, we order at the drive-thru and eat in the car; Mom mentions something about the sticky tables inside. What she doesn’t mention is how the last time we ate inside a restaurant Gigi left the handle down on the soft-serve machine. It took two employees to clean up the mess. Mom was red-faced as she pressed ten-dollar bills into their hands as we left.

I’ve plowed through half my lunch before Mom breaks the silence so far punctuated solely by the crinkling of hamburger wrappers and ice cubes jostling in paper cups.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with Richard,” she says, squirting ketchup onto her fries.

The cheeseburger feels like a lead weight in my stomach, and I wonder if I’ll make it through this conversation without needing to go to the bathroom. But before I can psyche myself up to use the fast-food bathroom, my seat thumps forward, and my back slams against the velour.

Mom turns around. “Gigi, knock it off!”

Gigi grins, lips rimmed in chocolate frosty.

“How long can he go on just laying around watching TV every day? He hasn’t worked in months; our savings won’t last forever.”I instantly regret ordering a medium fry; I should have gone with the small size. A list of my recent expenditures tumble through my head, the guilt accumulating: one pair of jean shorts, a tube of ChapStick that smells like cinnamon rolls, and the third installment in my favorite fantasy series. I can see Gigi in the rearview mirror happily slurping away, with no regret over the dollar twenty spent on her airy dessert, and I hate her for her innocence.

“—and it’s not like they pay me for cleaning the sacristy or washing the altar clothes. I have enough to do as it is what with you and Gigi to take care of.”

I think back to the walnuts, to us warbling off-key to that old song, and wonder how much trouble we really are. Years later I will remember how when they met Mom bragged about Richard’s good job working for the water treatment plant. Back then he drove a late model Lexus and took her out for three-course meals. I stayed home eating mac and cheese babysat by Stacy, a teen from our church who had a mole that looked like Ohio on her forehead. I can’t remember when Richard exchanged the glossy sedan for his truck, maybe when Gigi came to live with us, and a cluster of gray hairs sprouted at Mom’s temples.

“—I feel like I’m at my wit’s end. He won’t talk to me. Do you think you could talk to him?”

Mom’s request drags me back to the warm car, a melting frosty, and the churning pit in my stomach. She’s staring at me, expecting acquiescence. I wonder when I became their defacto go-between, a union of referee and negotiator, my role as a daughter a footnote.

“I’m not sure if that’s—”

“TA-RA-RA BOOM-DE-AY!” Gigi kicks mom’s seat. Mom’s Diet Coke goes flying out of her hands and smacks into the windshield. Brown splotches polka-dot the beige seats, my jean shorts, and mom’s linen shirt.

Mom whips around before I can register the soda dripping off the dashboard and into the stream of cool air blowing through the vents, baptizing us with aspartame and caramel color. She grabs Gigi’s Frosty, rolls down her window, and lobs it across the parking lot where it lands on the softening asphalt. Mom revs the engine, and we leave Wendy’s before anyone can yell at us for littering.

Gigi stares out the back window as the brown puddle grows smaller and smaller. She doesn’t cry; her face is frozen between longing and shock.



When we get home, I lead Gigi to her bench, to the pile of walnut shells. Without asking, she fills my pockets with the walnuts she keeps in an old bucket, the kind sold in plastic fishnets for kids to use once at the beach. I pat her hand, trace the deep grooves, then the dry patches around her knuckles.

Inside, Mom is wiping down the kitchen counters. When I close the door, she looks up, and stares at me for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the light streaming in behind me. Finally, she blinks, looks pointedly down the hall, and then back at me. I want to argue, but then I remember ordering a medium fry instead of a small and wonder how many more medium fries are in their savings because if Richard doesn’t get back to work soon there won’t be any. My stomach hurts again, and my forehead feels damp.

The bedroom door is open, and Richard is laughing. Al is plunking away on his handlink, cigar dangling from his lips. He has that look on his face—tobacco-stained lips turned up in a perfect smirk—he has after he says something crassly sexual. It doesn’t occur to me to think less of Richard for laughing at something like that.

“Good lunch?” Richard asks, eyes still glued to the TV.

I think of the hot car, of the spilled soda, and of Gigi’s frosty probably still seeping into the asphalt parking lot. “It was okay,” I lie.

He nods just as the station cuts to a commercial break. A local hot tub seller is walking around his showroom trying to convince the residents of our hot, arid town that what they really need is a human-sized boiling cauldron. Maybe it’s the sight of Dan Graham the Hot Tub Man jumping into a hot tub fully clothed, or the fries I finished in two blocks flat, but I excuse myself to use the restroom.

I stay seated longer than I need to, the warm wooden ring leaving deep welts. Magazines with pictures of cheetahs and rhinos on the front, periodical for kids, but purchased for Gigi, lay scattered on the tiled floor. I pick one up and flip to an illustration of a gorilla dangling from some tropical tree branch. A doodle of two girls in frilly dresses, done in purple ink, dances next to the gorilla’s back. Hands intertwined, they seem to be skipping in a circle, to what tune I’m not sure, though I can guess. Their legs are kicking, gamboling, and tripping. The breeze they stir ruffles their skirts, or maybe they’re spinning around in circles on purpose to see how wide a bell of fabric they can make. They both fall, becoming a clump of happy tears and hiccupping giggles. The gorilla is flat at their side, unaware and immune. When I pull up my shorts, Gigi’s walnuts cascade across the floor. I stare at them, trying to divine a pattern in the spread that spans the base of the toilet to a wicker cabinet that houses hand towels. My foray into osteomancy lasts five minutes before I gather the walnuts and dump them into the wastebasket.

Richard is where I left him, remote in his hand, poised as if he’ll change the channel. I gather my courage and try to find an opening to broach the subject of his unemployment. The anxiety I’ve carried with me since lunch propels me forward. I’m filled with dark energy, and the pores on my forehead and palms leak potential. I ball my fists, ignoring the churning in my belly even though I just emptied it.

“I was wondering—”

“You know what sounds good right now?” Richard asks, interrupting like he didn’t hear me. “A chocolate milkshake, even a Frosty. That would hit the spot.”

I exhale and feel my chest deflate as all the stored-up energy is expelled in one breath. I leave before the next commercial break, Sam whining at Al while Al hammers away on the handlink.

Mom is in the hallway pretending to wipe down picture frames. “What are the lyrics to Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay?” I ask before she can probe me on Richard’s lack of employment. She’s so shocked by my odd request, she looks up the lyrics and prints them out for me. I take the sheet into the courtyard where Gigi is swinging her bare feet, one of her big toes dragging across the stone.  

“Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay,” I begin.

Gigi looks at me, eyes blank.

Jordan Dilley lives and writes in Idaho. She has an MA in literature from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in the Vassar Review, Heavy Feather Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Loch Raven Review as well as other publications. Her 2022 short fiction piece “Lani in the River” was nominated by JMWW for a Pushcart Prize.