K. R. Walrod
Fiction
Harvey was named a finalist for the 2026 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose, judged by Lucy Ives.
Yes, Melissa, forty-seven years-old, sleeps with an oversized, stuffed bunny, but she doesn’t make excuses for him anymore. For decades, she has used Harvey as a body pillow, spooning him with her cheek resting on the soft inside of his long ear, his leg between her thighs, her leg draped over his button tail. His fur is worn bare on the top of his head so that the fabric shows. She sits him upright on her side of the bed, then arranges John’s pillows on his side, and smooths the comforter flat. She’s in a rush to see the girls off and clean up before Helen, the house-cleaner, arrives. Always a chore to prepare for Helen, but it’s worth it.
Melissa calls out, “have a nice day,” as the twins leave for school, but they don’t respond. Since she gave them the jeep, Melissa is no longer their driver. Now, the girls coordinate calendars, share a google doc, text each other instead of her when they need a ride. So independent, and so freeing for Melissa, the time she saves. Melissa bends to straighten Sadie’s turf shoes and Zoe’s black boots in the entry, then she races around the house—she clears the dishes from the counter, throws the bath mats in the laundry, unplugs a collection of chargers and stuffs them in the junk door.
Helen’s already at the door. Melissa grabs the dog’s leash, zips her windbreaker, and runs into Helen in the entry. Melissa steps aside for Helen to set down her bucket with mop, Pledge, Soft Scrub, yellow rubber gloves, rags.
“Heading out?” Helen asks.
“Uh, huh,” Melissa nods, holding up the leash as proof. She doesn’t tell Helen about her follow-up mammogram, she didn’t even tell the girls, or John. No reason to worry anyone.
“Good, good,” Helen replies.
“The girls are too busy for the dog. Or for their mother,” Melissa says, and then regrets her tone.
“It’s good for you,” Helen says, slipping on her white Reebok, indoor shoes. “Some exercise with everything you’ve got going on.”
Melissa nods. They have between them the presumption of Melissa’s busy schedule although she doesn’t work.
Helen, in her late fifties, is in much better shape than Melissa. From a distance, Helen’s white blond hair and her toned muscles makes her look even younger. Up-close, sunspots and wrinkles betray her. Helen’s hair is tied back in a slim pony tail, her thick bangs are swept apart like a broom. “Enjoy the weather this weekend?” she asks.
“I got out, how about you?”
“I took my camera to the wetlands, great dawn light.”
Melissa wants to sound encouraging, “You’ll have to show me your pictures someday.”
“I’m on Instagram,” Helen says. “You can follow me.”
Melissa doesn’t admit she’s not on Instagram or that she lectures her teenage daughters nightly about the evils of social media. “Oh great. I’ll see you later?”
“I’ll be here,” Helen says. She gestures in a proprietary way at the inside of the house. The grand sweep of her arm seems to imply the work is never-ending. Melissa doesn’t point out that the house is only 3,000 square feet, not a mansion. Barely big enough for a family of four. But she is dependent on Helen now.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Melissa says. Good help is hard to find. Raised with a Scandinavian work ethic, Helen is precise and thorough. She funnels her energy into the gymnastics of house-cleaning—scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, sweeping away the evidence of chaos in the house. Melissa feels the same awkward intimacy with her doctor, who also sees Melissa’s insides and knows details about her she would rather gloss over. Melissa walks away fast, forgetting the dog that she had lied about walking.
***
Melissa pinches closed the open flap of her gown. She kept her jeans on, but has slipped off her shoes even though it isn’t necessary. The diagnostic room is empty except the technician’s computer station and the massive mammogram machine. With her free hand she tugs her belt loops so her jean waistband covers the extra belly that began with her pregnancy and bulged with middle age. An elderly lady is her technician again, and Melissa is relieved. The technician, like the doctor days before, asks her questions to calculate her Tyrer-Cuzick score.
“How long did you breastfeed?” she asks.
At this question, Melissa always feels apologetic. “A few months? I had twins, it was…”
“Oh, twins,” the woman nods. Her short gray hair is pasted to her head in thin comb strokes. A hair style perpetually appropriate for older women.
“And your mother died at what age?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Of breast cancer?” the technician confirmed, although it was clearly in the notes.
On Melissa’s birthday last March, she realized she was now the age her own mother was when she had died. She had not mentioned this to the girls; her death would be a tragedy of epic proportions to them, while her own mother’s death had been a relief. After years of addiction, erratic behavior, and a suicide attempt, the breast cancer diagnosis was like the answer to a riddle Melissa had been trying to solve for years—what would kill her mother? During Melissa’s teen years, she worked to keep up the image of normalcy as her mother’s mental and physical state deteriorated.
The technician cups Melissa’s breast and splays it across the cold flat surface of the mammogram machine. She tugs on Melissa’s upright arm to angle her just right. “Hold,” she says as she darts across the room to push the button. She rushes back to Melissa and loosens the machine’s grip. She asks Melissa to pivot, instructs her to angle her chin, to shimmy her hip against the machine.
After a few more awkward positions, Melissa slips on her shirt and shoes. The technician guides her to a room the size of a closet where she waits for her consultation. Melissa thinks of chemo, radiation, losing her hair. She thinks of her devastated daughters. They would all rally around her. Walk for a cure. Wear Ribbons. Google experimental drugs.
A brief knock and a young doctor enters. “Good news,” she says. “You’re all clear. Sorry you had to come down here again.”
Melissa is surprised by this good news. In her mind, she’d settled into the worst-case diagnosis. But she would have beat it with her family rallying around her. She would not be doomed by her own mother’s fate.
“Thank you,’ Melissa says. The doctor smiles and Melissa stumbles out of the basement room, through the maze of hallways and back out into the daylight.
She still has a few awkward hours of Helen in the house, so decides to take herself to lunch. Growing up on a potholed street, raised by a single mom, Melissa had no choice about chores. The twin’s life is so different. They leave their clothes on the couch, tossed over chairs, in piles on their floor—everywhere except folded in the dresser. They would not know the difference between Pledge and Windex, wouldn’t know how to wet the rag to catch dust, how to feed dry wood by oiling the Amish dining room table. It is Helen who arranges Sadie’s toiletries and who throws away the tags cut off from Zoe’s new clothes that are always left on their bathroom counter. Helen scrubs the toilets so that they don’t have to, dusts the artwork passed down by the in-laws, washes the windows and the floors so that all Melissa has to do to keep their lives’ tidy is vacuum here and there, load and unload the dishwasher, take out the recycling.
Melissa sits alone near a fireplace at the neighborhood Italian restaurant that she has avoided since she’s been gluten-free. She orders the chicken Caesar, but then adds garlic breadsticks and a glass of Pinot Noir. At the table next to her, a pair of women in silk blouses, designer scarves and impractical shoes are having a business lunch. Melissa feels frumpy in her jeans, oversized Lululemon shirt and tennis shoes. Women have choices, and she made hers. Melissa’s career began promisingly in the marketing department of Portland’s quirkiest ad agency, but bedrest for her pregnancy morphed into part-time work turned into volunteer work as she mothered her daughters in ways she had never experienced. Swim lessons, co-op preschool and homemade playdough. Melissa showed up for parenting. Her daughters didn’t need to make excuses for her absences, the way she had with her own mom. Melissa was trust-worthy, reliable, a good mom.
Melissa waves at the waitress, says “yes,” and “thank you,” to more wine.
***
Melissa opens the door to a sparkling clean house and breathes in the lemon pine scent. This moment—Melissa feels grounded and safe—makes her hire of Helen worth the madcap tidying Monday mornings and the discomfort of negotiating their relationship. Her house feels like it has been staged by a real estate agent. She hangs her coat and a flurry of texts come across her phone—the girls are held up by traffic. At least they do her this small courtesy of letting her know when they’ll be home. Lately though, Melissa has not had dinner ready. She texts the take-out menu. Melissa opens the fridge, pours herself a glass of wine. The food delivery arrives before the girls, or John who is also running late. Steamy, brown paper bags filled with gourmet burgers and seasoned tater tots sit on the kitchen counter. She pours another glass of wine.
John, Sadie and Zoe burst in the door all together, an explosion of tossed coats, thrown off shoes, sports bags, backpacks, coffee mugs—spread from the entry into the living room and beyond. Their clutter is a virus moving through the house from room to room. The ease Melissa had felt evaporates. Zoe and Sadie are negotiating with their father for more gas money, a larger allowance as they spill into the kitchen. Zoe plunges her hand into the take-out bag and begins nibbling on tater tots. Melissa watches her chew. When the twins were little, the simplest way to tell them apart was the peach-shaped birthmark on Zoe’s cheek. Now it’s caked over with foundation. Recently, Sadie cut her bangs, matching her sister’s exactly. They’re often mistaken for each other, even by John. Melissa’s never been fooled; she’s tuned into the subtleties of their gestures, posture, fragrance. “At the table,” Melissa says, carrying plates and the greasy to-go bags.
In the dining room, the girls talk over each other. John leaves the table to take a call. Melissa pours the remainder of the wine into her glass and tries to remember if the bottle was already open.
Zoe complains about her calculus teacher and a score she got on a recent quiz.
Melissa doesn’t understand how the teacher could be wrong. “Isn’t there only one right answer?”
Both girls scoff at her. “That’s not how it works,” Zoe says.
“Isn’t math objective?” Melissa asks. She notices a stain on her empty placemat, she picks at it with her fingernail. The twins are used to her not eating dinner.
“You don’t get it,” Zoe says.
“There’s partial credit for your work,” Sadie says.
“I heard he slept with a student,” Zoe says.
“Who?” Sadie asks.
“It was like twenty years ago,” Zoe says, reaching for a tater tot off her sister’s plate. Melissa watches for the ketchup to drip, but it doesn’t.
“Gross,” Sadie says.
“Where’d you hear that?” Melissa says.
“Everyone says it,” Zoe says.
“You can’t believe gossip,” Melissa says. She doesn’t give credence to the math teacher rumor. Zoe often deflects her own mistakes onto the behavior of others.
“It’s true,” Zoe insists.
“There’s probably more to the story,” Melissa says.
“I hope he gets fired before the midterm,” Zoe says.
John returns to the room, picks up his Cubano sandwich where he left off. “Who should get fired?” he asks.
“Zoe’s math teacher, because of her score on a test,” Melissa says.
“That’s not what happened, Mom,” Zoe says. “You’re misrepresenting my side.” Melissa hears in her tone Zoe’s years of speech and debate club and knows that she has opened a can of worms.
John takes the bait and now both girls are arguing with him. Melissa thinks of her own quiet childhood, no siblings, neglectful mother.
The girls, in a stalemate with their dad, push away from the table, walk off with their phones back in their hands.
“Girls,” Melissa yells. “Help me clean up.” Melissa feels woozy from the wine. She would rather slip onto the couch than clean the kitchen.
Both girls return to the table, carry their plates, glasses and silverware to the kitchen in three separate trips because with their phones they are each one-handed. In the kitchen, they pause frequently between tasks, messaging friends, liking posts, continuing chats.
“In the dishwasher,” Melissa points.
Zoe scrapes her leftovers into the compost. Melissa doesn’t ask if she only ate tater tots.
Melissa has to reload each one of their dishes because they seem to have no spatial awareness. Melissa clanks her wine glass hard as she loads it. She inspects it for cracks before closing the rack.
Sadie pours herself a new glass of milk.
“We just finished dinner,” Melissa says.
“I’m thirsty,” she says.
“Couldn’t you have used your old glass?”
Sadie shrugs, “I guess.”
“What’s the big deal, Mom? It’s not like you’re washing the dishes,” Zoe says.
“You don’t appreciate what it takes to keep the house clean,” Melissa says.
“Isn’t that what Helen does?” Zoe asks.
Melissa stumbles over her words. She wants to say both yes and no.
“What do you even do during the day?” Zoe asks.
Melissa doesn’t need to justify her existence. All the insomnia, laundry, diapers, ballet buns. Standing in the rain at lacrosse games, the school volunteer committees, setting up and cleaning up for the plays, music programs. Packing the diaper bag, snack bag, lunch bag, sports bag.
“I went to the doctor,” Melissa says. “I got a mammogram.”
“Does it hurt?” Zoe asks.
“When will we have to get those?” Sadie asks. She cups her small breast under her black t-shirt.
“I don’t know,” Melissa says. It’s hard for her to think of her daughters as women also susceptible to breast cancer. Yesterday, they were pudgy toddlers and suddenly they have breasts and curves.
“Whether it hurts?” Zoe asks.
“It’s uncomfortable,” Melissa says.
“How often do you get them?” Sadie says, now adjusting her shirt tight across her chest, flipping her hair and cocking her head.
“It depends.”
Sadie angles her phone, snaps a picture of herself.
“Ugh,” Zoe says, leaning over her sister’s screen.
“I know, right?” Sadie says.
“…on whether you have a history of breast cancer and whether the mammogram was abnormal like mine,” Melissa says.
The girls don’t look up. Both stare at Sadie’s phone.
Zoe gasps, “She’s wearing cut-offs!”
They are gone again into the rhythm of their twinness, only using a quarter of the words normally needed to communicate. A shorthand that has gotten much worse, and more elusive since they have become teenagers in the age of emojis and texts. Melissa can hear John on the phone in the other room, the click, click of his tongue while he pauses in thought. As the Sales Rep for an up-and-coming solar panel firm, his salary trajectory could be charted from his twenties to forties in an upward, diagonal line. He is traveling more for work and enjoys it. The girls leave for college in a year and half—the empty nest is so close on the horizon and feels so empty.
“Not much time left,” Melissa says.
“What does that mean?” Zoe asks. She gives her sister a nudge on the arm.
“You’ve got breast cancer?” Sadie asks.
Suddenly they are both looking at her, their phones flat on the counter.
“Oh my god, Mom,” Zoe says. Already there are generous tears in her eyes.
“The doctor thinks it’s going to be okay,” Melissa says, unable to fully release the spotlight of the moment, she sticks to this statement that skirts the truth.
“Mom?!”
“Does dad know?”
“No,” Melissa says.
“We’re the first to hear,” Sadie says and there is a solemnness to her words, but also a conspiratorial tone that Melissa picks up on. She has penetrated the tight club of her daughters, she’s an insider, the way she used to be when they were spokes off her center, instead of a straight line to each other.
“Let’s not say anything to dad yet,” Melissa says.
The girls exchange a look, then nod. They leave their phones and move next to Melissa. They put their smooth, nail-polished hands over her wrinkled one. Her skin is splotchy and without the sparkle of her engagement ring, her hand would be ugly. She smells her daughters’ shampoo as they lean in, holding her.
“I’m not feeling well,” Melissa says.
“Is it the cancer?” Zoe blurts out.
“No, it’s not like that,” Melissa says.
Zoe and Sadie on either side of her help her up the stairs to her room. Melissa is overwhelmed by the concern of these two beautiful girls that she has raised, and also dizzy from the wine. The girls guide her into her room, plop her down on her bed.
Zoe tosses Harvey to the floor and fluffs a pillow for herself.
“Pick him up?” Melissa asks Sadie as she scooches over to make space for her too. Sadie puts him at the foot of the bed, as she moves to Melissa’s other side. “Your grandmother sent him to me when I was in college,” Melissa says.
Although she has told them this before, she is still surprised by the fact of it. Melissa’s mom never visited her there; she was barely coherent enough to fill out her financial aid forms, was too sick to attend her graduation. But one Easter, she sent her a large chocolate egg and this oversized stuffed bunny that she was clearly too old for. It was an inappropriate gift for a young adult sharing a tiny dorm room, but her mother had known by then that her days were numbered. The package felt like an apology for her years of dysfunction. Melissa named him after the Jimmy Stewart movie they’d watched together when she was little.
Melissa is sandwiched between the girls. Unaccustomed to quiet reflection, they are back on their phones. She’s happy to have them close, but needs to pee, needs some Tylenol. Already she is replaying the conversation in her head, questioning how she had led them to this untruth, but unwilling to correct it yet. A small deception that she can clear up tomorrow. She concocts a story in her mind about how there was an excusable mix-up at the office and that even though she is so angry at being told she had cancer – really, the important thing is that she doesn’t. Wouldn’t they all be too relieved to make anything of it?
She closes her eyes, listens to the whirs and beeps of her daughters’ phones as they lay beside her.
“Did you see this one?” Sadie asks her sister, holding the phone across Melissa. Melissa opens her eyes and sees a photo of Harvey with a vest on, a hat with holes for his ears, a suitcase on a railroad track.
“What did you do?” Melissa asks, sitting up. She pulls Sadie’s phone closer, inspects the photo.
“Nothing,” Sadie says, as Zoe puts her own phone in front of Melissa’s face.
“Look at this one,” Zoe says. Harvey, same vest, no hat, in a field of high grass. The morning light slants across the blades of grass, Harvey is seated, ears down, looking off in the distance.
“What is this?” Melissa asks.
“Helen’s Instagram account,” the girls say together.
“Didn’t you know?” Zoe asks.
Melissa looks at her girls, then at Harvey facedown at the bottom of the bed.
“No,” Melissa says. Her bunny? Why would Helen do that?
“That’s weird,” Zoe says.
“Creepy,” Sadie says.
“They’re cute, though,” Zoe says. She scrolls through at least twenty photos of Harvey: sitting in a field with a picnic laid out before him; on a train track with a funny bowler hat with cut outs for his ears; propped against a chain link fence positioned like he’s trying to climb it.
“Maybe he needed to get out of the house,” Zoe says. “Needed a little adventure.”
Melissa couldn’t make sense of it. A grown woman staging photos of a stuffed bunny for the internet? Harvey leaving the house?
“What’s this? Who needs adventure?” John asks, walking into the bedroom.
“Harvey,” Sadie says. “He’s an internet star.” She holds her phone to her dad’s face, scrolls through several poses.
“Mom didn’t know,” Zoe says.
Melissa’s headache builds. Too much wine. She closes her eyes avoiding John.
“You know, Helen?” Zoe says. “The one who cleans our house?”
“She took mom’s bunny,” Sadie says.
“That’s an invasion of our privacy,” John says.
Melissa waves her hand. “Shush, my head.”
“She could have taken something else,” John says. “Who knows if she’s been in our drawers, stolen things…”
“No, no,” Melissa says. “She’s not that kind of person.”
“What kind of person is she?”
Melissa doesn’t have an answer, she only knows that she doesn’t want to give up Helen.
“It was just a misunderstanding,” Melissa says. “Of course, I told her she could take Harvey. I just forgot. She tried to show me the pictures herself this morning, but I was in a rush.”
“Don’t be hard on Mom,” Sadie says. Melissa worries that Sadie is about to tell him about the cancer diagnosis already.
“Or on Helen,” Zoe says.
“Do you want to clean the house?” Sadie says imitating her mom’s frequent threat to her and her sister. “Mom needs the help.”
“Helen can be replaced,” John says.
“Let’s settle down,” Melissa says. He doesn’t understand what it takes to find help, hire, maintain a relationship.
“It’s a no brainer,” he says.
“So Helen can be fired, but not my asshole calculus teacher?” Zoe says. “You’re so hypocritical.”
Melissa pulls Harvey to her, smooths his ear under her cheek. She looks into his beady eyes searching for some answer. She knows she should feel differently about him now, but the contour of his soft body comforts her. It’s all such a mess. How did she get here? She closes her eyes. Her head hurts.
“What Mom?” Sadie asks, leaning closer.
“Tylenol, please.”
Sadie fishes for the pills in Melissa’s purse. She pulls out the folded mammogram order.
Zoe unfolds it. “This is so official,” she says. She reads aloud the medical jargon, exaggerating the terminology dramatically.
“Put it away,” Melissa says.
“Left breast tissue normal. Return in one year,” Zoe says.
Melissa opens her eyes, sees her daughter’s face doubled, Sadie and Zoe, both staring down at her.
“What the fuck, mom?” Zoe says.
“Language,” John says.
Melissa pleads with her eyes, don’t tell your father. “I can explain,” she says.
“You should fire her,” John says. “Helen.”
“At least she doesn’t pretend to have cancer,” Zoe says.
“Who would do that?” Sadie agrees.
“You don’t understand,” Melissa says. She had not meant to trick them.
Sadie tosses the Tylenol bottle on the bed.
“Water?” Melissa asks.
“Get it yourself,” Zoe says.
“What’s got into you?” John asks.
“Ask mom,” Sadie says.
All the years of service—diapers, carpools, school conferences, holding their hair back when they vomited—all wiped away by this betrayal. Melissa imagines the girls telling their future therapist this story. Like her own mother, she’ll be to blame for everything. Melissa embraces Harvey. She pictures the bowler hat covering his bald spot in Helen’s photos. Melissa doesn’t need to make excuses to these girls, so young, so oblivious to the sacrifices she’s made, or to John either, floating on the periphery of their lives, none of them know what it takes to be her, to care for them all, and the house too, her and Helen, keeping their world all together.
Melissa could have cancer, she might one day.
K. R. Walrod (she/her) is a Portland, Oregon-based writer and educator. Her fiction has appeared in BOOTH, Blue Earth Review, Literary Mama, Buckmxn Journal, and Prism Review among others. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. She serves on the National Advisory Council of Graywolf Press and the Board of Literary Arts.
Photo Credit: Carrie Cantalupo loves the quirky and unusual and is known to come to a screeching halt when she sees something that tickles her pink, turquoise, red….you name it. She lives in Northern Michigan in the Bohemian Wood and am surrounded by nature. She is known for incorporating both quirk and nature in her art work.
