To the Last Drop

Yvette Stephens was exhausted.

She’d married her high school sweetheart and bore him two children in less than two years of marriage. Now, she’d just turned 18, yet she felt like an old woman and thought she looked like one too.

Raising two small children so close in age was taking its toll.

Constantly chasing after a relentless, inexhaustible 18-month-old toddler, keeping her from hurting herself or destroying their home was a full time job, and doing so while breastfeeding and caring for a newborn was beyond exhausting and nearly impossible.

Her long light brown hair, once shiny with golden highlights, hung lank and greasy. Her long slender face, once perpetually smiling and vibrant with the joy of life, was now pinched with worry, sleeplessness and stress. She was still young and beautiful but the strain of caring for two very needy kids was telling.

She hated how her body had changed with her pregnancies, especially her breasts. They grew three cup sizes after she gave birth to her first child and didn’t shrink back to her normal 32 C cup after she stopped breast feeding. They shrank only a little to a double D and looked enormous on her slender five-foot, two-inch frame.

Then she got pregnant again and her breasts grew another three cup sizes. They were now a huge G cup and so swollen with milk that they throbbed and ached even after her newborn fed. She ordered a pump and froze the excess but the baggies of frozen milk in the freezer were starting to pile up.

It had only been two weeks. Maybe things would get better, or so she hoped.

Her hips were another sore spot for her. She thought they were as wide as a Mack truck and looked even wider because her waist was so narrow. When she’d asked her gynecologist about them, the doctor said a wider pelvis was an evolutionary development that made childbirth less traumatic.

She liked her 24 inch waist but didn’t care for her 36 inch hips. Her husband told her that her ass was a work of art, so that was another part of herself she liked, but that was pretty much it.

There was nothing to be done about it, it’s the body she had, and the doctor had been right. It took her less than four hours to give birth to each of her daughters.

She was young and healthy enough that her body took only a few weeks to get back to its normal small size, for the skin of her belly and hips to tauten, leaving behind only a few faint white stretch marks to mar the soft pale skin. For her stomach to cramp when she breastfed her baby as her uterus shrank back to normal within her.

Yvette looked down at her heavy milk-filled breasts and sighed in frustration and resignation.

She hefted them from beneath, her small slim hands disappearing from sight, and hoped the horrid things would shrink when her milk dried up so she could go back to looking and feeling normal, rather than feeling like a circus freak and having to endure men’s goggle-eyed stares.

She’d gone to a private store to get sized for maternity bras so gravity wouldn’t make her tits sag to her waist when she got older, and almost caused an accident when an awestruck ogling driver nearly plowed into a group of pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk.

He’d been staring at her bouncing and swaying, milk-filled boobs as she pushed the double stroller ahead of her on the way to the private boutique. It was a warm spring day and she’d been wearing one of her husbands oversized t-shirts, but her husband was slim himself so it did little to conceal her chest.

The experience had been embarrassing, reinforcing her desire to only go out in public when she absolutely had to.

To top it off, her husband Tyler had been fired from his job at a local paper factory. They were downsizing and he was one of the first to go. They didn’t care that he had a wife, a newborn and a toddler to provide for. They only cared about maximizing profits.

The day after Tyler broke the bad news, Yvette went to see her mother to cry on her shoulder and ask for advice. When she left, he’d been in bed staring up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, his eyes red-rimmed and sunken from lack of sleep and worry, and his shoulders as tense as blocks of wood.

Now wearing a well-made and supportive maternity bra under another of her husband’s large shirts, she opened the front door to her childhood home, pulled the double stroller inside and opened her mouth to let her mom know she was there when a chorus of babbling female voices cawed and chattered loudly from the kitchen.

She closed her mouth with a click of her teeth, stepped behind the stroller and pushed it towards the kitchen when she noticed someone was sitting on the living room couch.

She paused, startled for a moment, and then continued on.

“Hi Grampa,” she said, nodding and smiling at the old man on the couch as she passed.

It was her great, great grandfather, Samuel Larsson. He was ancient, as gnarled and wrinkled as a sturdy old oak, and almost as strong, even at 84. Everyone called him Grampa. His large wrinkled head was mottled and bald as an egg, his jug-like ears protruded like birds wings, the surface of his enormous bulbous nose was a lattice of broken blue and purple veins and the skin of his sunken cheeks seemed to droop like melted wax.

Thick white hair sprouted like weeds from a mole on his chin. Gray and white nose hair sprayed from his ears and nostrils and his gray and white eyebrows were as thick and unruly as bramble shrubs. Brown liver spots mottled his thin dry skin and his finger joints were swollen and bent with arthritis.

Grampa was an altogether frightening creature, made even more so by deep frown-lines on either side of his thin-lipped mouth and the perpetually downturned angry set to his mouth. Yvette had always found him scary and creepy and usually kept her distance.

The old man returned her nod but stayed quiet as she breezed past. She tried to ignore him as he stared intently at her large swaying breasts with deep-set flinty eyes. Even contained and well-supported in a sturdy maternity bra and covered by a large baggy shirt, they were a sight to behold.

When Yvette walked into the kitchen, stroller leading, babies squirming, she was met with a chorus of shrill greetings from three generations of women. Her great grandmother “Gran” and grandmother “Nana” quickly stood from their stools at the edge of the wide kitchen island and rushed to coo at her babies while her mother walked around and hugged her.

Holding her slender shoulders, her mom leaned back and stared at her eldest daughter’s face intently.

“What’s the matter, honey?” she asked, concern written on her pretty face. She was still young, in her mid-30s, and looked more like her sister than her mom.

Yvette tried to keep her composure, but when her Gran and Nana, straightened to look at her with concern, she started to cry.

In gargling hiccupy sobs, she told them about Tyler losing his job, that she was worried about how they’d pay the rent, pay their bills and put food on the table. Yet another worry was that their apartment lease was up at the end of the week. They’d been preparing to renew it, but now they probably wouldn’t be able to afford it.

The three older women started talking at the same time, trying to comfort her, each of them offered to take them all in when suddenly Grampa’s deep gravelly voice spoke from the living room.

“The boy can work for me,” he said loudly, over the voices of the three chattering women and the sobbing young mother.

The room went quiet as all four women turned to face the old man.

“I built a cabin on my land for my foreman and his family, but he up and quit on me,” the old man continued, still too loud. “He got another job and is gonna move out of state in six months.”

The four women watched silently as he stood up from the couch and limped to the kitchen entrance to glare at them.

“I need someone to take his place and part of the deal is that you get to live in the new cabin,” he continued after a moment. “It’s got all the bells and whistles and he’ll still get a paycheck, but he’s gonna have to work hard to earn it.”

Yvette looked at the old man in astonishment, a hopeful expression on her lovely tear-streaked face. She knew he owned a farm about an hour’s drive away. She knew he also raised and bred horses and cattle, but hearing him offer her husband a job and her young family a place to live left her speechless.

Grampa stared at the young woman. She looked so much like his Alice at her age that they could’ve been twins, big boobs and all. He sighed with sudden sadness at the thought of his wife Alice, dead now almost ten years. They’d had a good run. Why’d she have to go and leave him all alone?

After several minutes of silence, he began to shift his weight from foot to foot, waiting for some sort of response, but the women stayed quiet.

“That’s why I came by, to see if any of you knew someone who needed a job and a place to live,” he said nervously. “He’ll have six months to learn from my old foreman and then he’ll be in charge. I’m too old to do it myself.”

In a sudden squawking rush, the kitchen sounded like a disturbed henhouse as all four women began to talk at once. Yvette’s radiant smile and eager nod told him all he needed to know.

———————————–

Yvette called and urged her husband to meet her at her mother’s house where Grampa officially offered him the job, man to man. Tyler was just as excited and relived as she was and readily accepted.

He towered half a head over the bent old man, but the grip as they shook hands on the deal was like a steel vice that made the bones of the young man’s hand grind together before the old man released it.

Tyler knew the value of a firm handshake and looked into the old man’s eyes to try to convey his gratitude and to show him he was a man of his word, that he would work hard and be someone he could depend on.

Grampa nodded in satisfaction and understanding, reading everything he needed to know in the young man’s handshake and direct eye contact. Maybe his foreman leaving had been for the best.