IT USED TO BE THAT IF YOU drove south from town, heading toward Millboro, first you passed Honeysuckle Road and then, a mile or so later, Dandelion Road and then nothing for a long time until you crossed Wildwood Drive. That was the last paved crossroad. After that, you started counting mailboxes. The mailboxes stood in rickety little congregations huddled together by the side of the asphalt so that people who lived scattered out in the woods had to come up to the road to get their mail. At the seventh cluster of mailboxes after Wildwood Drive, there was a gap in the trees and a dirt trail, just wide enough for a narrow car, that led off down to the right. The trail split at a big tree stump. The left-hand fork wound through more woods and then a meadow where we used to see foxes and then ended at a three-room cabin with a brook behind it and woods of pine and dogwood all around it. There was a fireplace and a tiny wooden deck perched above the brook where we thought we would make love all the time. Danny and I went to live there together when my lease was up at the end of September.
If you are in love, pokey little cabins in the woods seem magic and beautiful and you don’t notice things like the way the whole place smells like mold or how the lights work only intermittently or how spiders are always in the bathtub. Or, if you do notice those things, it is only because they seem funny and endearing, and you make jokes about them together and eat dinner by candlelight together and fight off the spiders together. If you are in love, any dump seems like heaven, and really it is. When we die and finally reach the afterlife, I don’t guess we will care at all about the furnishings—we will care only that the people we love are there.
Our friends all came by the first evening after we moved in and brought housewarming gifts and drank wine and tequila and beer with us. Tom and Rosalita brought us a copy of Fried-rich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that still had the cover on. Vera brought us a case of Dutch beer in bottles. Billy Joe made us a bedside table, and Rafi painted it to look like a cow. Pancho made us a cassette tape of Beethoven piano sonatas, and Blossom brought a sweet potato pie, a cherry pie, a black-bottom rum pie, and a whole salt-cured ham. Jake brought us The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, but he never actually gave it to us—just left it on the kitchen table and then went home.
Everybody else stayed all night, and we ran around in the woods and howled at the moon. Just at dawn, Pancho and Pamela decided to sing hymns about the Jordan River down by the tiny stream, and their voices echoed together among the trees like skylarks. Danny said he thought he saw them kiss, but nothing came of it then, and Danny eventually admitted he wasn’t really sure after all.
Before I moved, Orla had come over and sat on the third-hand couch in my living room, watching me as I packed boxes.
“You certainly weren’t here very long,” she said.
“Well, I only had a six-month lease.”
“You could have renewed it, I’m sure.”
“Um, well, a friend of mine found a place out toward Millboro that we’re going to share. It’ll be a lot cheaper.”
“A friend?”
Orla had spied Danny coming home with me at dawn or kissing me goodbye in the doorway in the afternoon or sacked out all day under the shade trees out back, but she had never spoken to him.
“A friend,” I said, wrapping newspaper around some mismatched dishes. “My boyfriend.”
Orla pursed her lips. “A boyfriend,” she said skeptically. “Someone you’ve known quite awhile, I guess?”
“Awhile,” I said evasively.
“Girls these days move so fast,” she said.
“Well, there’s a war on, you know.”
Orla just looked blankly at me.
“Girls these days don’t set much store by marriage anymore, I guess,” she sighed after a minute, and shook her head in a pitying way.
“We’ll get married,” I said too quickly.
Orla shook her head again. “Girls always think so, I’m sure,” she said.
There was wild honking outside as Danny and Billy Joe pulled up in Billy Joe’s truck to get the furniture.
“They’re here,” I said to Orla. “We’re going to need that couch now.”
“Girls always think so,” she said again, getting up.
She left by the back door without meeting Danny.
Jake and I were alone in the bar. He was drinking his first Natty BoHo, and I was leaning on the cash register, watching Jeopardy! with the sound off. I was telling him about my conversation with Orla.
“Do you want to be married?” he asked me.
“To Danny?” I said.
“No—just to anyone. Do you want that?”
“Well, we’re supposed to want it, right? Aren’t we all supposed to want to find true love—forever?”
“Do you know anyone who is married and who is happy?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“No,” I said. “But then again, I don’t know anyone who is unmarried who is happy either.”
“Aren’t you happy?”
“I’m happy with Danny.”
“It’s not the same thing, is it?”
“Besides, he hasn’t asked me to marry him. That was just something I said to my neighbor to get her to shut up. He’s never brought up marriage at all.”
“He will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he always does—he can’t help himself. Danny is a romantic.”
“Liar,” I said. “Who has he asked to marry him?”
“You can’t believe he doesn’t have a past—that you’re the only one he’s ever loved.”
“Of course not,” I said, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “But I’m the one he loves now.” I remembered again how I had never liked Jake. “What do you care about it anyway?”
“I don’t care, actually,” Jake said. “Just making conversation.”
He turned back to his beer, and I turned the volume up on the television. I wished he would go away, but he just stayed there watching the end of Jeopardy! and then reruns of Gilligan’s Island and The Addams Family. He was still there, very drunk but quiet, when Rafi came in to relieve me at eight. I went straight home, but Danny was out, so I ate a sandwich from the last of Blossom’s ham and went to bed.
When I told Jake that I wasn’t thinking about marriage, I was lying. Because once I had said the word to Orla, it became stuck in my head, stubborn and sulking, like a brooding unsociable guest who hates the party but nevertheless doesn’t leave. Marriage to Danny—the idea of it colored the afternoon silence after we made love, lurked in the corners of our little cabin in the woods, watched us at the grocery store while we bought bread and eggs and in the bar where other boys never flirted with me anymore and where the seat next to him was always for me. I never said the word out loud to Danny, but he heard it anyway.
He went without me every week to visit his parents where they lived out in the country on the other side of Millboro. While he was gone, I washed dishes or cleaned the bathtub or watched TV or went down to the Cave and got drunk.
“Do your parents know I exist?” I asked him.
“Exist in what way?” he said.
“What do you mean ‘in what way’? How many ways are there?”
“Do you mean do they know I have a girlfriend, or do you mean they know it’s you and who you are and all about you, or what?”
“Do they know you live here with me?”
“They know I’m sharing a house with you. They haven’t inquired into the sleeping arrangements too closely.”
“Do they know my name?”
“Believe me, sugar, you don’t want to do this.”
“Do what?”
“You don’t want to get mixed up with all that—with my family. You don’t want them coming in here and making themselves part of our life. We’re happy now just like this, aren’t we? Let’s leave it be.”
So I didn’t say any more, didn’t mention it that night or all the next day. But I didn’t stop thinking about it.
Finally, late the second day, Danny broke.
“Okay, okay, okay!” he said out of the blue. “I give up! I’ll take you to meet them.”
“I’m sure it will be nice,” I said.
“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Danny took me to meet his parents on a warm Sunday afternoon. Late-autumn katydids were buzzing from the high grass as we rolled by, Danny driving and me watching his profile silhouetted in the dizzy bright sunshine from the car window. We drove south from our house, heading toward Millboro and then through it, passing the roadside filigree of tiny cornfields, gray wooden houses, little strips of gas stations and grocery stores, patches of pine forest, and scrap yards of rusting pickup trucks that decorated the edges of Old U.S. 213, mostly forgotten now that the new 213 had been built. We had the windows down.
The brick house Danny’s parents had built with the insurance money (after the wooden house he had grown up in burned to the ground in a suspicious incident involving cheap tequila and Danny on the roof installing an electric attic fan) sat close to the road with a new butter yellow Cadillac parked in the gravel under the carport at the side of the house and a faux-stained-glass ornament hanging in the front window that spelled out in Gothic lettering, “This HOME Protected By JESUS.” It featured a disembodied, presumably heavenly, and somewhat glowering pair of eyes that seemed to be sending out sizzling beams of yellow light on to the letters below them. Underneath that, in the very bottom corner of the window, was a sticker that said, “Protected by ADT Security Systems.” A sort of trust-but-verify attitude toward heavenly intervention that probably should have been comforting. I saw the two crocheted cats propped up in a side window and realized suddenly that I was out of my league.
We entered through the side door, straight into the kitchen. Danny didn’t knock; he had let go of my hand. His parents were sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, but he called out, “Anybody home?” anyway. The kitchen smelled delicately of air freshener.
Danny’s parents had had him late in life—old was the word he used for them more than any other. And they were old—with thin, papery skin that dissolved into relief maps of wrinkles like aerial photographs of drought-stricken lake beds, wispy white hair almost gone from his dad’s head and curled into pristine rigidity on his mom’s.
For a couple of such radically old and withered-type people, his parents had not lost the capacity for the strip-you-bare appraising glance. His mom did an amazing imitation of the Jesus eyes in the front window, lacking only the death rays of yellow light, and turned her whole body toward me.
“Now let’s see here, where are you from?” she asked in a lipless drawl. “Your people, I mean.”
My people. I remembered my mother, one long-ago morning, gently brushing Belle’s silky hair and tying a blue ribbon in it and then, catching sight of me lurking in the doorway, turning away as if she hadn’t seen me. I thought of Uncle Joe letting out a whoop the first time I hit one of the cans balanced on the top rail of the fence. My people.
I tried to subdue my uncouth backwoods twang and dial up my best genteel Deep South accent. After an entire adolescence of repeatedly watching Gone With the Wind on the cable channel out of Atlanta, I felt that anything was possible. I took a shot at Scarlett O’Hara but in the pressure of the moment missed and got Prissy instead. I babbled a bit while his mom stared at me and pursed her lips (which did nothing for my ability to form a coherent sentence), and I began to understand more viscerally what Danny had been doing on the roof with cheap tequila in the first place.
“Yes,” his mom said finally, a long, sibilant syllable that very obviously meant no.
His dad turned to Danny. “Y’all should have come down earlier, Daniel. Reverend Tucker asked after you at church, wondering how you’re doing. You know he always asks after you.”
“We knew another Catholic girl once,” his mom interjected to me faux-conversationally, making it clear that I had been discussed more thoroughly than Danny let on. “You remember that red-headed Barnett girl in your senior class, Daniel, whose daddy was in the highway management? They were foreigners.”
“They were from Virginia,” Danny said with a little sigh that meant this was not a whole new fresh conversation we were having here.
“She became a nun.”
“A nun?” Danny said. This was apparently news to him.
“She had to go to Charlotte to do it,” his mother smiled at me.
“Now, after the war,” his dad said to me, “I used to go down to Charlotte just about every month. Because of the fire department.” Danny’s father had been instrumental in setting up the local volunteer fire department, which of course made the whole attic fan/cheap tequila incident all the more ironic.
“Oh?” I said, trying to be polite. “What did the fire department need to do in Charlotte?”
His mom looked at me incredulously. “They needed to put out fires,” she said.
“But Charlotte’s miles and miles from here,” I started.
“Well, honey, they have fires miles from here, too. There’s fires all over,” his mom said with a small, ambiguous chuckle.
“Do they still have that Lunch Box Diner on Trade Street there?” his dad asked me. “What’s the cross street? It’s near the hardware store.”
“I’ve never been to Charlotte,” I said.
“You haven’t even visited it?” He sounded very surprised at this.
“Daniel,” his mom began, “Arnold was at church this morning. He said to tell you hello. He’s in the bank now. His daddy took him on last spring.”
“I would at least visit it first, if it was me,” his dad admonished me. “I know the bus goes down there because after the war we used to take it for the fire department. We took it from Waterville.”
“That sounds nice,” I mumbled, confused. I felt that one or the other of us was not tracking properly on this conversation.
“And of course, Robin was there. She’s such a nice girl,” said his mom, eyeing my boots.
“The corner of Trade and Graham!” his dad crowed with delight. “Next to the hardware store.” Then his face fell into a frown of doubt. “I don’t suppose,” he said to me, “that you’ll get out to eat much.”
“She always asks after you,” Danny’s mother continued. “You really should go by sometime and see her. I know she’d be so tickled to see you anytime.” She turned to me. “I’m sure Daniel has told you all about Robin, of course.”
“Well, I guess we’d better be going,” Danny said.
“Why, no, he hasn’t,” I said.
“It’s a long drive back,” Danny said.
“Gracious!” His mom definitely chuckled now. “They were inseparable, just inseparable!”
“Of course,” his dad added thoughtfully, “no one knows what you look like under there, so you might as well eat what you want.”
“High school was a long time ago, Mama,” Danny said.
“Might as well get whatever pleasures you can,” said his dad.
“Not to look at Robin, it wasn’t,” countered his mom. “Her figure looks just as slim and pretty as it did the day y’all graduated.”
“Is gluttony still a sin for y’all?” his dad asked me, looking concerned and holding up his fingers to count off. “There’s pride, I know, and fornication . . . .”
“We really have to go now,” Danny said, standing up and heading to the door.
“Good luck in Charlotte!” his dad called.
“Is there any particular reason why your dad thinks I’m going to become a nun in Charlotte?” I asked Danny once we hit the highway.
“Not that I know of,” Danny said, and then laughed. “I tried to warn you. Now let’s go home and figure out a way to forget them, okay?”
Summer lingered for a long time that year, but eventually the sky turned a hard steel color and the dogwoods dropped their leaves and the crows began to sound mournful calling to each other from the edges of the meadow, which is how you know that it is autumn at last.
Danny and I found a not-too-bad love seat at the dump and put it in front of our empty, ash-scattered fireplace and fully intended to spend our evenings cuddling before a roaring blaze. Danny went so far as to borrow a firewood ax from his cousin and to lean it up against the side of the house.
We had no neighbors out in the woods and easily could have spent all day fornicating on the deck—or in the middle of the road, for that matter—without being disturbed by anyone. But the weather had turned raw and gritty and inhospitable to exposed skin. The fallen dead leaves were slippery and damp, clinging like slugs to the outdoor furniture so you were never quite sure what you were feeling when you accidently touched one. Inside the house, the light was a perpetual gloom and we kept the lamps lit all day long. Danny was gone most nights until late.
Charlie Blue and I were sitting down at the end of the bar when Tom came in after closing up the bookstore and asked Rafi for a Natty BoHo.
“When did you learn to play bass so well?” Tom asked Charlie.
Charlie blushed and smiled and looked down at his beer. “Oh, I’ve just been picking at it some,” he said. “Just, you know, to kind of pass the time. I don’t really know how to play much.”
“Why don’t you start playing out more?” Tom asked him. “You could get together some folks to play with, I bet.”
Charlie blushed some more and didn’t take his eyes off his beer. “Oh, I just play from time to time,” he said. “Just kind of on the spur of the moment. I couldn’t go onto a stage or anything like that.”
“You did here.”
“Well, it’s different here. I mean, it’s just us here, you know. Friends . . .”
“I’d go see you play,” said Tom.
“We all would,” Rafi said, looking down the bar.
“Not me,” said Stinky, who had been shouting out a string of wrong answers to Jeopardy! and was looking disgusted with the TV.
“See?” Rafi said. “It would be perfect.”
Charlie grinned down into his beer.
“The problem in this town,” Stinky said, ignoring Rafi, “is that every two-bit circus pony thinks he’s the horse of the year. Some things are best left to be effectuated by the professionals. Who wants to listen to amateur hour? I mean, as a musician, you’re not exactly that hula hoop guy.”
There was a pause while we all thought about it.
“Yo-Yo Ma?” Tom said.
Stinky gave Tom a withering stare and pointedly turned back to Jeopardy! “Morons,” he muttered under his breath.
“Ignore him,” I said.
“He’s got a point, though,” Charlie said. “I’m no professional musician. I’m no Billy Joe.”
“Let me tell you,” Rafi said. “I’ve known Billy Joe for almost a thousand years now, and even Billy Joe didn’t used to be Billy Joe.”
“Who’d he used to be?” Charlie asked.
Stinky snorted with his back to us.
“Just another kid with a secondhand guitar,” Rafi said.
“Still is,” Stinky said to the room.
“Maybe in some ways he still is,” Tom said. “But that’s the beauty of it.”
“How do you mean?” Charlie said.
“I mean that we’re all in it together—just human animals here on earth together for a short time. If we can make some music and share it with each other, well, then I guess we’ve done some good in the world.”
“Oh, brother,” Stinky said to the TV screen.
“I’ll tell you what,” Rafi said to Charlie. “Billy Joe is at the house right now, and I bet he’s not doing anything much. Why don’t you go on over there and bring your bass and play some with him for a little bit?”
“Oh, I couldn’t just barge in like that.”
“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll go with you. Billy Joe will be happy to see us. We’ll bring beer.”
Charlie looked doubtful, but he got up off his barstool. Rafi filled a brown paper bag with cold beer and handed it to him. Tom pulled out his wallet.
“No charge,” Rafi said.
After they left, I said to Rafi, “Tom sure is a nice guy.”
“Nothing nice about it,” Stinky said, turning to look at me. “Take my word for it—it’s a pretty near certitude that, statistically speaking, Charlie Blue will just end up another failure. Uneducated punk kid like that? He’ll never amount to anything, future-wise. Tom’s just setting him up for a fall. Nothing nice about it.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Seen it too many times, little lady,” he said. “He’ll end up just another loser sitting in a bar.”
Stinky got up and paid his tab and left a nickel for a tip.
“You come back soon, now,” Rafi said as the door closed behind Stinky.
A couple of months later, I ran into Orla for the first time since I had moved. We were both buying cardboard-tasting winter tomatoes in the produce section of the big supermarket. She was happy to see me, especially in such a compromising position. I was like a Baptist preacher being caught with two hookers and a basketful of porn.
“I didn’t see your wedding announcement in the paper,” she said. “I looked and looked. Didn’t you put one in?”
“We’re not married yet,” I said.
“Hmm,” Orla said.
“We’re going to get married, but we just haven’t yet,” I said.
“Hmm,” Orla said again.
“There are so many details to take care of,” I said, and laughed uneasily, feeling unaccountably panicky, like when you’re driving down the road, minding your own business, and you suddenly notice the car behind you is a cop. Even though you’re not doing anything wrong, you start to worry.
“We’re thinking of June!” I semi-shrieked.
Orla leaned forward and gently patted my oddly sweaty hand. She looked deep into my eyes with a small, sad smile. “I’ll pray for you,” she said. Then she patted my hand again and walked off toward the snack aisle.
It is one of the ironies of Christianity that Saturday night turns so seamlessly into Sunday morning. Danny was face down on the pillow with his arm flung out across my belly. I could feel the warmth of him and hear the quiet sound of his breathing. He was awake.
“We’ve got to get up now,” he said. “I promised my folks that we’d come by after church and eat lunch with them.”
“It was either that or have them here.”
“Lord, anything but that.”
“Do we have an iron?” he asked, sitting up.
“Like for clothes?”
“There has been some discussion of wrinkled shirts from my mother, and I thought it might be best to head that off at the pass.”
We had no iron, but he found a sweater with only one smallish hole and a pair of pants that had been worn only once since they were last washed. I put on the dress Uncle Joe had bought me for my high-school graduation.
“I’ll hit you if you laugh,” I said to Danny.
He didn’t laugh.
“It’s just that they have these ideas,” he said. “They have these ways that they believe things should be.”
“What do they believe?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, they believe that hell is real, and they believe that I might be going there.”
“Nice parents,” I said.
“It’s just that they love me,” he said. “They want so much for me. Better than they had it.”
So we drove out on the old blacktop highway, not saying much—just watching the empty winter fields roll past. We arrived at their house and pulled up to the driveway at the same time as Danny’s parents.
“Oh, Daniel, there you are,” his mom said, getting out of their car under the roof of the carport. “I thought you might join us in church this morning.”
“No,” Danny said, looking vague. “No, we were in town.”
“Must be a mighty good preacher there to hold a candle to Reverend Tucker.”
“How’s Charlotte?” his dad asked me as we went into the kitchen.
“Charlotte who?” I said.
“I knew a girl named Charlotte once,” he said. Then he paused and smiled. “Now she most definitely was not a nun!”
“Hush, Daddy!” Danny’s mom said reprovingly. “There’s no call for that kind of conversation.”
Danny’s dad hushed, but I noticed that the smile lingered on his face for some time.
“Daniel.” She turned to him. “There was a sale on out at the JCPenney and I bought you two new pairs of nice everyday slacks.” She was beadily eyeing the pants we had been so happy to find that morning. “They’re in your room, and you can try them on now.”
“Mama,” Danny began, but she cut him off with a sharp bark—“Daniel!”—and he got wearily to his feet.
“Charlotte used to wear pants sometimes,” Danny’s father broke in. “Young ladies didn’t wear pants too often in those days, of course. I remember a certain white pair she had . . . .”
“No nonsense, now,” Danny’s mother said severely, possibly to both Danny and his dad, and then turned to me, smiling with obvious effort. “Boys will be such boys!” she said. “No matter how old they get, they always need a firm hand.”
“Firm!” his dad said, smiling into space.
“You seem like the sort of . . . ,” she paused, “young lady who knows how to . . . ,” another pause, “handle menfolk.”
“Well . . . ,” I started, thinking that both yes and no were bad answers to this question.
But Danny’s mother carried on. “Why, they’re just like children, all of them! They don’t know what’s good for themselves, no matter how many times you tell them!”
“Be sure to tell her I said hello,” Danny’s dad said. He reached out and patted my hand.
“Take Daniel,” Danny’s mother continued.
“No, I wouldn’t take Daniel along, if I were you.” Danny’s father shook his head and then lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Charlotte’s an awful pretty girl—you should see her in pants!” He winked.
“He has so much potential!” Danny’s mother said. “That’s what I always tell him. He could do things with himself, if he just showed a little gumption! Or if the right woman would settle him down. Like his cousin Bob Henry—he’s just almost exactly Daniel’s age, and he already runs four fried-fish sandwich franchises between here and Tennessee. Now there’s no reason in the world why Daniel couldn’t do that just as well. Or even better—half a dozen franchises! Why, when they were boys, Daniel could just run rings around Bob Henry.”
“Is Bob Henry the one all the cats follow around?” his dad asked.
“Now Daddy, you know Bob Henry!” Then, turning to me, “I’m not saying Bob Henry couldn’t maybe spend a little longer in the shower some days. It might help with his acne some, too. But that’s beside the point. The point is that he’s made something out of himself. You can’t say running four fried-fish sandwich franchises isn’t making something of yourself!”
“And cats sure do seem to like him,” Danny’s dad said, nodding vigorously.
“If he would use lye soap . . . ,” Danny’s mother began, but just then Danny appeared, looking resigned in a pair of khaki pants with pleats in the front. They seemed to come up especially high on his waist.
“Now don’t you look nice!” Danny’s mother said. “So much better than those ratty things you had on.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Danny said morosely.
“Kiss your mama who takes such good care of you,” she said, and he trudged over and kissed her cheek.
“Now let’s have lunch,” she said. “You look like you could use a good home-cooked meal for a change.”
We ate baked ham with macaroni salad, potato salad, coleslaw, and three-bean salad. Danny didn’t say too much, and we left as soon as we could after lunch.
On the way out, his dad leaned in close to me in the carport. “Don’t forget to tell Charlotte I said hello,” he whispered, and winked again.
Later that day, I asked Danny, “What was your mother like when you were little?”
He thought for a minute.
“Disappointed,” he said.
“I know the feeling. I think my mama would have liked me better if only I would have been all done up in a frilly pink dress all the time. But I don’t remember her ever buying me anything like that—or ribbons or shiny shoes. Those sorts of things were never for me.”
“Be glad. At least you weren’t paraded around in front of everyone dressed up like a prizewinning goose at Easter.”
“No,” I said. “I was never paraded around.”
Autumn wore on and slowly turned into winter—the Southern winter that is really just a long extension of fall, gray and sad and defeated and endless. Danny and I got used to living together and gradually didn’t go as much into town on cold nights to keep each other company at work. I worked mostly afternoons and then went home and watched the war on TV. Jake stopped by every now and then and drank beer and watched with me. Sometimes Danny came home early, and we watched the war together until the TV station went off the air. Summertime seemed longer ago than it really was.
In the mornings, I would wake up and find Danny asleep close to me, one arm flung over his head, his fingers gently curved as if he were cradling a handful of air. I wouldn’t touch his hand for fear of waking him, but I would very carefully lay my own hand next to his on the sheets and try to feel the warmth of his body heat.
How well I know this hand, I would tell myself, marveling at the construction of it—the way the bones and muscles fit together, the way the skin was molded so perfectly against them, the way my own hand could have been cupped so effortlessly into his palm.
My hand belongs in your hand, I would think, looking at them next to each other. Your hand belongs with mine and we belong together and you belong to me.
When I got out of bed to go make coffee and start my day, I was very quiet, so as not to disturb him, and sometimes he was still asleep when I left to go to work, his hand still curled into the empty air.
There weren’t people down at the pond very often, now that the weather had turned. The water was too cold at night and too forlorn looking in the daytime. I went down and sat on the dock sometimes by myself when Danny wasn’t around.
Pancho was there one night lying flat on his back listening to the water slap against the dock while he stared up at the star-filled sky.
“Whatcha see, Pancho?” I asked.
I looked up at the darkness. “There aren’t any clouds,” I said.
“There are lots of different kinds of clouds.”
“Sky looks pretty clear to me.”
“Yes, it looks clear,” he agreed. “But I can feel a storm coming in from somewhere. It’s very close to us now.”
“Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know. I just feel it. Maybe it’s coming from somewhere we never thought a storm could come from.”
“When will it get here?”
“It’s been coming a long time, but I’m afraid it will be here soon.”
“Should we go back into town? Will we be okay out here?”
Pancho closed his eyes and frowned in concentration for a few minutes.
“I don’t think we’ll all be okay,” he said finally.
So I followed him back to town, and we went together to Tia’s first and then down to the Cave after Tia’s closed. It rained the next day, but only a drizzle.