Robert walks me to my van, where I have an intense desire to steady myself by slipping my fingers through his belt loops. He opens the door for me.
“This doesn’t count as our coffee date,” he says.
I think of Robert’s scar, how it disappeared into his shirt, and my lips want to touch something. I am not breathing. I feel his hand stroke my hair as I lower into the seat. He watches my feet until they’re safely inside and closes my door. At the window, he waves good night but does not leave. There is a look. Slow. Present. His lips part as if to speak, but there are no words. Just this look. And right before he turns to leave, he mouths, Mary.
I place my hand on the dirt-flecked glass, hold it there as he walks back to his truck.
I’m too drunk to drive so I only pretend I’m about to take off, waving to Robert as he heads back to town.
I toss my keys onto the dark and cluttered floor of the passenger side, a trick Pete taught my senior class to keep us from making bad judgments on the road. I lay my face against the steering wheel and watch the shadows of the bleachers stretch long and crooked into the dirt.
If I hadn’t sat down in the driver’s seat, Robert might have kissed me.
My fingers trace the braided edge of leather along the steering wheel, and I hum the song from the old game. I always thought the kids invented it. But maybe we only echoed the feelings and judgments of the men we’ve honored as heroes.
With our song, with our finger-pointing, we ran Robert out of Petroleum. All of us. I remember my own voice singing, Sissy, sissy, and the glee of belonging. I can’t take it back. Not that and not leaving him alone for our coffee date. It sits here like a mass caught in my throat.
But he made a space for me to sit beside him. We sat, knowing each other’s flaws—some of them, anyway—and let down our guards. Usually I’m more cautious, trying not to upset people, trying not to be noticed at all.
It felt good to be seen.
The last bit of sun slips behind the rims. There’s a light snowfall, just a tease for what’s to come. I pull my hat lower, pull my hands inside my coat sleeves, pull my feet up to the seat, ready for a nap.
He might have kissed me.
The bleachers where we sat together are now completely black, like a construction paper cutout against a canvas of watercolors—a brush of pink, a moody purple, a splash of white. I feel an ache deep-in, as if only beginning to notice that something vital has been curled up in hiding. The girl who skated in socks, who ran to meet the train with a penny, who sat in the back of the art room hunched over a drawing and forgetting time—all buried under those stones.
Night draws its shade. Coyotes call, and another day comes to an end. It’s funny how time goes so slow one day, sometimes for a whole season or a whole year, and then it’s like a fast-forward button is pressed, and where did time go? How could you move no closer to the life you dreamed for yourself? How could you go so long without a kiss?