My father taught me to feel the air for the suggestion of coming seasons. On short dark days we flew our hands out the window of his Wagoneer and felt for a balmy current flowing through the cold. A game I have always loved. Feel the air for a future season. Fall in summer, spring in winter. Warnings. Promises.
In Cannon Beach, in those last weeks of August I found fall everywhere. The light had begun to lengthen. The wind was more often cut with that sharp winter edge. The nights became colder. We stayed up later and later and tried to take the last of it. There were great bonfires on the beach. Ending parties. Everyone was preparing to leave. Tess and I were making plans. September we’d drive up to Seattle to see my parents. Spend a few days and then fly to London. We had plenty of money. Until then we’d work and walk the beach and watch the summer die away.
I became tense and irritable.
Tess watched me from her chair, over the top of her book, from bed.
“Joseph,” she said. “Sad Joseph.”
She smiled at me with tender sympathy, still charmed and intrigued by my ever-changing mind.
My fading summer joy was like the dilution of some wonderful and potent liquid. Drops of water dripping into the vial, weakening the solution bit by bit.
“It’s everything all at once,” I told Tess. “The end of summer, my mother’s phone call, leaving.”
“That’s all it is?”
“Yes,” I said.
On a night off, waiting for her to finish work, I sat at the bar watching a Mariners game. She was keeping an eye on me. The bartender was a friend of ours, a short guy with red hair.
I was okay. I liked being in that little corner. Things were all right, but then in the middle of the rush, I looked from the TV to see a group of guys watching Tess walk away. They were making a show of it and watching was what mattered to them. The display. It was nothing new and nothing she couldn’t have handled herself. She was tougher than I was by a long, long way. But there was something about them, and then something about one of them. The way he sat slunk down in his chair. His leer. The way he collected his friends’ grins.
Waited for them. Little gold coins. The sad prick.
I felt that twinge in my gut. Sharp irritation turned to rage.
They were nothing. They were the usual. They were the same old shit. The same thing Tess endured every hour of every shift.
Still.
The timing was wrong. The night was poisoned. Winter was coming. Too much bourbon. The night was rotten. I’m not sure. Something though. It was something.
The Mariners lost. Then it was the news on mute, so instead of looking at the television, I looked at the guy.
I wasn’t that kind of person. I have never been that kind of person. Except for sometimes, right?
That’s a funny thing. A funny idea. This kind of a person or that. I wasn’t though. I wasn’t until I was, until he snatched at her. Until he grabbed at her wrist.
When he did that I hit him and broke my hand.