JUNE 26, 1975
The second time he sees her is a few weeks later at the Stonewall. It’s late June, the first truly warm night of summer. She raises her bare arm and motions him over to where she stands at the bar with some hippies: a tall striking woman who looks like a raven, a couple of soft-bellied, long-haired men.
“Stephen, right?” Deb says, smiling, as he walks toward her.
Stephen nods and tries not to look at the place where Deb’s white cotton shirt—faint stains in the armpits, frayed at the edges—buttons closed at her chest.
“Hey, I owe you a drink,” she says, butting her elbow into his ribs. “You gave me a ride.”
Stephen refuses but orders himself another Miller and pays for her glass of jug wine.
“You live here?” one of the hippies with stringy reddish long hair asks him.
“I guess you could call it that,” Stephen says quietly.
“Stephen’s a local,” Deb says, hooking her finger into the belt loop of her jeans. They’re the same tight blue jeans she wore the first time he saw her. She smells like cigarettes and some other scent he can’t place—sweat, her sex. She asks about his summer and he asks about hers. On their second round of drinks she leans her mouth in toward Stephen’s ear and tells him she’d like to see his place.
Stephen laughs. Nearly chokes on his beer. He is terrified of women always, but especially ones like this.
“I’m serious,” she says. Those gray eyes. The space in the V of her shirt where he tries not to rest his gaze.
“My place isn’t much,” Stephen says. “I don’t think you want to go there.” But his blood is racing and warm from his scalp to his toes and he tries quickly to think of some other place they can go. The creek. A field. The front seat of his truck.
“No, I want to see your place,” she says. “I really do.”
THEY DRIVE AS FAR AS THEY CAN IN STEPHEN’S TRUCK UP the steep track, then walk the rest of the way in the dark, breathing hard as they clamber up the old logging road. The night has not yet cooled, and by the time they reach the cabin they are both sweating. She leans in toward his body and looks around.
“It’s beautiful,” she says after a minute, tilting her head up toward the stars. All they can see in the quarter-moon light that filters through the pines is the outline of the half-built cabin, the roof of his mother’s house below, and the lights of the town on the edge of the horizon ten miles away. Stephen offers her a Budweiser from the bucket where he keeps them cool, buried in a wet spot in the ground.
“Thank you. This is good,” she says. They sit on a log, their legs spread out straight in front of them. She moves closer to him so their legs touch.
“It’s something,” Stephen says.
“More than that.” She puts her hand on his thigh.
Stephen laughs. “Okay.”
“Hey, Stephen.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to live here with you.” That clear resounding voice of hers—like a bell.
Stephen chokes on his beer. “You don’t know me.”
“I still want to live here with you.”
“Why?”
“I like everything about it. Woods. The view. You. I just have a feeling.” She’s not smiling now. Her voice is serious. “Plus,” she says. “I’m sick of the commune. This is far more real. Quieter. I like trees.” Then she sets her beer down and reaches toward Stephen, puts her mouth against his mouth. He fumbles with the buttons of her blouse until she laughs and helps him.
“Here,” she says, undoing the buttons herself and slipping the cotton off her shoulders. He doesn’t have any rubbers that night, so he tries to pull out of her—Stephen’s father isn’t a man he wants to see reflected in himself, and he doesn’t know his way in the world well enough to guide another—but she pulls him back inside her. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Get pregnant.”
“Oh,” Stephen says, not asking why, and then he lets himself loose inside her, a clean explosive sensation that leaves his insides feeling ripped apart and raw. They fall asleep like that, naked, their limbs wrapped around each other, his sleeping bag thrown over them to keep off June’s midnight chill.
SHE MOVES IN WITH HIM THAT SUMMER. THEY INSULATE the cabin walls with fiberglass, cover them with planed pine boards, fresh from the mill. Stephen cuts more trees to the east and south for the light, and turns the track that leads up the hill into a two-season road with three loads of gravel.
“I love it here,” Deb says, often enough that it becomes a refrain. “Let’s make everything we do right, Stephen. Everything. Down to the bone.” She quotes the Nearings: “To take his life into his own hands and live it in the country, in a decent, simple, kindly way.” Stephen withholds comment—thinks of his mother. The bitterness that can come from isolation.
But he likes her. She surprises him with her capacity to work, her willingness to learn new things, her ability to laugh out loud. Stephen borrows a neighbor’s tractor, and they spend hours that summer transforming the once-forest into a small field. Deb follows behind the tractor, pulling rocks and roots out of the ground and piling them at the edge of the clearing in rows. She wears, every day, the same blue cotton eyelet top, cutoff blue jeans, and a straw hat she brought with her from the commune, and Stephen loves catching a glimpse of her behind him, small and strong, her feet and hands black with dirt, her limbs turning brown as tree bark.
All summer and fall they work like that, late, side by side, and on weekends after dark they drive down the long driveway to the store for cold beers and fast food.
“You’re quiet,” she says one night, sitting in the dirt outside the cabin, touching his leg with the back of her hand.
“I guess.”
“I’m used to talking about how I feel. Blathering. Acting compulsive. You make me feel like a fool.”
“No need to feel that way.” Stephen smiles and runs a cold bottle up the length of Deb’s browned thigh and feels happier than he has ever imagined he could.
IN OCTOBER SHE TELLS HIM SHE IS PREGNANT. SHE SAYS she doesn’t know how it happened—that she must have gotten slack with the pill. She has cooked a dinner of ribs and green beans from the new garden. She opens a bottle of wine, rolls a joint, and sets the makeshift table—some boards laid across two sawhorses—with candles and a tablecloth. When Stephen comes in from splitting wood she meets him at the door and kisses him on the mouth. Her clean, still-damp dark hair smells like jasmine and lemon. A hint of woodsmoke.
“Guess what?” She closes her eyes and lifts her face up toward his.
Stephen sits down at the table and grins at her. He can’t think what. A job? Money? “What?” he asks.
Deb sits down across from him and takes his hand in hers. She leans in close and squeezes his palm with her fingers. “You’re going to be a father,” she says.
In the future it will always hurt Stephen to remember that moment—how it affected his breath. What it had done to the strength in his legs. Deb stands and steps toward Stephen and grabs his hands and starts, there by the table, to dance. A single lightbulb hangs from the kitchen ceiling, and she moves directly underneath it, her body weaving in and out between shadow and light. He can smell her, the remains of her jasmine perfume overpowered by her particular scent of sweet, overripe fruit. He wants to reach out to her, grab her body, swaying in the light before him, but something catches near his heart, making his breathing quick. He thinks of his father’s drinking, of his sad fiddle on the porch at night. Of him slamming the door, the reverberation of wood on wood. Of the day he disappeared and did not come back.
“You’re unhappy,” Deb says. She stops moving her body and looks up at him.
“No, no, I’m not. I’m happy,” he says, and picks her up and carries her out of the house and onto the porch and sets her down in the rocking chair they have brought there and gently begins to rub her bare feet and legs.
“Thank you, Stephen,” she says quietly, tipping her head back against the rocker, pointing her face up toward the stars.