Their final night in Nevada, they went to a bar where half the jukebox songs stole quarters and paper snowflakes still bent at the creases hung from taped-up string. They drank beer cold enough frost hugged the bottle. When a slow song drew to the floor by the pool table couples, Alexandra let him lead her, sway. And in the light of cheap lager neons, a drunk man hooting in the back, folded against Jeremy’s wool shirt so his bergamot smell touched her face, there was a private, spacious feeling.
That night, Alexandra and Jeremy held each other in her thin childhood bed so that neither would fall off, but also because she wanted to remain tight to him in whatever way she could. On a small table beside the bed sat a green glass vase and scratchy fake flowers, always in bloom, touched with clear glue dewdrops.
She remembered out loud and quietly. Her autobiography returned to her in old jean jackets and corduroy dresses, the edges of which she could see in the closet, in a black backpack drawn over in Wite-Out. They bent around each other in her cartoon sheets, never after grade school replaced. She rubbed on a type of soda pop chapstick she’d not bought since high school, and turned her eyes over a white window panel intimating wild birds in lace.
The next day at the airport, they discovered their seats had been, without cause, upgraded. She leaned her hip against an information kiosk.
“But why?” she said.
Jeremy accepted from her things passed she didn’t have hands for. Holiday pattern bags. A child ran by, rippling blue cape behind. To use her hands, she put on the sunglasses that made everything lavender.
“When the luck is good,” Jeremy said, pastel and happy, “the answer is not why. It is yes.”