Sol feels the presence of Elizabeth next to him in their bed. From her breathing, steady as it is, he can tell she isn’t sleeping, no more than he is. The old featherbed is oversoft and saggy and the weight of her body pulls his own towards her; he has to tense the muscles of his stomach to keep himself from being drawn down into the bed’s gully with her, against her. As much as he wants to. He can smell her scent, milky and damp and faintly sweat-smoky, calling to him, after all these years that haven’t yet passed. His prick is hard again, but mostly just as an afterthought, a purely bodily expression divorced from the way he feels. Sure, he’d like to get atop her, unlimber himself and slide inside her like they once used to do, so often, once, hot and frantic, bashing lips and teeth into one another but, more than anything, what he wants is to be just close to her, once more, now that he has the chance again. Earlier in the night he’d tried, sidling up against her turned back, pressing his chest against her and hooking an arm over her hip, hand on her belly, his other arm folded uncomfortably back behind his shoulder. The feel of her stiffening, though, drawing away with a slight but noticeable motion, sent him back to his own side of the bed, where he lays on his back now, staring up at the ceiling, willing his own breath to come still and regular.
It’s hot in the bedroom; he’d forgotten just how dense and stagnant the air had hung that last summer they were together. Stifling, even when the windows were open. From the crib next to the bed he can hear Owen whimper and snuffle, smell the dank fragrant heat of him, small as he is. Strange to see and hold this little lump of flesh and bone and know that, years from now, the boy will be stretched long and lanky, a spot-faced youth, taller than Sol himself, already, trying on a man’s life for the first time, to see the fit of it. A life that will be cut short in the burning dark unless Sol can steer things better this time.
This feeling of love for the baby seems familiar again; he remembers before, that first time around, the sense of pride and completion when he’d hold the boy, something that, at the time, seemed faintly unmanly, so powerful was the feeling, but was his nonetheless. A fierce, protective urge that is nothing but stronger now, knowing what will pass in the years to come. He knows that legacy is a pregnant, stupid, selfish word for what he feels: what this baby is is nothing more or less than the possibility of something good, that Sol helped to make and will try his damnedest to shape into the best kind of man that the boy can be. Owen isn’t so much Sol’s legacy as the chance for him to add a mark into the positive side of his own ledger, something, someone, to be weighed against all of his own failures and fuck-ups.
Strange to think these kinds of things now, again, when he’d felt this way the first time around and still had shipped Owen off to his brother as soon as things had gone south, with barely a second thought. Washed his hands of the boy, of his noble thoughts and his responsibilities, just as quick as he could, once life got a bit hard.
This is what he ponders as he finally drops off to sleep, wakening sometime later to the feel of Lizzie atop him, a knife at his neck.
“Why are you here?” she says, the warm, sweaty weight of her pressing down into him. “Why?” she says again, before he can speak, the point of his tarnished old pocketknife dimpling the skin under his Adam’s apple. Though it’s shameful to admit, Sol has a hard-on pressing painfully against his thigh, trapped under her leg, whether from racy dreams or Lizzie’s insistent pressure or just because he has to piss. He’s always been a heavy sleeper, so who knows how long she’s been on him, squatting over his prick like that. He hopes she’s asleep, having a nightmare maybe, but he also remembers how it went with the woman he’d brought in to help after Owen had been born.
He tries to answer his wife, with what he doesn’t know. Anything, something, but her hand reaches out, damp and clammy, pressing down over his lips, pushing them closed. The knife pokes more sharply at his neck.
“Why, Sol? Why? Is it real, this time? Is it real?”
He wants to explain that they’ve been given another chance, but then she starts to cry, shuddering, tears dropping hot onto his face, shameless uncontrolled sobbing that crumples her down into herself until her forehead is resting on his chest. Gently, slowly, he frees an arm, sliding it around her back and pulling her close, wedging his other hand between them to free the knife from her now nerveless fingers, the blade forgotten in her sorrow. She’s saying something, caught beneath the sobs, over and over into his chest. He can’t hear it so much as feel it, murmuring through his ribs. It takes a long time for him to peel the meaning out from the sound.
There’s something wrong with me, she’s whispering, again and again. There’s something wrong with me.
It feels natural, later, when her tears dissolve into exhaustion and the press of her head against his chest slides into the feel of her lips at his neck, and then they’re kissing, gently at first and then insistently, not thinking, just drawing into each other. With a practiced motion she slides him into her, straddling across his legs. One of his hands is at her hip, guiding her movement, the other clenched in her thick hair, fist against the base of her skull. After all these years, Sol thinks, it’s like it always was, clenching his teeth at the end and pulling her hard against him.
When he wakes up in the morning, he’s sweating in the sheets, his bladder near to bursting, and she’s gone, as if she’d never been there at all.
Lizzie ignores him after he gets up, busying herself with cooking his breakfast and sitting down with Owen for the baby’s own. Sol watches her as he eats his eggs, which are overcooked and rubbery as usual. She’s sitting there in the rocker with the baby at her breast like the Madonna. Finishing his meal, he scrapes the plate into the trash and, when the boy is done eating, Sol tries to take him from her but Lizzie turns away, slinging Owen onto a hip and carrying him into the bedroom and his crib.
“He needs a nap,” she says, brusquely; whatever tenderness there was from the night before has evaporated in the sunlight that’s already uncomfortably warming up the house, though it’s early yet. Sol thinks it strange that the baby would need to sleep again so soon after waking but he’s no mother, after all, and has learned by now not to contradict Lizzie on matters of maternal process.
He cleans himself up, splashing tepid water over his face and through his hair, brushing his teeth and marveling again at this new face, so different from the one that’s glared back at him out of mirrors for the last umpteen years, angry and broke-down and accusatory. Lizzie is outside at the pump when he comes back out buttoning up his shirt, pulling his belt tighter around a surprisingly lean belly. Her generous ass is rounding the thin, over-washed calico of her dress and yet again Sol feels the tug of blood in his new, younger man’s cock, even given that he’d wet it just a few hours before. This insistent sex drive takes him aback some, although he of course remembers those days, years ago, this hum of randiness that’s coursing through him at the mere sight of a shapely rear end. But Lizzie shrugs him off as he tries to ease up behind her, pressing up against her suggestively, so he’s forced to content himself with just working the well’s pump handle a time or two, up and down, splashing water out, which seems onanistically ironic, really. When he tries to carry the wash tub for her, though, Lizzie snaps at him, peevishly, pulling it from him so that a goodly portion of the water spills, and then she stomps back towards the house. Sol watches, forlornly, that ass of hers swaying with every step.
“Guess I’ll be headed to the tavern, then, honey,” he calls out.
She ignores him.
It’s maybe not his fault, then – well, not entirely – that he’s drunk before noon, not just tipsy but flat-out drunk. There are no customers this time of day and perhaps his inventory check got a little too exacting and personal, wanting, as he did, to ascertain the exact depths of various whiskey barrels. But he’s finding that ill-equipped doesn’t begin to describe how he’s set up to deal with the situation he’s found himself in and this is perhaps the easiest and most straightforward way to handle it all, drinking it out to a distance where it will get a bit smaller, letting him sidle up to it, inch by inch, until he’s ready to take it in at that more manageable size.
It’s maybe not his fault, either, that the way he gets through that day doubles and triples and doubles again, as the calendar flips. Each day passes in an increasingly drunken haze, each night sweaty and tense and largely sleepless, but without the release of that first night he’d come back, with Lizzie’s thighs wrapped around him, her tears smeared on his cheekbones as they’d made love. As they’d just fucked, really, he thinks more often; it doesn’t seem like there’s much love left in her to make, as he sees it. Had it been this way before? From the distance of years he’d remembered things, bad as they’d gotten, with a rosy glow, at least up to a point. The two of them together, one flesh, deep in love, until Lizzie had gotten sick and everything went bad. But, before then, it had been perfect, hadn’t it? Sol’s realizing now, with the experience of time – since lost – that maybe what he’d really pined for had simply been that feeling of first love, the one that burns hot and sharp and breathy, painful and ill-made though it usually was.
The more he ponders it, staring into it from the depths of glass after glass of the mediocre whiskey that he serves in his tavern to the occasional patron – but usually just himself – Sol begins to remember things as they truly were back then: the way they are now. Lizzie, angry and tired and disgusted with a life that she chafed against, with Sol and Owen and the lot of it, as if she’d been somehow caught instead of walking into it with open eyes. He himself, hardly home, at the tavern most hours of the day, and drunk for most of those hours. Two people like poles of a magnet, circling around the baby and the life they’d somehow fallen into together, forever pushing each other apart.
Weeks of this sodden, maudlin existence, the understanding dawning ever brighter, day by day, that this golden time in his life which, to Sol as an old man, had been the years he’d yearned for the most, with that warm ache of nostalgia were, close up, just another set of years. Maybe their juxtaposition against the way it had all fallen apart so quickly, and that Sol had spent so long afterward merely drifting, angry and grieving for what he’d lost, had helped to build them up as something more lovely than they were, before the end.
Or maybe it was all just the drink-sodden, sappy memories of a sad old fucker, by then, with a soft prick and only the occasional working girl to attend to it, that served to shine these years so brightly. Years that now, seen for what they were, were as dirty and cheap as the rest of his life. You always remember your first, they say; Sol remembered his, a neighbor girl back behind a stack of bales, the proverbial roll in the hay. Lizzie was the first woman he’d ever loved, though, a perfect specimen of the human female, he’d thought, at the time. Really, she was a fading, crazy bitch and he’d been nothing but a drunk. An incompetent provider, lousy husband, lousy father. An overall failure. Shakespearean tragedy it wasn’t, but a tragedy nonetheless, now that he’s near enough to see it again. He knows he’s being maudlin, that the whiskey isn’t helping but, once started, it’s hard to stop some of these sorts of thoughts.
Sol has the uncomfortable realization that maybe all the things in his life that he once thought were good are merely shitty memories that will fall apart when next he sees them. Sitting in Potter’s, by himself, watching the dust motes dance in the hazy light leaking in through the dirty windows, he takes another drink, refilling his glass with an automatic motion, his vision bleary but his pouring hand ever steady. It’s good to have a skill in life, to not be a complete incompetent at everything, he thinks. The whiskey pours into the smudged, greasy glass, just to the top, not a drop spilled. At least, at something, he’s a true artisan.
More and more, he’s beginning to understand that things are broken, that this isn’t going to work. Lizzie is broken, so maybe that’s why he’s here: to cut with this life, take Owen and leave. Go somewhere the boy will be safe. Get Ag to take Lizzie to his hospital. Maybe last time, after the fire, it was just too late, the press of her guilt weighing the crazy down too deep into her. Sol doesn’t want to just up and quit on her like that, even feeling as he does, but maybe that’s how it needs to go.
The whiskey burns hot down his neck, splashing into the pool building in his belly, firing his insides until there’s nothing to do but pour down another shot to drown it. Who cares that it’s barely three in the afternoon and he’s sitting by himself? He doesn’t have anywhere he needs to be.
He’s maybe not even entirely surprised when the bell over the door dings and the boy sits down beside him.