We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight. She says it just like that, \u201cthe fight,\u201d and he understands. He\u2019s got a lumpy, bald head, peppered with drops of sweat and he goes over to tell the guy behind the bar. We are seated beside a wall. Across the restaurant, people are seated beside windows.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She asks, \u201cHow\u2019s your summer been?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I say, \u201cI moved.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOh yeah? How was that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For my last month or so living in the old house, they played the same Tom T. Hall song every day and suggested I didn\u2019t leave. \u201cCall the whole thing off,\u201d they\u2019d say, \u201cIt\u2019s not too late.\u201d And I would say it was fine, that people moved all the time, people just moved. Anyone who found somewhere that cheap so much closer to the city would be stupid not to take it. Then I\u2019d go up to my room, close the door, open the window, and cry. I give her a brief lesson on the geography of the suburbs. Bridges I drive over now.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She begins to tell me that her summer was fine, except that the guy she was seeing drowned. She glances at the fight, frowns, then back at me. Yes, it was pretty sad. Pretty shocking. Pretty tragic.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe guy you were seeing drowned?\u201d I repeat. I can see it clearly. I must be remembering a scene in a movie. The man is wearing a 1920\u2019s style bathing suit and has center-parted hair. A British accent. British teeth. We have whiskeys and are pushing the ice cubes around with black stirring straws. I think of the Titanic. Now that\u2019s drowning.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWe don\u2019t need to dwell on it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cHow long were you two together?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cA month and a half,\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOh,\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cSee? It\u2019s strange. It\u2019s strange. I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m grieving \u2013 a summer fling? A future? The children we could\u2019ve had, I mean.\u201d She looks down at her drink. It\u2019s gone. So are the steaks. I wish we had just stopped talking long enough to enjoy them. We order more drinks, doubles this time, and fries to split. The sweat drops on the waiter\u2019s head are bigger now, as if he\u2019s crying from his scalp. \u201cSo now you\u2019re on a trip?\u201d She asks. That\u2019s why I\u2019m here. Passing through and staying at her place. Before we came out here for steaks, she laid a folded mattress topper on the floor beside her own unmade bed, then said \u201cIt\u2019s like a side-car bed.\u201d\u00a0 Her place is down the road from the restaurant, close enough to walk. She\u2019s got a window box herb garden and a rabbit named Misty and the whole place, an unairconditioned studio, smells like it. Her linens are the color of surgical scrubs and I can tell, somehow, that she took them from the hall closet the day she left her parents\u2019 house.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cYeah,\u201d I say. \u201cJust, you know, to shake things up.\u201d We were never very close. I realize this now, downing half my whiskey. It was only ever proximity and I try to conjure an image of it. There was the time we drove an hour away to see our professors present at an Environmental Studies conference. All I can remember is coming back, her maroon station wagon cresting a hill in the springtime. And I think we had discovered a commonality, lactose intolerance or left handedness, something that seemed to matter then. And now we are here, looking down at the wood laminate table, a little uncomfortable because lonely people are afraid of each other.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThere are three rounds,\u201d she says, picking up her steak knife and pointing it towards the television, \u201cand a one-minute break between them.\u201d I nod but don\u2019t turn around. I am not sure if I don\u2019t care, or if I do care and that\u2019s why I can\u2019t look.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cSo, tell me more about the house,\u201d she urges, using her knife\u2019s tip to draw a smiley face in the juices left on her plate.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe house?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cYeah, the house, the one you just moved to.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I stare at her and nod and think about the place. How all of the cabinets are labeled and none of the women wear bras and at night we sit around with our breasts falling in all directions and talk about dogs until one of us cries \u2013 cries about how good dogs are. Then we talk about talking, about ourselves and our habits. We talk about how we always talk about dogs until one of us cries. How strange this is. How special we are. Then bedtime, and we walk around the kitchen without looking into each other\u2019s eyes. \u201cThere\u2019s a big front porch,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cHey, that\u2019s great,\u201d she says. Then I sigh and look at the wall. There is a small, framed map of the state. That\u2019s all there is. If we were really friends, I would\u2019ve insisted we sit by a window. I study the image of the state, floating on a white page, trying to remember the borders. Was it landlocked? Was that a lake coast, up at the top?\u00a0 \u201cIt was a long, Catholic service,\u201d she says, through the ice cube she\u2019s chewing. I turn in time to watch her wipe a drip of water from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. \u201cCatholic with an open casket. And I hate open caskets and I hate Catholic services because all their songs sound like Broadway hits \u2013 I was raised Methodist, have I told you that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cNo, you haven\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI was, and the music is better. Anyhow, I didn\u2019t have anyone to sit with. None of my friends would come with me. I asked one and she said it wasn\u2019t appropriate. She wasn\u2019t family.\u201d I finish the watery whiskey left in my glass. She does the same.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On my last Saturday at the old house, I said that Tom T. Hall\u2019s voice had an adolescent quality. It was a particular note, a strain of startling, boundless grief \u2013 the sort we are no longer capable of feeling once we reach adulthood but might be reminded of in a plotless dream. None of the others agreed, \u201cnot quite adolescent,\u201d they said, frowning, \u201cnot adolescent, something else.\u201d But there wasn\u2019t much debate before we put the matter aside and drank coffee in the yard until only two of us were left. The shadow of the house was beginning to creep across the tufty lawn when he started in on it again, with waning conviction, saying it wasn\u2019t too late.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The whiskey floods me with affection for her \u2013 torrents of buoyant sympathy. I float on it like a lazy river at a waterpark, filled with Band-Aids and hair and timid children, too scared to ride the real attractions. The waiter wants to know if we want another drink. We don\u2019t. He wants us to leave but doesn\u2019t say as much. The droplets on his head are even bigger now, and they have multiplied. I take her hand. It is puffy and claw-like, with fingernails filed to points and I think of the man who drowned and wonder how it was to be attracted to a woman with hands like this. She\u2019s going on in a stage whisper, leaning across the table, like a conspiracy theorist. She had nothing to wear to the service, she\u2019d never met his mom, she didn\u2019t know what to do \u2013 bring flowers? She\u2019d been thinking of breaking up with him (actually, she\u2019d decided on it).\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t close with his friends, and they were grieving so hard (that\u2019s the adjective she chose: \u201chard\u201d), harder than her. Should she have tried harder, she wants to know, tried harder to grieve harder? Should she have made some sort of performance? The front of her blouse is dragging in the ketchup on her plate.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At church coffee hour as a child, I used to take the jelly donuts, suck the filling out, and then put them back on the platter. Their appearance was perfectly preserved, perfectly innocuous. But there was a backwash effect. With the saliva, I mean, if you can imagine that. It wasn\u2019t kind.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWhy are you<\/em> crying?\u201d she asks, a little incredulously, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in her seat.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I say. She looks over my shoulder at the fight and I can see it reflected in her glasses, not in any great detail, of course \u2013 just flesh and bright lights.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A few months after I make it back home autumn arrives over the course of a single weekend and in advance of the first frost, I ferry all the tropical plants from the big front porch into the living room and she texts me late one night to say that she found a dead opossum at the end of her street, that it was sweet, that it looked like it was sleeping. Before I can reply, she writes more, she says: \u201cAt any rate, it made me think of you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7028,"template":"","categories":[9,48,49],"tags":[1845,6,143],"class_list":["post-7027","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-fiction","category-literary-features","tag-anney-bolgiano","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n