The front door is open, so you know she is most likely home. You wait for her to answer, stand unnaturally still while staring at a small, fraying hole in the screen and praying with all your teenage-atheist soul for her not to be there, to have gone to the local store and simply left the door open to preserve the illusion of a breeze in her front room. Maybe she just had to take a quick trip to the
But no, here she comes now.
By no means free-speaking under the most inviting of circumstances, you have no idea what to say to this woman. Last time—the only other time you were here—you at least knew that much.
Ma'am. I'm sorry to bother you. I just ... I was just driving along ... driving a few -- little ways down, and I hit ... I was wondering, ma'am, do you have a dog?
Her eyes, previously sleep-laden, popped wide, ready to defend her own. The name left her mouth almost before it had a chance to open.
Hopper? HOPPER!
You both knew it was hers as she pushed past you.
And now, as she makes her way across the small interior of the house to answer the knock, the thin screen that separates you does not hide the recognition that passes over her eyes, doesn't mask the quick emotion just behind them. Last time you'd seen her, she wore some sort of mumu-esque robe thing, faded blue. She is much older in your memory of that night; now she wears jeans, a black tank-top and a bandanna. She looks as if she's been working, a smear of dirt across her cheek, the wisps that escape her bandanna dark with sweat and pressed to her forehead.
"Well?" The single word, gently split into two syllables by her accent, is absolute in the heated air it passes through to reach your ears. It rejects every notion you had for coming here, and suddenly the crumpled sheets of paper, paper scrawled with thoughts you have to tell her, are forgotten, left slightly damp with sweat in the front pocket of your jeans. You think of turning around, walking to the car you left parked on the side of the two-lane, and driving off in a spray of loose pebbles.
You stare at her for what must be a weighty chunk of forever, your mouth slightly open, sweaty palms stroking the hips of your faded jeans. She stares back. You feel silly, stupid, childish and a hundred other maturity-threatening diminutives you hate; your mind reaches out, back, trying to link this feeling to memories, but is cut off by her eyes. You are held, ungrounded to the past.
You remain speechless, but she does not.
"That's what I thought." With a sigh, she releases your eyes from her own and turns away. Just before she does, though, you see it, a look of age around her eyes, a tiredness evidenced in the purple pouches beneath them, in the puffiness of her cheeks and the tremor of her jaw, a jaw weary of clenching. You see the past three days in that face.
"I want to help you."
On the edge of interior gloom three steps from the door, her back is toward you. As she turns, she laughs, raw, throaty and real.
"Why?"
Through the half-light, you cannot clearly make out her expression. After a moment, she walks back to the screen, pushes it open and turns back into the house without a word. You grab the door, but stay where you are.
"Are you coming or not? I've got work to do." She does not turn and you think, again, that you should not have come.
You step into the house, leaving her porch and the road that brought you here from Paducah behind, and follow her on an unspoken tour: through the living room, in which a large, asthmatic box fan pushes damp, heavy air through the rest of the house; to your left, probably a bedroom, but the door is closed; past the bathroom, down a short hall, the walls covered with pictures; into the kitchen. The kitchen is small and cramped, a pale, ugly yellow. The corner to your left holds the table where she must eat. In a recessed nook, it seats no more than two, and you wonder if she ever has to feed more than that. Across the room, a door, also open, leads to the backyard. The kitchen, for all its lack of space and sun-bleached coloring, is immaculate, not a dish on the counter or the table; the stove looks as if its never been cooked on, the refrigerator, covered in pictures arranged with care, not slapped up as the ones in your apartment are.
She goes to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and grabs two glasses. She pulls a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator. "You can sit. You're making me uncomfortable standing there like an idiot in the doorway."
"Thanks," you say, hearing the dissonance of thanking someone who's just called you an idiot, and you move to the table without saying anything else. At least there are two chairs, you think as you sit in the one that allows you to continue facing the room. You can still see the pictures in the hall, and as she pours tea, you study the one closest. In it, she is crouched down on the front stoop of this house, her arm wrapped around her dog—Hopper—and he is turned toward her, licking her face. The last time you saw Hopper, you helped put him in the back of a pickup truck, cradling his crushed head, holding him by the shoulders and torso as the woman who is now pouring you a cold drink held his hindquarters; you both strained to lift his weight past the tailgate into the truck.
"Help me?" she questions now, back still turned toward you as she returns the tea to the refrigerator, giving voice to the question that has floated between you, probably since you knocked on the door. She begins to wash her hands as you roll answers over in your mind, contemplating each and then discarding.
You speak more because you have to than because you have found what you wanted to say.
"I haven't stopped thinking—"
She cuts you off with another laugh, dark as the first. She turns around, wiping her hands on a deep blue dishtowel. When she's done, she folds it on the small metal towel rack that hangs over the sink. As she leans against the counter in front of the sink, her arms fold themselves over her chest. "Let's get something straight, right off: I lost my dog three days ago when you hit him with your car. Since then, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him, and yeah, I see him when I close my eyes. Don't sleep so well. But I certainly don't spend time thinking about you. Jesus, kid, I've got no time to fix myself, let alone you, if that's what you're looking for."
"So, let's start this over. ...What do you want?"
She stands across the tiny kitchen, silently watching you, waiting. It is your move now. Everything that seemed right to say as you were lying in bed, thinking comforting words to offer up, now sounds pale. She is right.
Finally, you tell her the truth.
"I don't know."
An expression of your shame. You look down at your hands, which have become inextricably intertwined with your t-shirt, look back up at her.
She reaches to the two glasses of iced tea. Picking both up, she crosses the meager patch of linoleum and sets one glass in front of you. "At least we're being honest now."
She sits in the other chair. Her posture is relaxed, almost kicked back, as she leans one elbow against the table and slumps a little in her chair, drinking back from her glass, finishing almost half the tea before the glass leaves her lips and returns to the table. You timidly take a sip of yours. As you realize how hot the day actually is and how much you have been forgetting to swallow or breathe in the last fifteen minutes, you drink in earnest. The tea is cold and clear, deeply sweetened, and you have a brief picture of her setting the pitcher out on the front stoop to steep in the sun. Somehow, that makes it taste better. You both drink your tea in silence, and you concentrate on the sound of the box fan dying in the front room.
After a minute, she stands, returns to the refrigerator and pours herself another glass. Turning to you, she offers, "More?" She refills your glass as well.
Grabbing her glass, she moves to the door leading to the backyard. "I've got to finish this before four. I've still got to shower before work tonight."
With that, she's out the back door, once again leaving you behind. You look at your watch—just after one-thirty. Wondering what she has to finish, you grab your glass and hurry to follow her.
The sun is pounding against the back of the house, and as your sight comes, you see that you are on a narrow wooden deck that runs the short length of the house. The deck is covered with a tarp, which in turn, is covered with paint chips, and the back face of the house is about three-quarters peeling, olive-green paint. The left-hand side has been scraped smooth, and she stands at the flaking line of demarcation, two paint scrapers in her hand. She sees your sight returning in your expression and offers you one of the scrapers.
"You wanna help? You can scrape. I've got to finish scraping and priming this side today—it's supposed to rain tomorrow. The last thing I need is wood rotting."
You grab the red-handled tool from her.
"Name's Laurie. Since we'll be working together."
"Paul."
"Well, Paul, start down on the other side, I'll continue where I am, and we'll meet somewhere around the middle, okay?"
You set your glass next to hers on the 2×6 that makes up the top of the deck's railing. "Sure. Sounds great." She smiles. Small, but a smile, and you smile back.
She moves to her side, where a three-step ladder is perched. Climbing it, she begins scraping at the top, just underneath the gutters. You move to the opposite side and, since you have no stepladder, begin scraping at ground-level. While you scrape, you realize how comfortable this all feels. And you think about how odd that is.
"I was gonna build a fence for him. When I got the time, told myself. Next week, maybe." She is concentrating on her portion of paint. "Guess it should have been a little further up the to-do list, huh? You know it's not the first time he got out. I mean, he's supposed to stay in the back yard, but ... well, we're all supposed to do things, aren't we?" She gets down off the ladder, moves it over a few feet and ascends again. "I guess we all make mistakes."
Having paused to listen, you begin scraping once more. "I drive too fast."
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
You both are scraping again in silence, and for a while, you continue like this. You wonder if she heard you. You wonder how old she is—thirty-five? forty?—but don't want to ask.
The scraping is difficult work. Each slat of the siding is probably six inches wide, and then, the base of one slat juts out about a half inch farther than the top of the one below it. You note that she meticulously works the flat section of each slat until it's as good as she can make it. Then, she goes back and does the underside of the same piece. She can reach about eight, clearing a three or four foot section of each, and then she has to move the ladder. You concentrate on the lower slats, eight from the top leaves you twelve to do. You try to do your work just like she does, crouching down to scrap even the bottom ones completely. Every couple moves the two of you make, you stop to drink some iced tea, and soon you both need refills.
Sticking the handle of your scraper in your back pocket, you grab her glass and take both back into the kitchen. When you return, she is sitting on the stepladder, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She leans her other hand on her knee.
"Here's your tea." She looks up at you as you hand it to her. You both take a few steps backward, to an evaluative distance and look at your work across the back of the house. Your paths have just about met in the middle—you caught up with what she had done earlier on her side when you skipped the space taken up by the door to the kitchen.
"I've never met a nineteen-year-old boy who doesn't drive too fast." She says it in a quick, quiet tone that makes little mention of the time that has passed since you made that particular admission. You look at her, expecting more, but that seems to be all.
After a moment, she sets the half-finished glass of tea on the railing and heads back to the ladder. You stay where you are, watching her work. As she climbs the ladder and begins to scrape once more, she is partially silhouetted by the afternoon sun, and it sets the bits of escaped hair at the edges of her bandanna on fire. The near-scripted movie quality makes you want to cringe. The part of it that's beautiful keeps you from doing anything but looking at her.
"I didn't ask you back here to watch me work, you know," she calls without looking down. You make your way quickly back to the spot where you'd left off before, grabbing your scraper out of your jeans pocket as you do so. You begin scraping quickly, as if trying to make up the few lost minutes.
You are working in rhythm to the music—Allman Brothers—concentrating on maintaining the slick rasp of metal on wood in cut time, when she asks, "So what brings you to our little corner of the world?"
And so it is that the two of you transition to conversation. Later, you know you will only remember snippets of speech, your propensity much more for sound bytes than for entire dialogues. You work underneath her scraping overhead and eventually cross to her other side.
You find yourself telling her about moving from Chicago in pursuit of a girl you haven't seen in months, about staying because, despite the girl's departure, you still find yourself bound to two years of school, two years of friends, an apartment you share with three other poli-sci majors from Murray State, a part-time job and routine. The portrait Laurie tries to offer in return is composed, for the most part, of what sounds like an unpleasant waitress gig in town, summer days spent hiking and swimming the Land Between the Lakes, winters spent reading and cross-country skiing, peaking in a holiday visit to her parents in Boca Raton. As she speaks, you can hear the space that is missing in her stories, the space that belonged to Hopper.
Yes, later you will remember bits of every conversation, but none as a whole. You are not talking for content. More than that, you will see her, standing on the ladder, looking down at you and wiping her hand across the thigh of her jeans to dry it as you talk, the way her eyes seem to take all of you in at once. You'll feel her hand, brushing yours as she offers a fresh glass of tea, the skin soft and somehow knowing, and feel your own face, smiling as she turns up the small radio that has sat on the deck since the two of you went out there, as she dances minutely back to her ladder, a few shuffled, swayed steps in time to the Eagles. You will hear the way her voice glides around subjects and words without catching the words themselves, enjoying the vocal turns simply for the sound. Always, you will associate the smell of paint chips baking and grass dying with her and that afternoon spent in the sun.
At some point in the afternoon, before music, but after the final tea refill, the two of you have switched from scraping to sanding, replacing your metal-bladed scrapers with pieces of rough, grating sandpaper wrapped around blocks of two-by-four to save your hands a little. The harsh staccato sound of scraping wood, the flaking of chips on the tarp, has been replaced by the gritty, circular sound of sand-on-wood friction. A fine mist of wood dust hangs in the heavy air, making its way slowly toward the ground where it begins to melt into paint chips no longer crisp under the heat's power.
She slams down her block on the top of the ladder: "Shit, it's ten after four. I've gotta get ready for work." She leans out from the ladder and surveys the back of the house. It's probably two-thirds finished. "Shit!"
You respond without thinking, much as you've been doing for the past couple of hours: "I can finish it for you."
She looks at you, those clear, green eyes. "You don't have to do that. You've helped enough today... I can get up early tomorrow—before work—and finish it."
"It's not that big a deal."
She appears to kick that around for a minute. And then, "Okay. Well, I'll get ready and we'll see where you are then." You return to the spot you were sanding. After a minute, you realize she's still standing next to you. You look up at her. "Go inside and get ready, already."
She is gone into the house, the screen door slamming, bouncing lightly a few times against the frame. You work steadily between the kitchen door and window after she leaves. On the radio, Van Morrison is offering to share a moondance with you and your mind plays over the conversations which already begin to fade. You wonder vaguely what has happened. From inside the house, you can hear her shuffling through the bedroom, probably grabbing whatever uniform she uses to waitress. The sounds move into the bathroom after a few minutes, and you hear the shower start.
The blast of an air-horn bursts from the two-lane highway out in front of her house, followed by the roar of eighteen wheels and the rush of air that hurries to fill the space behind a semi. Hopper! Obviously not, you think, your body recalling the slam of the seatbelt across your chest as your right headlight and bumper connected with the black lab's shoulder, the shudder of the car's misaligned wheel as you slowed, the warm, loose feel of his dying flesh as you knelt over his broken form. Still, you are sure the driver is honking to warn an animal trapped in its path, and you start off the deck, running in the direction of the front yard.
Reaching the grass that separates her house from the road, you see the semi's back doors retreating. In its wake, your car is pulled haphazardly off the side of the road, back where you'd left it when you were still entertaining hopes of Laurie's absence. There is no animal splayed across the grayed blacktop.
Relieved, shaken in a way you would not have been a week before, you pull your car to safety in her gravel drive. You turn the car off and hurry to return to your work. As you walk back to the deck, you glance at the windows of the house and are looking at her for a few seconds before you realize it.
The bathroom window looks directly in on the shower, and she stands beneath the spray of the water, her body turned in a three-quarter profile away from you as she washes her hair. Your eyes, unrestrained, travel the visible length of her body: the small of her back, curve of her hip and up her side, the side of her breast, larger than any you've seen, smooth, with a dark, erect nipple, around to her shoulder blades, pronounced as her arms are raised over her head, her fingers kneading the hair you now see is long and dark, shampoo trailing from the base of her hairline, down her neck, following her spine down the skin of her back, to where your eyes began their journey. Your mouth opens a little and your hands move involuntarily to the window sill, the hairs on your arms strain. Your fingertips feel the silky firmness of her skin, they catch slightly because the water washes away their oils. You taste the water as it runs off the cleft of her collarbone and down her chest, smell the essence that is her close to you.
While you watch, she turns to face you, moving to rinse the shampoo from her hair; you are able to move once again as you glimpse her fully. You scramble back to the deck, your breath on hold. You feel caught. You hope she didn't see you, sure that she did. What the hell were you thinking? You pick up the block and begin a spastic sort of sanding that lacks the liquid flow of before. You have no right to fantasy, certainly no right to the reality behind it.
The shower shuts off. You want to calm down; you want to not feel; you want to leave, throw down the sandpaper-covered wood and get in your dusty, now-dented car and drive home; you want to go inside the tiny house, complete what was started by your over-active imagination; you want to erase the sight of her, to walk back from moving your car, grab the block and simply return to sanding. You sand slowly, concentrating on tight circles covering first one plank, then the one above it, the one above that, until the rough wood is beyond your arm's reach.
The motion of the work beneath your hand causes it to vibrate slightly, which starts a cramp twitching in the meaty part of your palm. Not wanting to, you stop, setting the block down on the window sill so you can massage the wound muscle. Turning out while you work your thumb deep into the flesh, you face the rest of the backyard, which is spacious and fades into the fields behind it. You try to discern where one ends and the other begins, but the sun is too bright in your eyes, blurring the distinction between short grass and long. As your eyes scan the expanse of yellowed green, which at some point melts and lengthens, they stop upon a darker patch, a patch that doesn't match the flow of the landscape. You step forward ... and then stop.
Hopper's grave. Freshly dark of earth, which is rich and near black. You wonder if there is a marker, some small cross or sign; you cannot see one from the porch. Yet, you do not want to walk closer. Instead you sit on a step that leads to the yard. The distance somehow seems proper, respectful. She didn't show you the grave, it wasn't a part of your afternoon by her design. You don't think she would want you to make it so. You realize how little of the afternoon you spent talking about Hopper, how this was not about him. There were no memories, no discussions of what he was like as a pup, or how he'd jumped on the Christmas tree every year and tried to eat the lights, or how he loved eggs in the morning (any time of day, really, but more so it seemed, in the morning), or how he always tested everyone she brought home by practically attacking them as they stepped through the door, barking and jumping. You wonder how she would have spent the afternoon had Hopper still been here, wondering how you would have spent this time. You think you would have liked to have seen her with Hopper.
Christ, you killed her dog. Hit him with your car, squashing his life with its tires as you were focused—where? On a night sky, so clear and different from your city home? On a CD that had slid beneath the passenger seat? On thoughts of your ex, on your hand squeezing your little-used dick? Does it matter? He is dead, a body beneath dirt at the edge of her property, a picture on her walls, a memory. And she has gaping holes in her stories. You haven't even talked about it today, haven't said you were sorry.
After a while, you hear the screen door open and shut behind you, her steps on the tarp-covered wood. You do not turn to look at her.
"It looks great," her voice calls over your shoulder, "You can stop if you want. Really, I should be able to finish this before work tomorrow."
"I'm just taking a break," your voice falls like so much stone from your mouth, crashing through the deck. "I want to finish it."
"Are you sure? You really don't have to."
"I want to." You refuse to turn around. You wonder if she is looking at the grave also. You just want her to leave so you can be uncomfortable in silence, solitary.
Instead, however, she puts her hand on your shoulder.
You turn your head too quickly and stare up at her, not speaking.
"All awkward and silent. What good does that ever do anyone?"
She waits for your response.
You want. Silent, your eyes tear to tell her, to act for once.
"Sometimes that's okay. I hope you know that much."
She wipes wetness from below your eye, gently with the pad of her thumb.
She pulls you toward her and you cry silently against her crisp, white oxford shirt, not even sure why you are. She just holds you, hand stroking your hair. And you can feel her breast beneath your cheek, her cheek against the top of your head and her breath slight against your hair, her hands, one on your head, one on your back, her thigh, which rests lightly, unintentionally against yours. You think how sex and comfort and love all lie on different spectrums; you think how they all converge.
And you are comfortable, once again.
Eventually, a gentle pat. She must go to work. You've got your own work to finish. The two of you say goodbye. She leaves through the house, off to her job, her alcohol and greasy food, her groping animals masquerading as men. You were almost done sanding when she came out, and, after a quick wipe-down of the wall to remove as much dust as possible, the priming does not take nearly as long as the other preparation. The back of the house glistens wet in the early evening. You clean up, folding the tarp, making sure not to spill paint chips, placing her tools inside the kitchen door, replacing the top on the can of primer and cleaning the brush.
When you're finished you sit on the top steps of the deck, just until the sun dips below the horizon and you can no longer make out the mound of earth that is Hopper's grave on the edge of the short grass. Then you stand, brush yourself off, and make your way through the house, turning off lights and closing doors as you go. You glance at the rooms. In front of her house, your car sits in a growing shadow in her drive. Under the windshield wiper is a folded piece of paper. You reach over and pull it out. Without unfolding it, you slip the paper in your shirt pocket, start the car and drive off, back the way you'd come.