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Brian smokes a thin cigar
and blows his smoke into the wind. “Hell of a night.”

“Too windy back there?”
Denise says.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because he can put it
out.”

“No,” he says. “I
can’t.”

“Brian.”

“Denise.”

“I just don’t want her to be
uncomfortable.”

“She said she’s not. What’s
the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

He laughs.

“Is something funny?” she
says.

“You are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“No,” he says. “You’re
not.”

I rest my head on the
window, good and cool.

“What do you mean, I’m not?”
she says.

“You said it first.” Brian
taps in the ashtray and turns up the radio.

“You said it
differently.”

“Well.”

She sighs and looks out the
window.

“This is it,” he
says.

Denise slides the stone of
her wedding ring around her finger.

“Did you hear me?” he
says.

“Not now.”

“Yes,” he says. “Now. This
time.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror. “How you
doing?”

“Fine,” I say.

“You’re not going to throw
up again?”

“I don’t think
so.”

“Denise?” He pushes into a
higher gear. “How are you doing, baby?”

She shakes her
head.

“What was that? I didn’t
hear you.”

“Fine.”

“Everyone is fine,” he says.
“Wonderful.”

Somewhere on me is the smell
of Marc’s aftershave.

I rub my fingers over my
skin and smell them until I find the spot, the back of my shoulder
near Jake’s favorite mole.

________

Denise stares straight ahead
when I get out of the car. Her nose is red in the light from the
open door.

________

In the dark and in my head I
am with him, with Marc in my bed and his arms are around me and his
stranger’s mouth is kissing me the way he kissed me in the kitchen,
the way I saw Brian kiss Denise before they disappeared down the
hall, after Denise said she wanted to stay a little longer and
after they thought I was locked away in the bathroom. I imagine
them together and then I think of him, of Brian, and then of Marc
and of Jake, all of them touching invisible me and I pretend I am
Denise, not me, and spread my legs and arch my back the way I think
she would.

APRIL 27, SUNDAY

Denise calls while I’m
sleeping and says she’s coming over with coffee from the café
downtown, the one with “that awful girl.” I ask her to find out
whether the house painting has been sold.

“Oh, that thing? Now I want
to know, too. Could you imagine someone buying it?”

“
It was gone,” she says in
the doorway, each hand holding a capped foam cup. Her eyes are red,
swollen, and a loose band holds back her hair. She pushes past me,
muttering that anyone would have to be crazy to pay more than ten
dollars “for that stupid picture of a house” and hands me a cup,
drops her bag on the floor by the couch, and falls into the
cushions. “I swear, this summer is going to be oppressive. Have you
been outside?”

“No, not yet.” I wonder who
could have bought the painting and if the coffee girl might give me
the name, not that I would know what to do with it if she
did.

Denise complains some more,
looking at me and looking away, touching her hair and taking short,
quick sips from the hole in the plastic top.

“So,” she says. “You must
have questions.”

“About what?”

She shakes her head and
reaches into her bag and pulls out an envelope. “These are for
you.”

I’d forgotten about the
pictures. I snatch them from her and she waits while I sift through
them.

Jake standing in front of an
Apache.

Jake sitting on a pile of
sandbags.

Jake posing beside the
painting of an Apache and pointing at the sun hanging low under a
dusty sky.

Jake with a cigarette, the
pack tucked in his shirt sleeve.

“Which one?”

“Hm?”

“You’re smiling. Which
one?”

I show her.

“He looks good, doesn’t
he?”

“Different.” In miniature,
as part of the matte-finished grain, he’s beautiful—painfully—in
his way. Bronze-brown skin, tanned and dirt-stained, and the
expression on his face—new, to me—is one of certainty and of
confidence and of correctness in time and place and purpose. The
pictures I already have, ones we’ve taken over the years in front
of statues or lakes or rivers or famous buildings, are of a
different person. Jake of this country, all-American boy who rarely
traveled outside of his state. Light, clean, and basic. Unlike this
new Jake, flat in my hands, who—just an image, yes, but—leaves me
feeling like the girl with a crush on the boy she hardly knows and
wonders if she’ll ever have.

“Thanks,” I say.

“They’re yours.”

I stack them—there must be
ten or eleven—and set them on the table and straighten the edges.
Denise gets up and smoothes her pants and walks around the room,
pretending to study wall hangings and knickknacks. She squints at
pictures she turns right-side-up on the shelves—“Oh, you’ve been
there? William and I were there last year,” and, to another,
“That’s one of the places he wants to visit when he gets back.”—and
when she runs out of things to pick up or point at, she sits back
down. “Your tree is dead.”

“I know.”

“Why is it still
up?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Do you want me to help
you?”

“No. Thanks. Chancey likes
it.”

She drinks more coffee, her
eyes on the ceiling, and then fumbles in her bag for a cigarette.
“Want one?”

“Please.”

Cigarettes lit, we sit
smoking with no breeze coming in through the open windows. The
cloud hangs in the middle of the room.

She bites her
nails.

I look at the clock. Eight
o’clock, Jake’s.

The remote control sits on
the arm of the chair. For three days, I’ve been disciplined, have
watched only half an hour before going to bed, much of it replayed
footage from the first days of the war. Explosions, explosions, gas
masks and bunkers,
Just over a month since
the official start of the conflict, Janie and Tom.
The killing of the third in command must not have
been important to the media. The story was brief, buried, gone in
two days. They’re onto something bigger, now: war protestors
spray-painting an Ohio recruitment office, then burning a Mercedes
belonging to a high ranking marine.

“Why were the pictures
upside down?”

“Sorry?”

“Your pictures on the
shelves. They were upside down.”

“It’s nothing. Sometimes
Jake will write things on the backs of pictures for me to find
later.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Did you find any secret
messages?”

“No.” I tip my cup for the
last few drops of coffee. “I think I want more. Do you want
some?”

“Sure.”

I bring the ashtray with me
to the kitchen and fill the pot, dump grains in the filter, and
stand there while it brews. Denise comes in to flick her ashes and
leans against the counter. “Thanks for having me over. William’s
mother is coming, so I’ve been cleaning like crazy. I had to get
out.”

“When will she be
here?”

“Tomorrow.”

I take a long drag, exhale
over her head. “William’s mother must be so happy to know he has a
wife who loves him the way you do.”

She laughs, then coughs.
Smoke-puffs the shape of mushroom clouds shoot out with bright,
sunlit drops of spittle. “I’ve been waiting for you to say
something.”

“It’s none of my
business.”

We put out our
cigarettes.

“No, it isn’t, but still…I
think I know what you think. I think you think we’re just having
fun, doing a little something on the side. You can tell
me.”

“I don’t think
anything.”

“Where are your coffee
mugs?”

I point to a cabinet, and
she pushes through the moderate collection until she finds one she
likes. She chooses one that reads, in large, comic letters, I LOVE
COFFEE.

She says, “I have to ask you
to not write Jake about him. What you do is up to you, of course,
but I would appreciate it.”

“I don’t keep secrets from
Jake. But, if it makes you feel any better, it hadn’t occurred to
me to write him about—about this.” I’d probably tell him about it
if he were here, but putting it in a letter borders on malicious.
Writing is…
intentional
.

“Well, whatever. Anyway,
Mia, this is between William and me. If you
do
write Jake, he’ll tell William,
so…”

“No, he won’t.”

“Then William would find the
letter.”

“I’d tell Jake to burn
it.”

“Quit smiling. This isn’t
funny.” She chews her lip and taps her mug. “You don’t
understand.”

“What don’t I
understand?”

“This. The whole
thing.”

I wait, listen to the clock.
I never took out the batteries.

The coffee finishes and I
pour some for each of us and we go back out to the living
room.

I think of Denise and
William, of Denise and Brian. What she can mean when she says I
don’t understand.

She’s probably right. I
don’t understand. Not really. But when I imagine the two of them
together, I think of Marc and that stock boy and I want to know how
Brian does it—if it’s different from what William does, and in what
ways. Does he smell like citrus? Does he grip her side instead of
her back? Does he bite her ear and whisper strange, private things
about the way her skin feels, maybe, or the shape of her shoulder?
I want to know, What’s it
like
to be with someone else, with someone
new?

I put my feet on the table
and my toe touches Jake’s pictures and I look at his face and
someone could have killed him at
that
moment,
that single second of innocent
fantasy, and it starts a panic, a strange sort of fluttering in my
throat, so I think
In real life never, I
promise,
and I imagine the painting and the
timelessness and endlessness of the love in that old house in the
snow. It’s Jake and me, I know it is, it is it is it is it is
it
is
—

—and I
need
it, the painting. Need it the way
the religious—and maybe, (or especially) the not-so-religious—need
their crosses over the dining room table, their Mary statues gazing
down from the fireplace mantle.

Denise wipes her eyes and
dries her fingers on her pants. Her face would be a mess if she
were wearing makeup, but as it is, there’s charm in her red eyes
and puffed mouth. Maybe it’s that I’ve never seen her like this. Or
maybe her pain gives me pleasure for no good reason. Whatever the
case, her swollen, splotchy face is strangely beautiful in a way
she couldn’t duplicate with all of her foundation and
blush.

“I love him.”

I rub my eyes, dry and
tired. “Does he love you?”

“Yes.”

“What about
William?”

“What about William,” she
says. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? What to do about
William.”

“Does he know?”

She bites a nail, looks at
it, folds her hands on her lap. “It was some time last year, winter
I think, when someone, some…nosy bastard…told William he saw me
with another man—who was, yes, Brian—at the shopette. We weren’t
doing anything
unseemly.
We were holding hands while looking for donut
holes. He prefers the chocolate ones, and I like glazed, but all we
could find were powdered.” She pulls her sleeves down to cover her
fingers, then pushes them back up to her elbows. “That was the only
time William ever said anything. He told me someone had seen me in
the store with a man, and he asked who the man was. It wasn’t
serious yet, so I told him I didn’t know, that it wasn’t even me.
He let it go. But now,” she says and puts another nail in her
mouth, “he must know
something
is off. We don’t kiss anymore. Not unless
we’re…well.” She shakes her head. “Isn’t that funny? I can say it
when I’m talking about Brian. ‘I sleep with Brian.’ ‘I have sex
with Brian.’ I can’t say it about William. Anyway, that’s when we
kiss. Or, that’s when he kisses me and I let him. You would think
he’d feel that, or that he could tell. How can anyone be that
oblivious? Anyway, time passes—months, sometimes—in between, and
it’s not like we hate each other. We’re adults, after all, and
fairly sexual people. But we don’t hug. Or touch, or laugh. He has
to have an idea. He can’t be that obtuse.”