Erin was the reason me and my buddy Nick stopped calling each other pussy. She didn’t ask us to stop. It was that we were seniors and she was a freshman rubbing vanilla extract on her neck because her mom didn’t tolerate perfume. In Nick’s car she always rode up front while I sat in back, knees splayed, leaning forward to better hear the radio and possibly avoid feeling like Nick’s bitch. The point of having Erin around was to protect her from guys like us.
Erin had bad posture, thick bangs covering the zits on her forehead, eyes that flashed with accusations and frequent falsehoods, and full lips she habitually pinched. She was lean but lacked angles, a dolphin of a girl. I was quietly in love. For me and Nick, there was a thrill in feigning maturity we in no way possessed. We believed she believed we were men.
Nick had a fantasy Erin was smarter than us, bound to make something of herself. He used to tell her so sternly, “I don’t ever want to see you again once you turn eighteen.” He’d say, “I better not lay eyes on you unless you’re on TV.” Erin may have been the only kid we knew with a library card, but that was no reason to think she’d end up on TV.
If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I ever loved that girl. Feeling a particular way about Erin could have been a lie I told myself at seventeen—or a lie I told myself twenty years later. For sure I associated Erin with a sense of my own selflessness. I had certain caretaking compulsions you could consider heroic. She brought those out in me.
●
We never went to Erin’s house except for the one time we did. Nick was interested in some pills Erin had caught her mom swallowing with SlimFast. We cut gym, loaded Erin into Nick’s Ford Taurus, and drove to her house while her parents were at work. That house was a seventies split-level with vaulted ceilings and a spider infestation, and when I was grown I sold it to a gray-haired couple from San Francisco who wasted no time tearing it down. The pills were nothing exciting—mild amphetamines for weight loss or narcolepsy. What’s important is Erin’s family had a dog they kept tied to a cable stretched between two trees in the yard, so it could sort of run back and forth.
That dog was a beautiful dog, with the square yellow head of a Labrador, the leggy precarity of a Great Dane, and a temperament destroyed by its circumstances. I asked Erin if they ever let the dog off the cable.
“No,” Erin said. “He’s an outside dog.”
Having permitted Nick to ransack her mother’s medicine cabinet, she was squeezing a pimple with her face two inches from the mirror. As she leaned over the sink, her shirt rode up. Her body was a source of fascination for me. I wanted to see the places where it all came together. Even in summer Erin wore loose shirts and baggy jeans and I couldn’t get a clear sense of her breasts, hips, whether those thighs were surprisingly slight or more substantial. Such questions weighed on me—maybe because I hoped I wasn’t attracted to her, or hoped I was.
In high school I didn’t do much Nick hadn’t instructed me to do, yet I took it upon myself to drive back to Erin’s house in the middle of the night and set the dog free. What happened was the dog took off like a shot into the woods and never was seen or heard from again. Possibly that outcome was not ideal. But if you’d seen the confidence and grace with which that animal shifted into fifth gear, knowing exactly what his legs were for, as if his captivity had only ever been a prank pulled by the dumbest of his dumbass friends, I can’t imagine you’d hold my actions against me. Truth be told, I’d do it again.
●
Nick cut Erin off after we graduated in 2001. By the morning of September 11th, Nick had attended two community college classes: Accounting Fundamentals and Achieving Success with Difficult People. The sight of his mother crying into the carpet in front of the television he found stirring, or he regretted his failure to turn past the first page of the course catalog. More charitably: Nick was braver than me, Nick was governed by an honorable restlessness and belief in his physical power and indomitable spirit. And perhaps he harbored secret patriotism about which I knew nothing.
A failed drug test delayed him a couple of months, but he was gone by Christmas. He did two tours in Iraq. Meanwhile, Erin finished high school and went off to college. Nick left the army in 2004 after a close call with a roadside bomb. An article in the newspaper gave me more details than he ever did.
Some nights, while Erin was still living in Bozeman, she’d call Nick’s phone and just breathe into it. Nick would take those calls and say zilch. He’d hang up after a minute, not a muscle in his face would twitch, and that would be that. Her sophomore year, Erin was impregnated by her crooked landlord. She came home and raised her daughter and worked her way up to a managerial position at WinCo. And for a long time, that was that.
●
Twenty years later, Nick was my employee at the real estate agency. Neither Nick nor Erin had ever married—not each other and not anyone else. They both lived in town, Erin in a riverside Craftsman paid for in Bitcoin she’d cashed out at the opportune moment. It was around that time or shortly thereafter Nick got curious about Erin’s daughter Sasha.
The appeal of a female in the blush of her early twenties was not lost on me, and Sasha looked an awful lot like Erin had in high school. Better, if you want to get technical. Sasha had a straighter spine and more effusive tits. She taught Saturday afternoon spin class and Sunday morning yoga at the fitness center on Main Street. Both her wardrobe and physique advertised these learning opportunities. When it comes to morality, I don’t believe in anything black and white. But I believe in gradations, and Nick’s roving eye landing on Erin’s daughter signaled a darkness I found troubling.
“Why the daughter?” I asked him. It was the end of the day and we were closing our laptops, tossing our empty Red Bulls. “Just ask Erin out. She’s the one you want.”
Nick zipped his raincoat to his chin. “No, man. Erin’s a mommy.”
“You’re forty.”
“Not a daddy, though.”
Me neither, due to a problem with Annette’s anatomy or possibly mine. What I liked about not having kids was the cathedral-like silence of our three-bedroom, single-family home. On a weekend afternoon I could drink seven beers and lose track of where the couch ended and I began. What I disliked about infertility was how easily Annette could have left me if she got the notion. She made her own money, negotiated her own way through life, was friendly to everyone she met, men included, including me.
“Forget Erin,” Nick said. I took my time locking up while he stood in the rain. I was proud of the agency’s location between the movie theater and the good coffee. “Erin is not it. I’m buying Sasha a beer Saturday. No harm in getting to know her.”
Nick got in my truck, indicating he needed a ride home. I climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. It was late November, darker than dark at 5 p.m.
“You ask her yet?”
“I signed up for her spin class.”
“Bad idea, Nicky.”
“Exercise?”
“You’ve had enough exercise in my opinion.”
“Gotcha. Requesting a refund now. Ordering myself a chastity belt from Amazon dot com.”
“How’s the fit?”
“It’s snug, man. Kind of bruising my balls. Does that mean it’s not my belt? Hey!” He yelled with manic intensity. “Maybe it’s yours!”
“Maybe it’s your mom’s.”
Nick laughed. “You’re worried a girl I barely fucked in high school is what, pining for me?”
“There’s such a thing as respecting your history.”
“Cody, baby, baby.” Nick talked tenderly to make me nervous. He did it all the time. “You’re such a pussy.”
The insult had been back in rotation for several years. I could ignore him or I could say it too. For a long time, I believed the reward was in not saying it, but more recently I’d changed my mind.
●
Saturday afternoon, as Annette got ready for her volunteer shift at the senior center, I let her know I was going into town to check on my bench. For about a week my face, in its capacity as the face of Cody Matthews Real Estate, had graced a bench on Main Street. Nick warned me I’d be vandalized, and I told him no, kids don’t do that shit anymore. Kids have vape pens and internet on their phones. But Nick was correct, and within hours I’d acquired devil horns, a prospector’s mustache, hillbillyish gaps in my teeth. It happened so fast Annette’s theory was Nick had defaced me himself.
“What’s the point of checking on it?” she asked me now.
“Make sure it hasn’t gotten worse.”
“What’ll you do if it has?”
“Leave town,” I said. “Start my life over.”
I watched her curl her hair. To me she always looked like the kind of girl who worked in an ice cream shop. I can’t explain that comment. In fact, we’d met at church, which I’d started attending in my early thirties to meet women and stopped attending once I met one. I loved my wife dearly. She allowed me my space. We had sex every two or three days assuming she wasn’t on her period and neither of us had a cold. Deep down I knew it should burden Annette I had so little faith. I could never tell if she had a plan for me or if she considered my soul a lost cause. But that particular anxiety was a private thing, yet to surface in our daily lives. About my marriage I had no complaints.
“Alright,” she said. “Nice knowing you.”
My bench happened to be outside the fitness center, which was where I happened to be parked as Nick and Sasha left spin class together. Sasha had on a lot of green spandexes, Nick the army sweatpants he wore to solicit thanks for his service. Nick was not a tall man, five-eight or five-nine, but to my knowledge no girl ever faulted him for that. He had no body fat. There was no softness to his face. He was all muscle and clavicle, sinew and jawbone. No homo was another thing we’d said as kids, stopped saying, then said a few more times in middle age. No homo was the truth, but I’ll admit I was jealous of his compact charisma. His familiarity with war. All Nick’s life people had seen the razor-sharp edges of him, whereas I was a blur, an approximation of a man. Annette must have seen me in some amount of detail when we’d started going out. But lately she loved me the way a girl loves God: because someone told her to, a long time ago.
Nick and Sasha went into Chinese Gardens, Nick’s preferred place to get Sierra Nevada on tap. I considered going in after them and doing—what, exactly? Loudly remembering the past. The way Erin used to draw on our shoes. The way Sasha didn’t exist. And then a woman got out of the car beside mine and the woman was Erin. She hunched her shoulders against the rain and sheltered beneath the restaurant’s maroon awning. With one hand on the door, she paused to check her phone.
In response to what my pulse considered an emergency, I lowered my window and called her name.
Erin looked up at me, her face slack, off duty. Deep creases underscored her eyes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m getting takeout.”
“You call it in already?”
She laughed at me.
I said, “Can you get in the truck for a second?” I was counting on a lifelong trait of hers that many have mistaken for passivity. To my credit, she turned up the collar of her fleece, hopped over a puddle, and got in the truck.
“How’s the house?” I started to drive, which was a form of kidnapping, yet I believed I had a responsibility to prevent Erin from witnessing Nick’s seduction of her daughter.
“It’s perfect. Everyone says not to trust the agent, they work for the seller and so on. But you got me a deal, didn’t you?”
“You offered cash. You got yourself a deal.”
“Okay then.”
“How’s Sasha?”
“Smarter than me. What do you want, Cody?” That she asked what I wanted and not where we were headed struck me as a good sign. I got on Highway 14 and kept driving. After her volunteer shift my wife would call me, and I would tell her I was at Nick’s, we’d sunk a few too many and I’d be home in the morning. Things of that nature happened all the time—though maybe they ought to have stopped happening by now.
I said, “I wonder if you could—”
“I bet I could.”
I coughed gratuitously. “Tell me something you remember about me.”
“Sure.” She pressed the soles of her boots against my glove compartment. She was still lean, built like something designed to be folded up and put in storage for the winter. “I remember in ninth grade I came to school crying because my dog had gotten loose and run off. Nicky didn’t care, he said, ‘You never showed that creature any love.’ He was wrong, though. I’d loved that dog as a puppy and I had a lot of guilt about outgrowing him. It was my parents who didn’t love the dog, and as a kid I wasn’t up to the task of compensating for how neglectful they could be. Jesus, this was supposed to be about you.”
“No, this is good.”
“You drew me a little picture of the dog. That’s what I remember. You drew me a cartoon of him sprinting into the woods, all four paws off the ground. I still have it somewhere.”
If I’d been Nick, I would have told her it was me who untied the dog. I would look over at Erin with a snarl of self-regard and dare her to love me any less than she always had. That was how men like Nick secured their status as men like Nick. Whereas the way I remained myself was to adjust the speed of the windshield wipers and ask Erin if she was warm enough, because if not there was a blanket on the backseat. It was a nice blanket. A Pendleton.
“What do you want, Cody?” she asked again.
I was capable of answering direct questions truthfully. “I want to see what you look like without clothes.”
“How long have you wanted that?”
There was a right and a wrong answer. I’d like to say I understood which was which, but I do not believe that was the case.
“About an hour,” I lied.
We crossed the bridge to the Oregon side of the Columbia and checked into a motel. Had it been light outside and not raining, we could have hiked up the foothills behind the parking lot and enjoyed a pretty view of the Cascades. I did still appreciate the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. As a kid I’d imagined the whole country and possibly the world was beautiful in its own right, but I’d since traveled for professional developments and funerals and understood I’d been naïve about that.
In our water-damaged room, Erin satisfied my curiosity. There was nothing sexy or performative about the way she took off her clothes. I sat on the edge of the bed, belt buckle fastened, shoelaces tied, and watched her take shape. Her breasts were small and somewhat deflated. Between them was a hollow into which I seriously considered slotting my nose. She had the longest torso I’ve ever seen on a woman. Her thighs were heavy but graceful, tapering into muscular calves which flared into those enormous feet.
I said, “You look like you’d be a good swimmer.”
She nodded, her hands on her hips. “I am.”
From time to time a man convinces himself what he wants depends on the answer to a question he first asked at seventeen. In that room I discovered I’d always wanted what I wanted. I had always seen Erin clearly. Without her clothes, she looked exactly as I’d pictured her. The ridge of my nose fit perfectly in the valley of her breasts.
●
On Monday morning Nick swiveled back and forth in his desk chair, slurping from his very large thermos. Coffee went down the wrong pipe and he choked. On occasion I still worried about the bits of shrapnel that roamed his body. Some of the guys who’d been in the Humvee with him were pockmarked with it. Supposedly the stuff itched more than it hurt. Nick didn’t have to tell me how many times he’d thought about reenlisting. Not a lot tethered him to civilian life.
“I have an open house at noon,” Nick said. “Coach Simon’s old place. Remember her? What was it I used to call her?”
The office was empty except for me and him. I was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and in those days Nick could reliably be found wherever I was.
“Something derogatory,” I said. “You have a good time with Sasha?”
“Nothing happened. Some things are sacred, turns out. What’d you and Annette get up to?”
Sunday morning, Annette got home from church and asked if we could go for a drive and I said sure. I did love to drive. We passed a dead dog on the side of the highway and my wife said, “You hardly ever see that anymore. Dead deer or skunks, but not people’s pets.” We saw a laundromat with a liquidation sign and three children playing leapfrog in front of a bait and tackle shop. In late November in Camas, Washington, the sun breaking through clouds is enough to make you think it’s been a pretty good weekend. Annette touched the edge of my jaw as we drove deeper into the gorge. I thought it was a kind of pleasure Nick had never known.
Erin was the reason me and my buddy Nick stopped calling each other pussy. She didn’t ask us to stop. It was that we were seniors and she was a freshman rubbing vanilla extract on her neck because her mom didn’t tolerate perfume. In Nick’s car she always rode up front while I sat in back, knees splayed, leaning forward to better hear the radio and possibly avoid feeling like Nick’s bitch. The point of having Erin around was to protect her from guys like us.
Erin had bad posture, thick bangs covering the zits on her forehead, eyes that flashed with accusations and frequent falsehoods, and full lips she habitually pinched. She was lean but lacked angles, a dolphin of a girl. I was quietly in love. For me and Nick, there was a thrill in feigning maturity we in no way possessed. We believed she believed we were men.
Nick had a fantasy Erin was smarter than us, bound to make something of herself. He used to tell her so sternly, “I don’t ever want to see you again once you turn eighteen.” He’d say, “I better not lay eyes on you unless you’re on TV.” Erin may have been the only kid we knew with a library card, but that was no reason to think she’d end up on TV.
If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I ever loved that girl. Feeling a particular way about Erin could have been a lie I told myself at seventeen—or a lie I told myself twenty years later. For sure I associated Erin with a sense of my own selflessness. I had certain caretaking compulsions you could consider heroic. She brought those out in me.
●
We never went to Erin’s house except for the one time we did. Nick was interested in some pills Erin had caught her mom swallowing with SlimFast. We cut gym, loaded Erin into Nick’s Ford Taurus, and drove to her house while her parents were at work. That house was a seventies split-level with vaulted ceilings and a spider infestation, and when I was grown I sold it to a gray-haired couple from San Francisco who wasted no time tearing it down. The pills were nothing exciting—mild amphetamines for weight loss or narcolepsy. What’s important is Erin’s family had a dog they kept tied to a cable stretched between two trees in the yard, so it could sort of run back and forth.
That dog was a beautiful dog, with the square yellow head of a Labrador, the leggy precarity of a Great Dane, and a temperament destroyed by its circumstances. I asked Erin if they ever let the dog off the cable.
“No,” Erin said. “He’s an outside dog.”
Having permitted Nick to ransack her mother’s medicine cabinet, she was squeezing a pimple with her face two inches from the mirror. As she leaned over the sink, her shirt rode up. Her body was a source of fascination for me. I wanted to see the places where it all came together. Even in summer Erin wore loose shirts and baggy jeans and I couldn’t get a clear sense of her breasts, hips, whether those thighs were surprisingly slight or more substantial. Such questions weighed on me—maybe because I hoped I wasn’t attracted to her, or hoped I was.
In high school I didn’t do much Nick hadn’t instructed me to do, yet I took it upon myself to drive back to Erin’s house in the middle of the night and set the dog free. What happened was the dog took off like a shot into the woods and never was seen or heard from again. Possibly that outcome was not ideal. But if you’d seen the confidence and grace with which that animal shifted into fifth gear, knowing exactly what his legs were for, as if his captivity had only ever been a prank pulled by the dumbest of his dumbass friends, I can’t imagine you’d hold my actions against me. Truth be told, I’d do it again.
●
Nick cut Erin off after we graduated in 2001. By the morning of September 11th, Nick had attended two community college classes: Accounting Fundamentals and Achieving Success with Difficult People. The sight of his mother crying into the carpet in front of the television he found stirring, or he regretted his failure to turn past the first page of the course catalog. More charitably: Nick was braver than me, Nick was governed by an honorable restlessness and belief in his physical power and indomitable spirit. And perhaps he harbored secret patriotism about which I knew nothing.
A failed drug test delayed him a couple of months, but he was gone by Christmas. He did two tours in Iraq. Meanwhile, Erin finished high school and went off to college. Nick left the army in 2004 after a close call with a roadside bomb. An article in the newspaper gave me more details than he ever did.
Some nights, while Erin was still living in Bozeman, she’d call Nick’s phone and just breathe into it. Nick would take those calls and say zilch. He’d hang up after a minute, not a muscle in his face would twitch, and that would be that. Her sophomore year, Erin was impregnated by her crooked landlord. She came home and raised her daughter and worked her way up to a managerial position at WinCo. And for a long time, that was that.
●
Twenty years later, Nick was my employee at the real estate agency. Neither Nick nor Erin had ever married—not each other and not anyone else. They both lived in town, Erin in a riverside Craftsman paid for in Bitcoin she’d cashed out at the opportune moment. It was around that time or shortly thereafter Nick got curious about Erin’s daughter Sasha.
The appeal of a female in the blush of her early twenties was not lost on me, and Sasha looked an awful lot like Erin had in high school. Better, if you want to get technical. Sasha had a straighter spine and more effusive tits. She taught Saturday afternoon spin class and Sunday morning yoga at the fitness center on Main Street. Both her wardrobe and physique advertised these learning opportunities. When it comes to morality, I don’t believe in anything black and white. But I believe in gradations, and Nick’s roving eye landing on Erin’s daughter signaled a darkness I found troubling.
“Why the daughter?” I asked him. It was the end of the day and we were closing our laptops, tossing our empty Red Bulls. “Just ask Erin out. She’s the one you want.”
Nick zipped his raincoat to his chin. “No, man. Erin’s a mommy.”
“You’re forty.”
“Not a daddy, though.”
Me neither, due to a problem with Annette’s anatomy or possibly mine. What I liked about not having kids was the cathedral-like silence of our three-bedroom, single-family home. On a weekend afternoon I could drink seven beers and lose track of where the couch ended and I began. What I disliked about infertility was how easily Annette could have left me if she got the notion. She made her own money, negotiated her own way through life, was friendly to everyone she met, men included, including me.
“Forget Erin,” Nick said. I took my time locking up while he stood in the rain. I was proud of the agency’s location between the movie theater and the good coffee. “Erin is not it. I’m buying Sasha a beer Saturday. No harm in getting to know her.”
Nick got in my truck, indicating he needed a ride home. I climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. It was late November, darker than dark at 5 p.m.
“You ask her yet?”
“I signed up for her spin class.”
“Bad idea, Nicky.”
“Exercise?”
“You’ve had enough exercise in my opinion.”
“Gotcha. Requesting a refund now. Ordering myself a chastity belt from Amazon dot com.”
“How’s the fit?”
“It’s snug, man. Kind of bruising my balls. Does that mean it’s not my belt? Hey!” He yelled with manic intensity. “Maybe it’s yours!”
“Maybe it’s your mom’s.”
Nick laughed. “You’re worried a girl I barely fucked in high school is what, pining for me?”
“There’s such a thing as respecting your history.”
“Cody, baby, baby.” Nick talked tenderly to make me nervous. He did it all the time. “You’re such a pussy.”
The insult had been back in rotation for several years. I could ignore him or I could say it too. For a long time, I believed the reward was in not saying it, but more recently I’d changed my mind.
●
Saturday afternoon, as Annette got ready for her volunteer shift at the senior center, I let her know I was going into town to check on my bench. For about a week my face, in its capacity as the face of Cody Matthews Real Estate, had graced a bench on Main Street. Nick warned me I’d be vandalized, and I told him no, kids don’t do that shit anymore. Kids have vape pens and internet on their phones. But Nick was correct, and within hours I’d acquired devil horns, a prospector’s mustache, hillbillyish gaps in my teeth. It happened so fast Annette’s theory was Nick had defaced me himself.
“What’s the point of checking on it?” she asked me now.
“Make sure it hasn’t gotten worse.”
“What’ll you do if it has?”
“Leave town,” I said. “Start my life over.”
I watched her curl her hair. To me she always looked like the kind of girl who worked in an ice cream shop. I can’t explain that comment. In fact, we’d met at church, which I’d started attending in my early thirties to meet women and stopped attending once I met one. I loved my wife dearly. She allowed me my space. We had sex every two or three days assuming she wasn’t on her period and neither of us had a cold. Deep down I knew it should burden Annette I had so little faith. I could never tell if she had a plan for me or if she considered my soul a lost cause. But that particular anxiety was a private thing, yet to surface in our daily lives. About my marriage I had no complaints.
“Alright,” she said. “Nice knowing you.”
My bench happened to be outside the fitness center, which was where I happened to be parked as Nick and Sasha left spin class together. Sasha had on a lot of green spandexes, Nick the army sweatpants he wore to solicit thanks for his service. Nick was not a tall man, five-eight or five-nine, but to my knowledge no girl ever faulted him for that. He had no body fat. There was no softness to his face. He was all muscle and clavicle, sinew and jawbone. No homo was another thing we’d said as kids, stopped saying, then said a few more times in middle age. No homo was the truth, but I’ll admit I was jealous of his compact charisma. His familiarity with war. All Nick’s life people had seen the razor-sharp edges of him, whereas I was a blur, an approximation of a man. Annette must have seen me in some amount of detail when we’d started going out. But lately she loved me the way a girl loves God: because someone told her to, a long time ago.
Nick and Sasha went into Chinese Gardens, Nick’s preferred place to get Sierra Nevada on tap. I considered going in after them and doing—what, exactly? Loudly remembering the past. The way Erin used to draw on our shoes. The way Sasha didn’t exist. And then a woman got out of the car beside mine and the woman was Erin. She hunched her shoulders against the rain and sheltered beneath the restaurant’s maroon awning. With one hand on the door, she paused to check her phone.
In response to what my pulse considered an emergency, I lowered my window and called her name.
Erin looked up at me, her face slack, off duty. Deep creases underscored her eyes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m getting takeout.”
“You call it in already?”
She laughed at me.
I said, “Can you get in the truck for a second?” I was counting on a lifelong trait of hers that many have mistaken for passivity. To my credit, she turned up the collar of her fleece, hopped over a puddle, and got in the truck.
“How’s the house?” I started to drive, which was a form of kidnapping, yet I believed I had a responsibility to prevent Erin from witnessing Nick’s seduction of her daughter.
“It’s perfect. Everyone says not to trust the agent, they work for the seller and so on. But you got me a deal, didn’t you?”
“You offered cash. You got yourself a deal.”
“Okay then.”
“How’s Sasha?”
“Smarter than me. What do you want, Cody?” That she asked what I wanted and not where we were headed struck me as a good sign. I got on Highway 14 and kept driving. After her volunteer shift my wife would call me, and I would tell her I was at Nick’s, we’d sunk a few too many and I’d be home in the morning. Things of that nature happened all the time—though maybe they ought to have stopped happening by now.
I said, “I wonder if you could—”
“I bet I could.”
I coughed gratuitously. “Tell me something you remember about me.”
“Sure.” She pressed the soles of her boots against my glove compartment. She was still lean, built like something designed to be folded up and put in storage for the winter. “I remember in ninth grade I came to school crying because my dog had gotten loose and run off. Nicky didn’t care, he said, ‘You never showed that creature any love.’ He was wrong, though. I’d loved that dog as a puppy and I had a lot of guilt about outgrowing him. It was my parents who didn’t love the dog, and as a kid I wasn’t up to the task of compensating for how neglectful they could be. Jesus, this was supposed to be about you.”
“No, this is good.”
“You drew me a little picture of the dog. That’s what I remember. You drew me a cartoon of him sprinting into the woods, all four paws off the ground. I still have it somewhere.”
If I’d been Nick, I would have told her it was me who untied the dog. I would look over at Erin with a snarl of self-regard and dare her to love me any less than she always had. That was how men like Nick secured their status as men like Nick. Whereas the way I remained myself was to adjust the speed of the windshield wipers and ask Erin if she was warm enough, because if not there was a blanket on the backseat. It was a nice blanket. A Pendleton.
“What do you want, Cody?” she asked again.
I was capable of answering direct questions truthfully. “I want to see what you look like without clothes.”
“How long have you wanted that?”
There was a right and a wrong answer. I’d like to say I understood which was which, but I do not believe that was the case.
“About an hour,” I lied.
We crossed the bridge to the Oregon side of the Columbia and checked into a motel. Had it been light outside and not raining, we could have hiked up the foothills behind the parking lot and enjoyed a pretty view of the Cascades. I did still appreciate the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. As a kid I’d imagined the whole country and possibly the world was beautiful in its own right, but I’d since traveled for professional developments and funerals and understood I’d been naïve about that.
In our water-damaged room, Erin satisfied my curiosity. There was nothing sexy or performative about the way she took off her clothes. I sat on the edge of the bed, belt buckle fastened, shoelaces tied, and watched her take shape. Her breasts were small and somewhat deflated. Between them was a hollow into which I seriously considered slotting my nose. She had the longest torso I’ve ever seen on a woman. Her thighs were heavy but graceful, tapering into muscular calves which flared into those enormous feet.
I said, “You look like you’d be a good swimmer.”
She nodded, her hands on her hips. “I am.”
From time to time a man convinces himself what he wants depends on the answer to a question he first asked at seventeen. In that room I discovered I’d always wanted what I wanted. I had always seen Erin clearly. Without her clothes, she looked exactly as I’d pictured her. The ridge of my nose fit perfectly in the valley of her breasts.
●
On Monday morning Nick swiveled back and forth in his desk chair, slurping from his very large thermos. Coffee went down the wrong pipe and he choked. On occasion I still worried about the bits of shrapnel that roamed his body. Some of the guys who’d been in the Humvee with him were pockmarked with it. Supposedly the stuff itched more than it hurt. Nick didn’t have to tell me how many times he’d thought about reenlisting. Not a lot tethered him to civilian life.
“I have an open house at noon,” Nick said. “Coach Simon’s old place. Remember her? What was it I used to call her?”
The office was empty except for me and him. I was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and in those days Nick could reliably be found wherever I was.
“Something derogatory,” I said. “You have a good time with Sasha?”
“Nothing happened. Some things are sacred, turns out. What’d you and Annette get up to?”
Sunday morning, Annette got home from church and asked if we could go for a drive and I said sure. I did love to drive. We passed a dead dog on the side of the highway and my wife said, “You hardly ever see that anymore. Dead deer or skunks, but not people’s pets.” We saw a laundromat with a liquidation sign and three children playing leapfrog in front of a bait and tackle shop. In late November in Camas, Washington, the sun breaking through clouds is enough to make you think it’s been a pretty good weekend. Annette touched the edge of my jaw as we drove deeper into the gorge. I thought it was a kind of pleasure Nick had never known.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.