Page 15 of Service Included

I read part of one of these. It was indescribable. Kind of porny.

But then she deleted the whole text without sending it. Her friend was probably too busy to reply or in a crowd where she didn’t want to get out her phone. Texting Aleesha wasn’t going to work as a diversion.

Truthfully, she was ahead of schedule. She could probably take a few minutes to search the box for the rest of the fireman story. Her mother had practically ordered her to have fun, and reading was fun. Good, healthy fun. Mind-improving fun. And right at her fingertips too.

The magazines stuck to each other, making them hard to separate when she wanted to check publication dates. Althoughsomeone had taken the time to circle blurbs on most of the covers, they seemed to be jumbled in the box without any organization. The chaos was uncharacteristic of her mother. Under September 1985, she found April 1987, and then March 1982. She paused to admire that cover, a brunette wearing fake bunny ears with a suggestively thick and straight plastic rabbit gripped in her fist. These magazines were forty years old, but some things, including, apparently, the shape of a vibrator, hadn’t changed much.

Why would her mother and/or her aunt have kept these trashy reads for decades?

An inch of paper stuck out of the center of the September 1984 issue, which beat eeny-meeny as a way to pick.

Chapter 5

The thing about chocolate

The bookmark was actuallya plane ticket, handwritten on a flimsy triplicate form of the kind that no airline had used for decades. If the information on it was accurate, Megan’s funny, unique aunt, the woman who’d employed oversized sunglasses to hold back her hair until chemo snatched it all, had read this magazine on a TWA flight from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Megan didn’t know if her aunt had traveled alone, with a friend, or maybe with a lover, but she’d marked a photo of a dark-haired man wearing a light blue dress shirt with contrasting white collar and cuffs. He posed like a model, a navy pinstriped suit jacket slung over one shoulder and his other hand thrust deep into the pocket of his pleated trousers. So pleated, so high-waisted, so eighties.

The title of the article opposite the photo read, “A question for our helpful readers, submitted by Mary from Spokane.” Since Spokane was an Eastern Washington city two hours from the farm where Megan’s mother and Aunt Bea had grown up, shedecided to read this instead of continuing to search for the ending to the fireman story.

Dear Editor ofHot Shortz,

The thing about chocolate is, it makes you do the things you very much want to do but shouldn’t.Last Friday, the most eligible partner at the law firm where I work brought candy to the typing pool, then said, “I scheduled a client call at four. Who can stay to take letters after?” I’ll call him Mr. G. He’s tall, over six feet, and has hair darker than day-old coffee.

Like Nico.Megan lifted her ponytail off her sweaty neck. The fan he’d given her fluttered the pages, forcing her to secure them with her forearm if she wanted to keep reading this close to the moving air.

His eyes are June-sky, and his voice always makes my stomach clench until I settle into the rhythm of his dictation.Thankfully, he’s not married, or it would be embarrassing to watch the rest of the staff try to catch his eye. I’m not the competitive type, not unless I’m on a horse, so I would never claim to have been trying to cause the events of last Friday. No, I would not.

Don’t let this be workplace harassment, 1980s style.Megan didn’t usually hate-read, but after the dumb ending to the fireman story, this letter had better include the actual payoff.

Growing up in the Palouse, I spent every free minute with my horses.My parents were older than average when I was born, and too busy competing with their Percheron wagon-pulling team to pay attention to the 1960s or 1970s. Mychildhood was full of animals and the freedom of five hundred acres of the most beautiful land under the red, white, and blue. We didn’t even have television until three years ago, when that John Hinckley shot President Reagan and my mother decided we should watch the news in color, not just listen to the radio.

This sounds oddly like Mom and Aunt Bea’s childhood, including the Percherons.

Along with saying please and thank you, my parents emphasized that a good girl waits for marriage.One time, when I was supposed to be asleep, I overheard them talking about a neighbor’s daughter. My father said no man buys a cow if he’s getting free milk, which caused my teenaged self to wonder how my friend could give away milk when her family grew wheat.

Megan’s mother had mocked the same saying, calling it a patriarchal holdover that equated women with livestock. Was the fact that this letter reminded the sisters of their upbringing the reason Aunt Bea had left a page marker? Something about the letter kept Megan reading.

This history is to explain why I don’t have anyone but you, Helpful Readers, to answer questions about life off the farm.I know the manner by which people have sex isn’t fundamentally different from ranch animals, except for the face-to-face part. At school, the teacher sent the boys out of the room when the four girls in my grade studied human reproduction, so I understand that after marriage, a man puts his penis into a woman’s body in order to create a baby, and he pushes in and out until The Deed is Done. By the by, the girl from the next farm was already looking to calve, so that was the day I surmised my father’s meaning about free milk.

Last month, Mr. G gave the typing pool fancy filled chocolates. The gooey cherry cordials are my favorite. My mother strongly favored home-baked goods like apple fritters, coffee braid, krumkake, snickerdoodles, and cream biscuits with strawberry-rhubarb preserves, so when I lit out for the city and discovered that devil’s delight known as dark chocolate, I will confess to a regular yearning to put it in my mouth. Luckily, I was a beanpole when I left home, because an abundance of chocolate has gifted me a similar abundance of new curves.

I’ve put off asking my question because thinking about the event makes me feel very scattered. Readers, I promise, it’s coming.

On the Friday when I agreed to stay late, Mr. G had brought chocolates in fancy gold boxes he said came from Belgium. While I ate one, I digressed into my opinion regarding the merits of Belgian draft horses versus my family’s Percherons. He did not seem to expect so many points of difference in the draft horse world, but he claimed that there were at least as many, or even more, differences between candies. He showed me the box, which contained chocolates shaped like scalloped seashells, and others like half-open oysters with a gold-dusted candy pearl peeking out. When I expressed interest in the ones stamped with a woman on horseback and licked my lips, Mr. G leaned close to me and whispered, “I saved you something special for later, Mary.”

His voice made me want to gulp air or water or I didn’t know what.

Later it became.

During my six months of city life, I’d replaced my round-pleated skirts and church dresses with a wardrobe approved by my roommates. I left the jacket to my best red power suit hanging on the back of my chair and took my steno book through the deserted office. The illuminated wall of glass blocks thatseparated the hall of partners’ offices from the reception area glowed in front of me. Wearing my silky white blouse and my straight red skirt with its high kick-pleat, I imagined being a Christie or a Cindy strutting the catwalk when I placed each foot across in front of the other. As I swayed through the open door into Mr. G’s corner office, I felt fizzy inside, no longer Mary from the farm, but someone who belonged here in the city, a woman going places.

He sat behind his desk, with the view of the Spokane River making a perfect backdrop for his dark hair and suit. Shirts like the one he wore, with a white collar and blue fabric, remind me of small clouds scudding high across a summer sky. One of the other girls told me that the art on the side wall, images of black and white ovals with pointed ends, are abstract prints, but I think they look like giant leaves that have come inside to stare at the couch.

I too stare at the couch. That couch confuses me. Like furniture pictured in those magazines that are too fancy to sell at a grocery checkout line, one side of it has a big, padded arm, but the other side doesn’t. It’s so deep, I wouldn’t know how to sit on it, and there’s a square ottoman almost as large as a bed. More startling than any of that, however, is that it’s made of purple velvet. Before I worked here, I thought office furniture had to be tan or black.

I prefer the gray leather armchairs that face his glass-topped desk. I’m descended from Swedish immigrants. Shoulders that look small when I drive a combine get some long glances when I wear a suit jacket, so I appreciate how those big, firm cube seats take my body without wobbling on their chrome legs.

After I sat, Mr. G produced another gold box. “Just for you, Mary,” he said as he came around the desk and handed it to me. Instead of going back to his chair, he propped himself on the edge of his desk and watched.

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