Page 99 of At First Dance
I don’t have to ask who her is. Nightly, I type, then delete it and write instead.
Me:
She’s doing her job.
Proud of her, he writes back, and I believe him. The tug that hits under my ribs when I read it, I don’t love. I let it sit.Feelings are not facts. Facts are: he looks out for her in rooms I can’t enter, and I look out for her in the spaces between.
By the seventh night, I’ve made a rule of three things I won’t do. I won’t ask for the return date. I won’t double-text. I won’t read meaning into delayed replies when half the state’s towers fall over if the wind sneezes. I replace those want-to’s with three can-do’s: pictures of morning; voice memos that sound like the creek; proof that staying isn’t a passive act. Some days that look like sharpening the set of loppers I’ve been ignoring since spring. Some days it feels like driving over two counties to pick up a used bench for the back field, because it seems like something a person who believes in the long version would do.
Bailey catches me throwing the bench into the truck bed.
“You redecorating the outdoors?” she asks, hip hitched to her car, eyes sharp the way the women who love me run their diagnostics.
“Just making a place to sit,” I tell her.
“For you or for her?”
“For anyone who needs it,” I say, and she smiles like that’s the right answer, even if it isn’t exactly true.
On the ninth night, she’s cross-legged again on carpet that has never seen a shoe with dirt on it. A different room. A different lamp. Same girl. There’s makeup smudged under one eye like proof of life lived and then scrubbed.
“They want to extend,” she says, too casual. It slips out on the tail end of a breath like she thought she could trick the sentence into being easier by hiding it in a sigh. “Add two days. Maybe four. They keep saying words like momentum and window.”
My stomach drops like an elevator cart pulled along an old rusted chain ready to snap.
“Do you want to?” I ask.
Her mouth does that half-quirk thing that I got good at reading before I admitted I was. “Want isn’t the word.”
“What’s the word?”
“Responsible.”
“Then be that,” I say, and I mean it. I am not made of the world that’s asking for her, but I understand what it is to do the thing you promised when it doesn’t feel like your skin anymore. “I’m not a stopwatch.”
Something in her face loosens. “I don’t want to lose what we’ve been building.”
I look out at the pasture. It doesn’t look built when you’re standing in the middle of it. It looks like grass, and some days the grass is defiant. “Then don’t,” I say. “We’re allowed to be steady and far.”
“You say that like it’s easy.”
“It isn’t. But it’s simple.”
She smiles for real then, tired curling up at the edges of it. “Send me a picture of the creek in the morning?”
“Already took it,” I admit.
“Of course you did,” she says, soft, like it’s the best thing she’s heard all day.
When we hang up, I sit there long enough for the mosquitoes to locate the parts of me I forgot to spray. Then I go in, pour two fingers of something my dad keeps for happy visitors and funerals, and make a list of tomorrow’s chores because doing helps when wanting threatens to take over.
The following morning, the creek throws itself over its own stones like it’s performing just for us. I send the picture, and my thumb hovers, but then it doesn’t write,When are you back?
Me:
The water has that green to it that your dress did at the barbecue. You remember?
She sends back three words that crack me open.
