I was thinking we could risk driving on soon when a green Ford Explorer pulled in to get gas. The guy who got out of it caught my attention. Hard not to notice a big, thick-armed guy with a mop of sandy-colored hair, maybe six two, deep-chested as a lion. He was past thirty, his skin very tanned for a guy with that color hair. He was wearing scuffed-up old work boots with weathered blue jeans that were doing all kinds of good things for him. For me, too.
Walcott said, quiet, only to me, “Gawking at the wrinklies again.”
I flushed, busted, and looked away. Walcott liked to give me crap because my first real boyfriend after I had Natty had been thirty-five. The guy after that, the one I’d stopped seeing a few months ago, had been thirty-nine.
The guy in the Explorer finished at the pump and went inside. I had to work not to watch him make the walk, and Walcott shook his head, amused. “It’s like you have reverse cougar.”
“I’m already raising one little boy. I don’t need another,” I said, arch, just as Natty passed.
Natty said, “I would like a brother, please.”
Walcott laughed, and I gave him a fast knuckle punch.
“Maybe later,” I told Natty. His skin had lost that curdling sheen, but he still looked peaked. I got my bank card out and said to Walcott, “Can you fill the car up? I’m going to take Mr. Bumppo here in and get him a ginger ale.”
Walcott waved the card away. “I got this tank. Grab me a Dr Pepper?”
I tossed him the keys, and Natty and I went on in. The door made a jingling noise as we opened it; someone had wrapped a string of bells around the bar for Christmas, and they were still up.
The hot, older guy from the parking lot was standing dead still with his hands clasped in front of him in the second aisle. He was facing us, towering over the shelves, right at our end. As we came abreast, I saw the aisle was a weird mix of motor oil and diapers and air fresheners all jumbled in together. He was stationed in front of the overpriced detergent, looking at a box of laundry soap like someone had put the secret of the universe there, but they’d written it in hieroglyphics.
Natty paused to scrub his eyes; it was dim inside after marching around in the sunshine. I realized I was staring at the guy, maybe as hard as he was checking out the box, but he didn’t even notice. When Natty was with me, I got rendered invisible to college guys, but a kid didn’t stop guys his age from looking. Heck, he probably had one or two himself. While I would never be a certified beauty like my mom, I was cute enough in my red and yellow summer dress with its short, swirly skirt that he should’ve spared a glance.
Especially since it was pretty obvious to me that he was single. Newly. It all added up: the shaggy hair, the interest in detergent boxes. He was trying to learn how to not be married anymore. Divorced guy meets laundry. Walcott said I was getting a little too familiar with the syndrome.
As we passed, I checked his marriage finger for that tattletale ring of paler flesh. Bingo. Add the broad shoulders, the permanent worry lines in his forehead, the wide mouth, serious eyebrows, and there he was: my type, down to the last, yummy detail.
If I’d been alone, I would have sauntered over, done the thing where I tucked my long hair behind my ears, showed him the teeth that Dad had paid several thousand bucks to straighten. If he’d had a good voice, I might have let him take me back to his place and introduced him to the mysteries of fabric softener, maybe let him get to second base on his newly Downy’d sheets. Looking at him, the football player build, I got a flash of what it might feel like to be down under that much man, pinned to fresh-smelling bedding by the great god Thor. It was a sideways thrill of bedazzled feeling, snaking through my belly.
It surprised me, and I found myself smiling. Sex had never quite worked out for me yet. When I looked at this guy, I knew my body still believed it would. Probably. Eventually. After all, I’d only tried sex with two men. Well, two and a half, I guess, because a year after I had Natty, I’d lost my virginity with Walcott, but I didn’t count that at all. He’d been doing me a favor, and we’d never even kissed.
Then Natty tugged my hand, steering me past the hot guy, heading for the candy aisle. Since Walcott wasn’t there to prang me, I gave myself a half second to check out the ass as I went by. Passed, flying colors. But then I went on, because Natty was with me, which meant no other man in the world could claim more than a look or two. They mostly didn’t exist for me in Natty’s presence. Not even Norse godlings. Policy.
Natty paused at the treat aisle and said in solemn tones, “They have Sno Balls.”
“Interesting,” I said, internally shuddering at the thought of Natty puking nuclear-pink coconut down my back as we drove on. “You know what’s even more interesting? They have ginger ale.” I said ginger ale like Mimmy said Jesus, walleyed with excitement, using long, ecstatic vowels.
“That’s not interesting,” Natty said, but he let himself be towed past the Sno Balls with the same good-natured disappointment I’d used to let him tug me past the blond guy.
The refrigerated cases at the back of the store were full of weird zero-calorie water drinks and Gatorade and Frappucinos, all in a tumble. Diet Coke by the Power Milk, orange juices stacked behind the Sprite. While I hunted ginger ale, Natty tugged his hand away to dig his Blue Angels jet plane out of his pocket. He started zooming it around.
I called, “You got ginger ale?” across the store to the scraggly, henna-haired object behind the counter.
“Do what?” she called back. We were closing in on Atlanta, but her Georgia-mountain accent was so thick I knew that she’d been brought up saying you’uns instead of y’all.
“Ginger ale?” I turned so she could hear me.
“Just two liters. And they ain’t cold,” she said.
I shook my head and opened the case to get Natty a Sprite, but I didn’t have any faith in it. Mimmy had raised me to believe that ginger ale and a topical application of Mary Kay Night Cream could cure anything but cancer.
I grabbed a couple of Dr Peppers, too, for Walcott and me. Natty had zoomed his way over to a tin tub full of ice, and as I passed him on the way to the register, I saw that it was full of green-glass-bottle Coca-Colas. The sign said ninety-nine cents. It used to be only country people remembered that green-glass-bottle Cokes tasted better than any other kind, but the in-town hipsters had gotten all nostalgic for them. They cost two, even three bucks a pop inside the perimeter.
If I’d gotten the damn Dr Pepper, Natty and I would have walked out clean, but I wanted a Coke in a green glass bottle. I grabbed one and said, “Just a sec, Natty Bumppo.”
He stayed by the tub, flying the jet low over the ice as I put one soda back. He was in plain sight, so I left him there and headed for the register to pay.
I passed the blond man, still standing at the end of the aisle. He was breathing shallow, eyes slightly unfocused, like he was looking a thousand years into the future instead of at a box of soap.
The girl behind the counter watched me approaching with her mouth hanging slack. She had big boobs, swinging free in a tight knit top that was cut low enough to show me a Tweety Bird tattoo on the right one. Her bobbed flop of dyed magenta hair ended in frizzles, and as I got close, I saw both her front teeth were broken off into jagged stumps.
“That all?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. It was very hard not to look at the teeth. She started ringing me up.
Then the cheery jingle bells on the door rang out. It was an odd Christmas-y sound on a late summer day, unexpected enough to make me look, even though I knew the bells were there.
I glanced at the door, at the stumpy little guy coming in. He had a broad, pale face with a wide nose under a baseball cap, pulled low. Then my gaze stuck. My whole body stopped moving and the very air changed, because the guy brought his hand up as the door swung jangling closed behind him, and I wa
s looking down the barrel of a silver revolver, really old and rusty.
All at once, I couldn’t see the guy behind the gun as anything more than a vague person shape. I only saw the shine of fluorescent light along the silver barrel, only heard a voice behind it saying in a redneck twang, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground right now, before I put shoot holes in you.”
His voice was low and raspy, like he was talking in a growl on purpose, but very loud, and I believed him. He would do it.
“On the ground!”
I couldn’t move, though. My joints refused to bend and take me to the floor. I was closest to the gunman, by the register, then the big guy in the detergent aisle, and beyond him, standing tiny and alone in the path of the gun as it swept back and forth, was Natty. Natty gone still with his plane clutched in his hand.
I felt my head shake, back and forth. No.
A gun had come, rusted with anger and ill use, loaded and alive in human hands, into the same room where Natty stood in his honorary pilot’s cap, hovering his Blue Angels plane over an ice bucket full of Cokes. Natty looked at the gun, his eyes so round that his fringe of thick, ridiculous lashes made them look like field daisies. The gun looked back.
It was not okay. It was not allowed. That gravelled voice told us all again to get on the ground, but I couldn’t get on the ground. I couldn’t move or breathe in a room where Natty stood far, so far away from me, too far for me to get there faster than a bullet could, under that gun’s shining gaze. His little fingers were white, clutched hard on to his plastic jet.
Then the guy by the detergent moved. Just a couple of steps. A step and a half, really. Barely a move at all for a guy that tall and big, but it changed my life a thousand ways.
It wasn’t a threatening move. He moved parallel to the gun, and his palms were up and pointed forward in surrender. He sank down, folding into the seated shape that Natty called crisscross applesauce, palms flat on the ground, spine straight.
That sliding half step put his big body between the gun’s black, unwinking eyehole and everything that mattered to me on this green earth.
And that was it. That was when it happened. I lowered my body to the ground, and all of me was falling, faster than I could physically move, way further than a glance or an attraction, falling so hard into deep, red, desperate love. I lay flat on the Circle K’s dirty, cool floor, but the heart of me kept tumbling down. It fell all the way to the molten center of the earth, blazing into total, perfect feeling for the big blond wall of a man who had put himself between my child and bullets, before our eyes had ever met, before I so much as knew his name.
Chapter 2
William Ashe stares at the detergent. All morning at work he ignored the ever-rising restlessness that invaded his body. His jaw would not stop grinding itself closed. His hands would not stop fisting. He’s left the lab early, heading for the mountains to exhaust it out of himself rock climbing. But now he’s been waylaid by a cleaning product. He holds his body very still, though his spine shudders and twangs inside him. The internal, tooth-jarring vibration of all his nerves feels endless. Meanwhile, the detergent sits in its mundane cardboard box, oblivious, as William fights not to shove the whole shelf over. He wants to rip the box in half, stomp in the powder until it is sullied black and kicked away, ruined and gone.
He breathes in. The detergent only seems like the perverse agent of some dark destiny. It isn’t. It is soap.
William Ashe doesn’t believe in destiny. The word itself is actually shorthand people use when they wish to mysticize random events or externalize the results of their own willful choices.
William’s own large, athletic father used to tell him he was destined to play football. All he really meant was that William was a big kid with excellent hand-eye coordination. His mother, in direct and endless opposition, insisted he was destined to unlock the secrets of the universe. Her own father was a physicist, and William had inherited the same aptitude. William grew up torn between these destinies; both his parents seemed so sure. By the time he was a teenager, he had formed two vertical wrinkles—his mother called them “stress horns”—between his eyebrows from the constant furrowing.
Then one day he saw Bridget, and he chose his own destiny. He chose her.
It was his junior year of high school, and she was ripping out the corpses of old phlox plants in the green space all the Morningside kids called Shit Park. Morningside was riddled with little parks and a nature preserve, but this one, the one near William’s house, had no playground equipment and very few trees. It was a square of brown grass with some flower beds flanked by sagging wooden benches.
Bridget, a stranger in his neighborhood, a new girl, was on her knees, her ponytail and the right-triangle points of her small breasts bouncing in tandem. It wasn’t only the way her hair shone copper in the sunshine as she tore up the flower bed. It wasn’t only that her geometry was perfect in a way that felt specific to William, as if the slope of her narrow waist as it widened into hips had been crafted for him exactly. It was more than that. Though to be fair, these things mattered. They mattered a great deal.
Puberty had made him overly aware of the pleasing shape of girls: their high, light voices, their distracting smells. In the girl-free environment of his own home, he had expanded his old chemistry set, spending all his accumulated birthday and Christmas money on it, until the bulk of it was probably illegal. Then he’d found Dartmouth College’s Chem. II and III labs online and worked his way through them. His grandfather’s university connections gave him access to the labs at Emory when his own became insufficient. Last year, he’d decisively ended the longstanding kitchen-ant infestation without harming the dog. It could not be called an unqualified success; William had vomited for three days straight. His parents now discouraged testing in this vein. Still, he had outgrown the online labs, and most of his experiments were of his own design now. His place at the State Science Fair was a foregone conclusion. But at school? A cheerleader passing his lab desk in a swirl of short skirt could muddle even a simple attempt to grow a bismuth crystal.
Sophomore year, he’d been bumped to start on Varsity, a promotion that had allowed him to sink himself into several girls. He was amazed at how the simple pumping action of it quieted his rowdy body, let him think clearly for hours after. It had been a great convenience to have sex available.
But it wasn’t only the curvy-girl shape of Bridget, sweaty and in filthy shorts, that caught him as she knelt in the loamy earth, tossing the leprous old phlox plants into a heap behind her. She hummed to herself as she tore up the flower bed with cheerful authority, altering ground that absolutely was not hers to change. Nearby he saw she had a bucket of tulip bulbs, a flat box full of black-eyed Susans and new chicory blooms, a wrought-iron post with a hook, and a brightly painted birdhouse. She was fixing Shit Park with no permission, ripping up phlox in mad handfuls. She hummed and streaked dirt across her face as she wiped sweat away. She either didn’t know or didn’t care that anyone was watching.
He recognized her.
She was a shiny picture of how he was in the lab when he followed an experiment he should not be doing down its next step and its next, until the reactions had fulfilled themselves in the chain he had predicted, once again not blowing anyone up. She was . . . He couldn’t find the word, but then he found it. The word was complete. She was complete. Watching her, his mind and body both surged into an electric, vibrating agreement that was final: That one. There.
He felt a huge unclenching in all the cells that drove his working parts. All the destiny he needed was murdering old phlox and wearing Converse high-tops. His eyebrows stopped their constant press toward each other, shifting back into the slot where eyebrows go. It felt good and easing, but a little painful, the way a lunge felt in his legs after a hard run.
He understood what his parents meant by destiny then: that they wanted a specifi
c thing. That they would be relentless until they got it.
This understanding made his own course feel preset, but difficult. This one specific girl was a subset of all girls, and all girls didn’t like him. He was weird. All girls told him so. Even the ones he had sex with told him so, and the sex was mostly secret. They weren’t his girlfriends. Even Paula told him so, and she was his best friend.
On the plus side, for the last year and change, all girls had liked to look at him. The soft pads of fat on his hips and belly had melted away, and his shoulders had spread themselves apart, until he was shaped like a triangle built out of hardened flesh. This made the girls forget that they’d called him Moosetard in middle school. Now they mostly called him William.
He’d broken himself of the comfort of covering his lips in spit bubbles. All girls did not like that. He carried a secret penny in his mouth instead, liking the tang of the copper on his tongue. In middle school, he sometimes cried and punched his hands into walls or the faces or stomachs of his classmates. Football helped stop that. His therapist had delighted his father by suggesting it, saying contact sports were exceptional stress relief, though William couldn’t see what he had to be stressed about. His grades were perfect. Still, he had learned to save the internal pulse and heave for football, and now it felt good to feel it building up red inside him, to let it spend itself in the hard smashing of his body into other bodies. He won games, and his face was symmetrical in ways that pleased all girls, so sometimes he got to spend the rest in sex.
Then he saw Bridget, this subset who mattered in a way all girls did not, and wanted her.
He still wants her. He holds his angry body rigid in the Circle K minimart, staring at the kind of detergent she used to buy, hearing her say, It smells like the color green, in his head. He uses Arm & Hammer now, which smells like clean nothing. The smell of nothing is another way to never have her voice sound in his mind. There were five very bad months of external silence, and after that, he had to push the voice of Bridget that he still heard internally out of him, away entirely, banished. She has not existed in his thoughts, not for seven months now.