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The last time I watered it. Jake
didn’t water the tree because he wanted it gone. “Even New Year’s
was almost two months ago,” he said, but it was doing well, staying
green. “Not yet,” I said.

Chancey rubs against my ankle. I
didn’t feed him this morning, I remember. Breakfast was rushed.
Jake had wanted eggs and pancakes and bacon and grapes, anything he
wasn’t likely to have for a while, and we’d forgotten about the
cat.

He leads me to his bowl in the
kitchen. Jake’s coffee cup sits near the window on his side of the
table, his cream and sugar spoon ready on the edge of the sink for
the second cup there wasn’t time to drink. I pull the cat food from
the cupboard and pour some into the bowl on the floor.

Chancey’s crunching sounds
loud.

I leave the bag on the counter and
go to the bedroom. Jake’s towel from his shower half-covers a torn
condom wrapper on the unmade bed, sheets and comforter flung to the
center. I pull up the blankets so Chancey doesn’t drag litter where
I sleep and throw the towel in the closet.

Jake’s blue flannel pants lie on the
floor, knees bent, running, his dirty socks on top. I pick them up
and fold them, then drop them back on the floor and, sweating in my
coat, kick and drag the legs and waist, slide them around on the
floor until they look the way he left them.

I sit on the bed and pull out the
letter he handed me before walking away.

Don’t let it ruin us, M. You know I
love you. You know it. Take care of yourself and know that even if
you don’t write me, I’ll be writing you. -J

I read it, then read it
again.

Some time later, still wearing my
coat, I fall asleep.

FEBRUARY 29, SATURDAY —
MARCH 19, WEDNESDAY

The news is on, the anchors’
dramatic and rolling inflection reduced to gibberish while I wait
for something to happen.

The news is always on, at
home and in stores and in bars and everywhere, while
everyone—guessing and second-guessing— waits for something, for
anything, to happen.

Talks go on and deadlines
leapfrog, and I expect Jake to be home before the end of March. I
expect he’ll call any time, now. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t do it?”
he’ll joke. “Now we’re stuck.”

Shellie tells me I don’t
have to come back to work until I’m ready, and that my cab is out
for a new fuel pump, anyway. She says she and her dog, Puddin’, are
thinking of me.

________

I wash one plate and one
glass and either watch television or stare out the window at the
snow and then the rain and sometimes the sun. Rarely the sun. I
vacuum the throw rugs and wash the gray ring around the bathtub and
drag the sponge behind counter appliances. Microwave. Coffeepot. A
pile of dried and burned crumbs have collected under the toaster,
enough to make a mound the size of a small anthill. I sprinkle them
over Chancey’s hard cat food, and he sniffs them, then eats
them.

________

A helicopter
whomp, whomp, whomps
over
the apartment and my chest thuds. I go to the window to watch the
Chinook’s dark, flat underside pass over the trees. “Apaches have
to fly in the back forty clear on the other side of post,” Jake
said when I asked why I never see his helicopter—only Chinooks and
Blackhawks—pass over the apartment. “I’d fly over, if I could. Drop
a message in a bottle, or something. A hamburger, maybe. No one’s
done that before.”

________

Denise and I sit—breathing,
waiting—on the phone while we watch the first bow of white light
streak across our screens and land somewhere in the center of the
city. Beautiful, if there’s no real thinking about it.

“That’s it,” she says.
Something goes
clink
on her end, reminding me to refill my glass. “We just watched
the beginning from our living rooms. Hey—what do you think they
were doing in their living rooms?”

I stay up long after we get
off the phone, until the bottle’s empty, and check the line every
now and then for a dial tone.

________

March 19

Jake,

Howe area yhou righkt
now;?

Don’t type trunk. Drunk/

Howareyouhowareyouhowareyou

Alive,righat? Alive, I hope. I’ma
sure you war.

Are!

What the hellk.

Lksdoihoagfnlkaglkd

MARCH 23, SUNDAY

Denise’s kitchen window
blinds slap in the wind and midmorning sun catches floating skin
and dust and particles. A fruit fly dives into my cup of tea, no
longer steaming.

She fiddles with an
arrangement of fat daisies in a vase on the counter, cutting
stem-bottoms and twisting stalks so the faces point outward. Her
black hair shines blue and she might have forgotten to close a
shirt-button.

“You could have told me you
don’t like tea,” she says, and when the flowers fall the way she
likes, she sets the vase on the center leaf and tucks in her shirt
with one hand and sips from a cup with the other. “I have coffee.
Soda. Water. Anything?”

I say, “Tea’s
fine.”

She tells me she’ll be right
back and her hips carry her out of the room.

Her apartment is warm. She
doesn’t have the air on. It’s cool for late March, but not that
cool. I make a streak on the table with my finger, then another,
the wood shiny and lemon-scented. Through the archway, in her
living room, vacuum cleaner stripes make a palm-leaf pattern on
beige carpet.

She calls from somewhere,
“Are you going back to work tomorrow?”

“Probably.” I try to picture
her bedroom. Jake and I were here only once before, for a battalion
party. Someone was leaving or someone new was coming, and they
grilled ribs and burgers in the light of tiki torches speared into
the lawn at the edges of their patio. Coolers held the beer, so no
one went inside unless it was to use the bathroom, and because
their toilet paper has—or had, for the party—one piece of trivia
per square, every return trip was announced by the sharing of a new
question. Jake jumped through the sliding patio door and quizzed me
on the state flower of Alaska, and when I had exhausted my guesses,
someone else—Ben? some B name—said, “Forget me not.” Denise looked
at him and shook her head, just a little, and then cheered loudly
and said, “Good job!” William kept his eyes on the grill and
flattened burgers with a spatula, making grease drippings pop in
the fire.

I fish the fly out of my mug
and drop it on her table. Dead, probably. I scoop it from the
puddle with my longest fingernail.

“You must drive some
interesting people,” she says, but her consonants sound funny. Must
be putting on mascara.

“I don’t know,” I say.
“Sometimes.”

“Anyone ever hit on
you?”

“They’re really only
interested in a ride.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Well, there was this one
time when…” But I stop. I’m not interested enough to follow through
with whatever story would come.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing.”

She comes out, feeling her
clothes and touching her hair. “Ready?”

I pick up my cup to bring it
to the sink, but remember the fruit fly and first check the
tabletop. The tea puddle is still there, but at some point, the fly
had dried off and flown away.

________

“
It’s like summer already,
isn’t it?” Denise rolls down her window, then closes it after the
crosswinds blow her hair in her eyes. Low, roadside cliffs support
ashy, leafless trees. Water drips from crevasses, and weeds bust
green from the rockface. The loveliness of it, the fresh smell of
damp soil and—somewhere—fresh-cut grass makes me feel
sick.

Denise punches radio
stations with nails that match her lips. I look at my own nails,
clear and unpolished.

“Deer.” Denise points out
the front window.

I scan the treeline on both
sides, look for a deer eating grass or waiting to cross. Then I see
it, just short of the median, head yanked from its body and resting
a few feet up the berm from the rest of the carcass. Bright pink
blood pools on the pavement and loose meat hangs from both
segments. I’ve seen dead deer before, contorted or crushed or one
portion flattened and mutilated, but the head on the road has a
round, black nose and alert-looking eyes under a light brown brow,
and the body is full. Headless, it might still get up and bound
into the trees.

I look away.

Denise adjusts the rearview
mirror. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Wow. What do you think
hit it?”

I tilt my head into the wind
and laugh. “A fucking big truck.”

She looks at me, then
changes the station again and sings along with a song. I close my
eyes. The breeze fans my eyelashes and rakes my hair and I pretend
the wind is Jake’s fingers tugging at the ends.

She says, “My mother in-law
is coming over tonight before she leaves town.”

“Was she here? I didn’t see
her in the hangar.”

“Oh, no. She didn’t get to
come to the hangar. That’s a rule.” She lights a cigarette and uses
her tongue, pointed and flexed, to remove congealed lipstick from
the corners of her mouth, then opens her window and asks me to
close mine. I crank the knob. “She actually waited at our house for
me to get back and made a list on our grocery pad so I could send
a
proper
care
package. Then she made sure the shelves were dusted. She said, ‘You
must keep the house immaculate.’ In case they come to tell me
William’s dead, but she didn’t say that.” She flicks her cigarette
outside and closes the window. “Too humid.” She turns on the air.
“I don’t think they care what your house looks like, personally. Do
you keep yours—” She taps the wheel. “Sorry.”

I wonder, anyway, what they would
think of my apartment. Maybe she’s right. Maybe they wouldn’t
notice or care. But, maybe they would. Maybe they’d eye the
underwear on the floor, or Chancey’s vomit on the cat tree. Their
first time doing it, their first time making that walk from the
street to the front door, maybe they see nothing but the doorbell
while they sturdy-up, prepare themselves for angry tears and wonder
whether they’ll be able to push out that first word. When the door
opens, maybe they stand there, their first time, and hope they
don’t give in to nervous laughter. That they don’t stutter or, in a
moment of freak empathy, cry.

But after the fourth or
fifth time, maybe they notice the weeds alongside the driveway
haven’t been pulled, that the yard isn’t taken care of nearly as
well as Mrs. Smith’s, whose house they visited last week, and that
some doors have doorbells and some have knockers and others have
neither but are thin and hollow and sound like empty cigar
boxes,
clak, clak, clak—

“Which entrance?” Denise
says.

—when they rap them with their
knuckles.

“Whichever.”

Denise flits from store—jewelry—to
store—interiors—and I follow. The mall is crowded, loud, filled
with weekend couples and mall-walkers. A teenage boy and teenage
girl stand hand in hand at a belly-ring booth, thin fingers tightly
woven—it will kill them to let go—while they choose from the
gemstones in a revolving display. The boy’s thumb strokes the
girl’s palm and their whole life is about this day and one another
and a new belly ring. If one of them were shot where they stood,
how long would it take for the other to walk away after their
pinkies unlinked?

Denise is looking for a lamp for her
hallway table, and she finds one quickly. While she pays I wonder
about purchases, new favorite things that will end up lost or
broken or taken for granted within the year. It won’t be long
before she’ll need something else, some new color.

Denise trails her finger under her
lampshade fringe on the way to the car and says something about how
the sunlight makes it sparkle. She’s decorated, too. Prettied-up in
glinting red dangles and a white cotton tapestry, her legs
upholstered in denim. Her new necklace, platinum, dips between her
breasts, expensive garland. While the jewelry store cashier rang it
up, Denise had winked at me and said, “Hazard pay.”

A passing man in the parking lot
smiles at her and Denise smiles back, says “Hi.”

Her “hi” sounds single.

________

I get out of her car into
the dark and a cold rain, a prelude to Tennessee’s tornado season.
She pulls away and honks before turning the corner.

Inside, dim light falls on a
black cat sitting on the first landing, and I recognize it as the
one belonging to the woman in apartment three. I’ve seen her take
it out to the side lawn and walk with it in the grass on sunny
days. I pet it, scratch its chin, and knock on the door and
continue up the stairs. The sound of the door opening is followed
by laughter, “Hi, Frankie!” and “Paul, look who’s here,” then a
clicking latch. Once inside my kitchen, I hear them through the
floor talking to the cat, asking where it’s been and why it never
called to say it would be late, and more laughter, all of it
muffled but intelligible. I try to be happy that they sound
happy.