Devil’s Lake

The year her parents divorced, she stood in what would soon be her old driveway, at her old house, with her older neighbor, Jeffrey, who held a new basketball fast between arm and hip. Though it wasn’t late, or not very, the moon was out, not quite full just above the treeline.

“Weird how it looks like it’s moving,” Jeffrey said, pointing at the bright disk.

“It’s not?” she said, glancing up fast, chiding herself for not knowing whether it was waning or waxing. Seventh graders were supposed to know that kind of thing, though she’d only been one for three weeks.

Jeffrey didn’t smirk the way he might have just a few months ago. As fall began to tear into the air with its cold little teeth, a change had come over him too. He already seemed taller at the start of his first year at the high school, wiser, and serious, the way he would seem next summer when she let him touch her whenever he asked. He’d remind her of a scientist then, an explorer, though their experiments always ended in failure, him scurrying away with his head down, mumbling a goodbye. Alone, she would dress slowly, waiting for the brief magic of being wanted to bloom the way it only did after he’d left. Then she’d brush the dirt from the back of her jeans before biking the three extra blocks to her mother’s new apartment along the same hot sidewalk where she’d first learned to ride.

Now, though, months away from those rendezvous in the park behind the equipment shed, he touched her for the first time, lightly, on the arm, drawing her forward two steps and to the right. “You can see better this way,” he said, setting the basketball down between his feet, and bending to put his head ear to ear with hers. “Catch a branch in the moon. See how it stays still? Only the wind and the clouds are moving.”

She peered up into the tangle of oak limbs whose leaves turned black against the lopsided orb. She knew this phase was called gibbous; most of the surface was visible, but some was still in shadow.

“I like it better this way,” she said, going back beneath the hoop where only moments before she’d won their game of Horse—because he’d let her, she suspected. Once again, the white sand dollar seemed to creep against its black beach. In the house, behind her, something broke. Glass against tile.

“I should go home,” Jeffrey said, dribbling the ball just once.

She counted his steps until they petered out at forty-three. Inside, her parents had come to a decision. She sensed it in the sudden stillness, the lack of slammed doors, the distant tinkling of glass fragments swept into a dustpan. When the moon reaches the roof, I’ll go inside, she thought, watching the sky, goosebumps peppering her arms, as if in a minute it would.

The grill is black and large and ravaged by untold numbers of Florida rainstorms. It was here when we bought the house last year but I won’t touch propane, so this is the first time we’ve tried to use it. Leonard stalks out on the deck in cut-offs and a white tank, his back wider since he got home last week, harder, wet hot dogs sliding on the plate in his hand.

“It’s perfectly safe,” he says, setting the plate down. His tube socks have sunk to half-mast around his ankles, their elastic shot to hell.

I’m setting out jars of relish and brown mustard, a bottle of Heinz 57. Neighbors are gearing up for their cookout too, hooting over the fence and opening wide their backyard gate to drive in a Ford-150 with the radio cranked to full.

“Don’t blow yourself up,” I say, leaning out the sliding glass door. Missy the Misanthrope winds around my ankles, slinky as a snake in a catsuit, and I let her out so she can stalk a few beetles in the fall of live oak leaves on the deck.

In six months he’ll be on a plane back to the Middle East. Another undisclosed location.

Leonard has a long red-handled lighter in one hand. With his other, he’s clicking the starter back and forth. “Plenty of gas,” he says, lifting the propane tank and shaking it stiffly, one-armed. I hear the sloshing and know how he’s operating a hair’s breadth from disaster. Some guys would rather hurt themselves at home than get deployed a second, third, fourth time.

The doorbell gives its sickly howl and I see through the window it’s his mother with a pie. On the phone she told me I shouldn’t be baking in my state. I’m not even showing yet, but she said too much heat is bad for a baby. Behind his mother is a truck with three of his cousins in the back, two brothers in front, plates of hamburger patties, coolers of beer and soda and ice.

“Don’t you look sweet,” his mother says, pushing the pie into my hands, which is warm on the bottom and smells of canned cherry filling. I kiss his brother on the cheek, the cousins, my sister and her husband and their daughter Abigail. In the kitchen, his mother starts rearranging my condiments, sets out plastic cups.

There’s a crowd on the deck now and Leonard is fizzing like a live wire in its center, doling out hugs and high-fives. In the driveway, my mother leaves my father half submerged in their truck, crosses the lawn to put her pink hand on my stomach and come inside.

“It’s too early,” I say. I can’t see the grill for all the milling on the deck. Missy zips inside, an orange flash, and beelines for our bedroom. If that gas went up now, none of us would see another sunrise.

My mother was a triage nurse and she feels around with her plump fingers so I have to lift the pie still in my hands to chest height as if I’m readying to throw it. “When I was this far along with you,” she says. “I’d exploded already.”

A cheer goes up in the yard and my niece Abby wraps her spidery arms around my hips so I almost drop the pie. I know what it would look like on the rug, a mess of red gel and spongy, white pastry. I know how everyone would turn and stare at me, the woman at the center of the mess.

Outside, there’s a ruckus, as usual. Friday night and the party next door is spilling into the street. In the morning the yard will be rashed with red solo cups and my husband will shock the front door on its morning hinges, not frozen, not cold enough yet for that, but reluctant just the same, and stuff the debris, cup by cup, can by can, into a Target bag big enough to hold an exercise ball, fully inflated, which is what it carried home last week from the store.

“Can’t you wait an hour?” I’ll ask, waking with my hands still clawed and aching from sleep. I clench them at night, and grind my teeth. Try exercise, the doctors say. Take walks. Breathe deeply whenever you remember. A lot of lawyers have these problems, they tell me.

“You could help me clean up,” he’ll say without turning so all I can see is his freckled back tensed and tight. If he’d let me, I’d dig the heels of my hands into his lats, work up to the shoulder blades, knead the corded yoke of his neck. But his terms were very clear. No touching he doesn’t initiate. No criticism. Even pointed questions are dicey.

My best friend tells me to let it go. Both my mistake and the terms of our accord. “You’re miserable,” she says every Thursday at the Mexican place where they know our names.

“It was even worse without him,” I say. “The constant variable in that equation is me.”

In the morning, there will be a moment before he wakes where I will bump up against the surface of sleep and roll into his warmth, forgetting his rules. The dreams are bad these days. Giant warehouses, cold echoing spaces housing nothing but empty crates. Truck stops where I find myself hunched over a lukewarm cup of coffee, no wallet, having forgotten my own name. Thank god, I’ll think, crossing my fists at the wrists in front of my chest, burrowing into his back, just a dream, and that’s when he’ll wake.

“Stop,” he’ll say. “I’m not ready.” Then he’ll stoop to grab a pair of jeans from the floor.

“Can’t you wait another hour?” I’ll ask, and dare to touch the cooling depression he left in the memory foam, a shallow dent already losing its shape. It didn’t mean anything, I’ve tried to tell him. It was one night. A conference. Too many white Russians. The stress. Nothing to do with him. You’re perfect, I told him after it happened and every day of the month he asked me to move in with my mother so he could think. You’re everything any woman could ask for.

“You could help me clean up,” he’ll say.

Instead, I’ll take my time dressing, putting on the coffee, dividing the newspaper—sports and arts for him, front page and obits for me—and setting out the milk, the cereal, a carafe of O.J. with extra pulp because it’s his favorite kind.

The only question he asked when I told him, still in my pinstripe skirt suit at the pizza joint where we stopped after he picked me up from Logan, was why. Why? he asked. Why?

I looked at him across the table littered with crusts, what we used to call pizza bones when our mutt, Brewski, was a puppy. Nine years we’d been together. No kids, never a ton of money, but plenty to talk about, plenty of laughs.

I pinched my straw between my fingers, releasing streams of Sprite again and again into the dregs of my drink. The man’s name was Henry. He smelled of synthesized evergreen. He was no one. Anyone. A medium-tall real estate lawyer who looked smart in a fawn-colored suit.

I don’t know, I could have said, or reminded him I was drunk. I said nothing, though. Nothing. Over the radio, The Boss sang his way through the entirety of “Born in the U.S.A.”

The bay window by the breakfast table looks out on the front yard. Lying in bed, sleep elusive as ever, I hear the college kids outside raising toasts to the stars. I can already see the way my husband will shiver in the punishing morning air, the way he’ll bend and bend and bend.