Unremarried Widow (2 page)

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I'm twenty-three.”

“Then you haven't met your daughter yet.”

I was surprised when hot tears came to my eyes; children were not part of my plan.

“You haven't met your son, either.”

Her pen scrawled across the page.

“You'll be married when you're twenty-five.”

She wrote this down.

“Better pack your cowboy boots, because your life and love will be out west.”

At this, I laughed out loud. I had been willing to buy into a certain amount of Psychic Suzanna shtick, but she had gone too far. Out west? I didn't plan on getting married at all, let alone to some cowboy from the far side of the Mississippi. Suzanna's hand stopped moving across the page and she refocused her eyes on the dimly lit hotel lobby. My five
minutes were up. I hoped for some last parting wisdom, a promise of a future I could actually believe, but she was already looking toward the next customer.

On the weekends in Tallahassee
I often went dancing with my roommates and their friends at a place called Chubby's, just this side of rough. Lights flashed across the dance floor where I let sweaty college boys dance up against me, but I rarely handed out my number. They were too young, too rangy—like colts set loose in a pasture. I wasn't interested in what they had to offer.

One Saturday night we headed instead for Late Night Library, a step above Chubby's, where Florida State's frat boys prowled. It was cold—cold for Florida anyway—and we cranked up the heat in my car. We dashed from the parking lot to the doors of the club, our arms wrapped around ourselves, trying to hold on to our body heat. The mass of sweating bodies inside had warmed the interior and we stepped into a boozy sauna. Our group staked out a strip of territory against an arm rail before making our way to the dance floor. People crushed around us. I danced until sweat soaked my hair and my thighs began to burn. Breathless, I stepped away from the crowd and worked my way back to our railing. I leaned there, catching my breath, and saw a young man out of the corner of my eye. He leaned against the railing, too, with a beer in one hand. I had the distinct feeling he was working his way toward me. Let me say this: I'm not the kind of girl men pick up. I'm not the right kind of pretty, not the right kind of flirty. There's some reluctance in me, an unwillingness to go with their game. While other girls had steady boyfriends, I mostly spent time with boys I didn't take seriously. Or who didn't take me seriously. I could never find anyone who felt just right.

The young man against the rail moved next to me. He was dressed casually in a red baseball cap and a brown T-shirt. He was about my height, built thin and wiry, and I could just make out his face in the dark bar. Handsome with blue eyes that made me think of the Gulf in winter.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

“I just came off the dance floor. I'm beat,” I said. “But if you ask me again in five minutes, I'll say yes.”

He nodded and sauntered off. In five minutes, he came back. This time I let him lead me into the crowd and we danced to the beat from the enormous speakers. He tried to make conversation, but it was impossible in all that musical noise. A few songs later he pulled me to the side.

“My name's Miles,” he said.

He stuck out a hand and I shook it.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Texas,” he said. “How about you?”

“Florida. Are you a student here?”

“I'm in the Army,” he said. “A pilot.”

I liked that he wasn't in school and that he had a steady job. I liked how he was quick to smile and seemed to listen when I talked. I liked the way he leaned in close to hear me over the music. When we moved back to the dance floor, Miles stepped in to kiss me. I pulled back, shook my head, and rolled my eyes as if to say,
I'm not that kind of girl.
But when he moved to kiss me again a few minutes later, I let him. I am that kind of girl.

At the senator's office
on Monday, I tried not to think about the dark-haired boy I met at the Library. I made sympathetic noises to the callers who complained about the state of the economy, the left-wing conspiracy, the war in Iraq. They worried about weapons of mass destruction and asked me to urge the senator to have Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed.

“The senator's not in right now,” I said. “But I'd be happy to pass your message on to him.”

I logged correspondence from heartsick newlyweds, men in their sixties trying to convince immigration services that their twenty-something Colombian wives were not scheming for green cards. I filed letters, sent faxes, and shredded documents. Despite myself, I thought about Miles. I thought about the way he laughed, how he took me in when we talked. I thought about his quickness, his brightness. I thought about the way his skin felt beneath my fingertips. I waited for him to call.

Monday came and went. And Tuesday. By Wednesday, I'd entered that place women go when we decide the world has contrived to keep us single for the rest of our lives. When my phone rang that evening, I'd nearly given up on the boy from the club. But there was Miles, and all that worry, all that irrational fear, disappeared.

“I just thought I'd call and see how your week was going,” he said.

I had the impression the line was rehearsed, that he had gone through several versions before calling, trying each one out, feeling the heft of them in his mouth.

“It's going all right,” I said.

Casual, too, as if I hadn't imagined the conversation from every angle. We worked like that for half an hour, easing into the talk, seeing how we might fit together.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Miles said finally.

My stomach folded in on itself, the way it does when I'm nervous or excited.

“I don't know yet,” I said. “What are you up to?”

“We're coming back down to Tallahassee,” he said. “Me and some guys from flight school. I was wondering if I could see you again.”

I smiled, and I knew he could hear it in my voice.

“That would be great.”

Miles came to my apartment
the next Saturday afternoon. He carried two long-stemmed roses he had bought at a gas station on the drive down.

“Let me put these in water,” I said.

I turned away so he wouldn't see me blush.

We set out across town in his pickup, and I asked about his family.

“My dad's a pilot for Southwest Airlines,” he said.

“No kidding? My dad was a pilot too.”

“Who'd he fly for?”

“Eastern,” I said. “But that was back in the day. He died when I was five.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

I shook my head. “It was a long time ago.”

Miles told me about growing up in the Texas Panhandle across the border from Oklahoma. I told him about my half siblings, two brothers and a sister, much older than I am and scattered across the country. He talked about flight school in Alabama where he was learning to fly Apaches, the Army's attack helicopters. I understood only vaguely that he was training for war. We drove to a park north of the city and pulled alongside an empty pavilion. The sun had lowered in the sky by the time we found a footpath that ran through the woods. Dry leaves had fallen across the trail and they crackled beneath our feet as we walked. Miles pushed aside a hanging branch and held it for me as I passed.

“Do you go to church?” he asked.

He let the branch go and caught up to walk beside me.

“I'm a spiritual person,” I said, “but I don't go to church.”

Miles pressed. “Do you believe in God?”

I could tell it mattered to him what I said, as if this were some minimum requirement.

“Yes,” I said. “My mom went to church every Sunday growing up. I was raised in a Christian house.”

A hedge, but not a lie. I run more New Age light than biblical. But
it must have been enough because on the way back to the truck, Miles took my hand. He slid his fingers between mine as the last light of day seeped through the trees, and he held my hand the entire way home. Later that night, when his breath had evened beside me and he had relaxed into sleep, he held it still.

The next morning I stood at the stove in my kitchen while Miles sat at the breakfast bar. He told me stories about Texas while I fried eggs in a pan. I salted a pot of boiling water for grits, and my roommates joined Miles at the bar. I dished out plates for everyone and all of it—the rowdy boys behind me, the grease popping on the stove, the butter melting in a dish—felt right. It looked nothing like the life I had imagined and yet it was the most natural thing in the world, with Miles there at the center of it.

That summer Florida had its
worst hurricane season in years. Four storms hit the state, one after the other, knocking down power lines and tearing off roofs. The phone lines at the senator's office never stopped ringing. On the drive home from work I would open the car windows and gulp the fresh air, already counting down the days to the weekend when I would see Miles and we would set off on some new adventure.

On a dense and humid Saturday late in the summer we decided to visit limestone caverns just south of the Alabama line. Water dripped from the rocks overhead as we shuffled along with the group, following a guide, and Miles and I pressed together in the tight space.

“The caverns date back more than thirty-eight million years,” the guide said, “to when the state of Florida was covered with a warm shallow sea.”

I had the sudden image of salt tides spread over the land, and I stepped closer to Miles to breathe in his sun-warmed smell, like hay
in summer. Even in the cold and damp he radiated heat. I still had to catch my breath with him sometimes, the way he made me feel. When I thought of the men who came before him, I thought of weighty materials, of earth and metal, bags filled with sand. I imagined carrying them like a load, being yoked to their desires. They asked too much of me. Miles asked nothing; he took me whole. When I thought of him I thought of water, of running my hand through a clear pool. Even surrounded by him, I could still see myself.

“And these here,” the guide said, indicating the rocks that thrust up from the cavern floor, knee-high, thick-headed, with shafts as big as my fist, “are stalagmites. They'll grow a cubic inch every hundred years.”

I leaned close to Miles. “Does that look like . . . ?”

He was already smiling. “Sure does.”

The caves had a corporeal quality, like cloistered parts of the earth's body, damp and dark and moist, lungs breathing in and out. I pressed against Miles's back and we were a pinpoint of warmth in that vast and humid cavern. The distant dripping of water reached us, a steady
plunk-plunk-plunk
into a hidden pool, and as the group shuffled forward Miles took my hand. He ran his thumb over the fleshy webbing between my thumb and first finger, back and forth, so that the rhythm matched the fall of water. The guide led us farther into the cave and pointed to small ridges in the rock.

“These marks here?” she said. “Made by the retreating tides. Water giving over to dry land.”

Miles gave my hand a squeeze and I squeezed back, softly at first, then more urgently. Did we feel the tidal pull of our own lives then? Or were we content to simply lean into each other and let the heat of our bodies build in that cold space?

The parking lot emptied quickly
after the tour. By the time we arrived at the car, the other visitors had gone. Miles unlocked the passenger side door and held it open for me as I climbed in. I sifted through the glove compartment and retrieved a folded map, and Miles perched on the edge of my seat as I pored over it.

“There's a lake not far from here,” I said. “We could go for a swim.”

Miles moved his head close to mine to peer at the map. He looked up to see me looking at him and he leaned forward to kiss me, a slow kiss that deepened and lengthened. I reached up and circled his neck with my arms. He pulled back and looked at me, and I smiled at him as he surveyed the parking lot through the windshield.

“Nobody's around,” he said. “Parking lot's empty.”

“Do you think . . . ?”

“Do you?”

He raised an eyebrow, a question, and I raised mine, an answer.

“I've never—” I said.

“Me neither.”

“But maybe we could . . . ?”

The passenger door stood open to the afternoon and the air was hot and damp, an exhaled breath.

“If we were quick,” he said.

“If we were quick.”

“But how would we—”

“Like this?” I said.

Miles whispered, “Is that—”

“Just like that.”

We were all talk until suddenly we stopped talking. The day stilled except for a light breeze at the tops of the trees. They leaned together, talking in whispers. A bird called out. Then silence. Miles's breath echoed in my ear, and I watched a droplet of sweat bead on his forehead and run down to his ear. It hung there for a second before falling to my chest and sliding beneath my shirt. I kissed him and his mouth
tasted like salt water. Beneath us the caves reached down to the earth's molten center, the place where the planet is hottest, and the ground heaved up and collapsed onto itself with a shudder that left fissures in the pavement.

Afterward we drove twenty miles
west. I navigated on the folded map and Miles held my hand as he drove. He looked over at me from time to time and smiled. I smiled back. We were like cats licking our paws, slow and content. We found the lake tucked back behind a stand of pines, three hundred yards off the main road. By then the sky had clouded over and a cold wind coursed over the surface of the water. A single family gathered on the man-made beach at the water's edge. In a folding camp chair a heavy woman with oily skin and red splotches high on her cheeks sat surveying the lake. Her hair was short and wispy, the color of old copper. I walked to the edge of the brown water and stood with my hands on my hips. I looked over my shoulder at Miles.