Fiction

As soon as he heard the first cool breezes of autumn rustling through the dry leaves, Philip Ryan imagined himself flying point in one of those southbound Vs of Canadians he’d seen moving across the sky. The sight of those flawless formations always excited him so much that he’d feel like answering their distant call with a good honk or two of his own. The feeling was so strong that sometimes he wondered if he’d been one of those soaring birds in a past life and had been reincarnated into his flightless form by some horrible mistake.

He figured he might not be able to fly like a goose, but he damned sure knew where the highway was. And one morning he would look over at the aging woman sleeping beside him and slip from her bed as quiet as a cat burglar. He’d pack his duffle, he’d take all the cash in the house, and he’d be down the road by sunrise, looking for something better, or at least something different, leaving nothing of himself behind save a few stray hairs and the imprint of his head on the pillow.

But this stay had been so long he felt like one of those fat geese whose wild spirit has been drained by the lush grazing around lakes and farm ponds. Instead of a pond, he found his easy pickings in a McMansion that sprawled across a tiny suburban lot south of Birmingham. By his standards, the place was luxurious. But he had grown weary of hearing how Carol’s ex had paid for it.

"Made the son-of-a-bitch pay through the nose," she would say after too many glasses of Chablis, pointing to what Philip thought was her best feature, her little button of a nose. "Through the fucking nose."

Tough talk, he thought. And about as much at home on her tongue as a ring would be through that cute nose.

She often came home from her job as the district sales manager for Wilmot Pharmaceuticals, packing some kind of bauble for his pleasure. She’d bought him more clothes than he would ever wear and a membership to Gold's Gym so he could keep his long, lean body tight and fit. And she bought a new car, a blue BMW Z4 convertible, for him to drive all the time as long as he promised to cruise by her ex-husband's place every day or so.

"Remind that cheating son-of-a-bitch that I don’t need him or his fucking money anymore," she said, a weak snarl masking the cracking of her voice and the tears welling in her eyes every time she mentioned her ex.

On a scale of looks, Philip thought she had probably always been several notches down from pretty. But with that button nose and those soft lips, she could’ve been recognized at one time as cute. He imagined her in high school as a perky cheerleader with her cheeks firm and dimpled, her brown hair long and ponytailed. She had never told him how old she was, but she now looked to be in her late forties, knocking hard on fifty. He could see a double chin collecting around her neck like slowly rising bread dough, with gravity doing its treacherous thing to the skin around her eyes. A shiver trickled up his spine as he thought, time is damn sure hell on the cute and perky.

He hadn’t thought of his own age since his birthday back in May. He remembered how old he was and bit his tongue before the dreaded number could pass through his lips. He walked over to the dresser mirror, stroked his blond hair that grew in a riot of curly tangles.

“Hell, kid, you don’t look a day over twenty-five.” He shrugged. “Eh, maybe twenty-six.” But he could do the math. Twelve autumns had blown by since that had been the correct answer.

That morning, as Carol scrambled around the house getting ready for work, he leaned back into the pillows bunched behind him on the headboard and sipped the coffee she brought him, wiping sleep from his eyes and thinking he had to get the hell out of there pretty soon. He could feel his wildness draining from him amid all that freedom-sucking domesticity.

“Would you mind taking a damp mop and going over these floors today?" she called from somewhere down the hall.

Instead of answering he stared at the door, telling himself to just walk through it as he had all the others. She could boss those toads at work around all she wanted, but he wasn't a man who took orders. He had no intention of mopping a damn floor. What bothered him was she suddenly dared to ask him. She had become too comfortable with him, leading her to talk about him to some of her girlfriends. He was sure those bitches had put her up to asking him to do fucking housework.

"And the kitchen," she said, now standing in the door. "I don't mind cooking when I come in. Really, I don't. I love to cook. But it would help me a lot if you'd have everything kind of cleaned up and ready. If you could do that, it'd really be great, baby."

She walked over to the bed, bent over and tagged his cheek with a quick peck. "Gotta go," she said, glancing at her watch.

As she walked away, he thought that if he left today, the swell of her hips in that tweedy brown suit would be his last sight of her. He listened to the familiar sound of her heels punishing the hardwood in the hallway, the front door opening and closing, the growl of her Mercedes' diesel turning over in the garage. By the time the scent of her hairspray and cologne faded from the bedroom, his coffee had grown cold.

Before her, all the older women he had lived with had at first been satisfied with having a young man sleeping in their beds. But they eventually wanted more, and it was this more thing that always scared the hell out of him. Their mores—usually: get a job, meet her family, go back to school, or some shit. It had never taken much of this to get him packed and down the road. But this was his second autumn in Birmingham, and Carol had already dumped a truckload of mores on him.

His experience led him to understand the unhealed wound of a broken marriage at this stage in a woman’s life, all those dreams and expectations crushed by an egomaniacal husband's need for something younger, leaving her to feel like a formerly cute puppy, grown into a fat, ugly mutt. That wound was his stock-in-trade, and he understood that he would have to listen to them lashing out at their exes. He knew he would have to hold them and make them believe his imaginary bond with them would get them through another night.

But with Carol, it wasn't just her ex-husband. It was her weight, her job, her intelligence, or lack of it as she sometimes thought. To him, her job sounded like a total train wreck. The night before, she spent hours glued to her computer and yakking on the phone, suddenly pushing herself away, shouting to the ceiling, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Listening to this kind of shit was the last thing he ever wanted to do. But the strong impulse he felt to leave at the sound of it was soon overcome by the horror of crawling on another Greyhound bus.

"Baby, you sure look like you know what you're doing," he said, moving in behind her, rubbing her shoulders, feeling her taut muscles melt under his fingertips.

"I don't, though," she whined, giving in to his ministrations.

"Of course you do, and you know it. Hell, you're the smartest woman I've ever known."

It was easy to compliment her because she really was smart. But she didn't always believe it. She curled up in his arms, content after his reassurances, but he knew she would be good only till the next office crisis, the next dip in her confidence which could be set off by anything, especially her weekly telephone call to her mother. Then she would look as if she'd been kicked in the gut by an NFL punter.

"That bitch," she said, pointing at the phone one day as if the old lady were curled up in it. "How did she get to be a mother, anyway?”

He’d had enough of her emotional meltdowns. He sprang from the bed and found his canvas duffle in the corner of the closet, crumpled under the parade of shirts, pants, and sport coats, all cleaned and lined up in neat rows. He pulled the frayed old bag out, brushed a couple of dust balls from its stiff folds, and watched them float to the floor. The thing wouldn't hold a fraction of the stuff Carol had bought him. Before he split, he'd have to get a suitcase or something.

He ran his finger across the rod that held his shirts, contemplating his choices, caressing the hanger hooks as if he were strumming harp strings, already missing the things he would have to leave behind. Then he thought the whole thing was too much of a decision to make before breakfast.

~

Phillip headed out to Joe Bean's Coffee shop. Remembering the fifteen hundred bucks he'd squirreled away, he figured it might be a good time to get out while he was ahead. As he gripped the wheel, he envisioned how good it would feel to have the highway crushing under his tires with trees and cities whizzing by his windows. But as he pulled into the coffee shop's lot, he released his grip with a sigh. He’d been spending Carol's money these days and doubted how long fifteen hundred dollars would stay in his pocket. Besides, the damned car was in her name. He knew he couldn't take it. With all the vindictiveness she targeted toward her ex-husband, he knew if he pissed her off by leaving in the Beemer, he'd be swimming in cops before he hit the county line. That meant he would be back on the Greyhound like the old days, and as he leaned back into the firm leather, he could almost hear the lonesome moan of the bus's engine, the hiss of its brake, the pungent scent of diesel, and the usual unwashed passenger sitting beside him, giving him a gap-toothed grin before taking a ragged pull from a half pint of cheap whiskey.

He sat in the coffee shop parking lot while everything he had come to know moved farther and farther away from him. His daily excursions here to the coffee shop, the gym, the track, the mall, and the TV shows he watched on the sixty-five incher in Carol's den every night. He shuddered at some of the things he'd done to get where he was now and wondered if he would ever have another set-up like this again.

Even before he climbed out of the car, he knew the blonde barista would greet him with a toothy smile, her face all scrunched up as if she were trying to beam at him.  She always giggled at everything he said and caressed the hair on the back of his hand after she handed him his coffee. When no one was looking, she would refill his cup and slip him some of the pastries she was supposed to chop up for customer samples.

She saw him coming and cooed. "Philip. Grande house blend.”

He reached for it. "Something extra for you,” she whispered. “Our new pumpkin coffee cake."

"Thanks," he whispered back. "You know. I'm going to have to do something nice for you one of these days."

"Yes, you are," she said.

He snatched a newspaper from the rack, and wended his way through a gauntlet of lattes and laptops, laying claim to an empty table next to one of the east-facing windows. Some classical piece seeped from the speakers hanging from the walls, soft violins and cellos, mingling with the gurgling cappuccino machine and the hum of conversation. 

He'd never given the barista a second thought, but as he sipped his coffee and rustled through the newspaper, he thought of her tits peeking at him under her short black apron. Carol's tits on the other hand—well, Carol's tits were fast surrendering to the law of gravity. They’d done all the peeking they were ever going to do. Those nights when she wasn't harried by work, depressed over her failed marriage, or inflamed by some backhand comment her mother made, he managed to talk her into making love. He often thought it was a mistake because they always ended up with her lying under him like a lump, breathlessly whispering for him to slow down. Slow down? He was already moving so slowly, like one of those shapeless globs wiggling in her stupid lava lamp in the den.

The barista surprised him, refilling his coffee and plopping another slice of cake on the table.

"Nice day, huh?" she said.

"Nice day?" he said, lowering the paper and looking out the window as if seeing the October sunshine for the first time. "Yeah," he said. "Damn, I think you're right. Kinda crisp or something like that. You know what I'm saying?"

"Crisp?" she said with a little giggle in her voice. "Yeah, I think I do."

"Hey, how long have I been coming in here?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've been here a little over four months. You've been in every day I've been here."

"That's what I'm getting at. You got my name when I ordered coffee on the first day. But I don't know yours."

"No. I don't guess you do, do you?"

"Oh, you're not going to tell me?"

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I will."

"Well, whoever you are, you know what we ought to do on this nice, crisp day?"

"What?"

"Go on a picnic."

"A picnic? You mean like, together?"

"No, we should go on two separate picnics. Of course, together. I could jam some sandwiches into a cooler, grab a bottle of wine . . . Hey, I may have to check your ID."

"I'll show you my mine if you show me yours," she said.

"Got yourself a deal," he said. "What time you get off?"

"I get off at one today. But I'm supposed to go to the dentist."

"Blow it off. Let's go out to the park, have lunch by the lake, and, you know, chill with Mother Nature for a while."

"For real?" she said, cocking her eyebrow, a smile trickling across her lips.

"I’m always for real, baby," he said, pushing up from the table. "You up for some picnic or what?"

"I don't know. I guess.” A haze of doubt before her face broke into that beaming smile.

"See you out front at one.”

~

After driving back to Carol's, he nestled into his favorite spot on the couch for a little TV. Judge Judy talked him into a deep sleep, and when he woke it was a little past noon. Excited by the thought of getting his hands on someone young and firm with her full allotment of estrogen, he packed up a blanket, the cooler, and a couple of Carol’s fancy wine glasses along with the Chablis she had cooling in the fridge. He stopped by the local deli for a couple of roasted chicken sandwiches and got back to the coffee shop to find the barista standing at the curb, her black apron tossed over her shoulder, checking out her phone.

He screeched to a halt in front of her.

"I didn't know if you'd actually come or not," she said.

"You kidding? Who in his right mind would ever stand you up?"

"Well, I wasn't really sure about all that ‘right mind’ stuff.” She opened the door. "Nice car."

He wheeled up on the interstate with the wind whipping through his hair. "Let's get some tunes going up in here.” He cued the Foo Fighter's CD with Grohl belting out "The Pretender."

"You like this?" he asked over the roaring wind, the moaning traffic, and the driving guitars.

She looked up from her phone and shouted back, "It's okay. I kinda like old music sometimes."

"Yeah, me too.”

~

There were only a few cars scattered around the lake. He parked the Beemer, got out, and snatched up the cooler and the blanket. "This way."

The tall grass slapping against their legs. "You come out here a lot?" she asked.

"Not a lot," he said. Carol brought him out here once with the intention of picnicking. She had wept like a bereaved widow when she told him that it had been her favorite place to go with her ex.

He spread the blanket in the shade of a sycamore and motioned for the barista to sit. He dropped down beside her, opening the wine and filled the glasses.

"Wow," she said, looking at him with one eye through the pale liquid. "This is so cool. I feel like a girl in a TV commercial or something."

"You look like a girl in a TV commercial.” He raised his glass." Bottoms up." Drained it.

She followed his lead and swallowed her wine. She came up gasping, giggling, and dribbling wine down her chin.

"One more time," he said.

"I thought you were supposed to sip this stuff with your pinkie finger poked out," she said.

"We'll pinkie the shit out of it after we get us a little buzz going," he said, refilling her glass.

By the time he gulped down a second glass, the alcohol had him floating. He poured them another glass, and they sat sipping it without talking, the air nutty and sweet smelling. Across the lake, the hardwoods on the mountain shimmered red, gold, and purple among the green pines.

“So, what is your name?"

"Kirsten," she said. "My friends call me Kirsty."

"Want to hear a secret, Kirsty?"

"I totally want to hear a secret."

"I've been wanting to kiss you since the first time I saw you."

She smirked and shook her head. "You must not have wanted to very bad."

"Why do you say that?"

 She shrugged. "Took you four months to ask me out."

"My life's been kinda complicated.”.

"You probably stay all jammed up with a lot of women and all."

 "Well, not so many. I'm mostly jammed up with work."

"Work?" she said. "You mean you work somewhere?"

"What do you think I am, some kind of bum?"

"No," she said. "I just thought you were rich or something. You know, you drive a cool car, and you have a buncha time to hang around the coffee shop in the morning."

"I wouldn't say I'm rich, but I do all right.”

"Who do you work for?"

 "Actually, I'm self-employed,” he said. “You might say, I'm sort of a consultant."

"I guess you have to be really smart to do that kind of stuff, huh."

"Oh, not so smart," he said. "But you have to do a lot of listening. I mean a lot of goddamn listening."

"Well?" she said, scooting closer to him.

"Well, what?"

"You going to kiss me or not?"

"Yes," he said, slowly leaning into her. "Yes I am."

 He didn't see her toss her glass, but he heard it shatter on a rock. Her breasts crushing against him, tipping his own glass over, wine splashing on his blazer and spilling across his lap.

It didn't take him long to forget about Carol's blanket, her fancy glasses, his blazer, and even his wet jeans because Kirstin's hair smelled like sweet coffee, and her lips surrendered to his as they lay facing each other while his hand roamed from her breasts down her back to the curve of her ass.

Her breathing was so heavy, he wondered for a second if she were having an asthma attack. She sucked in a deep breath and rolled on top of him, clinging to him like a wrestler trying to pin an opponent to the mat. Her mouth moving down his face like some wet little animal. What would Carol would say if she saw a hickey the size of a drink coaster on his neck?

Her hand snaked down to his crotch, and he worried that there was nothing much going on down there. This had happened to him a few times with Carol in the past several months. She had held him and told him not to worry, to take his time, and he always recovered.

He untangled himself and sat up, gasping. "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Goddamn! Slow down!" Kirsty tumbled back on the blanket, looking at him like he’d slapped her.

"Look," he said. "This may not be such a good idea."

"Not a good idea?" she said, blinking her eyes as if she were coming out of a trance.

"No, I mean. I just got to thinking. You're kinda young and all . . ."

"I'm twenty-two," she said.

"Well, see . . . that's a little . . . and I'm . . ."

"Whatever," she said, and for a moment she looked at him as if he were a birthday present she hadn't really wanted in the first place.

"Hey. I was just thinking it'd be better if we had some lunch first," he said, fumbling in the cooler. "I got these great sandwiches."

"I don't want any great sandwiches," she grumbled. By the time he raised up, sandwiches in his hand, she was already standing, staring down at her phone. She was just going to stand there, flipping her finger across the phone’s screen.

"You want some more wine?" he asked.

"I hate wine," she snapped without looking at him. "Shit. I missed my dental appointment."

~

He left Kirsty at the curb in front of the coffee shop, watching in his rearview mirror as she thumbed messages into her phone as if she were keying in a code that would delete the whole miserable afternoon from her life. He might have disappointed a few women in his time, but this had to be the first time he'd made one long for the medieval torture of a dentist's drill.

The barista had surprised him with that tsunami of passion. It wasn’t just surprise, he admitted to himself.  She’d scared the shit out of him. No wonder. He'd been hustling aging divorcees for so long his days had become nothing but a constant parade of the moods, fragrances, and special lubricants of menopausal women.

He drove for hours, thinking how he needed to move out and start dating young women. Of course, he would have to pick up on some other hustle. He didn’t think that would be any problem. He'd been such a wiz at pimping timeshares down in that Orlando the owner had begged him to go over and help him unload some properties in Boca. That was back when he’d latched onto that chunky red-head divorcee from Tallahassee. And here he was, eight years later, cruising around Birmingham watching the sun leave a pink stain in the western sky. 

He trembled with the thought of getting a job and going through an episode like this afternoon again. He'd always been able to talk any self-doubt away by giving himself a little pep talk. He drove into a Shell convenience store and pulled down the visor to look at himself in the vanity mirror.  If he ever wondered where those eight years since Tallahassee had gone, he'd just found them on his face. There was no use telling this reflection that it was the sun lightening his hair. The gray mingled in made it more taupe than blond, and it looked as if it were eroding into a peninsula in front. 

~

"Where have you been?" Carol asked when he walked in the back door, her voice so desperate she sounded as if she'd just organized a search party.

"Oh, you expect me to account for every second I'm out of your sight?" he snapped.

"No. You didn't answer your phone. I was worried."

"The battery on that new iPhone won't stay charged," he said.

"I'll see about it tomorrow," she said. "You hungry? I thought we'd have the leftover roast."

"Aww," he whined, deciding to see if he was still the leader in this little dance. "I don't want any old leftover roast."

"What if I fixed you an omelet," she said. "The way you like it. With ham and peppers."

That might make him feel a little better. He decided to raise the stakes. "Could we have those spicy potatoes you make along with it?"

"Whatever you want," she said. 

"And biscuits," he said, upping the ante. "We could have biscuits, couldn't we?"

"Of course, baby," she said. "And you can sit in the kitchen while I cook and tell you about my day."

While she baked the biscuits and sautéed the onions and peppers, he sat and listened.

"Mother called," she said with a groan. "That woman won't just come out and tell me I'm fat. Oh! Hell no. She sneaks it into a conversation like someone slipping poison in your drink. She knows weight's my sore spot because she made it sore when I was a girl. And she never misses a chance to peel the scab off. She just told me she hoped I was staying away from Twinkies. Then she chuckled like we were sharing a fond memory of my high school days or something. I swear, I've eaten only two Twinkies in my entire life. In the eleventh grade, she had me on nothing but carrot sticks and lettuce so I'd be thin and popular. I didn't have enough energy for cheer practice, so I ate everything in sight when she wasn't looking. I got those damn Twinkies from a friend. Mom found the wrappers in my room and made fun of me, pointing out that I had sucked all the sticky white stuff off the cellophane like a drug addict."

Without even thinking about it, he knew what to do because he'd done it at least a hundred times before. He held her and reminded her how smart and beautiful she was.

“Your mama?” he said. “Just a cranky old voice from a long time ago. This is what's happening now. You and me."

After eating, instead of taking up his station in front of the TV, he handed her the plates and glasses while she loaded the dishwasher.

“You want to listen to some music or something?” he asked when they finished.

“Who are you?” she said. “And what did you do with my boyfriend?”

In bed that night, she took him inside her, and he fell right into that dreamy rhythm she favored as if he'd mastered a dance he'd been practicing for a long time.  It may have been a far cry from the heat and passion of the barista, but it had been worth enduring once it was over and she held him in her arms with his face nestled in the hollow of her breasts. And sleep came easy to him there in all that warmth, smelling the damp, grassy scent of her skin and feeling the gentle thumping of her heart. He knew that if he ever did leave, he would miss this most of all.