Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

Gerome was snoring. He had maneuvered his body so that his forearms and head were stretched onto the armrest between the front seats. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was only ever truly relaxed when he was touching one or both of them. Maggie ran a finger over his nose leather. Cold and wet. Gerome was a mix, which meant he was a healthy dog. When her clients asked, she always recommended mutts. Pure breeds helped the clinic’s bank account, sure, but that was it. Pure breeds — and she wasn’t shy about saying so — pure breeds were accidents waiting to happen. Boston terriers? All of them were brachycephalics, and half were born with luxating patellas. Bernese mountain dogs? Most were dead by five. Great Danes? With those hips? Don’t get her started.

Lake Shore had added an extra hour, but once they hit 90/94, they were essentially traffic-free. Just them and the big rigs, and they were actively making good time. If they stopped only when they needed gas, there was a chance they could still make the Blue Ridge Parkway by midnight. It was possible they wouldn’t have to get a hotel. They’d wake up in Virginia to green grass and full forests. Maggie and Gerome could go for their first official farm run of summer.

They’d only just taken the exit off 90 for 65, a hundred and some miles outside Chicago, but Mark was in a visibly better mood. He’d turned on the radio, and every few minutes he flipped through the channels. Even though Mark couldn’t find talk radio, he seemed happy. The fifty-mile stretch of turbines always calmed him down.

“How many do you think there are?” Maggie hadn’t intended to ask the question aloud, but it was a relief to break their silence.

“More than six hundred,” said Mark.

She tried counting the number of turbines in a single row. She gave up at ten.

“When it’s completed,” Mark said, “they say it’ll be the largest in the world.”

“They must be — what? — two hundred feet tall?”

“Closer to three hundred,” he said.

Maggie moved nearer to her window and gazed up at the one they were passing.

“They look like gods,” she said. “Enormous three-armed gods.” She leaned back in her seat.

On the west side of 65, the windmills’ blades were still. To the east, they were turning at full speed. “You could explain it to me a million times — harnessing wind power — and it would never make sense. Try to imagine the first person, standing in some storm, getting rocked about by the wind, thinking, I can work with this. ”

“His name was James Blyth.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“A professor in Glasgow. Late nineteenth century.”

“Your father quizzed you as a child.”

“Of course he did.”

“Instead of playing in the snow, you were sitting in front of a chalkboard.”

“Yep.”

“You poor thing.” It was an act, of course, and one they both enjoyed. Mark’s childhood, as Maggie well knew and admired, had been spent almost entirely outdoors. He’d been given books obviously. His parents had monitored his evening reading habits closely, but during the day he’d been encouraged to engage with the wilderness. Before Mark turned ten, he’d built a canoe with his father. Before high school, he’d built another on his own. The second one was mounted, family-crest-like, on the wall of the guest cabin on his parents’ farm, high above the wood-burning fireplace.

They were both still in grad school when Mark first took Maggie to his parents’ farm. “They’re eccentric,” he’d said more than once on the drive from DC. They’d been talking recently about moving in with one another, though they hadn’t yet talked about rings. “My mother can be competitive,” he said. “Plus you’re a knockout, so Robert will be overly attentive, which means Gwen might act out. Also, she’s going through an astrology phase, so fair warning.”

In fact, when Mark and Maggie arrived, Gwen had been so welcoming, so immediately receptive, that Maggie had wondered briefly at his capacity for accuracy. But as the night wore on — and after several bottles of wine had been opened and poured — Maggie did begin to see glimpses of the so-called eccentricities. For starters, at midnight, when she was so tired she nearly fell asleep on the couch, instead of being allowed to go immediately to bed, she was walked by Gwen into Gwen and Robert’s bedroom.

“Come, dear heart,” his mother had said. “I want to show you something.”

Maggie tried to linger in the doorway — she’d rarely stepped foot into her own parents’ room — but Gwen took her hand and pulled her to the bed. “Sit here,” she said.

Maggie did as told, though she felt her presence in their bedroom was inappropriate; she couldn’t say why. She longed to be in the company of Mark and Robert; longed to be in a common living space, where meetings between strangers were customary and formal.

What Gwen showed Maggie that night was a deck of Tarot cards. “Have you ever had your palms read?” asked Gwen. “I’m a newbie. I need practice, and I can only read Robert’s so many times. Do you mind?”

“Oh,” said Maggie. She looked at the door to the bedroom. “I’m so tired.”

“This won’t take long,” she said. “Besides, you should always please the mother. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Is it?” Maggie said.

“You’re a hoot. Now let me read.”

Maggie could no longer remember the cards Gwen read for her, but she remembered the way her stiffness gradually fell away. By the end of the reading, she was sitting cross-legged on Mark’s parents’ bed, her back against their pillows, gabbing about her life back in DC.

When Mark finally came to fetch her, it was nearly two in the morning, and any fatigue she’d felt earlier had been spirited away by Gwen’s exuberance. He leaned in the doorway watching them. “You’ve made a little girl out of my Maggie,” he said.

His mother threw a pillow at him. “I’ve seen her destiny,” she said. “See, look. I’ll show you.”

As Gwen proceeded to move the cards about on the bed, lining them up and explaining them all over again now to her son, Maggie watched Mark and Mark watched Maggie. Neither of them was listening to Gwen. Their focus was singular, intense.

“The point is,” said Gwen, rising suddenly, causing Maggie to bounce slightly, “it seems you’ve found the one. It’s in the cards. Your future; your doom.” She brushed her hands together as if wiping away crumbs. “Now out. The two of you. I’m old and tired. Tell your father it’s time for bed.”

Mark and Maggie slept that night not in his boyhood bedroom but in the guest cabin ( the guest cabin! ), its windows high and open. They pulled the mattress from the bed and centered it in the middle of the room, close to the fire, so that Maggie could take in the handiwork of Mark’s handmade canoe as he told her stories of the wilderness just beyond their walls. They didn’t have sex that night, but they held hands and fell asleep naked, and Maggie, in her final moment of consciousness before giving herself up to sleep, had thought, The one. I’ve found the one.

“I could drive,” said Maggie. She reached over and touched Mark’s leg. Gerome stretched and shifted so that his head was now weighing down her wrist, as if he could indefinitely keep her there. She moved her arm away gently. The dog sighed.

Mark scratched between Gerome’s ears but didn’t take his eyes off the road.

“When we need gas,” he said. “I feel good right now.”

“But you like to watch the windmills,” she said.

He glanced over and gave her a smile. “You watch them for me,” he said.

Lately, this was how it went after a squabble like the one they’d had that morning — a slow, sweet back-and-forth of trivial politesse and minor deference. They behaved like people unfamiliar with one another, people entering anew into the world of social contracts. The intimacy would return eventually. It always did. It mostly always did. But first the quiet back-and-forth.