Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

For Lauren — age thirty-nine, unmarried, not a homeowner, underemployed, mother a drifting cloud of ash — every choice made carried such weight . How ridiculous. Never in her life had she been so unencumbered. If only she’d known it at the time.

—

One night, Dr. Sandy put her wineglass down in mid-conversation, leaned over the dinner table, and kissed Lauren full on the lips, one hand wandering and getting tangled in Lauren’s hair.

Kisses have a way of gathering mass unto themselves — first there is a snowflake, then a snowball, then an avalanche. Dinners became sleepovers, and Lauren walked around feeling like overnight she somehow sprouted a strange new appendage, or woke up to find that an unexplored room had appeared in her old house. It was disconcerting, but not unpleasant. Definitely not unpleasant.

—

The Montana winters were hard on Sandy, sweet blooming flower of the South. She had arthritis in her knee from a riding accident she’d suffered as a girl, and when cold fronts blew down from the Canadian Rockies, she’d hobble and swear. Lauren bought her an electric blanket and made a point of coming by to shovel her out on the mornings when they’d gotten new snow. They made frequent trips down the valley to Chico Hot Springs to soak in the mineral water. Sandy said it helped her knee, and Lauren loved the way the thick white steam hung in the cold air, blanketing the pool, and how they could sit there, arms around each other, and no one could see a thing.

In the early spring, Sandy’s mother fell and broke her pelvis and Sandy took two weeks to go be with her. During this separation, Lauren spent a good deal of time trying to figure out just what in the hell she was doing. She was thirty-nine. She could still have kids or a kid, at least, if she wanted to. She could get married and all the rest. She didn’t have to resign herself to anything. But, she missed Sandy. It was an almost visceral truth. Had she ever wanted kids anyway, or was that just something she thought she should want? From what mixture of head and heart and womb do these thoughts arise?

Sandy came back and things continued as they had for a while. It was summer, maybe the best summer of Lauren’s life. They hiked up to the lakes above Pine Creek and had a picnic. They stripped and jumped in, shouting and cursing at the shock of the frigid water, then they dried off, lying side by side, shivering on the sun-warmed rock.

Fall came, days when you could taste the coming snow, the bloody-copper tang of it on the wind. People in town burning leaves under gray skies. Great flocks of geese making their way south, the ragged lines of them like stitched wounds in the bellies of the clouds.

Sandy’s mother was not doing well. She was going to need full-time care soon. Lauren could see what was coming. She wasn’t surprised when Sandy, after dinner one night, grasped her hand and said, “I’ve got an idea.” She had a smile on her face, hopeful, but scared too, she was putting her heart in her hands and offering it to Lauren. “What if you came with me down to Lafayette? You’d like my mother. She’s an old southern belle but smart and tough and I can see you two sitting on her porch drinking sweet tea and talking and that thought makes me happier than anything else I can think of. It’s warm there. There’s pecan trees and the people are so nice.”

Lauren thought about it. She really did. She got up and ran water in the sink and put the dinner dishes in to soak. She came back and sat at the table.

“What would I do,” she said. “In Lafayette, what could I possibly do, other than drink tea with your mother?”

Sandy was holding her hand again. She had both of hers around one of Lauren’s. Lauren was briefly aware of how alike the two of them were, their hands almost indistinguishable from one another. Blunt nails, dry cracked skin on the knuckles from frequent vigorous washing.

“You’d just help with my mother. I’d work — my old practice would be glad to have me back — and you’d make sure mom was okay. It wouldn’t be too demanding, and mostly you could do whatever you wanted. It would be perfect. I’d feel better having my mother looked after by someone I love and trust, and you wouldn’t have to find a crummy job someplace.” Sandy kept talking, her words speeding up and colliding with one another. Lauren had mostly stopped listening. She leaned back in her chair, pulling her hand from between Sandy’s.

—

Sometimes an action you think is born of conviction, staunchness, taking a stand, is actually a simple product of fear of the unknown. At the time she was indignant. How dare Sandy even ask that of her, after everything Lauren had told her about her own mother? Did Sandy really think she would be content to be some combination of housewife and caretaker? How would it look, their happy little family? Lauren stuck in the house with a querulous old woman in the Louisiana heat while Sandy went out and made a living for them both? Absolutely not.

Lauren’s self-righteous anger carried her through that fall. Work became awkward, and she slowly became aware of a growing suspicion that she’d been wrong, and cruel, and an idiot on top of that. But, she’d lived her entire life in one place. It was too late for her to reimagine herself as someone who could just pick up and leave. Louisiana wasn’t real to her. It was a swamp.

—

Dr. Sandy was gone before the snow hit. On her last day at the clinic, they had a going away party. They hugged and Lauren said something, choked on tears. “We’ll stay in touch. I’ll call you. Maybe I can visit?” They were in the middle of a crowded room and Dr. Sandy kissed her full on the lips and shook her head. “That’s not how it works with me,” she said. “I don’t do halfways.”

Then someone came and wished Dr. Sandy well and they were separated. Lauren watched her for a while. She was talking, laughing, even, holding a paper plate with a piece of cake on it. Dr. Sandy would be fine. It was written all over her. She was a woman who would make a good life for herself wherever she ended up. Lauren had the peculiar feeling that it was she who’d had her affections spurned, not the other way around. She never spoke to Dr. Sandy again.

—

No one had ever told Lauren that you could be in love and not know it until after the fact. It seemed like love, the very state of it, should be self-evident. That this wasn’t always the case rendered the whole enterprise suspect. If you were in love and didn’t know it, were you in love? If love didn’t clearly reveal itself to all parties involved, did it even exist on this planet? Was love a thing or an idea or just a hope? Does love have gradations? Levels? Volumes? Variations in force or intensity? Or, is love, as it seemed like it should be, a perfect natural phenomenon like the homing instinct of salmon or the supreme vision of an osprey or the incredible tensile strength of spider’s silk? Is love the human animal’s one ceaseless, oft-neglected gift from the universe?

5.

If you live long enough, eventually there is a doubling back. In old age, there is a regression to childhood, of course. But before that, even, late middle age can become more like young adulthood than would seem possible. At age forty-eight, Lauren was again in the habit of going to the Longbranch on Friday nights. It actually wasn’t called the Longbranch anymore but its new name never registered with Lauren, as she was now part of the demographic that mainly knew things by what they used to be, rather than what they actually were.

She drank whiskey and ginger ale, and sat with her back to the bar watching the dance floor. Occasionally, drunks would ask her to dance, and she’d shake them off silently. Sometimes, more rarely, nondrunks would ask her to dance and she’d turn them down as well. She met Manny there one night. The bar was full, and he came stumbling through the crowd, cane in one hand, sloshing drink in the other. As he was making his way past, the stool next to her became vacant, and, simple as that, he lurched himself onto it and into her life. Something was obviously wrong with his legs, and he had a hard time getting up on the stool. His cane whacked her shins. He nearly spilled his drink on her, and he was cursing. When he got settled, he turned to her, hanging his cane by the crook from the bar top.