Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

All three of them gave me similar looks of disapproval.

Sitting on the bus stop bench out front, I lit another cigarette and watched the tourists walk by lapping ice cream. I thought I saw Sarah drive by in a red Honda. Lately I was seeing her face in lots of places. Because there are several ends to every love, and good God, we mourn its death in many stages. I saw her in supermarket lines, in afternoon game show commercials, and in the face of pretty much every short female runner. Hairs glued in strands across her forehead, glasses forever fogged while she jogged, actually impairing her vision. A pink ribbon emblazoned on her T-shirt: “Race for a Breast Cancer Cure.” She had a vast collection of souvenir shirts. “Let’s Win the Race Against AIDS.” Run for muscular dystrophy awareness, or heart disease, or some children’s hospital. Actually, anything at all having to do with children. Personally, I’d never wanted to have kids. I had made this clear from the very beginning. I also said that if she wanted kids, well then, we should have kids. She sometimes accused me of contradicting myself.

I told her once how I heard a man tell his son — well, I assume he was the boy’s father, because they were walking along with baseball equipment bulging from a duffel bag — this was a sunny day and I watched this man proudly announce to his son, his chest was all puffed up, he said, “Do you know it takes only four minutes for sunlight to reach the earth?” I figured no way this was possible. I had to go home and look it up. It takes eight minutes, it turns out. He was wrong. And I knew this was not the kind of misinformation that would necessarily divert a child’s healthy trajectory, but all I could think of at that moment was when my own imaginary son first asked me why the sky was blue, or where babies came from. These are basic father-son exchanges, and was I really going to tell my child, if we ever had one, that I had no idea? I mean, I did of course, I do, but we all know where those kinds of questions lead at some point — how did we get here, why are we here, and what happens after we die?

I usually told Sarah the timing wasn’t right.

She actually hit me once with a pasta spoon. This was not a wooden pasta spoon. And this just because I told her that kids would never keep us from dying. Can you imagine? I actually said to my wife, No matter what you may have heard, you cannot live through your children. Which was especially unfair, even mean, because our life at home had become so constricting, the place felt smaller every day. I knew that having somebody besides me — a child, say — would have been a completely natural and welcome and well-deserved change in our life. What can I say? The only real family life I knew seemed distorted. What model would I use? I told her once, toward the end, that a baby is no way to save a marriage. I accused her of “polishing brass on the Titanic. ” I believe she called me a motherfucker. Who was that guy? And who was I now? I was a man who wanted to raise children with his ex-wife. Ridiculous. I hardly recognize the old miserable me anymore. I mean, there was a time when Sarah and I actually clutched at the soil on a daily basis, and we would not let go. We went mountain climbing. We drove cross-country and made love on desert floors. We bungee jumped over the Colorado River, and muled our backpacks down Grand Canyon paths. We took a hot-air-balloon ride in northern France and ate up the cold air in mouthfuls. We watched the ground fall away looking like a patchwork blanket, sweet earth sleeping beneath us.

I still loved her.

I considered calling Dad again, thought better of it, and watched the woman in the visor and her daughter leave the store.

They brushed right past me, as if we hadn’t just met, a large plastic bag in the daughter’s hands. The mother tapping the bag as they walked toward a gray-haired man sitting in an idling station wagon.

Amad was beside me, showing a receipt. He said, “Not a bad way to start the morning.”

I said, “Today is the day, my friend. I can feel the tide is turning. I feel alive, Amad, I wish I could tell you.” I followed him inside. He slipped the receipt into a black tin behind the counter. He snapped the tin shut.

I looked at him in the mirror, caught his eyes. “I may have to go to New York. See my dad.”

“The walls are still standing, for now anyway.” He patted my back. “But why are you having dinner with Sarah?”

I shook my head. “It’s supposed to be our anniversary today, so it’s funny, you have to admit. To have dinner tomorrow. But it should be fine, no big deal. Am I right?”

“Nothing is supposed to be anything and that is why you are always in a pickle. Nothing is supposed to be anything.”

“One of your famous pep talks.”

“Happy anniversary.” He blew me a kiss, then opened the door to the storeroom and disappeared inside.

I laughed out, “Is that all you got? We need to vacuum this floor.”

A muffled shout from the storeroom: “Teri is coming soon. And if she sees you standing there and doing nothing she will ruin our day.”

“When do I get to be the boss again?” There was a lot of light filling up the windows. “Tell me something,” I said. “What are we doing wrong here, exactly? And for how long already?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This, like a ghost town in here.”

He came out from behind the counter. He took my hand in his and he put it to his cheek. “My friend. If my wife left me, I would shrivel up and die. So I’m sorry. I really am. And you are right, this place will come back to life if we work together. Remember? When I first met you I said to myself, this man knows how to make money. Used to, anyway.” He walked away. “On the other hand, all of this did not happen overnight.”

I rubbed my hands together.

He knew the story all too well; he was there for most of it. How in the late nineties I’d backed a software developer after reading a magazine article. It had claimed all the clocks would stop come the New Millennium, 2000. My kind of language.

“Three million and change,” I said.

“You see?” He was fully awake and alert now and kept looking over my shoulder. “You were a millionaire. Maybe you still are, I don’t know.”

“Not so much.”

“You should come by for dinner this weekend and we can sit, and we can talk about what we should do. Is that Teri? I think I see her car.”

“Tell her to make that chili.”

“Come with me,” he said.

We went outside. The sun was low and reddening through clouds.

He said, “Look at them, all the tourists by the water. You see that? They always look for otters, and the otters have been gone for too many years already.”

I nodded.

He jerked his head and looked away. “I thought it was her.”

I said, “Do you think we can do this? I think we can do this.”

“Look, you go and have your dinner tomorrow night, which if you want to talk about crazy, that is a little bit crazy. But be careful. I love Sarah, and I miss Sarah, but remember they call it a past for a reason. And this weekend we will have dinner at my home. And we will have Teri’s chili, and we will have a beer, and we will knock our heads together until we figure out how we get this place shipshape. We are all in a funk, my friend. And soon I will have a son, or a daughter, either one would be fine with me, really, either one, as long as the baby is healthy, I promise, to put all the way through preschool. And then to college. And we will do what everyone else in the world is doing and that is having meals together and making a living and having a drink together and watching our little ones get grown up, and getting ready to retire so we can die a little bit happy, okay? What do you think?”