At the café table, he taught her new vocabulary: empleado, corazón, verdad.
“El jefe is the boss,” he said, nodding along with himself. “If you’re not used to it, I’m going to help you.”
She pointed at the page with bitten nails. He wanted to loosen her ponytail, teach her words outside the proscribed curriculum.
I still don’t know who started it. I just know I had no inclination toward action until the moment when it became inevitable, as if I’d been tipping in a particular direction for hours, slowly losing what I had long recognized as equilibrium. There is no name for this, there are no rules delineating what comes next. There are only new levels to find, new approaches to discover, and such enjoyable, enjoyable surprises.
Toward the top they hiked, hand in hand, one clasping an umbrella, the other a camera. They did not, for a second, think how strange it was to reach out to each other, to touch, to let palm rest against palm after all that had gone between them. They did not, for a second, consider the cracks in their foundation. It was only at the mountain’s summit, when they felt both invincible and so alone, that they turned to each other and let their eyes reveal what would pass between them, back and forth and back again, every day of their lives together.
According to his mother, his father left so much pocket change lying around that she started saving it. In the end, she saved enough to buy him a new suit—his father always wondered how she’d bought it.
Later his father abandoned him, and he never got over the heartbreak.
He shared his father’s habit: piles of change left everywhere, like archaeological fragments. I collected it in a bowl, and he abandoned the money when he left me.
It was not enough for a suit. But it was enough for my first two tanks of gas out of town.
She awoke like a mermaid, her legs bound by the covers, her hair fanned out against the pillow. Dawn had seeped into the room without their noticing, and she held her breath, held onto the night, fought not to slip under the surface of the day.
At that moment, when the light disappeared behind the hill, she realized just how dark it was around her. Her eyelids could have been closed or open, her hands waved in front of her, but she could not see them. She could have been upside down and never would have known it, unless she listened for the pounding in her head.
All week, I have walked on insubstantial ground, my arches aching from the effort of keeping my feet from wobbling. This inconsistentency is of my own making, the clamor in my head causing liquefaction all around me.
There is a corner up ahead; there is a rock just out of sight.
I plan to perch there for a day or two. I plan to make myself like that stone. I will stare hard in a forward direction, not back at the agitation I created in my wake.
100 Proof 