by Julia Gaunce

Summer wanders sweetly on, and you and your wife were walking through the park. It was raining. It never rains here—you were crying. You were crying and the boys on the baseball diamond thundered around the bases. Love tried to end the conversation. "Go home," she said. You’re accidentally teaching her to forget you.

She meant home: your new apartment. The radiators knock, the tenant next door plays darts, and the woman downstairs has dogs. You hear her call the dogs every morning. She's always reasonable, at first, then benignly fed up. "I see you there. Come here." You think the woman is a call girl. A call woman, really—she's probably about forty. She says she works at a knit shop.

None of this is your fault. You came home at the beginning of the summer from a business trip. You took your shoes off, phoned the office to report in to Mr. Brown and to get an update on his stormy state of mind. As soon as you hung up, your daughter phoned you on her cell to say hello from the pup tent in the backyard. The dog whined at the door. Your wife asked for a lift to her check-up. You waited in the hot car, and when you saw her walking back to you, funny look on her face, you thought about the heat. She stood there, leaning in through the window, hand on her hip. "Did you have enough air," you thought she said. "Yes," you said, sensibly enough, then it dawned on you, with horror, what she had actually said, and you were stuck with your sorry accidental story, stuck with your stupid accidental truth. You drove home together, both of you completely oblivious to her purse flapping on the top of the car. At the house, she begged you to tell her, over and over. (You remained courtly, demure on the question of the bruises, on the woman's arms, her hips, and her ass.) Then she left you there, and you went to the den to lie down. The dog still whined at the back door; you finally heard and let him in. You plucked a soggy empty pregnancy test box from his mouth. You moved out.

The downstairs woman is loose-limbed, quick, almost hinged. She has men's shoes and a handbag light as air. You would like to touch her hair. She removes herself to another room and emerges a few minutes later, hair feathered further. Love calls every night around dinnertime, when it knows people are home.

You make toast, because that's what it smells like, down there, where she lives. Toast is a long dark apartment, and it makes you feel sleepy, because now you're feeling good, although you don't feel very well. You feel like you felt when you sprained your ankle, years ago, when it started to get better, when it began to be yours again, something attached and something in trouble, something you would have to bring along with you after all. You have to stop this feeling, before the feeling comes true. You lie down, your face turned toward the heating vent. The cigarette smoke from the woman's apartment comes through the vent. You breathe into it. Your breath hangs in the air, acrid as a shaken match.

You invite the woman to go for a drive. You and she and her dogs are on the outskirts now, out where the houses give up to the fields and the woods. You are taking her to a cabin you know. (When you were a boy you wanted to live in a house made of roots.) There's a mowing jacket there, hanging on a nail; sometimes you like to wear it. There are four small l's chalked on the wall, with another one drawn straight through. You saw a deer on this road, once, standing in the fog. Its legs were so thin you thought they must break. You rest your arm in the open car window and the hair stands up. You are picturing yourself shaving the crook of the top of the woman's inner thigh. You ready yourself, you fish around for her name. You could end up having a heart attack today.

Your attention is wandering. Out of the blue, by mistake, you ask her if she has ever had to beg for mercy. She doesn't say it, she just looks it: she looks at you. You can't stand that look. If she doesn't start talking, you're going to pull over, right now. And then you are pulling over, too fast; the tires are pushing deep and pulling hard into the soft sandy shoulder. You lean over and snap open the passenger door. You push the woman out, and then you get yourself out too and you walk around to her. The woman steps back into the sand and lands on her ass, then she pops back up and cups something torn off against the heel of her hand. She's still looking at you.

There is no one who can say you cannot do any of this. You are capable of anything. Look at Mr. Brown: he used to be a dentist until he got caught, and last year he pulled out all his teeth and made his own set of plates, in his own little workshop.

It's maddening, the way the woman stands there, looking. You want her to resist, you want her to make this impossible, to teach you that there are some things you just cannot do. You would like to see the devil. But she just stands there, in her figured dress, refuses to talk her way out of this, the way you do, the way you run off at the mouth, like when Mr. Brown gave you your last performance review, grabbed a handful of your inner thigh in a killer grip, the way he likes to do, his favourite test of loyalty, a test of how a person takes to that. You drove a pen by mistake into the back of his hand. It was an accident.

This—you and the woman standing here, almost in the ditch, almost out of sight—this is a car accident. The facts are rude. Mistakes are being made; they must be making themselves. You talk yourself into circles until you start to run. You're running through the field to the woods, and you'll get ahead. The woman's hounds sound a million miles away. They're getting overexcited and fucked up and they're turning on each other. They won't get dinner because of you, but they'll be too fucked up to remember it was you, next time, to hold it against you. They'll just come running up the way they always do, slobber on your pants.

That is what they do, when you walk back to the car. You drive the woman home, quietly.

So you don't get your heart attack. Instead, on Monday morning, outside your office door, Mr. Brown turns his face to you, sidelong and private. He is flushed, or drained. Or he is flushed and drained at the same time—that is possible, these are only figures of speech. "You're the goodest man I know," Mr. Brown says. And then he wobbles down the hall, shuts his office door behind him and (as has been reported) collapses in a terrible huff. You wonder if he doubled over his desk at that moment, as if he had only then discovered a mistake, a mistake buried in his own plumbing, a mistake for which he likely fired some other poor dope months ago. You wonder if he looked embarrassed.

At the end of the week, Mr. Brown is lowered down.

The men from work clot together at one end of the churchyard. They are slim and beautiful. They are sharp dark suits. Tom's necktie is loose. (They're all freedom now, out of reach of Mr. Brown's punctual demolitions, his running down the hall at them with his teeth out.) The men look like the difference between dust and mud. The preacher starts the fireworks with a spade of loose earth. You stand apart, focussing on the neighbouring farmer's field. You know that farmer. You happen to know that last year he planted a field of corn, just for the deer.

And then you find yourself at the foot of the hole, eyes boring in. These are guts you don't like very much, but you find yourself talking to Mr. Brown. "You are going to be all right," you say—more like, it comes ripping out of your mouth. You look around to see if anyone has heard you. The grass shimmers. You think, Mr. Brown is going to be alone, but he shouldn't have to go alone. This is no time to be hard. You will be the one to watch him go, you will see him through. This is your new job. You look around again. You wonder where the family is; you wonder if they know.

And then, looking up, at the grass and the yard and the lie of the field, you're surprised to see there is no snow. Only you know that snow has left, not over the course of last spring and this summer but just now. A tongue of snow, not a tongue—it slipped across the grass and down the banks. It joined the river then and overran. The snow rolled back like carpet, not before your eyes but rather just before you saw, because the snow you can no longer see was not snow but love, and now the snow is gone.

Julia Gaunce's novel Rocket Science was published last fall by Pedlar Press. She is working on her next book.