The two of them were in the gravel driveway, just outside of the radius of the dim porchlight, looking at the horizon where the sun was just beginning to silhouette the clouds. It was the sort of fleeting summer evening they used to catch fireflies in. It was the kind that, when they got a bit older, they’d sit with their backs on the hot blacktop street and ask each other if they thought they’d end up just like their parents.
The kids were in the center of a half-block plot of dirt that dead-ended the street, playing on the pavement just between a large patch of clay and the torn up cement at the ends of the road. He lived a couple blocks west, just between Mr. McGlaughlin with the baby-blue-Pontiac and the Evangelicals who planted about a week too late every spring.
“Happy birthday,” he said at last.
She rubbed her eyes, hands furled. With a deep breath, he put his arm around her, pulled her close to him, and kissed her lightly on the top of her head.
“We need to get the kids in bed,” she said.
“Your mom’s already asleep. Don’t worry about it.”
“She’s gonna be pissed if she knows they were up past nine.”
“Amanda,” he said, shakily, but couldn’t finish.
She looked at the kids, now sitting up and calling to each other in syncopated shrieks, like swamp sparrows.
“You think you’ll be a father someday?” she asked him.
He laughed. He had always laughed just like his own dad. No one else in his family took after his father– his sisters all had the thin brown hair and hazel eyes of their mom. But he had that palomino tan, that slight Puerto Rican complexion, como café con leche, he always said, and he had his Dad’s laugh.
“Maybe,” he said.
They looked back at the kids, who were slowly and finally beginning to tire.
“Amanda,” he said.
The summer had come cautiously, like the movements of a young doe. It was very eventually warm, and then it was very eventually hot, and then it was so hot and humid that the air was hardly breathable. But it had come on so slowly and sweetly that no one had complained.
The two of them were there together under the setting sun, the feeling of hot night, the sweet smell of mulberries beginning to rot. It was the time of day when everything was drenched in sunlight that was thicker than honey and looked washed-out and golden as a 60’s polaroid. I don’t know, he had told her.
He laid his head on her shoulder, the way he always did after a hard day. The kids were sitting cross-legged on the street, the youngest of the three cuddled up and melting into her older brother’s leg. Amanda looked at anything but him. The Dairy Queen sign from East Street towered over the cornfields like a conquistador flag, claiming all the natives in the county.
And what if I want to wait? What if I don’t want to? Would you still want to stay?
I don’t know.
“I saw your dad,” she told him as he picked his head up, “betting on the East Side game last Thursday.”
“Of course you did,” he said, and risked a smile.
The pregnant silence that followed lasted as long as he could let it before the anxiety set in.
“You know what’s funny?” he pressed on, “He gambles in town with the boys every weekend. Has been for years, but I don’t think he likes playing at all. He just wants the jackpot, one day.”
“But you’re not poor.”
“No, we’re not poor. I don’t think it’s about the money.”
“Then what?”
He met her eyes, smiled with conscious effort.
“What else?” he said, slow, and very deliberate. “He wants to win.”
When she didn’t say anything to this, he shrugged and looked back at the kids. “People are strange.”
Yes, she thought.
“Amanda,” he said, and his smile fell.
She’d been spending her afternoons working at the brand-new Dairy Queen downtown, and she’d been working hard. That’s what you had to do to get out of there.
He’d always been a paragon of the town– he had that devil-may-care handsomeness of the boys down on the east side but donned the same telling blue collar everyone here on Lake Street wore. His parents had a hundred and sixty acres or so, and he was set to take over once his dad got too old to work. After all her town had given her, it would have been impossible not to feel some sense of stubborn loyalty. It had been her first and only home, and she did love it; she owed it her commitment. It had given her seventeen long years, and she owed it something.
But in the meantime, she was working hard, because that was what you had to do if you wanted to get out of here, and maybe one day she would.“Look,” he said. His arm was warm on her shoulder, his eyes were heavy. “If you’re mad at me– well, I.”
It wasn’t exactly a retraction; it wasn’t even a complete thought. It just was, and it hung suspended in the air like the premature moon in the sky above them.
It’s been two years, he’d said. Your mom loves me. But I just can’t win with you. I just can’t win with you. And then, so softly: am I? Am I ever going to win?
“Do you think your dad will get anything from that bet?” she asked him, placidly.
He looked slightly surprised, but all he said was, “who’s to say?”
There were some things she couldn’t take back, and some contracts that couldn’t be unsigned– once she was in, she knew she’d never leave. But how effortlessly she could live here. Marry young. Start a family. Stay at home with the kids, take over the farm, go to the methodist church on Sundays.
Where else would she go? She’d give herself away to another town, and she’d either never look back or realize suddenly what an enormous mistake she’d made. She loved it here, but she had never had the chance to love anywhere else. This town was the only happiness that she could guarantee. But was that what the town really wanted? A promise made out of obligation? A promise just because she was afraid?
The first time she’d gotten drunk was here on her front porch, soaked in cold moonlight on New Year’s Eve with him right there next to her. As he’d finished off the bottle of champagne, she had looked out at the corn fields, which came together to form a black monolith in the dark shadows from the moon. The first time he’d said the only-thrice-repeated-phrase had come that evening, and she’d responded by kissing him on the cheek and laughing.
“Baby,” he said, and moved his hand from her shoulder to her waist.
The kids were playing with their youngest sister, who had fallen deeply asleep, picking up her arms and dropping them so that they fell limply onto the road. Harvesting season was rolling through– Amanda could already see the green husks of the corn-cobs and the dried brown silks peeking out of the fields from here in her driveway. The kids hated the harvest; it meant they were going back to school. Amanda had, in her maturity, become numb to the whole cyclical nature of it all, and had long since been excited for the summer or disappointed at the arrival of fall.
Last Halloween she’d dressed the kids up for trick-or-treating while her mom was out helping the neighbors, and he’d snuck her into the closet while the girls finished putting their makeup on in the bathroom. He’d kissed her so completely and fully that she couldn’t breathe, and she thought about their town, and how small it was, and how beautiful it was, and how empty the crop fields were this time of night. When she’d finally pushed him out, insisting that the two of them needed to get the kids fixed up before seven o’clock, her little sister had asked her what the purple spot on her neck was. “I don’t know,” she’d said, not without irritation, and looked at him, “what is it?” To which, after a blush and a bit of stammering, he’d finally replied, “it’s Halloween, Jess, we’re dressing as vampires. And that’s how vampires say…” He’d looked back at her. And that was the second time he said the thrice-repeated phrase.
“I have a…” –he skipped the latter part of the word ‘a-nother’ at the last second– “…present for you in the car,” he said. “Do you want me to get it?”
“Do I have to come with you?”
He flushed a hot red. “No. It’s not like that one. And, Amanda, you know, don’t you?– you know that I only meant–”
“Later, ok?” she said. It wasn’t much of a question.
He nodded.
The earliest hours of the morning, the latest hours in the night, the longest days and the shortest, all her life could be charted like a star. There was so much to lose, and she desired so much to lose it.
Maybe, she thought, I should take the kids inside.
As he left to go get her present from the car, she felt her legs fold under her like those of a pond-duck and she sat on the driveway, keeping an eye on the kids. By the time he was back, his face looked more rigid, more sunken, than it had even before.
It was a keychain from Hollywood. He’d been over spring break. LOS ANGELES, it read. CITY OF ANGELS. She pocketed it, and didn’t say anything when he sat down on the pavement next to her. There was a pause in which neither one of them could speak, because of their overbearing need to. She looked again at the cornfields, backlit by the moon, a mass of black in the dark that made it impossible to discern one stalk from another.
“Amanda, I love you,” he said for the third time in her life, “you know that, don’t you?”
“You’re my best friend, too,” she told him.
He opened his mouth once, twice, three times, but couldn’t speak; his fingers fidgeted nervously.
“I mean–,” he said.
“I know what you mean,” she said.
And so they sat in the porch light and watched the sun set over the East Street Dairy Queen, and they didn’t say another word to each other.