by Taylor Grace Flowers (2023)

Whether any rain who’s to say. The sky’s all clear and blue now late afternoon though when I went to bed this morning everything was white, couldn’t see a cloud, maybe everything was cloud, clouded, and all the fields looked so flat and wet, this great vast line against the sky. In New York today they say no rain. I don’t check the weather here just as I never checked when I did live in New York because you know you see for yourself and all. They’ve still just got dial-up here in the house so it takes a little while to check, to do anything, and I can’t use the computer for personal business at work. So maybe I do miss New York, feels boring to say so. But otherwise why would I bother. I don’t know that I ever even really liked anything about it, just there for school is all. Maybe more I like knowing what New York would feel like were I still there. I have to drive near everywhere here anyway so why bother to check the weather anyway, you know, or all the more reason.

Before I’m out of bed like a lot of people I think I’ll just lie and listen to the sounds of the house. Annie’s talking with her dad, I hear, and there are cooking noises. Annie’s mom’s making me breakfast, I always know that because Annie doesn’t cook anything and her dad doesn’t cook anything anyhow, and anyway my breakfast is everyone else’s dinner but the baby’s. The baby’s named Ruby after Annie’s grandmother and I like the name not that I had any say and I like the name though she doesn’t look like a Ruby yet, to me. I haven’t said so to Annie. Ruby’s about two months now, born on the first day of spring. Annie said our daughter’s a Pisces and I should learn more about that so I can be a good father.

It’s very hard to picture Ruby’s face or anyone’s, as I lie here. I used to be much better. I used to be the kind of guy who’d see his old undergrad friend from a block away and way out of the neighborhood way and run up to him and say hey how’s it going man and easy. Now not even my own little daughter, my own fiancée. Much less any of the regulars at Harold’s, and they get real offended about it. Everything feels the same, every day’s felt the same, and but I could never tell anyone a word about this because I know the feeling’s cruel and I know I ought to remember, ought to be better. Out here it’s strange. So spread out and still I’m almost always surrounded by people. So middle of nowhere and still. The only time I’m really to myself’s the third shift at the Holiday Inn, overnight. Hardly anyone’s around from twelve to six or so; I read the astrology book Annie gave me and I do the crossword from every newspaper we’ve got, and I read some more, other books, and then by seven the guests start to show for breakfast and they’re asking for extra towels and mini soaps, or to check out, and I put my things away. The Holiday Inn’s considered this town’s nicer hotel. Harold’s is not so nice for a bar here, at least as it’s considered or from what I can tell, but I like it okay, and you could do worse for a second job. I’m over to Harold’s by five and I get off at eleven. Most bars here aren’t open past ten but the 110 on Broadway, which closes at midnight, and which I walk over to almost every night between jobs, for a beer and a sandwich, lunch. It’s just across the street from Harold’s.

I do like that I can walk some. It’s fifteen minutes’ drive from Annie’s house to Harold’s Bar, and I keep the car parked there in the lot all night, they don’t mind, though they’ve said maybe this won’t work in the winter and they have to plow, and but anyway then I’ll go on over to the 110, and a couple blocks further’s the hotel. It gets beyond dark here at night but also I don’t mind. Can stand in the middle of the street in the middle of the night and not get hit by any vehicle and take in all the stars. In New York nowhere ever gets properly dark, you know like completely, whether inside or out there’s everywhere light.

Annie’s opened the curtains. How I’m seeing the sky I’m seeing. I don’t know when she comes in to do it but I like that she does, to help me wake up, and she doesn’t even sleep in this room herself. She sleeps in her childhood bedroom with the baby. She keeps this guest room clean and organized for me, it’s a very simple room, and she washes my clothes, the sheets, everything’s done while I’m away. I work six days of the week and those days I’m only awake and around for maybe an hour or two tops, depending. I don’t always sleep very well. Sometimes I’ll jerk off real quiet if I can’t sleep. Annie’s my fiancée now but we haven’t been intimate since leaving the city, not once, came close but did not happen. I think it’s almost six months now, no, more, I’m losing track of time bad, it’s been six months and change I guess, so I do remember the last time, just before Christmas. I know she’s still recovering from birth and she had a very tough time those last months pregnant especially so I don’t fault her for anything and I won’t mention it, I would never, but I can’t say I don’t miss it. I’m sure in time. She’ll come to me.

Annie’s knocking on the door. She wants to make sure I’m up to eat something, get ready, go to work. She never opens the door when she knows I’m awake, after my alarm, but I would like it if she did. I fantasize about her knocking softly as ever, coming in and closing the door behind her, coming over to the bed and touching me. I don’t even need words or a lot of affection so much I think as I know I need to be touched. Out here it’s strange. I can get to feeling very lonely. And you know at the same time I don’t know that I have any right to.

We weren’t even dating. She was one of a few undergraduates at our end-of-the-year law school party and I was never clear just on how she got invited to that and she wouldn’t say and but then I kept running into her over the summer. She stayed in the city to work as I did. We slept together a few times and at the end of July she told me. Never any question of keeping it. After the fall semester, halfway through my 2L year and halfway through her junior, very intense for the both of us, we both decided to put school on pause. I hope to go back and she knows it and she’s vague as to whether she will or even wants to. She likes her parents, likes being here. And still her dad won’t teach me anything about the family farm, say, not that I’ve asked so many times, because in his words he doesn’t want anyone stuck here. He’s not like I thought he’d be. He’s not on board with giving up and going home forever. Again his words. He knew Annie long before all this and he knows what she wanted, what she can do, what she’s capable of. I hope to see that in her too. I hope to see it in myself again. I don’t know when.

When I try to picture Annie’s face, or the baby’s, all I can see is a grown body or a tiny body whose scene’s not fixed but shifting, and all the feelings around are so mutable, like love belongs here but also love is not a promise. Today as every day I know nothing about the future. Today as every day I know Ruby and Annie and her two kindly parents are waiting for me to join them for this day, rain or shine. See I’m to go.