“You are a mess,” she said aloud to the grubby walls and mildewy shower curtain. She turned her back to the mirror, didn’t want to know what she looked like right now. Something awful and twisted inside her had drawn her to him, of all people. She was twenty. Last year at this time, she’d been in college—Mankato State—learning about the nineteenth-century English novel. When her financial aid had fallen through, her dad said, “Well, you weren’t exactly college material, anyway.” Becky sprang from a long line of failures. Her parents lost their farm when she was eight, and her father had been driving semis ever since. Her mom worked in a high school cafeteria. Originally Becky had wanted to study to be a teacher. “You, a teacher?” her dad roared. “Yeah, right. The kids would take one look at you, crumple you up in a ball, and toss you out the window.”
Hank had been the one to comfort her. “What do you need college for? Why do you want to pay all that money for four years of B.S.? I never learned anything that really counted in school. You don’t have to take that shit from your father, either. I never took shit from anyone.” Hank had made her feel so reckless and wild. They used to go out on country roads late at night. He let her drive that old Mustang as fast as she wanted, egging her on until her foot ground the gas pedal into the floor and the wind roared through the open windows, whipping through her hair and bringing tears to her eyes. He said it was the closest she would ever come to flying.
When she started getting serious with Hank, his divorce had just come through. Although he was only five years older than she was, he already had two kids and a pissed-off ex-wife. But he told Becky that she was the real love of his life, the one he had been saving everything up for. Then his ex called Becky’s mom and told her what a slut her daughter was. Becky’s father said, “That’s enough. Either break up with that loser or move out.”
So she left with Hank for Minneapolis. On her better days, she told herself that they would work everything out. He could be so tender when he begged her not to leave. Sometimes he even wept. “I can’t help it if I go crazy each time I think of you with another guy.” The trigger for their last fight had been Becky getting a ride home from work with Ty, who was black and made her laugh. Hank looked out the front window and saw them laughing together in his car. When she came inside the house, he exploded. “I saw the way you were looking at him! You know, if there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s betrayal.” What would he do if she really tried to leave? She thought of the guy with the busted jaw.
Becky held her breath, wondering how long it would take for her face to turn blue. Eventually she would pass out from lack of air. At moments like this, she understood why people did drugs. She wanted to go numb, not feel anything. In the silence of not breathing, she heard her neighbor play his flute. That music drove Hank crazy, made him bitch and turn up the TV full blast. For Hank’s sake, she had always acted like she hated it, too, but now that she was alone with the music, she had to admit she kind of liked it. It was pretty in a strange, sad way.
Going to the bedroom, she changed from her shorts and T-shirt into a black sweatsuit, dressing with the lights out and the dusk filtering through the window screen. She loved this time, which was neither day nor night but twilight, when everything seemed beautiful, even the condemned house across the street. She loved trying to blend into the twilight, imagining herself invisible and untouchable. Stepping out the back door and past the gutted wreck of Hank’s old motorbike, she crept to the chain-link fence, metal cooling her cheek as she peered through the Virginia creeper. If Hank caught her doing this, he would twist it into something perverted, accuse her of having some obscene crush on the guy. But she just liked to look into his yard, which wasn’t anything like her mom’s and her aunts’ with the marigolds and plastic deer. His garden was luxuriantly overgrown with all kinds of flowers bursting up between the vegetable beds. At dusk, the place was a mysterious darkened tangle with a few fireflies darting through it.
The neighbor had the porchlight switched on; she could see him as clearly as if he were under a spotlight. Even though he had to be at least fifty years old, he still had long hair. There was something about him, the way he could play for hours as if he were playing for his plants so they’d grow better. It seemed like the kind of thing a person from the ’60s would believe in. Her neighbor was old enough to be her father, and yet he was as different from her father—and from Hank—as a man could be. How different would she have turned out if she’d had a father like him? His music infected her, the way it danced around her, drawing her to his fence.
