There’s nights in the deep end of summer so hot and thick and wet you can feel the dark wrinkling up your fingers like bathwater—and my last night breathing was one of those.
2 a.m. came to ring my bell and found me perfectly awake, swinging back and forth on a hanging sweetheart bench with a faded pink and yellow tulip pattern on the cushion. Every time the bench rocked, the chains groaned on their hooks, the pads of my bare feet made kissing sounds on the floorboards of our big wraparound farmhouse porch, and I hung onto the shotgun across my lap just a little tighter. Waiting on a disturbance, just like like I’d done a hundred times before, when bears had been at the plum trees again or raccoons had run a heist on the henhouse.
Charlie and me bought everything you can see from where I sat that night hardly five years out of high school. All the way from that craggy ridge of blue slate holding up the road down to the wall of matted-up honeysuckle and bald cypress wrapped up in misty silver bunting. Not that we were the kind of splendid people, doing splendid things splendidly, who had any business buying much more than scratch-offs at twenty-three, but my cousin was an idiot and needed to unload assets before the nice folks at the tax office noticed he’d ever had any. So we took on three nasty, knotweed-infested acres of goosegrass, sowthistle, bullfrogs, and a mighty empire of deer ticks. Back then, there wasn’t a thing on the parcel but a numbered county road, something the state promised was a river despite it never running any thicker or deeper than a rusty faucet, and half a barn busted to near nothing by time and rot.
Now there’s us. A whole life. House on a hill. Carrots and roses in the garden. Shoes by the door.
I still think about the wood on that old ruin. Desperately clinging to the shape of a barn. Still half-remembering having once been red. We couldn’t believe the state of that poor carcass. Charlie put his fingers right through a ten-inch beam—soft as cheese. There’s a plank of it, not so badly off as the rest, nailed above our door. So that we remember, too. That once upon a time, between the two of us, we could rescue something good from something lost.
I insisted on this porch the minute we started hammering a home out of the still-sturdy backend of that barn. Charlie thought it was a waste of our budget. But sometimes I understand things a fair bit better than him. See, a porch makes another space. Always thought that, even as a little girl. A porch is another world. Not inside, not outside, not the woods, not the lawn, not the house. Not a dining room or living room or a bedroom, not a kitchen or a study or a playroom, but you could go ahead and use it for any of those or all of them if you wanted to.
And when night hits, it slips and teeters and, for a few hours, your own porch becomes the only place in the whole world. You question things at night on a porch you’d never poke at anywhere else. Do things you’d never at noon. Tell secrets you shouldn’t let out the front door. Imagine possibilities you should never let inside the house. Hell, add a bottle of booze to a porch and you could dance all the way up to the bleeding edge of telling the truth about your own silly, sad life.
I’d brought one of those, too. Generic store brand Brown Stuff. And a couple of paper Dixie cups I’d pulled off the stack in the medicine cabinet. Lavender. With tiny white sailboats dotted all over them.
But the truth was, it wasn’t a bear I was waiting on that night. Nor a raccoon. I was waiting on a girl. In fact, I had a pretty good idea that bears and raccoons and just about anything else with teeth would clear right out if she so much as thought about crossing the tree line.
Oh, but there’s no fooling an empty porch at 2 a.m. She wasn’t a girl, either, not really. At least not through and through. But you could use her for one. For awhile. If you wanted to. If she wanted you to.
A great big smug moon eyeballed me from on high. And honestly, good for her. That old bald girl’s been around. She’s seen the sights; knows every score. The moon had every right to judge me. Probably always knew I’d end up somewhere within spitting distance of a goddamned mess and never expected too much more of me.
I was never one of the moon’s girls, anyway. Some of us are born to dream in the moonlight and some of us are born to work in the sun and that’s just how it is in this valley of the shadow of life. I mostly never had any argument with the straw I pulled. It was a reasonable enough straw. Reasonably pretty, reasonably strong, reasonably good at reasonable things. The heavenlies did see fit to grace me with one powerful talent, though, and the older I get the more I think maybe it’s just about the only one worth a damn: being happy with what I’ve got.
My Charlie pulled plenty of his own gifts from the cosmic grab-bag, but not that one. Not by a long mile. Usefully handsome—squared-off here, sweet-soft there, but only just enough that most people liked him right away without quite knowing why; not so much that he took to preening. Never met an animal that wouldn’t follow him home in half a second. And Charlie could fix, build, or grow just about anything on this earth. You’d think all that’d be enough to slow-dance from one end of life to the other smooth as a smile, wouldn’t you? But the second that man got anything in his hands, he’d start turning it this way and that, frowning at it, poking at the joints, finding a million invisible faults, looking for a way to get shucked of it without anyone thinking poorly of him. Jobs, friends, cars, plans, hobbies, successes. The paint he chose himself hadn’t half-dried on this house before it was too small, too hot, too close to the road, too backwoods and settled-down for a man so young and promising. It was like Charlie despised anything that gave him what he asked for.
All except me.
Now, I know that sounds perfectly stupid if you’ve ever met even one single solitary man in your life, but it really was true. One fall day a hundred thousand years ago, I saw Charlie cutting on a frog in class, so clean and sure and smart and so unlike every other boy with more dirt round the back of their necks than brains in their head, and I knew that man was the rest of my life. And even though that man was so allergic to opportunity he once quit a job the same day they promoted him, the ring on his finger never bothered him one bit. Or at least, if it did, he never gave me any reason to think so, and that’s just about as good, I think. We pulled each other along, in fits and starts, through the dog days of our youth just fine. I managed the bakery section down at the big chain grocery store in town; Charlie bounced around (and around and around) until one day he turned up home with a bottle of wine from the middle shelves instead of the bottom, his electrician’s license, and a bear hug.
I suppose I’m the moon’s own fool, thinking we’d go on like that till our curtain closed and the lights came up. Thinking it just wasn’t possible for anything to slice into us the way he carved up that frog in the cidery afternoon light of my best memory. Thinking babies would just come along like letters in the mail. Thinking what you’ve put in the ground at twenty-five will feed you through till ninety.
A sound clawed at the back of my head. Stripped all the light and warmth of my thoughts straight down to the studs. I shut my eyes against tears that couldn’t do anyone one scrap of good, but they came welling up unwelcome anyway.
All the crickets stopped stitching the wind for half a second—even through three locked doors, that scream was just too much for any creature to stand. It’s all right, though, little bugs. I tied him down good and tight back there. Charlie’s not going anywhere. Not tonight.
Christ, how I’d learned to hate that sound over those last weeks. The sound of my husband screaming in his sleep, so loud and long and sad it could spook the dark right out of its shoes. It was her name my husband was screaming. Not mine. In our house. In our bed. Out of the depths of the life we built nail by nail and kiss by kiss. Over and over and over and over again until it turned into a howl that pricked up the wolves in the hills and got them going, too.
He said that stupid name so much I never had to once. That name lay between us like a nasty sick panting dog, shoving its horrible wet stink against our skin. Even the very first time I caught him slipping out the front door at an hour reserved only for cheaters, runaways, and witches. I asked if he was going out to see her. And Charlie knew better than to ask who I meant. The front door. The gall of it. Too excited to even bother being sneaky.
There’s a word for what she is. But I don’t like it and I don’t like to use it. It makes me feel stupid, and small, and all kinds of wrong up and down my spine. My mother always said other women are the only salvation that’ll find you this side of hereafter, so you don’t go around cutting your sisters down to make yourself feel half an inch taller. And I won’t.
But there’s a word for what she is.
We saw her for the first time three weeks ago. Doesn’t seem possible it’s only been three weeks, but I guess that’s part of it. Part of her. What she does. What she needs. How long it takes. One late afternoon just under the close-of-business wire, somebody got in line behind us at the bank looking like the very thing men fought wars over the whole world through. Flaming auburn hair kissing the place where the small of her back met her hips. Eyes of emerald green—and when I say emerald, what I mean isn’t real emeralds, whose green in the jewelers’ glass cabinets always seems a bit pale and sad and swampwatery. I mean the color you think of in your head when the word emerald unfurls up there.
We both thought right away that she didn’t belong there—just not for the same reason. Charlie’s brain said to his blood that somebody that damned pretty had no business whatsoever running her own errands. She should be reclining on some silver couch stacked up with velvet pillows, palm fronds, and three bowls each of ice cream and emeralds.
My brain said to my gut there wasn’t any place on this sad green all-alive earth where a woman like that belonged. She didn’t look like a country girl, unless that country had nine damn rings. But she wasn’t really a city girl either, despite her fine clothes and fine way of talking and standing and laughing and being. Not unless that city was Uruk. Or Troy. Or Jericho.
Seeing her there in the cool, quiet, clean, open-plan bank floor was like seeing a sword in a salon. And not a shiny fancy letter-opener with fancy nonsense all over it, either. Something ancient and heavy and enormous, just enormous, too much for any one person to hold onto. Not even iron; bronze. Stone. Crusted with dirt and blood and time, with bites in the blade where it went up against hard bone and won. Just sitting there jammed into a clean white table between aromatherapy oils and volumizing shampoo and the racks of nail polish color options. All those pretty, civilized fruits of a pretty, civilized world—and then that. And then her. A dream a caveman once had, standing there in the middle of the thin, papery, air-conditioned quiet of a modern financial institution.
I should’ve grabbed Charlie and bolted right then. Banks are open Saturdays, too. But you can’t say baby, honey, that lady there is nothing but a knife in a silk dress, can’t you see it? Can’t you see she’s meant for cutting things open? Not out loud, you can’t. So neither of us repeated any of that to the other.
That was the first thing she did to Charlie and me. Without even talking or moving or blinking. She made a secret where there never had been one before.
Not one man in the place bothered controlling themselves one bit. They just kept on gawking at her. Her red hair hanging all tumbling free and glowing; her eyes so big and green you just felt all-over sure you’d die if she didn’t look at you, and her seeing you, really seeing you, was suddenly the only oxygen you could live on. I suppose she made two secrets that day, because I never did breathe a word on it to Charlie, then or later, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t a bit different from all those men at the bank. I gawked, too. I wanted to breathe, too. I wanted her to look at me. To choose me for looking at. I felt my world, my guts, my sense of me-ness go all wriggly like gas fumes and I gulped that wriggle down just as eager. But she didn’t look at me. Only at the men. Only at their looking. Those boys, shuffling in the line to get a better look at her figure, like nobody ever thought of curves before her.
Hell, maybe nobody had.
She paid those boys no attention at all. She watched my Charlie. Charlie watched her. Her heels clicked forward on the fake marble floor, stepping carefully around the squares of sunshine streaming in through the windows, keeping her feet in the shadows. She lifted one hand and absent-mindedly rubbed two fingertips along her lower lip. Her red lipstick smeared a little; somehow that made her even prettier. All of us standing together in a row like a hall of mirrors and her the only real person at the carnival.
And I disappeared.
I felt it happen. Felt myself go invisible. Felt myself become ice-cold nothing. Like a foot falling asleep, only you can’t shake it out, and it’s your every single cell that’s gone all over numb-thick pins and needles, because your whole world just forgot about you. Forgot it needed you, forgot it ever had, right up until it tried to keep on doing like it’d always done and fell clean over.
Charlie started sneaking out that actual night. Couldn’t waste a moment. Slicked his hair back all dashing, put on a shirt with buttons, barely touched his dinner, even shined his own shoes, right in front of me, at eight in the goddamned evening like it didn’t even matter whether I knew. There isn’t any way of describing how dull and sour and heavy the minutes crawl while you watch your sweetheart grow a whole new smile and know to your toes it’s not for you.
But he did come home. Every morning. For awhile. Charlie dragged his guilty self through the dawn, not clean or sure or smart, looking like a half-dead horse broken in by a tornado with a grudge.
Now, I may have been a married woman since about thirty seconds after I could vote, but I’m aware of what a man looks like after a night of doing what he pleases. Charlie didn’t look like that. Oh, his situation had all the traditional bells and whistles: untucked shirt, rumpled trousers I’d be expected to iron, a thick shine of half-dried sweat all over, red marks on his collar, wrapped up in somebody else’s perfume like a winter scarf.
But Charlie wasn’t right. Not from the minute she touched her lips for him. It was all so obvious, almost deliberately obvious, opulently obvious. Like she was talking to me through what she left of my husband. Talking real loud so I couldn’t hear anything but what she wanted me to. Underneath the giant flashing signs that plainly and garishly read I Am Having An Affair, See What An Affair I Am Having, everything else on that man looked like a room with all the lights burnt out.
Every night he went out he came back worse. Eyes sunken so far back in his head he couldn’t see where he was going. Skin looking like he’d never heard of sunlight. Fingernails all ripped and busted with thick slashes of black dirt under each one. Slurring words, even though Charlie never drank; stumbling into the cabinets and walls, even though he never took a pill stronger than aspirin and had to be wrestled into that much. So frantically hungry and thirsty. By the third night I caught him eating whole steaks straight from the freezer, stacked up like pancakes, just gnawing chunks of raw frozen cow, washing it down with cold fatty beef broth straight from the can, all the time moaning like it was Michelin-starred filet mignon and French Bordeaux.
There’s a word for what she is. Oh, isn’t there just.
All that lasted about the first week. Seven days of red kisses on his best shirts and raw red meat and oh, goodness, that dull red color you see behind your eyes when you’re fighting over the dishes or the bills or where he’s been all night, this creature you lashed yourself to like Ulysses on his silly old rowboat, hoping that plank of sullen, aggravating wood will be enough to keep you from drowning after something better and finer than you’ve a right to know about.
Funny how all that feels like the good old days now. At least then he still bothered to fight his longings. Still felt like he had to justify himself. Still glimpsed something me-shaped when he looked my way. If he squinted. And the screaming hadn’t started yet. When it did, that scream was red, too. The next week was worse. And the one after? Intolerable to the civilized mind, inasmuch as mine is one of those.
Charlie stopped coming home. The first night I tried to wait up for him in the big front room recliner, pretending to read, pretending I didn’t know. I woke up way past when he’d usually leave for work, but I knew Charlie hadn’t come through that door all night. Didn’t touch his things or the dinner plate I left for him in the oven or dry his hands on the bathroom towels or sleep in our unmade bed.
I think what I hated most wasn’t him off clutching on another woman. There’s things in this world you can avoid and things in this world you just have to swallow whole. I said I could be happy with what I had even if it wasn’t much, and you don’t marry a man who’d get bored of his own ten fingers if they weren’t attached without a good grip on which prides you’ll swallow and which you won’t. No, I hated that he turned me into a waiting-up wife, perched at the door like a fat ugly vulture so I could catch an idiot in the act of being an idiot. As if I didn’t have anything better to do! As if I was in a play about my own life with no good lines left. Men stray more than they don’t, but I never gave that man permission to turn me into somebody else. Somebody I didn’t like one bit. But I couldn’t find any door back to who I was before.
Well, Charlie didn’t come home the next three or four nights, either. When he finally deigned to come stomping up the porch steps, the clock called it one in the Lord’s own afternoon on a working man’s Thursday. He looked like a shadow sliced off his old self and left out in the rain. And in no soft words whatsoever, Charlie laid out how everything in the universe, from Eve and the apple right on down to the interest rate on his work truck, the quiet emptiness of guest rooms that were supposed to be sons’ rooms, and his own splendid self neither being in Congress nor ever getting to sleep with more than two girls who weren’t me, was all very thoroughly and entirely my fault. Oh, suddenly he had plenty of energy to tell me all about it.
Right up to the second he keeled over into the china cabinet.
Smashed the glass doors and busted almost every silly little porcelain figurine and egg cup in there into atoms and dust. Charlie staggered and plopped down on the floor, bleeding from one eyebrow and the other cheekbone. I mopped all that up while he kept on mumbling about a whole barrel of other glories he missed out on because I existed. That man’s forehead was putting out fumes he burned so hot. His eyeballs were practically sweating; his skin throbbed pink and thick and delirious. But by the time I got him into bed, Charlie was trembling nose to toes with chills. He fought me trying to get him under the covers, but he didn’t have the strength God gave a peppermint candy anymore. Still whapped my right eye a good one on the way to giving in.
I had to grab his shirt and haul hard to wrangle him onto the pillow. I’m only a little thing in the end, and Charlie was built like a medieval ox. I didn’t even notice I’d gotten scratched up fairly well on the china cabinet mess. Not too bad, little cuts all over, a wisp of blood on the pad of my thumb, my forearm, my chin. Like when you first start shaving your legs and it looks like you just finished walking bare-assed through the jungles of Cambodia.
Well, Charlie snatched that bloody hand so quick I didn’t have time to gasp, stuck it right against his lips, and licked the wound raw like a poor stupid nursing kitten. Staring me right in the eye the whole time.
Now, I may be a nobody behind the bakery counter with not much more to her than a high school diploma, a piping bag, and a wedding ring, but I’ve read books. Plenty of books. An honestly substantial number of books, by any librarian’s count. And I’ve seen my share of movies, too. There’s only so much you can see right the hell in front of you before your brain can’t steer around the truth no matter how much it would prefer to. Minds are like that, which is why we suffer so in this vale of invasive knotweed. Brains will put patterns together, even when you tell it so, so sternly to mind its business; stick to buttercream rosettes, fondant dinosaurs, and making the best of what you’ve got on hand.
There’s a word for what Charlie was, too. At least, for what he was becoming.
So I stopped trying to convince my brain not to know what it knew. And I tied my lawful-wedded husband to our bed with a couple of leather belts, cooking twine, and the snow chains from the back of his criminally high-interest truck. Wrists, waist, ankles. Knees and elbows later.
I’m only a little thing, in the end.
I had no real way of knowing which book was right about any of this wreck of a situation, so I did everything I could think of. Kept cold cloths and hot water bottles coming on a regular rotation. Fed him chicken soup every couple of hours even though he mostly threw it up and what he threw up wasn’t chicken soup anymore. I took the phone off the hook. Called him in sick to work. Hung up some withered old garlic outside the bedroom door and every necklace I ever owned with a cross on it inside. Never once in my life have I felt so all-around goofy about a whole series of things I was absolutely not going to stop doing—but then he’d hurk up half a cup of broth which had been plain store-brand beef flavor when it went in, and on the way out landed all over my chest thick as sharkskin, sharp as a fistful of wasps, the sour black of coffee in hell’s worst gas station. Wringing that bitter, slicing slop out into the bathroom sink, I didn’t feel goofy. There were things in the slop. Hard, tiny, pricking things. Like baby wolf teeth. Thousands in every puking splatter.
“Charles William, that is enough of this absolute foolishness,” I told him a hundred times and cleaned it all up. Wiped it off my cheeks, my stomach, my neck, even though his muck cut me up good in the wiping down.
Over and over again.
And all night, every night, while he struggled and spat and the snow chains groaned and the medieval ox I’d loved all my life said things to me I simply will not repeat now or never, Charlie called her name.
Her name. Never mine.
After awhile, I stopped thinking it was a dumb name. It was beautiful. It was the shape of my memory of her in the afternoon light, her hair the color of blood and love and sin and fury. The color of wanting.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.
Then she was there. In the middle of all my thinking about her and Charlie and whether anything I’d done to keep him in that back room was strictly legal in any way. She just occurred. Like a radio turning on. Or a match getting lit. One minute nothing. The next, everything. Just a mess of fireflies feeding on a hot pile of dark—then: her. Walking across the summer grass in a long pale green dress, cinched in round her waist with a wide old beat-up belt, feet as bare as Eden.
She walked like a man. I do remember that. Not like she was making a big point about it either. It wasn’t a showy thing. She just walked across my property like it could be hers any old time. Without apologizing to the space she moved through. Without curling her shoulders in out of sheer embarrassment that she’d gone out and bothered the air. Frankly, it made me uncomfortable. My head wanted to tell my heart it was tied up in fits because that woman walked along like yet another thing that belonged to me had always been hers. But my heart wouldn’t have it. My heart knew it was mad as marbles because I could’ve been walking through the world just like that this whole time, only I never thought to.
I feel very entirely certain Charlie’s girl meant to just walk on by me, with that mannerless stride, right on by and into my house to claim her prize. She never took her eyes off her goal, never sped up or slowed down. Just made for that door like she meant to bite it in half. But she didn’t; she marched right up to the screen and stopped, still not noticing I or my shotgun existed. That green dress was unbuttoned up the thigh and down the cleavage like she’d come dressed up as the cover to her own romance novel. She ran her slim fingers around the edges of the frame, the hinges, the handle. Then she put her face right up to the space between the screen door and the front door, the little crack of nothing between them, and I swear she sniffed it. Like a hunting dog.
Charlie moaned inside the house. Moaned her name. Moaned for her.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.
He moaned for her and she throbbed for him. Like the two of them were the only two there’d ever been in the history of primates. Pink jumped up in her cheeks and dammit, I didn’t have to see the back bedroom to know his cheeks were blushing, too. She lay her head against the screen and petted it pitifully. Pawed at it. Those gorgeous, long, perfect fingers, not even manicured and still glossy and lovely as an advertisement. The little bumpy metal mesh strummed awful music under her hand.
I don’t know, something about all that claptrap just stripped the mad clean off me. All I felt down to the underside of my toes was annoyed, and tired as hell, and pretty thoroughly disgusted, plus not half drunk enough for this windswept bullshit. Affairs are just so thickly goddamned fascinating to the people having one that they forget how plain and common and crass as a barnyard rut they look to everybody else.
And whatever else it was, it was still an affair.
“Well,” said I, finally managing to insist on my own existence in my own house with my own husband and my own shotgun in my own lap, “What are you waiting for, girlie? Thought you came to take my man.”
Jolene turned that pretty chin toward me like I was the rude one. I don’t believe I knew a plain old nothing-doing chin could be pretty till just then. She stared down at me, or stared me down, I couldn’t tell yet. Her pupils went soft and wide, hard and sharp, like she couldn’t quite focus on me. I was too much light, or too little. Oh, but the green of her eyes hurt me so. Little pricks of betrayal all up and down my arms, like safety-pins popping open. Or a spray of broken glass. I couldn’t hardly think while it was busy happening, but a long time after, I figured out what it was. My whole life, the universe hid an entire color from me, but this girl from the bank got to have it all to herself.
She hadn’t even brought a purse.
But she was looking at me, at last, finally, her attention was all on me. Her attention was happening to me, like all those men wanted it to happen to them in the bank. Like I wanted, too.
“Aw,” I smirked, and I did smirk, because for just these couple of minutes, I knew more than her by quite a stretch. “You can’t, can you? Poor baby.”
“I’ve…never been here before,” she whispered, and that whisper was full of uncertainty and pain and strange, unlovely shame. She didn’t sound like a monster at all. But they never do, do they?
“Well, stop humping my screen door and sit down.” I patted the tulip-slathered cushion next to me. Jolene blinked slowly, like I’d just pointed at a math problem with way too many things that weren’t numbers in it. I slapped the cushion harder, like calling a dog. “Hey, lady. That’s my husband in there, for whatever that word is worth. And this”—I rattled my fingernails on the barrel of the shotgun—“is what my grandmother used to keep coyotes out of her garden. So kindly park your vehicle, Miss Coyote.”
“I…I would rather talk inside,” she said softly, with even bigger, more luminous, greener eyes. Her voice came falling like summer rain, warm and wet and soft and nourishing. “Let’s go inside. Bring me inside. We can have…tea.”
“I don’t want any goddamn tea, lady,” I snapped. “It’s almost three in the morning. Threes in the mornings are for bourbon, which is what I have and what you’ll have and, while we have it, you will sit your sneaky butt down next to me on this swing and figure out what we’re going to do about you and me and Charlie like civilized modern people.”
“I’m cold,” she pouted, even though I had sweat pouring down my spine and everywhere else. But she sat down. I glugged out the bourbon into two flimsy lavender paper cups with tiny white sailboats printed all over. She didn’t drink it, but she took it. I did drink it, and another right after.
“It’s not poisoned,” I said quickly, realizing she’d have every reason to think it most definitely was. Probably should’ve been. I pounded back all of mine in one gulp, then reached over and pulled her tiny white sailboats out of her hands. She didn’t resist; I sipped a teensy bit, then put it back down in the nest of her fingers.
My husband’s obsession nodded—but still didn’t lift her hands up out of her lap. Her eyes moved the littlest bit. Toward the wax-paper edge of my cup, where my silvery plain chapstick lip-print glimmered faintly in the porch-light.
I realized I couldn’t smell her. Any kind of smell. No sweat or shampoo or toothpaste or fumes from dinner. No fabric softener, no perfume, not even the clean plasticky slick of unscented store brand lotion. Might as well have been sitting next to a washed rock. One of those henges. Or the big black rectangle that scared the fur off the monkeys in that old space movie. I began to wonder why I thought a shotgun was enough. I began to wonder why I hadn’t just booked Charlie and me a vacation to the sunniest place I could think of.
Well, then I just didn’t have one single idea what to say now that I had her where Charlie wanted her. My mind just clocked off. I’d practiced so many things to say. So many ways to say them. Not much else to do when your husband and the cat refuse to stop hunchback-screeching at each other for hours on end. But now I just couldn’t think how to get from a woman scorned all the way over to saying that word out loud, that word for what she is, a word somehow too vast and too tawdry to get your breath under. I felt like a silly little girl trying to get justice for a stolen toy from a museum statue.
And she was so warm. The air around her danced and vibrated. The closeness of her, the unbearable tension in her long neck, her big shoulders and her hard-cut jaw; it all shook me up like an old Etch-a-Sketch and sandblasted away all the many highly correct and morally airtight points I meant to make. I poured another wallop. The real trouble was, she was so tall and so quiet and I wasn’t completely sure she was breathing. Her chest didn’t move up and down like it ought to’ve. That sort of observation will clear every single clever barb you’ve ever dreamed up right out of your skull to make enough room for all the fear.
“Why can’t you just leave us alone?” She said at last. She said. All plaintive and vulnerable and earnest. All my blood rushed up into my head. I sharpened up real quick. It all came out of me so loud the fireflies ran off terrified.
“Why can’t I leave you alone? Are you out of your screaming mind? You leave us alone! That’s my Charlie! Go back to wherever the devil bred you! Who asked you to come barging into our business and breaking things? We were doing just fine! That’s what I’ve been waiting out here to tell you. I knew you’d come. You’d have to come.”
Jolene’s long red hair slipped down over her shoulder as she turned her face to me in such a peculiar slow way I really did expect to hear a terrible long creak, like an ancient door opening into a cellar.
“Who’s Charlie?” she asked, with genuine confusion. Only now that voice wasn’t so soft and warm. Now it gave me the same shivers as a pencil eraser worn all the way down to the metal band, sawing and scraping its way across a sentence.
“Who’s Charlie?” I practically screeched in her stupid gorgeous face. “My husband? The man back there tossing and turning and sweating through our spare sheets, hollering for you like a baby?”
Jolene blinked. She ran her fingernails around the lip of the cup where my lips had been. “Oh.” That’s all she had to say to me. Oh.
“Sweetheart, as far as I can tell, you’ve been all over him like red on a rainbow, so you can drop whatever act you’ve decided to try with me. You know his name. He sure as shit knows yours.”
And like the good husband he so very sometimes was, Charlie chose that moment to back me up. He bellowed for her out of the belly of the house.
Jolene’s head snapped toward the sound. Her lips parted slightly. Color climbed up her cheeks. Charlie was there. He should’ve been busy burning our house to the ground to get to her by now. But he wasn’t. I watched her do the math in her head, slowly realizing she was stuck with me.
“I never asked his name. We don’t…talk much,” she said finally, still staring back over her shoulder in confusion through the big dark living room window.
“I bet you don’t.”
Out with it, I told myself. There’s no good way to say it so just say it. “I know what you are. I know.” I slugged down another shot. “You can come out now. Olly olly oxen free.”
That got her attention. It had to, didn’t it?
Within half a second, Jolene turned into a whole different person. She turned away from the window, all the way toward me, kicking up her bare feet onto the swinging bench, tucking them under herself crisscross like a kid, suddenly awake and keen and bristled all over. Liquor sloshed over her hands; she didn’t care. Charlie sobbed again from the shadows; she didn’t seem to hear him at all anymore. Her gaze stuck hard into me, all the way down as deep as anyone goes.
“You have no idea what I am,” she said, but she said it so sweetly, so kindly, so apologetically, I almost thought I had the whole thing wrong from the start. Maybe Charlie really did just run off with the lady from the bank and the rest was just what a porch at 3 a.m. does to you.
“Drink up, then,” I told her flat.
My god but it feels good to be right—or at least to not be wrong. She didn’t, and she wouldn’t, and she never could. She just smiled at me. A sly little smile. Fine, you got me. But I got him.
“All right, if this is what you want. Do you know why?”
“Why what?”
“You think you know what you think you know. Do you know why I can’t drink that?”
“Lady, that is the last single thing in the great grand story of humanity I care about tonight. I suppose it’d make you puke up the same hell’s dumpster juice Charlie does when I try to get soup in him these days. Allergic, I suppose. What difference does it make?”
Jolene picked up the waxy lavender cup and held it up against the porch-light. “Well, you haven’t shot me yet. So I figure that means you’re the kind of person who likes to understand things. And everything about me is a lot easier to understand if you don’t get tangled up too tight in what you’ve heard about…well. Ladies of the night. It helps if you focus on why anybody would dream up all that crazy stuff to begin with. The truth rumors started out as. I’m not allergic. Neither is…Charlie.” She swirled the bourbon’s shadows around the cup. “Bourbon used to be corn. And rye, and barley, and wheat. Then it sits around in barrels that used to be oak trees. All those plants, growing and swelling and pushing out new leaves in the sunshine, for months and months, absorbing it, concentrating it, making more of themselves out of the light. I expect a lot of what you think you know’s about as accurate as what you think you know about Santa Claus, but some of it’s real enough.” Jolene tossed her drink out onto the grass. “There’s so much sun in that little shot. Far more than just standing outside on a nice summer day. And we’re strictly night-shift, me and mine.” She reached over and ran one long, pale fingertip down the line of my jaw. “But you? Oh, I could eat right you up, pretty girl. You’re thick and strong enough to filter out the light for me. And you’d thank me for every drop I took. Charlie did.”
I winced. How could I not? I’m sure she bit him, but I’m sure she kissed him, too. I’m sure he loved it. I’m sure it felt like nothing else mattered but holding her and feeling her and being with her for always.
There’s some things in this world you just have to swallow whole. I tightened my free hand on the shotgun.
“I know.” I did know. I was scared. But once you have to tie your husband to a bedpost while he curses God and screams for your blood, scared doesn’t have much to say for itself.
“Do you think I can’t? Do you think I won’t?”
“Honey, I’ve known folks to do worse to escape conversations. I’m sure you could toss me back like a cheap beer. That’s why I’m asking so nicely. Begging, really. Because I’m not proud. Never have been. I’m only human, and I cannot compete with you, Jolene. I understand you’re strong and I’m weak. I understand whatever you’re doing with Charlie is old and delicious and ugly. I understand how easily you could take my man. But he’s not out here for the taking. He’s in there. And that rule looks plenty real to me tonight.”
She shrugged half-heartedly, just that little bit embarrassed that makes you want to like a person. “You’ve no idea how annoying it is, honestly. You know I can’t open somebody’s chest of drawers without an invitation, either? Or even a refrigerator? Each enclosed space is its own enclosed space. All the way down to safety seals and boxes of soap. Going to the shops is a nightmare.” She laughed. The crickets went quiet. “Gosh, it’s nice to talk to someone like this! I never get to be myself, you know, just myself without all the…” She waved her arm grandly in the night air. “The drama of it all. The severity. Humans got to wind down and relax over the centuries, stop taking everything so seriously, but when you do run face-first into the old ways, my god, you expect it to put on a show. And anyway, they usually want to get straight to business—” She stopped short in her excited gurgling. “I’m sorry. Insensitive of me.”
I glared back. “If you have your way with me, there’ll be no one left whose name’s on the deed to invite you in, so you won’t get him either way. You have to talk to me. You have to see me. I won’t disappear for you.”
Her lip quivered. I tried very hard not to stare at the way her hair curled down over the buttons on her dress. “That is going to be a problem. I need him,” she whispered, barely louder than the breeze. “I am sorry. It wasn’t personal. It’s only nature. Wolves hunt.”
“And people shoot wolves from fucking helicopters, lady.” I leaned toward her over the barrel of the gun lying between us like a property line. “I’m actually a very nice person. I really am. It doesn’t have to be like this. Just go. I’m begging you. I won’t tell, I won’t follow you, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. Maybe this world is better for having a few secret things in it, who am I to say? Just walk away. Please don’t take him. That’s my man in there and this is my life out here. It’s only a little thing, I know. It doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things. Charlie and this house and maybe or maybe not a baby and decorating birthday cakes behind the glass counter and picking out lavender Dixie cups at the store. You’re not human. You could never understand how much all that means to me. You don’t need him. You could have any man who’s ever walked the surface of this world, and two of them on holidays. But he’s the only one for me.”
Charlie’s face flashed into my mind: young, relaxed, and calm and curious, cutting on that frog on that cold white table before he even knew I existed. And there she was, right in front of me, all in green and red, that old dead frog come back to cut on him.
“Please. Charlie’s all I’ve got, so you go find someone else. He’s the only one for me. Always has been.”
Her immaculate face went all over winces and wrinkles of concern. “God, really?”
“What do you know about it? About us? Nothing, that’s what. You don’t love him. You don’t even know his name. You just want your supper.”
Jolene shook her head. “It’s not like that.”
“Well, what’s it like then?”
Jolene looked me over uncertainly. She clicked her tongue behind her perfect, even teeth. I supposed they came out when wanted. Her eyes got all big and glisteny and her voice trembled ever so slightly and I knew it was a bunch of tricks to make me like her and trust her and not shoot her twice in the face, but I liked her and trusted her and didn’t shoot her just the same.
“Like I said,” she began slowly, “it helps to think about why people come up with all the mad storybook stuff to begin with. It’s pretty easy not to believe it, so there must have been something true they made up the rest to explain. Like Greek myths explaining the seasons. So the invitation thing…it doesn’t work because a mortgage is a magic spell. It works because you want it to work. Your kind…wants ownership to mean something profound, to have…an observable effect on objective reality. You want that quite a bit. You really cling to the concept. So…enough people pretend it does, and it does. If I’m allergic to anything, I suppose I’m allergic to ownership.” I listened to her voice change. The words she picked. The tone she took. I listened to her forget that I was food.
“Doesn’t apply to husbands, I guess.”
“Nobody owns a husband, darling. But all of it goes the same way. The fairy tale says I’m dead, that I sleep in a grave, that I rise to torment the living. It’s all very overwrought. But I’m not dead, darling. I’m just another way of being alive. Like a crocodile is. Like those jellyfish that live forever. Like the knotweed all over the place that just keeps growing and growing no matter how you try to cut it down or burn it out. I sleep with blackout curtains, but I sleep in a bed. I go to the bank on Fridays, as close to closing as possible. I go to the movies. I have an electric bill which is far too high. And I have a life cycle. A life cycle that only accidentally torments the living. My body isn’t like your body. I can…hibernate. For a long time. If current events get too hostile. Or the glaciers are on the move. Crocodiles do that, you know. Bury themselves far down and away. Sleep away the drought. And when the crocs and me wake up, we’re very weak. Like a newborn, almost.”
“So you just woke up. And you’re sick. Hungover, I guess. And Charlie was making you stronger.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said.
Then I leaned back as far as I could on that sweetheart seat and shot her in the chest.
The sound broke like a bomb. Jolene didn’t cry out. I might have, but she just sat there with her hands flopped limp in her lap. The moon came out from behind a smear of cloud. All three of us, me, Jolene, and the moon, stared with numb, frozen curiosity at the map of black and red slowly blooming through her spring-green dress.
“He never mentioned you, you know,” Jolene said, as though nothing had happened, as though this was simply the next logical topic. She poked at her chest gingerly. The blast had shattered one of her big round buttons. A shard of it jutted out from under her collarbone. “Not even once. This man you’re fighting for.” Jolene plucked the shard of wooden button out of her skin with two delicate fingers. She held it up to the moonlight. “They usually do. But not him. Never said he had to get back home to wifey. Never said he shouldn’t kiss me but he just couldn’t help himself. Never hesitated one little second. Easiest I ever had. I didn’t even have to try. He couldn’t wait.”
“You hypnotized him. With your ancient gaze or something.”
Jolene laughed gently, such an old, tired laugh out of a young mouth. “Oh, honey.”
The moonlight washed over her wounds like water. Little silver invisible bubbles just scrubbing the ruin away. I watched it happen right in front of me and I still don’t believe it.
“You said you were weak,” I accused. “You said you were like a baby. Liar.”
Her voice was so calm, so peaceful and unconcerned. It pissed me right off. But now she was my friend somehow, and forgiveness takes up more space in a friendship than you ever think it’s going to. “Oh, I got bored with lying centuries ago. Lies are so nice. So kind. So pretty. Lies are how you get a society out of a mud village and half a stick’s worth of fire. If you just tell the goddamned truth all the time, no one wants to be around you, not for anything. It’s very peaceful. I am weak. I am new.”
“But you’re not even winded! Your chest is doing things! It’s awful.” But I couldn’t stop watching her body become her body again.
“The moon’s a mirror,” Jolene murmured. “Reflections of the sun’s light, after it’s passed through a million miles of blackness.” She shrugged as her bones crocheted themselves back together. “Everything works backwards in a mirror.”
Jolene stretched like a barn cat. Something popped free of the carnage. She winced, clenched her teeth, and dug into a quickly vanishing gouge of flesh with one finger, prying a small and shiny lump out of her shattered sternum.
It was the worst thing I ever saw. My grandmother’s silver earring sticking out of my husband’s lover like a meat thermometer. I don’t know why I was so calm. I don’t know why I wasn’t sick all over.
“What in the hell did you shoot me with?” Jolene laughed ruefully, and I felt it happen and still don’t believe it. I shot her, she laughed, and we were some kind of friendly I don’t think I’ve ever heard a word to fit. Maybe we were even. She hurt me and I hurt her. Maybe I was suddenly a lot more interesting.
Maybe blood was just something she understood.
“Well, I didn’t know, did I?” I blurted. “I just kinda chucked everything I could find in a book into the chambers. Rock salt, people food, wood, some crumpled up Bible bits, garlic—garlic powder, anyway—silver. That’s my grammy’s earring you’ve got there. And, well, see, I didn’t want to leave Charlie alone to go swipe some holy water from St. Christopher’s and I had to officiate my baby cousin’s wedding last year? I’m technically some kind of clergy according to the U.S. Mail so it’s all soaked in holy-ish water but I guess the ish won out…”
“I don’t think so. I definitely felt it. The sacred puts a little serrated edge on the pain. Don’t feel bad. You did a good job.” She patted my knee.
“It didn’t work,” I grumbled.
“Of course not.”
“Because of the moon?”
“Moonlight helps. But the rest of it, your salt and your grammy’s silver and, what, three-year old garlic powder? All that would hurt plenty even if the big girl up there were full. But you’re still not listening. Think about the truth the stories had to come from. It works because you want it to work. When you want it to work.”
“I did want it to work!” And I did, I had, or else why was I bothering with here and now and the porch-world and the night and sharing stupid sailboat Dixie cups with a crocodile?
Jolene rolled her perfect green eyes.
“Did you now?” she smirked. “Science is science, darling. Listen. I didn’t hypnotize Charlie with any kind of gaze, ancient or otherwise. I can’t really do that, excepting as much as any pretty girl can.” Jolene casually picked scabs away from the smooth rises and falls of her breasts as they finished closing over in the soft silver light. “To understand, you have to ask yourself why people think we could? Because they want it to be a magic trick. They need it to be. My goodness, it’d better be magic! Otherwise, Johnny ran off with that girl after twenty years of marriage because he was just a shallow, selfish shit, and we can’t have that. That would mean all those nice people in their nice village full of nice manners raised a shallow selfish shit with a rotted pit of a heart. And they’ve less than zero intention of considering the idea that they might be shallow selfish shits themselves, so obviously that boy’s bewitched and it’s nobody’s fault but that poor girl no one ever liked to begin with because she was born prettier than she’d any right to. And guess who’s stuck with Johnny and his bullshit now? Magic is so much easier than love burning out or growing cold or never having been there to begin with. So much less painful that having to sit there with the truth: that all it took for the love of your life to forget you was a giggle and half a smile.” Jolene had a funny look on her face. Like an echo of the wound over her heart. “Pretty is chaos walking, just waiting to blow into a settled life like a spring wind and take it all apart. Anybody in that village could’ve ended up Johnny, because everybody’s Johnny when they want more than they got. And everyone wants more than they’ve got.” She sniffed and yanked her hair up into a knot at the back of her neck. Her fingers were shaking. Cool as a tile floor when I shot her, but just talking about a boy in a long-ago village whose name damn sure wasn’t Johnny had her trembling. I wanted to put my hands over hers and stop the shakes. But I didn’t know how to make myself do that.
“I don’t,” I whispered. “I’m happy with what I’ve got. I’ve always been. Whatever I got. I could always make something good out of it. Something good enough. Like a box of fabric scraps and yarn ends. If you care, you can put it all together any which way, and all the ways will keep you warm.”
Jolene stared at me for an endless minute, and if I had all the words Roget ever heard I couldn’t explain how the expression on her face moved in the dark. How it developed, like a picture.
“Liar,” she said finally, barely loud enough to carry. “Or if not, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard. Didn’t you ever want one thing for yourself that wasn’t dug out of the bottom of a scrap box? Didn’t you ever want to make yourself something new?”
I thought about it, because you have to take everything seriously on a dark porch at 3 a.m. I didn’t lie. Hardly ever. I knew myself and she didn’t know anything. I was happy. I was fine. Whatever was or would be.
But it wouldn’t stick. I wasn’t happy alone in frog class, I wanted Charlie. I wasn’t happy at the checkout counter, I went and learned how to make buttercream into flowers and icing sugar into leaves. I wasn’t happy with Charlie making a mess of his own ambitions like always, I pushed and pushed, like pushing our fingers through that old wet wood.
My face shivered over, hot and mad and red. I moved my lips around the word maybe, but I couldn’t put any breath under it.
“Jolene?”
Charlie’s voice broke through the quiet between us, perfectly normal, perfectly calm, even a little afraid. Definitely confused. Both of us looked toward the back room. After a long, long pause, he tried again.
“Honey?”
“It goes away,” whispered Jolene. “Eventually. If I don’t finish up. If I get distracted. Like anything you don’t look after.” She ran her fingers over her chest, smooth and pale as ice. Blood soaked down the front of her dress darker than a funeral. She leaned in to me and her face was the size of the whole world. “Keep him. You villagers would rather bend your minds in braids and invent a dictionary of magic rules than see Johnny for what he is. So go on, go back to your marriage and try not to see the truth. Find a nice lie to hold you at night. Like invitations and moonlight and silver, it works if you want it to work.” Jolene laced her fingers through mine. “But you gotta know something first.”
“What the hell is going on?” Charlie yelled on the other side of the door.
Jolene held my cheeks in her hands. She was so close to me, so dizzyingly close. “You think you know how I got this way, but you don’t. It’s not like the movies. It’s more like that thing you always say about trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. Well, maybe they don’t make a sound. Maybe they don’t even fall.” Jolene shivered. Her voice cast a shadow in my soul like the underside of a church pew. “If you were to die alone. For example. Abandoned, because that’s how stories with a Johnny in them always end. Completely alone. Without anyone seeing. Without anyone knowing. Without anyone finding you. For weeks, maybe. For months. If no one cared, or wondered where you’d gone, or called out your name in the woods hoping desperately for an answer. If no one noticed, because you blinking out of the world made so little change in it you might as well never have lived. Not always. Not to everyone. But sometimes, in the autumn. In the moonlight. When the frost comes. Far from the village. You can die and just…keep going, because there wasn’t ever very much difference between you being alive and you being dead in the first place. How many pretty girls are worth throwing after one Johnny? The village has an answer. It’s always been the same answer, and it’s always been all of us. Forever.”
She didn’t talk right. Or she did, and I never once had. She talked like a book about talking. I hated it. I loved it. I wanted to duct tape her mouth shut and I wanted her to never stop. I could hear the lonely wind of her life blowing over a thousand bottles of tears. I could hear the click of her heels across the marble floor of the bank.
“That could never happen to someone as pretty as you,” I said quietly, eyes closed, pressed against her under the porch-light. “When a girl looks like you, everyone notices her.” The moon’s girls. The girls made for dreaming that I could never be.
Jolene kissed my nose so tenderly. Such a silly, loving gesture, like we’d already known each other for centuries. “Baby, have you seen yourself? He should have been telling you so every hour on the hour. But if that’s the scrap box you’ve settled on, keep him. It’ll work if you want it to work. And I’ll probably see you in fifty years, because a Charlie’s no better or finer thing than a Johnny. Or come with me now and figure out another way of being alive. Free and fierce and new. Allergic to ownership. Washed clean by the moon.”
I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t breathe. Hungry and free. With her. Or not, even. Just out. Just loosed. Just other than this.
“Sweetheart,” Jolene whispered in my ear, her breath sinking down into my body, “he’s not calling my name back there. He never has once. He’s calling for the life he thought he was owed before you turned up. He’s calling for a life without you. He just doesn’t know how to pronounce it right.”
The stars got busy winking out one by one. I watched dew steam away over the grass. It’d all be gone in a few hours, mist boiled away by the morning sun like nothing. Like fifteen years with a man you thought you could put your back against.
I got up and unlocked the door. The porch swing rocked without me for a minute. It’d settle down soon enough. I walked back through my house, the house we built, the years we built, the floors we knew. The corner where we always put our Christmas tree. The rug I made out of boat-rope. The wine glasses his aunt gave us for our wedding in a dustpan full of shards.
Charlie had fallen asleep again. His mind just ran away from the belts and snow chains and guilt and shame and blood and hunger, back into dreams and nothingness. I couldn’t blame him for that. For those steady breaths, up and down, untroubled, as though nothing could ever be wrong if he could just sleep this one off thoroughly enough.
I unbuckled the belts and the snow chains and put them all neatly in the corner. I made him a couple of eggs and some bacon. Left it on the bedstand. Coffee. His keys. Fed cat. Clean socks.
When I stepped back out onto the porch, she was gone. Just shimmering, smirking silver footsteps leading across the grass, leading down, leading past, leading out. Toward the property line, the end of the county road, through the unkillable knotweed growing and growing and growing, far and forever, the tangled bramble and the river, away from the dawn.
Author’s Note: With the greatest love and respect for the works of Dolly Parton.
(Editors’ Note: Catherynne M. Valente interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2025 Catherynne M. Valente
