The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Still he felt the excitation, like bees or butterflies, at the thought of seeing Tracy. It wasn’t love. He was almost sure. But it was something like it. Not even the sight of a trucker in a ball cap coming out of the back could deter him. He had noticed the eighteen-wheeler in the parking lot. It was hard not to.

  She was shorter than he remembered, but prettier.

  “That girl out front,” he said. “I don’t think she likes me.”

  “She’s a bitch,” Tracy said. “She doesn’t like anybody.”

  This time McHenry let himself watch her, at least at first. Tracy was brisk, professional, exact in her movements, the way she cupped her hand to take the oil from the bottle, for instance. She held it there to warm before she let it rain onto his back. Beneath the cloth skirt—was it a sarong?—she wore lime-green striped underpants, like a kid would wear. She was clothed and he was naked. She was at work, in charge, she knew where she was and what she was doing. While McHenry was way out past the safe shallows. This made no sense to him, the fact that he was here.

  And then it didn’t need to make sense, he was just all body again, all goo and drool. At least at first. He went down again into and then back up with the nearness of her, the body. When she rolled him over this time, she didn’t bother with the towel. In fact she touched him there, a little, just lightly, then went on with the massage. When she went from his face to his feet, she touched him again, as if she were befriending it; and when she had worked her way up his thighs, when it was time for the happy ending, she moved so easily and automatically from one thing to the other that it was not like they were two things at all but just one movement.

  She left. He lay empty and adrift, on his back on the bed. They must change the sheets, he thought, between each one of us.

  What if this was not wrong? He turned the thought around on the drive home in the dark, a white crust of ice at the edge of the headlights. He knew he’d never do a thing like Tracy if he had to explain it to anybody. If Marnie were alive, if Carolyn were around. He wasn’t a cheater. But just in himself, he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. He wasn’t stealing tenderness from anybody or spending someone else’s money. On the other hand, he knew he wouldn’t want to get caught doing this. So that was something. But he couldn’t figure out who was being hurt. Tracy herself seemed cheerful enough.

  Then came this other thought, which McHenry didn’t want in his head but which wouldn’t leave. That thought was this: What if this was something beautiful that he had shut himself off from his whole life? What if they were wrong, the watchers? Maybe there was really nothing bad with this. Had he been mistaken his whole life? Until now, near the end. Something sad here. Even with Marnie there was something furtive, always in the dark. That one time they went to Mexico, just the two of them. It was a glimpse of something. But they could never quite bring it home. Fucking, he thought. He had been using the word his whole life as a curse. What if it instead turned out to be a blessing?

  Not a thought he wanted to have. But McHenry could not put it away.

  He wound up in a Christian Singles group, run by the church where they used to spend Christmas and Easter. He could not be trusted by himself. This was McHenry’s conclusion. He needed minding.

  The Christian Singles mixed in the lobby of the Graves Hotel on the first Friday evening of each month. Although this month was May, it was still cold out; men and women both arrived in Carhartt brown. The Graves had a coffee shop off one side of the lobby and a bar off the other so you could go one way or the other. McHenry opted for drink. It was looking like a long night.

  “Look at you,” said Tom LaFrance. “Come to meet us on a Friday night. I was wondering if you might join the group.”

  “Just putting a toe in,” said McHenry.

  “Nice bunch. Good to get some new blood in, though, I’ll tell you.” He leaned closer to McHenry, inside the bloom of his whiskey breath. “The same old faces. After a while you’ve made the rounds.”

  “It’s a small town,” said McHenry.

  “In the middle of nowhere,” said LaFrance. “Oh, well.”

  They left the bar and joined the group: about a dozen altogether, with only four men. Some of them were people McHenry had known (and in LaFrance’s case, disliked) since high school. The women especially had made an effort, red lipstick and pretty skirts and city shoes, but in every one of their faces were the marks of weather, of a life lived outdoors in a place where the wind hurried and the snow flew. The men were dressed Western in boots and sport coats. They looked at home in these clothes, while some of the women looked like an impersonation, a costume. These were widows, most of them, and had the short hair and hard practical faces of Montana wives, their girlishness erased by weather and work. They didn’t look at home in their pretty dresses.

  All but Lydia Tennant. She was ten years younger than the rest of them and dressed for a ski resort in sporty, bright colors. She had married into the Maclays, an old ranching family, and had somehow stuck it out after her husband, Tom, was killed in an avalanche, three or four years ago. She had two kids, both boys, McHenry thought. He had never considered her as a possibility. But here she was, presenting herself as a single, smiling, making small talk, looking tan and pretty in the lobby of the Graves Hotel. This was interesting, at least.

  But before he could make his way to her, he was sidelined by Adele Baker, one of Marnie’s good friends, an English teacher at the high school. She was plump, energetic, dry.

  “Are we moving forward or giving up?” she asked him.

  “I’ve no idea,” McHenry said. He was wary of her; she thought before she said things, and you were likely to get yourself in trouble if you just said the first thing that came into your head. He asked, “What do you think?”

  “I gave up several years ago,” she said. “I’m just here to get out of the house.”

  “Oh, me too. Getting the shack nasties.”

  He looked over to see where Lydia was in the room—the far side, by the bar door, with Tom LaFrance standing at her elbow—and Adele caught the glance and laughed.

  “No fair,” she said.

  “What’s not?”

  “You and she are the only two new faces since last summer. I believe that almost everybody else has dated almost everybody else. And by dated I don’t mean dated. Don’t be shocked.”

  “I thought these were the Christian Singles.”

  “We’re all Christian and we’re all single, but we’re not always both at the same time.”

  “You’ve been saving that one up.”

  “Maybe,” Adele said. “It’s a long winter. Come buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all our secrets.”

  That Saturday they went birdwatching, or birding, as it was now called. Adele wanted to go to Freezeout and McHenry hadn’t been there in decades so they went, three hours each way and iffy weather but they went. They left at seven in the morning, which was early for Adele on a weekend, she said so. McHenry had been up for two hours.

  It wasn’t a date, they agreed on that. They didn’t have another name.

  Adele drove her Honda, which only made sense—McHenry still had the Expedition from his drilling days, which smelled of dirt and petroleum and got eleven miles to the gallon. But he hadn’t been a passenger in a while and it was strange, filling her go-cup from the thermos and watching the weather. It really had been quite a while. Marnie never drove when they went places together unless she was driving him to the hospital, which had happened a couple of times. But just sitting back and relaxing and watching the snow fall on the far hills—this was like something out of his childhood, a distant memory, watching the telephone wires loop by in their rhythm of rise and fall.

  “You miss her,” Adele said. “Hell, I miss her and I wasn’t married to her.”

  “It’s been a while,” McHenry said.

  “Feel any better?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, sure, better than that first few months. It took a while to see th
e point of keeping things going. It helped having the girl around but she wasn’t around that much except summers. It was kind of happening to both of us at the same time, you know? I do miss that.”

  “But she’s doing well.”

  “I know she is. I’m not talking about her, I’m talking about me.” McHenry laughed. “Carolyn’s perfectly all right. I’m the one that’s messed up.”

  “You’re all right,” Adele said.

  “Maybe,” said McHenry. In fact he didn’t know. It felt like he was telling a story and it was a true story but it wasn’t who he was. Wasn’t where he lived. He looked at Adele, who drove with great concentration, slightly hunched forward over the wheel, and knew her for part of that story—he had known her, never well, for thirty years at least—and yet the known, the familiar, seemed strange to him, and only the thought of Tracy seemed his own. This felt mysterious. He felt like he didn’t know himself.

  The snowstorm drifted down off the hills and onto the road and Adele flipped the wipers on and leaned even farther forward. She seemed like a comic character from this new distance. McHenry felt, small, upholstered, flowery. Though this was underestimating her. She was a serious person, intelligent, and she had been very good to Marnie in her last year. It just seemed impossible to think of her in bed. That sadness, again, that waste of years that should have been joyful.

  “You were married,” McHenry said.

  “I still am,” she said, blinking into the storm.

  “How does that work?”

  “His family was Catholic,” she said. “He developed mental problems after we were together. I mean, I guess he had them all along. But they pretty much took over after a while and he lost control of his life.”

  “I’m sorry,” McHenry said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Really?” A quick glance over, to see that he wasn’t lying. “I thought everybody knew. A town the size of Harlow. I talked about it with Marnie, I remember.”

  The sadness again, at the secrecy and fear that had kept them from bright life. It was too late for Marnie. McHenry thought it was too late for him too, and maybe for Adele too. This had meant something. Marnie had known but never told him.

  “Where is he now? Your husband, I mean.”

  “He’s in Seattle,” she said. “Kaiser, a long-term-care place. They tried to make him better but they wrecked his mind from trying, all the different drugs and treatments. He had a very beautiful mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” McHenry said again.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said. “I’m sure I could find a lawyer to straighten it out, if there was ever any need. It’s just never come up.”

  She shrugged. It wasn’t a hint. Nothing was going to happen between the two of them. The deep elemental strangeness of another life, even one as familiar as Adele’s, and McHenry naked and alive inside. It was just such a strange world.

  They got to Freezeout a little after ten—a couple of cars and pickups—blue skies and a cold breeze but shoots of raw green in the grass. Spring was coming after all. They bundled up and carried folding chairs and binoculars and in Adele’s case a bird book and a life list. McHenry had an old, heavy pair of Leupolds that had been kicking around in the glove compartment of the Expedition for years but Adele had an immaculate medium-sized Leica pair. She was going to add a few to her list today. Only then did McHenry realize how boring this day would be. He could look at birds for about ten minutes.

  They walked over the last rise. There was the lake and on the lake were geese and swans beyond counting, tens of thousands of them, teeming. As they watched, some invisible impulse ran through the flock at the far edge and they rose in one movement and circled through the air, blocking out half the sky in white movement, black wing tips. Okay, McHenry thought. This was worth it. All this beautiful life, this excess, generosity.

  “Don’t say it,” Adele said.

  “Don’t say what?”

  “The joke,” she said. “Whatever it is. About how they mate for life.”

  “I’m not really a joke-type person,” McHenry said. Which was true.

  And then the next morning, back at the Bangkok Sunshine. Sunday morning! And his truck parked right out front for all the world to see.

  A different and much friendlier girl up front. But heart-stopping beautiful. McHenry could barely talk to her, she was so perfect, so nice and lovely and young. Sunday morning, he thought: celebrate a life so full of amazing things as this. Just lately it felt like the world was full of gifts.

  But Tracy wasn’t there; he should have known as much. Would he like one of the other girls? A test of some kind, McHenry thought. Not what he was supposed to want, or what somebody else would like him to want—he wasn’t trying to please anybody but himself. So what did he want himself? Nobody was watching.

  “Why not?” he said. And went into room number two and stripped and folded his clothes neatly on the shelf provided for that and lay facedown and naked and asked the question again: why not? There must be a reason why not. He still couldn’t sort any of this out. What would Adele have thought? But he knew as he asked the question that she would have disliked him for it. It was just a rule. But who made the rule?

  A girl came into the room barefoot, in the same outfit as the others, but this one had an unhappy look to her, even an angry look, as if she had just been woken up, which maybe she had. She said her name was Flower and he said his name was Bill. She was, if anything, stronger and more expert than Tracy had been; he found himself spiraling down into that same pure moment of feeling, of being in his body and not thinking and not even being present in the room. He didn’t even think of himself, of his nakedness. He was in the moment of her touch and nowhere else. Until she turned him over, covered him with the towel. Then he began to wonder again, whether the rules were the same, whether he had to do something that he didn’t know how to do.

  The feet. The face. The legs.

  And then the whisper: “Happy ending?”

  “Sure.”

  “Twenty extra.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  And then he was standing, blinking in the warm sunlight, alone in an acre of gravel parking lot. While he was inside, spring had come. It was actually warm. McHenry took his jacket off and threw it in the back seat of the Expedition. The smell of old petroleum grease filled the cab, released by the new heat. He didn’t want that, not just yet. He lay back on the hood of his truck and closed his eyes and felt the sunlight pouring down on his skin, another gift in a world of gifts. Somebody might come by, Lydia Tennant or LaFrance or any of the Christian Singles. Somebody might see him. It didn’t matter. His life was about to change.

  DIANE COOK

  Moving On

  FROM Tin House

  THEY LET ME tend to my husband’s burial and settle his affairs. Which means I can stay in my house, pretend he is away on business while I stand in the closet and smell his clothes. I can cook dinner for two and throw the rest away, or overeat, depending on my mood. Or make a time capsule full of pictures I won’t be allowed to keep. I could bury it in the yard for a new family to discover.

  But once that work is done, the Placement Team orders me to pack two bags of essentials, good for any climate. They take the keys to our house, our car. A crew will come in, price it all; a sale will be advertised; all the neighbors will come. I won’t be there for any of this, but I’ve seen it happen to others. The money will go into my dowry, and then someday, hopefully, another man will marry me.

  I have a good shot at getting chosen, since I’m a good decorator and we have some pretty nice stuff to sell off and so my dowry will likely be enticing. And the car is pretty new, and in the last year I was the only one who could drive it and I kept it clean. It’s a nice car with leather seats and lots of extras. It was my husband’s promotion gift to himself, though he drove it for only a few months before illness swept him into his bed. It’s also a big family car, which will appeal to the neighbors, who all have big families
. We hadn’t started our own yet. We were fretting over money, being practical. I’m lucky we didn’t. Burdened women are more difficult to place, I’m told. They separate mothers from children. I’ve heard it can be very hard on everyone. The children are like phantom limbs that ache on a mother’s body. I wouldn’t know, but I’m good at imagining.

  They drive me away from our house, and I see all the leaves that fell while I was too busy burying my husband and worrying what will become of me. The leaves, glossy and red, pile in airy circles around the tree trunks like Christmas-tree skirts. I see the rake propped against the rainspout. The least I could have done is rake the yard one last time. I had told my husband I would.

  I am taken to a women’s shelter on a road that leads out to the interstate. They don’t let us go beyond the compound’s fence, because the land is ragged and wild. The night skies are overwhelmed with stars, and animals howl far off. Sometimes hiding men ambush the women scurrying from the bus to the gate, and the guards, women themselves, don’t always intervene. Sometimes they even help. As with all things, there is a black market for left-behind women, most often widowed, though, rarely, irreconcilable differences can land one in a shelter. A men’s shelter is across the road. It is smaller, and mainly for widowers who are poor or who cannot look after themselves. My father ended up in one of these shelters in Florida. A wealthy woman who had put her career first chose him. Older now, she wanted a mate. They sent him to her, somewhere in Texas. I lost track of him. The nearest children’s shelter is in a different county.

  My room has a sealed window that faces the road and when I turn off my light I can see men like black stars in their bright rooms. I watch them move in their small spaces. I wonder what my new husband will be like.

  There are so many handouts and packets. We have been given schedules and rules and also suggestions for improving our lives and looks. It’s like a spa facility on lockdown. We are encouraged to take cooking classes, sewing classes, knitting classes, gardening classes, conceiving classes, child-rearing classes, body-bounce-back-from-pregnancy classes, feminine-assertiveness classes, jogging classes, nutrition classes, home economics. There are bedroom-technique potlucks and mandatory “Moving On” seminars.