If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  “Would she write you a letter?” Mara asks.

  “You’re kidding,” I say dryly. She knows the marriage ended badly.

  Mara’s been bugging anyone she thinks will help us, most recently for letters of character to give my lawyer. The two don’t speak, Mara and my lawyer. They’re similarly obdurate. Mara thinks I should take the case to trial, but the lawyer’s saying my best chance is a plea bargain. I haven’t decided yet. I’ve been out on bail for three weeks, and the clock is ticking.

  “You always think it hurts to try,” Mara says. “That’s your number one problem, I’d say.”

  I’m about to say something mean—You’re my number one problem, Mara, which is far from true—when another phantom glides through the door. It’s Catherine, who, at least when I knew her, was Dani’s best friend. I’ve seen her posts on Dani’s pages, but those, I avoid reading. She was one of the main crusaders against me back when Dani and I were together. Her eyes knock against mine for a second, but they skip right past, and I gather she saw me looking at her but didn’t recognize me herself. Enough time has gone by, I guess, and more worthwhile fights have made her raise her banner.

  Catherine’s swift to cross the room to Dani’s booth. The girls exchange a high-voltage greeting, clasping hands over the table as they take seats opposite one another. Dani throws her head back and laughs. I see nothing of the girl I convinced to marry me. She was a senior in high school when we took up together, and I was old enough to know better.

  We both worked at the CVS in town. We stole cigarettes and smoked by the dumpsters out back after our shifts. We made out in the boring midwestern evenings. She had homework waiting for her, homework she didn’t do. I’d done two years of college, even wrote some poems while I was there that won awards, but I’d dropped out of everything in my life except for cashiering, and then her. I don’t know why, really. Just a thing I did. A mistake, I guess.

  Brian is growing bored; he arches his back and slides down the booth, a whine like a fly’s issuing from his mouth. He hits his head on the table as he tries to slip underneath it, and the whine turns into a sob. He reappears on my side of the table, his eyes trying to press upon me his sudden toddler misery.

  “Come up here.” I lift him awkwardly by his arms. He doesn’t like the way this makes his shirt ride up, and he cries harder. I rub the crown of his head, plant a kiss against the side of his closed eye. “Shh,” I whisper, and he starts to quiet. I’m no great consoler, but I can approximate comfort. Eventually his red-washed face breaks into a rare smile. Mara stands up and takes him from me.

  Despite myself, I look over at Dani’s table. She and Catherine return my gaze. A brief, unsmiling moment passes before I realize they know about the current charges. In a town this size, of course they know.

  “I’ll go talk to her about the letter,” Mara says. She’s moving before I can protest.

  It’s something like a nightmare I’ve had: all the people I managed to turn joyless in one room, talking to each other. Brian is still in her arms—her empathy card.

  The girls stare at Mara and Brian and then trade openly incredulous looks.

  Mara doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. She has no ability to estimate how people will receive her, which makes her bold, but also leaves her open to ridicule, which she absorbs like UV rays. You can’t see it right away, but it must be working its slow annual damage. I suppose I’m the same way, though. It’s part of why we love each other. This thought softens me, and as she walks back across the room toward me I realize what a dick I’ve been. It’s a miracle Mara’s with me. I try not to think that it might be because she thinks I’m her only option, the man who accepted her son, lied to her conservative parents, and helped her so she wouldn’t have to go to his real dad—a bigger loser, if you can imagine—for support.

  I turn away from Dani, but the idea that I would go to her, if beckoned, keeps a steady pace with my love for Mara.

  “She says she’ll think about it.” Mara sets to work eating Brian’s uneaten meal, which makes Brian want it again, and the tears begin anew.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Mara’s own eyes mist. I seize up, just like when Brian cries: I feel particularly handicapped when it comes to soothing their emotions. She’s holding back tears, and soon she clears her throat.

  “Just a little bit of effort goes a long way, Jordan,” she says.

  We finish eating in silence. Outside of the restaurant we get ready to part ways—me to work down the street, Mara and Brian back to my dad’s house, where we live. She rummages my blue CVS polo from her purse, where she bunched it up for me earlier. The afternoon is hot, and the sky looks torn between sun and storm, and we say goodbye beneath it.

  I go to work and try to forget about Dani, though it crosses my mind to wait outside for her and Catherine, talk to her again after all these years. Instead I scan and bag the usual drugstore purchases: aspirin and bandages, gum and cold drinks. A shamefaced teenage boy comes up to my register to return a big box of condoms—the biggest quantity one can buy them in—and since the refund amount exceeds ten dollars, I have to call the manager up for approval. The boy looks ready to flee. I try to give him a look that says I’m not passing judgment.

  I imagine Dani’s left downtown by now, back to her mom’s house in the wealthier part of town, or maybe driving the country roads with the music blaring like she and I used to do. But then, a few hours later as I’m paying for a Snickers bar and bottle of ginger ale to take on my break, I hear the bell chime above the door. There’s Catherine, with Dani a few paces behind. She’s sending quick missives from her phone.

  “Jordan,” Catherine says.

  Dani looks up at me. She blinks and smiles. A year after we split we exchanged perfunctory apology emails, as limp as dissected frogs, and since then it’s only been stiff hellos in passing.

  Their eyes are guarded but curious, like cats. I expect anger, but I don’t receive it, then I feel a sense of opportunity. It’s been a long time; maybe I stand a chance to recover a shred of grace with Dani. Things had just gotten too heavy between us. We lived together in a narrow, moldy railroad apartment: no doors, each room leading into the next. We had no money and no way to escape each other.

  “I didn’t know you were still working here.”

  This is the first thing Dani says to me. I doubt it’s true. From her Facebook I can tell she pretends not to know what’s going on in town, as though she’s risen above it.

  “Yeah. I’m still here,” I say. “I was just about to go on my break.”

  Catherine breaks the silence. “Sell us cigarettes first, and then we’ll join you.”

  I’ve already clocked out but slip behind the counter, ignored by the other cashier, who’s taking a personality test on her iPhone. “Let me use your register,” I say to her, and she moves aside without looking up. Catherine points to the kind she wants, and I scan my employee discount for her. Then I hurry them outside, to the back alley where Dani and I used to go, as though they’ll change their minds if I’m not fast enough. Once we’re outside, the feeling is euphoric. I’ve just slipped back in with them.

  “I guess you only have a few minutes?” Catherine speaks around her cigarette. She snaps her lighter but the alley is a wind tunnel, and a breeze keeps catching the flame.

  “Let me do it,” Dani says. She cups her hand around her friend’s mouth. For some reason they giggle once the cigarette is lit.

  I look at my watch. I have fifteen minutes until I should be clocking in.

  “I’ve got some time,” I say.

  The lie is a foot thrust forward to stop a door from closing. Dani bunches her hair between her hands and looks sideway at Catherine. I used to hate watching Dani defer to Catherine, but now they seem conspiratorial, telepathic. Maybe they were always that way and I just never understood them.

  Catherine presses her lips together. She resembles, in personality and physique, an office supply—useful and precise,
maybe a ruler.

  “Okay,” she says. “We’re meeting a few friends at Old Harper Village if you want to join for a little bit.”

  “Haven’t been there in ages.”

  Old Harper Village is a park in town, with a circle of preserved turn-of-the-century buildings: a one-room schoolhouse, a church, a general store, and a blacksmith’s. A stream runs behind it; it leads you out into the country if you follow it. I remember school field trips when we were made to dress up as Victorian children and, later, getting into trouble after hours. It’s closed Sundays, the buildings locked but unattended.

  Dani starts down the alley. “You coming?” she asks.

  Dani’s simple words beckon me back into her life. Leaving work—just walking away—is everyone’s fantasy at some point, and it turns out it’s easy to do. Maybe it helps that I’m already outside. I’ve already given them half my day, I justify. I’ve already helped them with the after-church crowd.

  I follow the girls as they walk single file through the alley, leaving the cool, darkened tunnel with only a small strip of sky overhead. Dani and Catherine don’t make room for me to walk beside them once we’re on the sidewalk so I walk behind them, feeling the breeze of their quick movements.

  My head is somewhere up in the sky—high enough for me not to think about Mara, not to think about work. The clouds are getting dark, but the sun is still bright behind them, turning their image into an x-ray. A bird flies across the storm-ready sky. When I think of Dani, I always think of conflicting things: how it was wrong to be with her in the first place, but how could I have been so stupid as to let her go? She was the biggest mistake of my life, though I can’t say which mistake I mean: being with her or losing her.

  The confusion sucks me in again, and I look for the easiest answer to it: Here is this girl walking in front of me. She’s invited me back into her life again, even if only for an afternoon. She’s pretty. Things ended badly, but we’d abandoned a ship that still might be out there somewhere, floating. Dani’s texting again, and I imagine it’s me she’s writing about, me who’s making her fingers speed over the keys.

  The village is deserted when we arrive. The displaced buildings stand in a horseshoe before us, quiet and dark. A rocking chair, empty, shifts vaguely in the hot breeze on the wood-plank porch of the general store. The iron hitching post outside of the blacksmith’s hasn’t hitched a horse in nearly a century, but someone keeps giving it a fresh coat of paint.

  The first raindrops begin to fall, and soon they quicken into a stream.

  Catherine hops up the stairs of the schoolhouse. “If you can believe it, they keep a key underneath the flowerpot,” she says, nudging the ceramic pot of petunias aside with her foot. There’s a skeleton key beneath it, which fits into the building’s original lock. Ill advised, it seems, to keep the key—an antique itself—outside, but this town is backward in more ways than one.

  The door swings open with a squeal, and we shuttle inside. Wooden desks with lacy ironwork sides are arranged in neat rows. A half-erased block of cursive script is on the blackboard, a lesson about the Pilgrims. The smell of old wood haunts the place.

  “Ballsy,” I say, “to come inside the buildings. I always just drank behind them.”

  “Since when are you afraid of a little danger?” Dani asks.

  “I think I’m good on danger. I got myself into some trouble not too long ago. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.”

  Dani nods. “I did. My mom told me.”

  It doesn’t surprise me that Dani’s mom is still keeping track of my transgressions. When I proposed to Dani, right in front of everyone at Dani’s high school graduation, her mom’s face looked like a fly on which someone had slammed a dictionary. She did her best to get between us, but Dani was as stubborn then as she seems to be now.

  “I think they’re bullshit, the charges. Anyway, it’s not true, right?”

  I shrug. Clouds cover the sky outside and the last of the sun is siphoned away. There’s no electricity in the schoolhouse and the room grows dark.

  Catherine’s been lingering on the periphery of our conversation, but now she says, “Oh my God, it is true.”

  “I only sold to consenting adults. And mostly weed and pills.” I’m ready to defend myself. I’m so tired of people looking at me like I was selling fentanyl to toddlers.

  “I know that,” Dani says. “Pot’s going to be legal in a few years anyway.” She looks defiant. I remember that look: she gave it to me whenever I underestimated her.

  “Are you really going to jail?” Catherine asks.

  The door swings opens before I can answer, and standing there is a group of kids, or, rather, the type of young adults who still seem like kids. Six or seven of them, all Dani and Catherine’s age. The rain offers them laughing into the schoolhouse. Their shoes leave muddy prints on the old wood floor. I don’t know any of them, though I might have met them years ago, when Dani and I were still together.

  “Listen.” Dani sidles close to me. “I know you’re probably flying the straight and narrow, but if you do have any stuff, we’d pay a premium. To help with your legal fees.”

  I think of what Mara or my father would say. My father is trying hard these days to resist me, but he keeps caving and offering me help. Money for the lawyer, whatever food Mara, Brian, and I want from the fridge. Mara and I don’t pay rent, and my dad and I have an unspoken understanding that she and Brian will keep living at his house if I do go away. My transgressions are mounting, though. I’m getting to be beyond help, even beyond the help of my complicit, loving dad.

  I do have an eighth in my pocket. I was planning to sell it to a coworker at CVS, who’s probably wondering where I am with his weed. My intentions are well meaning if wrongheaded: I want to leave Mara and Brian with as much money as I can. Even with my dad’s help, we’ve been struggling.

  Instead, I take the bag out and hand it to Dani. “On the house,” I say.

  Her fingers graze mine as I hand over the bag, and there’s heat in my heart like a beggar’s fire burning.

  “Awesome,” Dani says, but she sounds almost bored. She turns the bag over in her hands, inspecting it. She hands off the baggie and ignores the conversation it produces. She wanders to the corner where there’s a stool with a dunce cap perched on it. She knocks off the dunce cap and sits, legs crossed, elbow resting on her thigh, chin resting in her hand, nose back in her phone.

  Catherine appears with a backpack from one of the newly arrived guests and tears the zipper open. Inside, it’s impossibly full of beer, with a bottle of whiskey perched on top. It’s like Mary Poppins’s bag: inside is every medicine we need. Watching Dani, trying to analyze her voice and eyes and postures, has made me anxious for an elixir. In other words, ready to get fucked up. I’ve skipped work, am betraying Mara by being here, and I’d rather delay the regret I know I’ll feel.

  Rain streams down the windows. I take a swig of whiskey, then a beer, and sit in one of the too-small desks. Time falls away in big chunks, though a small part of me believes I’ll be going back to work any second. But the more I drink, the less I entertain the idea.

  It stormed on our wedding day. Catherine was there, and my father, because he couldn’t stay away. Dani had sewn a short white dress using the fabric from her graduation robe. It had a satiny sheen to it that glinted with light on the courthouse steps even though there were clouds cemented to the sky. When the tornado sirens wailed we had to go inside and crouch in the hallway with the clerks and everyone else waiting to conduct their business.

  I bet she’s sold the ring I gave her, or tossed it into a lake, but my eyes search her finger anyway. It’s bare. She and Catherine are running their tongues up and down rolling papers, pinching the weed into place. I finish my beer quickly and reach for another. I take a puff of a joint that’s passed to me. I’m starting to feel the relief I needed, the soothing feeling like a teacher’s reassurance I haven’t made that big of a mistake. That people will forget a
bout it. That I’ll get another chance.

  A chill tumbles down my spine. There’s a thin song in the air. I look up and see Dani standing above me. She’s whistling into my scalp. It’s something she used to do at night and now it hangs between us like an invitation. She bites her chapped bottom lip. There’s lipstick on her front tooth and I reach up and wipe it away. It doesn’t feel like me doing it, not really, though that must be the excuse all cheaters use when they reach out, asking permission to touch someone they shouldn’t. The one-room schoolhouse helps along this feeling, as though we’ve slipped back in time to a completely different past. I remember lining up during school trips here to sit on the corner stool and wear the dunce cap so the teacher could snap a photo. To avoid singling out a dunce, everyone had to be one. Right now we’re all dunces. Or none of us is a dunce. Whatever it is, I’m allowed to touch Dani. My thumb lingers on her lip.

  “Easy,” she says quietly, stepping back. Her tongue licks the spot where my thumb was. She looks around her. People are eavesdropping, and she knows it, and I know it.

  “Tell me about Mara,” she says. “What’s going on with you guys? To be honest I was surprised to learn you were still together.”

  “There’s Brian to think of,” I say. To her blank stare I respond, “He’s my son.”

  “Sure. That makes sense. Is that the only reason?”

  “No.” But I don’t offer any others.

  “It’s easier to just tell people what you really want,” she says. “Like with me. You should have just told me you wanted to fuck other women.”

  It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s saying. She’s talking about me as though she knows me better than I know myself, better than Mara knows me—but instead of feeling resentful, I’m grateful for the attention. Maybe it’s true that people from your past have the right to offer insight based on the differences, or lack of them, they detect between the person you were then and the one you seem to be now.