Maureen smoked on the golf course and parked in the front of the clubhouse, a no parking zone. It wasn’t really raining when we got out, but some raindrops hit my purse. I pushed through the bathroom door and held it open for her. Her purse was bulky. She was small and a little chubby. I watched her walk past me into the big stall around the corner.  

“How long have you been in Kansas?” I asked, crossing my arms on the toilet seat.

“I grew up in KCK, then I moved to Eudora.”

           

“Oh I’ve been there.”

             

“I didn’t like it. Everyone knew my fiancé. I couldn’t drink a beer outside without someone seeing. It’s too small. Now I live in DeSoto.”

“Do you like it?”  

“I like my house.” 

The toilet flushed. She held her purse between her arm and body while she washed her hands.

It was green in the light from the clubhouse bathroom. There were bulletin boards and posters with wives on the walls. I thought about how Desoto to Maureen didn’t seem like Desoto to me. I had been up too early in the morning.

           

Little white dogs on leashes walked by the tent after we drove back. The tent had been badly decorated with internet bought banners and bracelets, pirate-dressed rubber duckies and an inflatable treasure chest full of bottles of hard alcohol the nurses called shots. Thanks to Kansas liquor-license restrictions on the golf course where I worked, sitting under the Hospital’s OBGYN-sponsored, pirate-themed Hole 12 with these women for twelve hours was my job. So I took walks to escape and got rides from white haired men in golf carts who were nice, and who I was nice to. And even though I had time to enter the white tent and eat some rice and beans and an enchilada. Volunteers for the hospital handed out shirts and musicians with brass instruments and hungry supervisors sat or stood together as I left with my plate. Even though I talked to the nurses about the seasons, with Maureen repeating “I just eat healthier in the summer” and with her later in a car because we were out of walking distance from a restroom and the golf cart still wasn’t back. It was raining. More mist really. We were driving through neighborhoods I recognized but I was confused about where we were. Even though they surprised me with their moments of calling an ex-husband because he was closer in vicinity. How that was the weirdest part. Temporary tattoos on their cheeks. Their lawn chairs and stomachs out over their legs. Their bandannas and noses and makeup. Falling asleep in the lawn chairs because Deb would stay awake waiting through the lightening for the next round of golfers and Maureen grabbing the keys from her friend’s purse saying “Come on, we’re going to the bathroom.” The people who really kept me there were the men.

                       

At Ryan’s, ideas drift in front of us like islands and we are the captains of different truths. Something as natural as the two of us gives me light I can hold onto until later that week when I wonder and hope it won’t go away. There are too many faces in memory I don’t remember anymore.

In the upstairs apartment of a house where cats rule and all of the cats are overweight Adam just looks at them shaking his head asking why, but I don’t want to ask myself that question and look away. I understand the attraction to someone who loves what you love, out of everything.


He weirdly pulls my chair close to his while we pick out which cat bowl is our favorite. He holds my legs as if they were one and leans over them. He arches over me. The chairs are at two different angles. It is difficult because he's so big.

He says, “Let me take care of you.”

Smiling sort of hard like my eyes could probably start crying soon. The kitchen is not the same with my eyes this way and I am unable to hide for the first time. The smallness of the cigarette between his fingers and the scar along the bottom of his palm. Shaky big hands. Thick. 

Him saying you’re going to make me cry. Me saying I doubt it. Him saying I haven’t cried in three years. I can’t believe that. 

The cat scratches his neck and he shouts ow and it scares me and I am drinking my tea like are you going to scream again sort of scared and curled and him really apologizing, speaking extra softly to the cat, cradling it like a baby.

           

Cat hair falls from the ceiling and we are in a sort of intercourse facing the bookshelves in different rooms. Conversation leads too far inside Adam’s head to be real because it’s me looking in and he is the wall around me and we are unable to get to the bottom of anything that way. 


The hipbone is his favorite part of the body. I repeat you don’t know me. Luckily, there’s a patch of mud and I’m wearing shoes.

           

I rush into Ryan’s living room with my arms full saying, “These are the only clothes I had in my car and I have to wear my uniform tomorrow.” Shaking my head in the mirror in her room as I change out of my uniform and walk into the living room in a long floral skirt and plaid button down.

They all turn from Futurama.

           

“You can borrow some of my clothes.” Ryan says.

           

Scott stands and walks past me, “You look like a Mormon.”

           

The mud in between us.

           

The feeling of needing something. The feeling of needing to beg in the bathroom, washing my face. This is an important concept. Very strange. The dynamic shifts and I make plans to leave. Wanting normalcy and then catching my friend run out of the shower without a shirt, a little crouched going through his dresser but not completely guarded because maybe he wants me to see something real.

           

This is what I talk about with Ryan. The almost encounters and how hard it is to live in more than one place. How waitresses should be paid more and how her boss has it out for her. She’s cold, but Scott is still here with his whiskey and ice cubes saying he figured out why wine in Spain is so cheap.

“They’re all alcoholics,” he says.

The porch light is off but the light through the living room window is bright enough. “That’s why they take that naptime, so they can get their fix and be able to work.”

           

I have a theory that Scott is a little boy trapped in a body that's too big for him. He drinks at night because he can’t sleep. So many leftovers are at everyone’s houses.            

It’s raining outside when I wake up at Adam’s and drink a large glass of pre-brewed iced coffee before a slow and overcast day at the country club. And even though it hasn’t rained in the morning since then, I wake up happy and watch viral videos in another living room on another couch with another person who plays Halo like he’s watching football. Shouting. He comes home tired and I know that means I have to leave.

Scott asks me where I’m going and I can picture him thinking about it. But the image and reality are not the same. The image can’t capture the little things, like my dishes piling next to the sink and when Adam says cigarettes are evil. When it was ninety outside in September, but we were out there anyway. 

I pointed, “Look a woman landscaper” 

I thought he'd be excited about her blue bra strap, but Adam was just happy she was a woman.

“There’s no women landscapers,” he says.

           

No image contains the view from his front steps and the side of him. If he leans back. Or the way he can’t really fit on his couch or the poem he showed me by Wang Ping. The lack of light in the bedroom. The billowed curtains. The art on the wall. His office. How I don’t get his jokes or like his music, but I liked that it was soft and that he played it for me the second time in his broken car. He opens my door and I crawl through to open his. Taking the pillows out from under my head. How I open around him. He starts to tell me he doesn’t like it when I feel bad and listens to my theories about why Ryan is the way she is, asking me to stay, it doesn’t matter, he just wants to see me, and he is stronger than me and I watch my body crumble against the wall if he threw it.

           

“Why would you think that?”

           

“I don’t know. You’re so big.” 

           

How impossible it is to be a nomad on my period. Just hoping it won’t come and wondering why I got so sad in the kitchen when he offered to take care of me. I make it back to my couch where my friend is playing Halo and his girlfriend is pixilated and asleep on his computer screen.