It would not be the last

We tell ourselves these stories out of order. The alternative is the raw sequence. The fist already balled before the words arrange themselves into blame. Let’s call this one strictly fiction.

I was in the townhouse off Wilton Drive that summer. The one with the jalousie windows that never quite closed and the overgrown hibiscus pressing against the screen like it wanted in. The one where the light was merciless at four in the afternoon.

He stood in the kitchen doorway. I had been slicing limes for no reason except the knife needed motion. Motion kept the silence from settling.

Don’t make me, he said.

He sounded like he’d practiced it the whole drive from the beach. Flat. Almost bored. Or maybe just done. No drama. Just a decision the faultline ran through someone else.

No, don’t make me.

You’re going to make me.

I watched the way his shoulders moved under his faded polo. The fist he was not going to use hung at his side, an object he had forgotten he owned. The other hand held the keys to the Jeep. The silver ring caught what was left of the sun and threw it against the refrigerator in small bright darts.

Look what you’re going to make me, he said.

The limes bled on the cutting board. I noticed the exact shade of the juice against the white laminate. How it spread and then stopped. Outside the afternoon storm had come up from the Everglades. It carried the smell of wet asphalt and frangipani from the neighbor’s yard. It jolted the loose jalousies. For a moment I thought we might simply lift away. The summer. The townhouse. The man. The story we had both agreed to inhabit.

He balled his fist tight. Knuckles showed white against sunburned skin. I had seen that same whitening on the hands of men loading coolers at the marina in Fort Lauderdale. On the hands of boys in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven where I once bought cigarettes at two in the morning. It was only the body preparing its instruments.

Until I made him say he made me.

The sentence arrived broken. He twisted the words so he stayed clean. You have this coming, he said, and turned to walk away with a not quite smile. It did not reach the eyes and therefore commit itself to anything so definite as pleasure. The screen door slapped shut behind him. The Jeep started on the second try. I listened to the tires on wet pavement until the sound dissolved into the larger sound of the rain on our tin roof.

It wouldn’t be the last.

Later, when the light had gone, I sat on the concrete steps and picked pulp from under my fingernails. The hibiscus brushed my shoulder like it had better things to do. Somewhere down Wilton Drive a siren rose and fell. The note thinned as it traveled the empty streets. I thought about the little trades we strike so we can keep breathing. The way we file the receipts under headings we can bear to read. Domestic. Inevitable. Whatever the sky decided that time of day.

I wasn’t Job. Never tried. Protest needed another kind of man. He might still believe the next sentence could redeem the last. I had lived long enough in this latitude to understand that words never fixed a damn thing. They only accumulated with our unpaid bills in the drawer.

The Jeep did not come back that night. The townhouse settled into its own silence. I left the limes on the board and went upstairs to the room where the bed faced the dark canal. I lay down without turning on the lamp. The ceiling fan turned slowly. It stirred the same warm air it had stirred the night before and would stir the night after. Things stay put right until they don’t. That is the only story this place ever gave you.

Outside, the rain kept its own counsel. I listened to it for a long time. Then I closed my eyes and let the whole mess fall where it wanted by morning.