“Jesus, you’re a shitty bartender. What would you tell yourself when it’s sober you talking to drunk you?”
“Get your act together. You’re pitying yourself. Doesn’t do anyone a lick of good. Yeah, life’s tough. Be tougher.”
“Then that, then. That’s my advice.”
“You’re a smart man, Lou.”
“Sure I am.”
I nursed the water and I fell down from piss-drunk to just-drunk-enough-to-be-unhappy, and that’s when Maggie walked in. Her lips were deep red, her eyeliner thick and black, her hair thick and black and tumbling down her shoulders. She took off her jacket, had on a tank top that told me she was wearing that lacy black bra I loved her in.
Jesus, why do I do this to myself?
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked.
She smiled, then. She hadn’t smiled when she saw me. She’d been wary.
“Whiskey, straight up,” she told Lou. Then she turned back to me. “You don’t look like you’re doing your best.”
“I’m alright.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus, everyone’s on my case tonight.”
“Alright,” she said. Lou set the tumbler down in front of her, and she took the shot. Her smile deepened. She had such good teeth. Just that little bit crooked where it’s not gross, just all that much better to kiss. And those lips, she had the thickest, nicest lips I’d ever kissed. I didn’t like to admit that, but it was true.
I was staring at her so hard I didn’t notice her staring at me.
“What’s up with your hands?” she asked.
I looked down at them. They were looking pretty rough. A few blisters just starting to heal, a few scratches that were still raw.
“I’ve been working,” I said.
“You contracting again?”
“No, it’s not like that,” I said. “Been building houses for people who’ve lost everything, up north. Heartland Habitat.”
“You get paid for that?”
“No, I don’t get paid. It’s volunteer.”
“You’re good at what you do. You should get paid.”
“Nah,” I said. “It’s fine. Keeps me in practice.”
They never wanted me back again, actually. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“How about you?”
“Same shit,” she said. “Been trying to get some work, computer stuff.”
I cared about as much about computers as she did about building things.
“Well,” I said. “Do you want to, uh,”
“Yeah. Fuck yeah.”
“Where?”
“Luke Cawley I want you so bad I’ll fuck you in the alley outside like I’m some 19th century whore. Let’s get you out of here.”
I closed out my tab.
She pushed me up against the brick, started kissing me, and I reached behind her and closed my fingers together at the back of her head and pulled her up against me. Her knee went up my legs, her thigh pressing against my dick.
And just like that, I realized what I was doing. Shit.
She could tell. I must have froze up, or stopped kissing her like I meant it, because she backed off, looked at me questioning.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think this is going to work out.”
“It’s not going to work out?” she asked. “It’s not going to work out? Are you my fucking boyfriend or something? Are you breaking up with me? Did you start caring enough about me in the first place that we started dating? Jesus, Luke, you’re the one who called me. You’re the one who dragged me down here...I had to take a cab, you know...to hang out with you and yeah maybe get my clit licked, but no it’s not going to work out. Don’t you think you could have told me that over the phone? Oh, wait. You did. You basically did, the last time I called you.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“No.” Maggie shook her head in disgust. “I’m sorry. I’m the sorry loser who for some goddamned reason answered the phone in the middle of the night when you were drunk and horny. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“I’ll pay for your cab,” I said.
“You’re a disaster area, Luke Cawley. Hell you’re practically a crime scene. I should wrap you up in police-line-do-not-cross tape and start scaring away reporters. You need to pull yourself together.”
“Well,” I said. “You’re right.”
I pulled out my wallet, to pay for her cab. She knocked it to the ground and strode off, her hips swinging with every step.
Yeah, she was right.
Back in the bed of my truck, too drunk to drive for the second night in a row. I should start drinking at home. That was the solution.
I fell asleep like that, my head at a funny angle, drunk with my shoes on in the uncovered bed of my truck. Woke up some hours later, with the streetlight pouring down over me like it was the morning sun, but it was still the middle of the night. I sat up on the corner of the tailgate and looked out over the city like it was mine.
A pack of dogs ran out of the alley I’d been in, looked both ways and then darted across the street. Pack of dogs that thought they were coyotes. I know I was supposed to hate ‘em, because they attack people sometimes. But I envied them. They were free, they were with their friends, and if I had their lifespan I’d be dead probably twice over.
I saw John Lawson walking down the street, heard him whistling show tunes. Made me laugh.
“Luke?” he asked, squinting at me.
“Evening.”
He strolled up, eyeing me in the bed of my truck. “It’s 3:30 in the morning, man.”
“Sounds about right.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I was too drunk to drive, about three hours back. Laid down, took a nap, now I’m just kind of watching the dead streets of Kansas City being dead.”
“You need anything?”
“Need a lot of things, John Lawson.”
My walls were crumbling. I don’t open myself up to people like that, not people who were half-strangers. Not to anyone, really.
“You need to get your shit straight,” John Lawson said. Seemed I was hearing that a lot, lately.
“It’s a nice night, though,” I said.
He thought about that.
“It is,” he said.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Goodnight.”
I made it home and found out King had taken out his loneliness on my couch cushions like I’d wanted to take it out on that lumberjack at Lou’s. Maybe King was a wild dog too, a street dog who thought he was a coyote. I was jealous. He didn’t have to think so much about the consequences of his actions. He could just do what he thought he should do.
But that wasn’t true. King wasn’t a coyote.
King loved riding in my truck, he loved playing nice with the other dogs at the park. He loved when someone cooked for him, when someone took him on walks. He loved sleeping in bed with someone warm and he loved being safe and he loved knowing that life was going to be alright.
He wasn’t a coyote.
I wasn’t a damn coyote either.
I stormed up the stairs, hurrying like the tears were going to fall out of my face if I didn’t move fast enough. Pulled out my phone. Scrolled through recent calls. Found Natalie.
Four in the morning.
I didn’t care.
It rang four times, then went to voicemail.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Luke. I miss Emily so much. Every day. I miss her so much. I’m sorry I was an asshole last time we talked. Call me.”
Then I hung up the phone, and I did what I should have done more often.
I sat on the edge of my bed, I put my hands up to my eyes, and I cried. I bawled. Wracking sobs that came over my body until I was shaking and I cried like it might wake up the neighbors. I cried, and I cried.
And as I fell onto my bed, curled up in a ball, King jumped up there with me, and I rested my head on his side and I cried some more.
CHAPTER SIXT
EEN
When you haven’t slept, nothing feels real. Which is a good thing, when your wife is in the hospital room next to you, dying.
On the day that she died, I hadn’t slept in I don’t even know how long, but I knew she was going to pull through. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with every last part of me. It was faith. I had more faith in her than I had in God. I had more faith in her than I had in the idea that the earth rotated around the sun or that flowers smelled sweet or that pork tenderloin tastes like bliss.
Natalie was there with me, that morning. There hadn’t been a minute that her sister or her mom hadn’t been with her, and her dad only went out of earshot when someone needed something. He cooked us three meals a day, and the whole lot of us had basically moved into the hospital waiting room.
Me, though, I never left her side except to use the bathroom.
Emily was awake just then, but she could barely talk or think owing to the pain she was going through. She mostly mumbled, and sometimes she kissed me, and sometimes she’d reach out for my hand and I held it like we were kids still, just falling in love for the first time.
The harsh smell of hospital chemical clean and the scent of flowers fought to break through the congestion that had built up in my nose from crying. The daylight filtered in through the blinds in the tiny vertical slit of a window, and all I could hear was Emily breathing. Even when other people were talking, most of the time all I could hear was her faint breathing.
Her eyes were bright, despite it all, but they were sunk into hollow sockets with all the weight she’d lost. Her lips were brittle and cracked, but she was still beautiful. Unbearably beautiful.
“She’s so strong,” I told Natalie.
“You’ve told me,” she said.
“She’s the strongest woman I’ll ever meet,” I said.
“We need to let the nurses give her drugs, knock her out. That look in her eyes, that’s pain.”
“The doctor says she has a chance.”
“The doctor says she has a chance of making it another couple of days, maybe a week. A chance.”
“She can pull through.” I turned to Emily. “You can pull through.”
“You’re being selfish,” Natalie said, shaking her head. “You’re being weak. My sister is in pain, and you want her awake because you want every last bit of her life focused on you. Let her sleep. Let her rest.”
I took a deep breath, let myself really hear what Natalie was telling me.
“You’re right,” I said.
Natalie pushed the nurse call button.
I was crying.
The door swung open and the nurse came in, and it didn’t even register than I was crying in front of him. Faintly, I heard the muzak playing in the waiting room.
For a moment, I was overcome with fury. That room, with its obsessive clean and its filtered daylight and that godawful music, that room wasn’t where a spirit as wild as Emily should die. She should die in the fields, somewhere, with the waxing moon rising in the sky and wildflowers leaning in a warm breeze and the sound of horses in the distance. I hated the hospital, just then. I hated everyone who was trying to save her or drug her or keep her from me.
Then I came to my senses. I thought back to the last two weeks, with her in critical condition, and how her family had come from far-flung corners of the country and Mexico to see her off, and I realized those two weeks had been worth it. I didn’t want her to die in the hospital because it wasn’t how I wanted to remember her. I was being selfish.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to Emily. I put my face up near hers, and she turned to look at me. Recognition cut through the pain, I think. “I got to let you go and rest, my heart.”
She smiled. “I love you,” she said, so quiet I could barely hear her.
The sedatives went into her IV, and I started humming her song while she drifted off into sleep. I wasn’t humming it anymore when, an hour later, she drifted off for the last time.
Three days later, I was at the funeral. I sat in the front, and my mother sat next to me, held my hand. I hadn’t said a word. Not for three days. Not to my mother, not to Emily’s.
I knew they were staring. Everyone was staring. I was glad I was in the front, where I didn’t have to meet their gazes, where they didn’t have to turn back to look at the spectacle of a broken man, a man who was twenty-three and as good as dead.
I could hear them talking, though. Whispers carry in a church, that’s one of the cruelties of the world. My brother was in whispered conference with my father, over in the corner.
Natalie and Emily’s parents had their own concerns, and the three of them held one another tight, huddled like players discussing a play. I could hear them sobbing. I could hear her father sobbing.
I wouldn’t do that, not in front of strangers. Because I wasn’t half as brave as that man who rode bulls for a living.
A wooden cross loomed over us, and my mind turned to darker thoughts. Nails driven into your hands and feet, and then you’re left to die. That was a pain I could respect. But it still couldn’t match what I was feeling at that moment. I might’ve even traded places with the man if given the choice, though I’m sure it was blasphemy to think it.
“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”
It wasn’t the first thing my brother said, but it was the first thing I heard. His voice boomed out across the church and the whispers fell silent. He was officiating. It was his church.
I didn’t want to believe him, about eternal life. It wasn’t that I’d lost my faith—not yet—it’s that I wanted to reject it. I didn’t want to one day be in heaven and reunited with Emily. Just then, with her earthly body in a casket at the front of the room, I wanted to know that one day I simply wouldn’t exist. That one day it would be over.
I’d spent three days in my house, ignoring almost everyone who called on me, and not speaking a word to any of them. My mother had come with my dinners. Dave had come with my lunch. I hadn’t bothered with breakfast, and I’d only picked at every meal. Most of that time, I’d sat alone, on the edge of our bed. Emily’s shirt in my hand, breathing it in. Her smell wouldn’t last forever. It was like an echo of her voice, and it would soon fade to nothing.
I didn’t want to forget her smell. I was terrified that I would.
As Mike went on at length about how Emily wasn’t dead, but instead in the hands of the Lord, I started to get angrier. First, at Mike, for telling lies like that.
I’d seen her die.
Then I realized it was God who’d killed her. Who’d taken her away into heaven without her permission. It was God who’d broken up my marriage, laughing at the supposed sanctity of it. It was God who had left me alone in the world. It was God who’d forsaken me, as he’d forsaken billions of others before me. It was God I was angry with.
“There is an appointed time for everything,” Mike said. “And there is a time for every event under heaven. A time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.”
Emily had never given birth. She’d been taken from the world long before that. If God insisted on cruel metaphors, seeing us like we were crops, He’d pulled her in early spring before she could bear fruit. He’d pulled her up from the soil like she was a weed.
Like He didn’t care about her.
Like He didn’t care about any of us.
“I believe my brother, Emily’s husband, has a few words to say,” Mike said. More lies. I didn’t have anything to say.
But I stood up, and I walked to the front of the room, and I stood right in front of the coffin and I faced the crowd.
“Emily was better than anyone who’s come before her on the planet, and she was better than everyone who’s going to come after her. She blessed us, just by being in our lives. She blessed me. What matters in life isn’t what we do, it’s how we do it. She used to tell me that. She also show
ed me that. It didn’t matter to her if we had money or status. It mattered that we lived life simple and right, that we learned how to love our neighbors, that we learned how to do what we could to keep the world headed the way it should be headed. Love is what mattered to her. She taught me that. Love is what matters. Just love.”
She was my heart, and today we bury her. I didn’t say that part. I just went and sat down before I started crying all the worse. Before all those pitying eyes could be on me another moment.
Natalie was next, and her eyes were drying up, and she said her piece without choking up.
“Emily was too much for the world to handle, and anyone who ever met her knew it. She burned the candle at both ends, and she did more in twenty years than most people do in eighty. She lived the rodeo life and she lived the city life and she went between them so easy that I know she ain’t going to have a lick of trouble getting people to like her where she’s going. I miss her, I’m going to miss her every day of my life, and I can’t wait to see her again.”
If I could have shortcut my way to seeing her again, I might have done it.
Instead, I stood up, and six of us carried her casket out to the hearse.
We drove in slow procession through town.
A few final words at the gravesite, and that was it. Crows were in the trees above us, and we were somber in the light spring rain in our dark clothes with the darkness in our hearts. The fresh-dug grave smelled damp and earthy. It wasn’t right that she was full of chemicals, that her body was entombed in the fiberglass of that coffin. She was gone, and what was left of her should be back in the earth. Back to being part of the earth.
That was the end of Emily’s life. The last we’d see her, the last we’d interact with her remains.
It’s not proper to throw yourself down into the grave and let them pile dirt up on you, or so I hear.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I got a window table at the restaurant, where I had a good view of the street. Ordered a Corona while I waited, tried not to eat more than half the chips. My guitar was in its case, leaning against my chair.
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