My favourite moments of the day are during my forty-five minute commute between work and home. They're the only times of the day that I let my mind go where I don't dare all the other hours. There I stroke her hair and make her tremble with kisses. I have whole conversations there. Sometimes I dare to tell her. Depending on the weather, how my customers talked to me, or how lunch is sitting she may laugh, yell or just walk away, but usually she softens and allows me to draw near. Sometimes she approaches me, drenched in rain or glowing in Saturday sunlight, lips parted and eyes darting. These are my favourite because I always end up doing the whole manly shoving her up against a wall thing, pinning her hands.
It's a difficult balance cultivating these fantasies, surrounded by jostling commuters, and keeping them from going too far... it's awkward enough bumping up against the high schoolers and business women.
On either end of the commute is the rest of my life, the parts that don't allow for fantasies. The downtown side is in a department store selling women's cosmetics that cost more than a day's salary for me, sometimes more than a week's. But tips are good... those women with their tight pants and sculpted cleavage appreciate a carefully timed wink when it comes from someone so dewy and humble as me. The blushes I coax from their botoxed cheeks are so much prettier than the ones I apply with squirrel hair brushes.
The suburb side is the creaky little house with the powder blue siding and the cherry tree and porch swing. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. Floorboards worn. Kitchen with those puke green appliances and turquoise walls. I hung orange curtains just to amplify the visual assault. The toilet will keep flushing unless you wiggle it twice while running the bathtub faucet. Each piece of comfy furniture is a dust mite ridden hug of wine stained velvet, corduroy or microfiber. Trinkets drip from every surface, even the ceiling. Things she's collected, found, cast off, and hoarded with intense, but brief, passion.
When I walk up the concrete, moss lined path she's sitting as usual on the porch swing, casually crooked and wearing a long floaty skirt, one bare foot on the peeling white railing beside a sweating glass of sun tea. She wiggles her fingers at me through the railings, a little smile lighting her porcelain face. I wiggle my fingers right back.
"So?" she asks without moving.
"Four hundred and thirty," I tell her. My most expensive sale of the day.
"And?"
"Fifty dollars... in my boxers." And I tuck my hand into my shorts and pull out the bill.
"Good flirting, cowboy," she tells me, only her eyes following as I clomp up the dry and cracking wooden stairs.
"So what are you feeding this cowboy?" I ask and push the rusted chain to make her swing back and forth. Tendrils of auburn hair under her head kerchief shiver around her face with the breeze.
"I was thinking pesto salmon and fresh minted peas."
"What about those strawberries?" I ask because I picked them yesterday for her and I know she's so proud of how well they grew this year.
This rouses her and she flops her bare feet to the hot, peeling-paint wood. She lifts one finger to me. "Ah but that's a secret." She drops a luscious wink and pads into the house, crooked screen door creaking.
"Oil that please, Ellis," she mumbles as she slaps dirty feet through the cool darkness of the hall to the sunlight of the kitchen and its stained laminate.
I test the door a few times before falling into the cool embrace of our home (their home). I slide off my loafers, tuck them underneath the table we found at the flea market a month after I moved in. The floor snaps and pops as my sock feet tread the distance to her.
The kitchen smells of fresh basil, garlic and powdered sugar. Sugar dust catches the sunlight and dances like miniscule fairies, landing in her hair.
"Spark it up, will you, cowboy?" she asks without turning around, fingers deep in pesto and fish.
The back screen door creaks just as much as the front door, bangs harder, but she doesn't bother to ask me to oil it. She'll forget about asking me about either of them for another week. Maybe I'll get around to it tonight.
The barbeque lights with a satisfying whump of air and whiff of rotten eggs. I always take the life of my eyebrows and floppy bangs into my hands when I light this old and rusted beast. A bee buzzes through the heat, becomes lazy, falls and sizzles.
Rowan manages to keep the grass out here a luscious green, the kind that squishes beneath your bare feet and commands you to drop and roll and giggle. The front yard simply crisps in spots, no matter what she tries. She's given up and calls it our polka dot lawn.
I go back inside and bring out the bottle of wine, slide it onto the counter in front of her. Her favourite: apricot.
She squeals and beams at me, throws her arms around my neck (being sure not to get her pesto fingers on my good flirting work shirt).
"Oh Ellis! Just what I wanted! Perfect perfect you're perfect!" She bounces as she hugs me and smells of lavender and strawberries. I lose her warmth as quickly as she flung it at me and she's outside placing the delicate fish on the grill. I'm sure the neighbours suddenly have a craving for garlic.
I open the wine and pour it into two mismatching glasses (mine thick pale aqua with rustic, Peruvian bubbles and crookedness, hers a paper thin crystal that sings the moment you touch the rim with a wet finger). I carry them both out and tuck hers in her waiting hand, flop in a hammock chair and watch the hummingbirds at the honeysuckle. She sips and sighs.
"Perfect, isn't it?" The salmon behind her sizzles. I don't answer but admire her in my peripheral vision. Thoughts swell and I have to crush them. Before I can my hand slips over her barely exposed navel to rest on one jutting hip. My fingers tingle with the imagined touch.
When the salmon is done, she fusses in the kitchen. I don't help because my duty is dishes. Sometimes she lets me barbeque a steak, even though she doesn't like them. I hear the creak/slam and then a plate appears in my hands, laden with thick coated fish and a puddle of peas. My fork was stolen from a hospital cafeteria. The food is delicious as usual. Afterwards I savour the garlic still on my tongue and watch as the sun slides behind the lilacs, dappling the grass. The moment stretches and she flops her dirty bare feet on the railing. I wish I could paint her toenails.
She stays there, drinking her second glass of wine as I wash the dishes in water as hot as the weather will permit. As I prop them, dripping, over that ridiculously red towel she loves to use, a memory invades unbidden.
Before, it was my turn to do dishes only when I visited. Beyond the noise of the water and steam I would hear their soft voices on the porch, their laughter. If I twisted my head to the left I could see them, sitting there in those hammock chairs, fingers casually entwined and caressing. I twist my head to the left now and see her sitting and rocking alone with her wine.
When I'm done, I shake my hands and dry them on the red towel, then carry the second bottle of wine outside. The sun is golden and peeking between the branches in that secret evening way. I pour her a third glass, myself a second and sit.
"I miss him, Ellis," she tells me and her voice sounds thick. "Can we lie on the grass and get drunk again?"
I nod even though she doesn't see. She carries the bottle out and spreads herself on the green carpet.
"I'll be back," I tell her and go change my clothes into something casual and white and crisp (grass stains be damned). When I get back out there and place myself carefully beside her, she's already on her fourth glass with cheeks flushed. I down my third just to catch up. She trembles as she pours me another, giggles. We both flop back and stare up at the darkening blue. But then my heart flutters as her head nestles into the crook of my shoulder, her hair tickling my chin and wafting lavender into my nostrils.
When I first met her she smelled of lavender, although her hair was longer then. She was made of sweetness and laughter, I thought, and my heart had belonged to her from that moment. It was the day Jonah had brought her home to meet our parents, tell us they were engaged. Her cheeks had flushed with the celebratory wine (an inoffensive but cheap chardonnay) and I had smelled how sweet the wine was on her breath when she had placed a soft kiss beside my lips before padding upstairs to bed that night. Lavender and wine and gentle lips had filled my dreams that night. And almost every night since.
They had married later that summer. She was a summer person, even bundled in a dozen layers during the winter she exuded the light of July. I was their best man. My brother had never looked happier, creased in smiles and damp with July sweat. Her dress had been simple and so white, with little yellow flowers at her waist and in her hair, grass stains growing around the hem of her skirt. Their first kiss as man and wife had shattered my poor fragile heart, and made it soar with hope for humanity. If two perfect people could find each other amongst it all, we must be doing something a little right.
I lived with the pain of loving her. Sometimes it stabbed so hard it felt like razors to breathe. Especially when he stroked the back of her neck with his finger, which he often did. I could almost feel the soft hairs there on my own fingertips. When she visited us alone, she would speak of him tenderly and often. We would gather around a puzzle of a Monet painting and she would talk of their visit to the Louvre on their honeymoon. And then the streets of Paris and their stink and romance.
It was icy with sleet the day we got the call. She was with us, warmed by hot cocoa laced with brandy. My father answered the phone and paled quickly. As he did we were tied to that single reaction in our own personal ways. Rowan's eyes had widened and become sparkly, I felt like my whole body had suddenly melted and was falling away from me in wet chunks, and our mother had clutched her knitting tight and stared into her husband. He said little over the phone, but somehow we knew in the heavy way he spoke just how terrible it would be as soon as he hung up.
We learned in small doses that it was a car accident. A semi. A bridge. Black ice. It had been quick (which we learned later was a lie). Father drove us to the hospital, knuckles white on the steering wheel, accidentally turning on cold air instead of heat as we rode, chilled and not noticing. Rowan clutched my hand during the ride. I was too terrified to notice.
I had moved in with her, into their home, one month after the funeral. Mom and Dad, their health failing, sold their house and rented a small room in a retirement home. Rowan was having trouble paying the bills. It only made sense. I took the room that was eventually to have become a nursery, but she didn't tell me that until months later, drunk and sobbing into my shirt.
