Thursday Afternoon Tucumcari Nm

Who are you sitting next to?

I'm currently sitting at a bar downtown. 2pm on a Thursday. My fourth beer, most of them Yuengling.

There's a girl next to me. Before you go that direction: no. She's probably not even twenty-one, even though the bartender gave her a vodka tonic. Her boyfriend who came in with her stormed off after some argument, but he'll be back: she says she's the one with the bus tickets. She's got short pixie-esque blonde hair. Has a baby-fat look to her. Her voice is deeper than you'd think seeing how compact she is. She seems to swallow her L's when she speaks.

And she's speaking to me. Not in any flirty way, just venting. I'm staring mostly ahead, looking at the liquor selection behind the bar, wondering why the same bottles are always full - always unopened- in every bar I've ever been in. But they're still there.

She's asking me a lot. My answers are rote. Yes I'm married. No I don't love her. Yes I love someone else. Yes, someone else is married.

That last one seemed to amuse her.

"If I was going to love someone else, I'd at least make sure they was available," she says with a laugh, then asks me if I smoke. I don't. She fidgets and looks at the liquor bottles, trying to figure out what I'm looking at.

"So what's in it for you?" Her eyes drift across the bottles. "Is it just the sex?"

I take the last swig of the beer in front of me. Consider a change to another brand. Ask the bartender for two whiskeys, pointing in front of me and her. She shakes her head no, but doesn't move the shot glass towards me when it arrives.

The song on the jukebox changes. It's that overplayed Journey song.

"It's not the sex," I say.

She looks over at me.

"We haven't had sex in over five years."

She laughs out loud. Looks at the bartender but he's not looking at her. Looks towards the door then back at me.

"What kind of affair this that?"

I turn to her.

"It has its benefits," I say.

"What could be in it for you? Texts that say 'thinking about you'?"

I smile as I look down. Shake my head no.

"Once, maybe six years ago, she disappointed me."

"She disappointed you," she confirms. "You were here when my guy..."

She reconsiders the whiskey, puts her hand around it.

"You were here when Bobby stormed out. He disappoints me all the time. I disappoint him."

She looks back over at me, sliding the shot glass closer to her. The rust water sloshes inside the glass, a miniature dirty ocean.

"I don't need to have an affair to be disappointed," she finishes, drinks the whiskey.

I decide to move to a Corona.

"So," I say, making it clear by my tone I'm continuing the story, "So, she disappointed me."

The bartender brings me the bottle. I wave off both a glass and a lime. My ocean is bigger and cleaner than hers. I look back at her.

"People who are married to other people are going to come up short. They have to cancel. They can't get away. She's on her period when you can get away."

I take a sip. Grab a salt shaker and shake some into the beer. She winces in disapproval. I now notice she has a baby in a car seat on the chair next to her. Glance down to her chest, wonder if she's nursing.

"So, disappointment comes with the territory. But this time I'm talking about, she disappointed me a lot. And it was her fault. Not her husband's. Or her kid's. And I'm mad. We're trading angry emails. She's apologizing like hell."

"Ok," she says.

Take a sip of the briny Corona.

"About 4 o'clock one day she emails me a picture. It's her, naked, on the floor of the bathroom."

She laughs.

"I've sent naked pics before."

I shake my head, want her to hear the point.

"She was naked. Sitting on the floor. But she'd taken a sharpie and written my name on her. My first name. She'd written it backwards as best she could, so in the mirror when she took this pic most of them would read correctly."

I take another sip. The bartender is now leaned between us, hands folded, paying attention.

"I bet she'd written it on herself fifty times. On her legs. On her arms. Her neck. Her stomach. Her feet. Of course her tits, writing it on a curve above her areolas. Above her box. Everywhere you could see."

Pixie-hair mom shakes her head.

"That was her apology."

"That's fucked up," she says.

"That's hot," the bartender says, pouring three tequilas, apparently deciding he deserves one, too.

"It was pretty hot," I agreed. "But that's not the hottest part."

She tucks a little blue blanket around her sleeping baby's chest then looks at me again. I continue.

"The best part...the fucking best part, is thinking about her in the shower, all in a hurry, soaping all of that off her so that's back clean and pristine before her husband turns the doorknob on the front door. Watching the black-tinged water wash down the drain as she scrubs and scrubs. The best part is her undressing for him later, praying she didn't miss a spot."

They both look at me. She looks down at her hands.

"The best part is the next time he used that pen," says the bartender as he slides us our free Cuervo and we all laugh. Good point. He leaves to go help someone else down the bar.

Pixie is tearing up just a little.

"I'd never do that for him," she says, tilting her head towards the door. The jukebox is quiet now.

"Neither would any of the other girls he's screwing," she says, eyeing the shot before turns to get a bottle out of her baby bag.

For the first time in the conversation I conjure up a picture of what it would be like to screw her. What the back of her head would look like buried in a pillow as I moved myself from her pussy to her asshole, the baby sleeping in a chair across from the bed at whatever hotel we could find within walking distance, its mother's moans no doubt serving notnfor the first time as a cut-rate lullaby.

But while I have the energy for the fantasy, I have no interest in trying to make it a reality. As we drink our tequila in silence, looking at the bar door that Bobby may or may not ever trudge back through, I try to remember my mistress's aroma, but all my brain can summon is the scent of a sharpie.

Somewhere many states away, she's taking her seat at their family dinner. Her, him, her son. She hasn't shown me her body since all the way last night, when she sent me a pic of her breast, nipple pink against her Irish skin. I'm picturing her husband gazing on her as she passes him the vegetables.

Who are you sitting next to?