Harry’s absolution for a lifetime of off-color humor was to get poetic about the sky. We’d met at a bar a few weeks after I got to Emporia. I’d come to relax. To take a break from academics. And my mother was flush with cash from her divorce settlement, so her charity had made relaxation a lot easier. Harry had seemed bemused by me. He was always inviting me out to sit in the bed of his pickup and have a “field fire,” which was less interesting than it sounded; it was just a bonfire in a field. I’d been to my share of these growing up back east in Pennsylvania and had never felt the need to call them something special, but Harry saw it differently.

            “People think you’ve got to have something worth doing in order to name it,” he told me at one of these fires when I pointed this out to him. “But I call bullshit on that.”

            “You do.” I was wearing one of his flannel shirts tied cutely at the navel the way I was supposed to and picking at my cuticles the way I wasn’t. I think he could tell I was bored. He took a swig of his Miller and struck a cocky pose against the taillight, gazing off into the dim saturation as the sun dipped finally and partygoers milled around the flattened husks.

            “Have you been downtown lately? Have you seen the billboards?” He swept a hand out across the field and held it there for a beat too long. I smuggled a laugh into a cough.

            “I’ve seen them,” I said.

            Harry nodded. “Well, there’s a reason most people are spending their Friday night seeing Captain America, or ordering a Family Fill Up, or watching Wheel of Fortune.” He looked over his shoulder at me with one eyebrow cocked. “It’s because they’ve got names that make them seem worth doing. It’s the other way around, Sher.” He shook his head and pursed his lips. “I can’t believe you can’t see that. Fancy coastal elite like you.”

            He sipped his beer and turned away again, taking all of it in. I wanted to point out that Allentown was neither coastal nor elite but couldn’t shake the feeling that to do so would be coastal and elitist of me.

            “Nobody’s figured out how to name this yet,” Harry said wistfully. “Except for me.” Muted laughter fell around us in sparks from the little crowd of strangers gathered at the fire. A decal of the U.S. flag shone in jagged relief in the back window of the pickup. The moon rose.

I think it was then that I started getting deliberate, about looking for the right name.

___

            Harry’s best friend was a big lumbering baby-smooth mountain named Cormac, who had the haunted look of men that have stumbled into greatness and then watched it slip away. He was a traveling welder, but for a minute he’d been a star catcher on the varsity team at Ohio State. Early on in our relationship, when I asked Harry what had gone wrong, he told me Cormac had gotten the yips.

            “Mac had a cannon,” he said. “We played together in high school. He was about to get drafted and all, you know. And then, one day, he just couldn’t do it anymore. No injury or anything. Just, one day, couldn’t throw the ball right.”

            Harry told me it happened to guys sometimes and started rattling off the names of fallen big leaguers. Rick Ankiel. Jarred Saltalamacchia. Chuck Knoblauch. None of the names meant much to me, but Harry said them the way orators list the names of the dead at wartime vigils. I’d had to start picking at my cuticles again, to avoid laughing.

I had to admit, though, that there was something deathly about it. All that rippling muscle, and he couldn’t throw the ball back to the mound. Or even begin to understand why.

“Mac seems kind of lost, always, don’t you think?” I asked Harry one night. We were parked in the lot at Dairy Queen, propped up against the cabin in the bed. I tended to treat Harry’s truck like a mobile chaise longue. It felt like a funny thing to do, to therapize and emote in a place that was meant to be all about how broad of an arc you could make when you swung your dick. He was midway through a chili dog and gave me an incredulous look from behind puffy cheeks.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said. He dabbed at a spot of mustard on his upper lip with the back of his hand and then wiped the back of his hand on his pants. I wanted to say that this seemed like a lateral move, but instead I glanced out across the lot to where Cormac was pissing in the bushes and looking innocently up at the stars while he did it to announce that he wasn’t doing anything unusual over there, in case any cops passed by. He might as well have been whistling.

“Just look at him,” I said, gesturing with my chin. “His idea of fulfillment is to pee into the DQ parking lot and imitate Daffy Duck.”

“What?”

“Or else he’s just scared of seeing his own penis, like he’s the Punxsutawney Phil of closeted ex-jocks. It’s one or the other.”

“Sherry, what the fuck…”

I smiled wryly to myself. I had to laugh at my own jokes if I wanted to maintain any sense of continuity about what was and wasn’t funny. “I’m just saying,” I said as Cormac struggled to zip his fly without making eye contact with it, “he’s got a certain… a malaise, I guess. Like he’s waiting for the day when God walks in and says he’s sorry he was late, there was bad traffic on the southbound.”  

Harry looked at me and shook his head. It was an annoyingly handsome head. “So intelligent,” he said, “and your parents had to name you after wine.”

My parents had actually named me after Sheryl Crow, but that seemed like a step in the wrong direction, so I just rolled my eyes and smiled a little as a counterweight, to tell him he had offended me and made me wet at the same time, which was what I figured guys like Harry wanted. Act unperturbed and you lost your whole allure; you’d just be like one of the guys. But make too big a stink and you were a pain in the ass. I poked around at my Blizzard with a long spoon and side-eyed Harry as Cormac made his way across the parking lot. Then Harry looked over at me and I blew him a kiss to let him know I’d gotten over the wine thing, the dismissal. He smiled. He had a great girl.

Then he took a hit of his vape. It smelled like raspberries.

“Woof,” Cormac said. He had this weird habit of saying “woof” after he’d peed. He shook his head and blinked. “Like Niagara Falls over there.”

“You want some?” Harry held out the vape.

“No.” Cormac cracked the back of his neck. “I might be applying for a job soon.”

“What, the welding biz isn’t doing it for you anymore?”

“I don’t know.” Cormac turned and shrugged in a way that made his shoulder blades look positively tectonic, Alpine. “Guess it’s getting old like any other thing.”

“What’s the job?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“Bank truck?” Harry asked. He was wearing a backwards Cardinals hat that barely contained his sandy hair, which flipped up around the brim at the back and sides. I traced the muscles in his neck down to his collarbone, where a cross hung on a chain, gold against the sun-kissed skin. “You finally hooking up with one of those bank truck gigs?”

“Nah, man, I…”

“God damn it, Cormac, I keep telling you to sign up with one of those bank trucks.” He turned to me. “You know how much they make, those bank truck drivers?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“Like forty bucks an hour. To drive a bank truck. Because they think you might get robbed, you know, so they’ve gotta, like, compensate you. For the risk.”

“Huh,” I said. I was thinking that Harry seemed a lot more appealing when he was quiet. He seemed full of possibility, then, and dignity, and depth. Which I was realizing, just then, was my own depth reflected back at me. I wondered vaguely how long I had been doing that for. When I got bored of thinking about that I took another bite of the Blizzard, which was starting to melt.

“So no bank truck?”

Cormac shrugged. “I don’t want to get shot.”

“Aw, come on.” Harry punched him in the shoulder. “What have you got to live for, big guy, that ain’t worth forty bucks an hour?”

Harry giggled and readjusted the baseball cap. Cormac looked down at the ground and smiled a little bit, but he was deflecting, I could tell. He was really crying out for help. Too fraught and helpless with his big burn-scarred hands to see what was going on inside of him. Harry threw his hot dog tray out into the parking lot and began licking his fingers.

“Harry,” I said. “There’s a trash can right over there.”

“Eh.” He looked at Cormac. “World’s dying one way or the other.”

“It’s bad for the environment,” I said, although I didn’t really care. I said it kind of half-heartedly. It was a fun thing to say.

“It’s dinner for a bird. Come on.” He hopped out of the bed of the truck and beckoned toward me. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go bowling.”

“Aw, I don’t want to bowl,” Cormac said.

“That’s because you’re shithouse at it, Mac.”

“Cormac,” I said, “What’s the job?”

“Security,” he said. “At the minor league park in Wichita.”

Harry threw up his hands in an exaggerated way. “So you’ll wear a badge and a gun for small potatoes at the kiddie park but you won’t do it for forty bucks at Loomis.” He shook his head, the same way he had earlier when he said I was named after a wine. “You’re a bum, Mac.”

Cormac shrugged again. “It’s free baseball.”

“I can get you that at home on BSM.”

“Jesus Christ, Harry, and what the hell do you do with your time?” I said. I hadn’t really meant to say it. It was too real of a thing to say just then.  They both looked at me like they were surprised to suddenly find me there.

“Someone’s bitchy tonight,” Harry said.

“Sorry,” I replied.

Cormac didn’t say anything. He put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the stars, although I don’t think he was embarrassed by me and Harry. He seemed more eager to pretend he’d never brought it up, the quitting welding. Like he wanted to play innocent about that. Like he might as well have been whistling.

—

            “Dontcha ever feel kinda weird about the whole thing?”

            “The whole thing.” I was sitting across the table from my mother at a pho place in Kansas City. I had come up to meet her for lunch. She was there to visit a particular acupuncturist. A very good one, I guessed.

            “Oh, you know.” She poked at her bowl with chopsticks, which she was gripping awkwardly but determinedly, to prove how very much she knew how to use chopsticks. “The names.”

            I blinked. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

            “You know…” She looked up at me and smiled coyly.

            “Mom—”

            “Sherry and Harry. It’s just so silly! You’re gonna have to start telling people about that, if you get married. You’re going to have to say, we’re Harry and Sherry whatever.”

            “I’m already telling people about it,” I said. “Those are our names.”

            “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t date, oh, a Billy.” My mother’s name was Millie. She shook her head in fascination and lost her grip on a pho noodle. “I just couldn’t do it. I’m telling you.”

            “We’re not even that serious, Mom.”

            She looked up at me while craning to suck a noodle into her mouth. She had the kind of coarse gray hair that reminded me of steel wool. “It’s been two years, Sher,” she said wetly. “What would you call it if not serious?”

            I poked at my soup. “I wouldn’t call it anything.” And it was true, I wouldn’t. We had both decided, when it had become apparent that we’d wandered into the appropriate territory for it, that we would prefer not to label anything. To postpone the naming. I’m not sure why it was; I’d been in relationships before. I think maybe with Harry it felt like putting a name on it would force me to actualize it to myself. To discover some rationale for continuance. It seemed much better to drink beer in parking lots and watch the evenings soothe the sun into into its dark cradle. And moreover to do those things with someone else. To not be alone.

            My mother was shaking her head. “I don’t understand you, Sherry.”

            “He thinks I’m named after a wine,” I said. “He’s not worth calling anything.”

            “Well, did you tell him the truth?” 

            “No, Mom,” I said. I gave her a withering look, a teenaged look that made me feel good but also silly, petulant. “I did not tell him that I’m named after Sheryl Crow.”

            “She’s very talented.”

            “Yes,” I said. “You’ve mentioned.”

            “Why are you letting him think you’re named after a wine?”

            We locked eyes then. I put down my chopsticks and knitted my brow.

“What do you mean?”

“You do this, Sherry, you know. You don’t let people get to know you and then you turn around and blame them for it. As though they should have been smart enough to interpret you.”

“Maybe they should have.”

“The poor boy probably just wants to get to know you.”

“He’s not a poor boy.” I picked the chopsticks back up and started playing with the broth again, although I was down to the final bits, the floating green onions and clumps of miso. “He’s, like. He’s like an actor in a Dodge Ram commercial. Or the jock in a John Hughes movie.”

I looked up at her. I’d been pretty sure this would work, but she seemed unmoved.

“He’s a misogynist,” I said.

“Oh.” My mother picked up her chopsticks bashfully. “Well, in that case, you should show him what’s what. Put him in his place.”  

“Put him in his place.”

“Yes,” she said. “You have to. Unless he knows exactly what he is to you, there’s no sense in wasting your time on a silly thing like that with some pretty little hick who doesn’t even have the decency to treat you like a human being. There’s only one way to deal with people like that. With men like that.” She was nodding her head, as though she were listening to herself talk and approving roundly of it. “You have to preempt them. It’s the only way they learn. It’s only the sweet ones you can treat like human beings. The others have to be puppets.”

“Puppets.”

“Yes,” she said. “Puppets. By necessity.” She chewed a little, and then she said, “Your father taught me this the hard way.”

“Right,” I said. I was looking into the broth, hoping it might coagulate into a word or a phrase. Something that said anything. I looked at my murky reflection in the steel tabletop.

“Oh, shit,” my mother said. She looked at her wrist even though she wasn’t wearing a watch.

“That’s a beautiful piece.”

“I’m late for my acupuncturist,” she said. “Here, pick up the tab.” She reached into her clasp and handed me a credit card.

“Don’t you need this?”

She waved a hand and slung her leather purse over her shoulder. “I have others. Besides, this acupuncturist” —she widened her eyes for emphasis— “is première.” She said it the French way.

“Since when do you need acupuncture?” I asked.

“I don’t,” she said. Then, after a moment’s thought, she said, “I want it.”

When the waiter came to take the check, I had to explain that I wasn’t Millie Brosseau, I was her daughter, Sherry. They were very confused by this. They told me that next time, I should bring my own credit card. That otherwise they would not be accepting my business. I told them sure, fine.

____

            People were whooping and hollering around the blaze in a shadowed way that made it look like some kind of pagan ritual. The light had gotten to that low point where people’s features seemed saturated and, from a distance, indistinct. I thought, sometimes, that it was moments like these that allowed you to see the real truth of a person, their essences boiled down to their outlines. They seemed simpler, like shapes in Plato’s cave. Clearer. More real.

            It vexed me that Harry’s outline looked firmer than the others. Cormac’s shadow, at the other taillight, seemed to waver even as it stood still. Like it wasn’t quite certain it existed.

            My mother had gone home to Pennsylvania a few days earlier, and since her departure I had found myself turning over what I’d said to her, about Harry’s feeling toward women. He was quiet that night, less garrulous than usual, and had resumed the dignity that so often seemed to accompany his silence, the kind that I was beginning to feel was more projection than anything else. What killed me was that I wasn’t even sure if it was true. That he was a misogynist. At least not truer than it is for anyone else. When he was taking the piss out of you like he enjoyed doing when he got in one of those boyish moods, it was easy to feel like there was something targeted behind it, something demeaning. But when you thought about it a bit longer you realized it was all the same, no matter who he was talking to; he was as likely to give Cormac shit about his yips as he was to give me shit about my biology, and he spoke so reverently of Cormac when he wasn’t around. People like that had always driven me up the wall, people who couldn’t bring themselves to express the full bleeding truth of their love for another person except for when it didn’t matter, when the stakes were made low by that person’s absence. It struck me as sort of tragic. Harry seemed to move through life with an idea that someone was writing all of it down in a big celestial book, and that one day Cormac would be able to read all the chapters he had missed, and come to understand the urgency and depth of the affection that lay between them. But of course this wouldn’t happen, couldn’t. They seemed doomed to tear each other down ad infinitum. Maybe it was a man thing.

            Harry shuffled slightly and recrossed his legs, all somehow without breaking the impression that he was carved elegantly out of stone. “Look at all that,” he said, pointing with his ring finger while retaining a grip on the beer bottle. “Look how fucking pretty that is.”

            Cormac nodded. To spare him, I said lazily, “Harry would cheat on me with the stars if he got the chance.”

            “Harry’d cheat on you with anything if he got the chance.”

            “Hey.” Harry wagged an admonishing finger in his friend’s direction. “I’ve grown. Since the wild days of my youth.”

            “Grown taller, maybe.”

            “I’m telling you, I’m a good boy now.”

            “Don’t worry about it, Harry,” I said. “If you try anything I’ll just have to get you back.”

            “Oh yeah? And how are you gonna do that?”

            I shrugged. “I’ll sleep with Cormac.”

            Harry laughed sharply, a laugh that exposed his discomfort even though it was meant to shield it. “What makes you so sure I’d let you?” Cormac said thickly.

            “Well,” I said, “for one thing, I don’t think you’ve gotten laid since you could throw a baseball.”

            It hurt him, I could tell. But he smiled downward and kicked some dirt around with his feet, and besides, it made Harry laugh, a real one this time, which I figured he needed. It occurred to me that if there was one thing men like Harry couldn’t stand, it was the whisper of sexual autonomy. Which in turn caused me to reconsider my whole stance about the misogyny. And then I had a moment of guilt, looking at Cormac’s big unstable blueprint as it struggled to regain its footing.

            “But beyond that,” I said, to even things out, “we all know I’m hot.”

            “We sure do,” Harry said, and draped an arm around my neck in the truck bed to kiss me on the cheek. Cormac didn’t say much. He was still looking down at the dirt.  

He spoke, then, after looking up, way off into the distance, and squinting his eyes at the horizon. “This is my favorite time of day,” he said. “When you can just barely make out the trees on the tops of the hills. When the light runs through them like that.”

            There was a moment of silence, and the sound of the wind through the stalks of wheat and the crackle of the fire and the distant laughter of the others gave the air a chilly fullness that made the hairs stand up on my arms. Indigo bled between the seams of the arbors.

Then Harry said, “Mac, buddy, leave that shit for the poets.”

I felt something in my heart that had been petrifying for a long time seal over and harden. And the dark trees felt like God. Like absolution.

___

            The next week, I decided to stop being so vigilant about Harry’s whims, which, once stripped of the veil of their importance, began to seem miraculously inconsequential. I realized with a particular numb horror that Harry was as content to spend time around me without my practiced subservience as he had been previously, and I started to wonder if the imposition of that particular prison had been not Harry’s but my own, a kind of preemptive docility. He was the same as ever, so much so that I began to believe the emotional chainmail that was allowing him to weather my abandonment was forged—if not merely in stupidity—of his own indifference, armor he’d been wearing around long before I started sporting mine. And so I hated him, still, even as he tactically avoided giving me new excuses to; I hated him for having the gall to not hate me.

             Then, without my realizing I’d been waiting for it, Cormac invited me out.

It was a Saturday as clear and blue as a postcard, the kind of day that, unbidden, makes you proud to be an American. It was the last weekend in August, and at some point in the early evening Cormac showed up at Harry’s place grinning like an idiot. Harry lived in the basement of his dad’s house, but his father mostly left him alone; there was a bathroom down there, and a microwave, and a Foreman grill, and you could come and go through the storm door. We were down there making out in a rote kind of way when we heard Cormac pounding on the storm door.

           “Jesus Christ,” Harry said. Then he stood up and adjusted his shorts a little bit. “Sorry.”

           “I’ll survive.”

           Cormac was there with two tickets to the minor league park in Wichita, two tickets he’d copped, he informed us excitedly, because he’d finally managed to land that security gig. Harry’s annoyance was clear; he muttered something about Loomis and didn’t move aside to let Cormac through the doorframe. But Cormac wasn’t fazed. He just kept on grinning.

           “No, dummy,” Harry said when Cormac asked if he’d tag along.

           “I’ll go,” I said.

Harry looked over at me. I had already put on my little knit cardigan, which is a garment that I believe they designed specifically so that women could announce their intent to exit in a polite, oblique way. I stood up off the couch and looked Cormac square in the eye.

“I’ll go with you.”  

Cormac hunched over the wheel of his rickety little pickup truck as he drove. Little pieces of the American evening poked their way into view as we drove out of town and into Kansas’s liminal spaces, the ones where roads meet at perfect 90-degree angles as they interstice the land. Bowling alleys, neon-lit. People spilling out of karaoke bars like they were overfilled decanters. Theater marquees with two films listed. And storefronts, empty. So many of them empty.

“It’s pretty here,” I said to nobody in particular. I guess I was saying it to Cormac, but he seemed to know better than to respond. He just nodded and kept his eyes on the road. The clouds drifted down from the fishbowl sky like dandelion seeds blown off by God. Everything on a night like that felt like it had to have been done by God, whether you believed in that stuff or not. I thought to ask Cormac what he thought about God, then didn’t. But it was easy to tell. Men like Cormac are sustained exclusively and entirely by belief. It is belief that keeps them human.

“Your best friend is an asshole, Mac,” I said as the Wichita skyline started to come into view.

Mac just shook his head. “Harry doesn’t mean anything by it. He just likes getting under people’s skin.”

“You can’t tell me you never get sick of it.”

He cracked his neck.

“Come on, Cormac.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“You can’t be sometimes sick of a thing.” Outside the window, the wheat looked like it was burning. “You’re either sick of it or you aren’t.”

I wasn’t so sure, just then, that that was true. In fact, as the highway wound down to nothing and the lights rose on the evening’s stage, I felt like I had never been less sure of a thing in my entire life. But it sounded good, and I’d said it well, and so I let it be. I had given things a name.

—

            For six innings, I watched the baseball game and tried my best to grab Cormac by the arm whenever something exciting happened—which as far as I could tell was never, in the sport of baseball. There was, though, a certain illustrious magic about the way the lights fell on the grass and made it sharper, more vital, to say nothing of the atmosphere of the minor league park. It had the same shimmering feeling as a backyard cookout. Like the event was a holier thing than the itinerary. It struck me, at some point, how rare that was. And in that sense, I supposed I could see the appeal.

            The game itself, though, bored me to tears, and I thought about asking Cormac why he loved it so much, but figured his answer would fail to articulate itself, as his so often did, and only leave me more curious and dissatisfied. I tried different ideas out. He loves the slowness of it, I thought. The way it reflects him, accommodates the way he is. It moves at nobody’s pace but its own. It’s not even timed. Or, It’s a sport that lets you consider only your own movements, while you’re up there at the plate. You don’t need to contend with what anybody else is doing. But then I settled on the one that spoke most clearly to me, the one that I thought really wrapped Cormac up in a bow.

It’s the only sport where there is always time to make up for what’s been lost.

I decided that was the reason he loved it so much. That you could spend eight innings biding your time and win it all right at the end. I was proud of myself. I felt that I had cracked a code. And so, as the players ran off the field between innings, I looked at him.

“Cormac.”

He turned to me, the veins sticking out against the square simplicity of his temples, which looked suddenly attractive to me, solid and without room for argument.

“What’s up? Do you need another drink?”

“It’s not too late for this.”

His eyebrows knit. “What?”

“This can happen, Cormac,” I said. Then I held a hand up to his cheek and kissed him on the mouth. Firmly, I thought as I did it, but sweetly, too. His mouth was flat and straightforward. It was a kiss like an office cubicle. Then he rested one of his stone hands on my forearm, which was draped across the back of the seats. I broke the kiss off and looked at him as deeply as I could.

“You can have me.”

“Sherry,” he said, but I grabbed hold of his arm.

“He doesn’t have to get everything he wants.”

“Sherry,” he said. He was looking up toward the food court. “Harry’s here.”

I turned to look, and it was true; he was standing there in his backwards Cardinals hat, holding a hot dog that had been so heaped upon with relish and mustard it had ceased to resemble a hot dog. He was scanning the crowd. A beat passed, and then Cormac stood up and waved. Harry caught sight of him and broke into a toothy grin before gamboling down the concrete stairs and sliding into the seat next to me. He gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then he leaned across me to speak to Cormac.

“Mac, buddy,” he said. “I stand corrected about this place.”

Cormac blinked.

“You came,” I said. Harry gave me a funny look and then laughed through his nose at the way I’d said it, with such incredulity.

“Don’t look so surprised, Sher. I’ve gotta support my pal.”

He reached his arm around me and clapped Cormac on the shoulder. Cormac smiled, but he didn’t look at Harry. He pretended to be watching the infielders take warmups.

“You said you weren’t coming,” I said, dumbly.

“Eh.” He took a bite of his hot dog even though he still had things to say, which in the moment struck me as the most Harry thing he could possibly have done. “I wath being an athhole.” Then, when he’d swallowed, he leaned to Cormac again and said, “I really was, bud. My bad.”

Cormac waved a hand dismissively. Harry clapped his shoulder again.

“And I was really wrong about this place,” he said. “It’s hella nice. And I asked the lady at the hot dog stand, and she said security eats for free.” He turned to me and lifted his eyebrows mischievously while I kept looking at him like he was a ghost. “Then I said I was security.”

“And she bought that?” Cormac asked. He was looking at Harry and horribly smiling, genuinely smiling. He had one of those gaps in his teeth that made him look like a jack-o-lantern or a scarecrow. He looked big and towheaded and just flat dumb, smiling like that. But he looked happy.

Harry snorted. “I said I was plainclothes.”

“Jesus Christ,” Cormac said. Then he took a sip from his plastic cup of beer. “Our best and brightest.”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Harry laughed at himself and started rooting around in the bottom of his hot dog tray to eat the relish with his fingers. “What’s with you, Sher?” he said. “You look like you’re undead.”

I had a brief moment where I thought that seemed apt. Then Cormac said, “She’s just bored out of her mind, man. She’s peed three times.”

“Three times?” Cormac nodded. “That’s excessive,” Harry agreed. “Even for Sherry.”

I swallowed. “It’s just the beers,” I tried to say. My voice sounded hoarse and cracked like a smoker’s. “I’ve had some beers.”

“Don’t worry, Sher, if you get a new job, we’ll go to something you’re interested in.”

“How do you know Howl?” I asked. I hadn’t realized I was going to ask it until I did.

He snorted again. “Jesus, Sherry, are you high or something?”

“How do you know it?” I sounded desperate. Even manic, which was a word I tried to avoid being described as. It was getting close to hysterical. To crazy.

He popped some relish into his mouth. “I’ve read it, babe. I can read, you know.”

The way he said it made it seem like it wasn’t entirely a joke. It was the way he liked to say I was named after a wine. And so things tapered off into silence then, and for the rest of the game I sat there between them, these two ridiculous men, who I was feeling in that moment would always choose each other over everything, in spite of their flaws, their arrogance and their stupidity.  And the beauty of the summer seemed to be fading, then, with the beauty of the night. As though nothing was ever going to happen, here, in this narrow part of the world. As though nothing ever could.

—

            When Harry dropped me off at my apartment, I told him that we needed to break up. I said it kind of sternly, without venom, as I was stepping out of the truck. He was quiet for a minute, and I was expecting him to settle on something petulant, to beg or to lash out. But instead he started slowly nodding, sucking in his lower lip, until finally he seemed to arrive at something.

            “Okay, Sher,” he said. “If that’s what you need, then that’s okay.”

            The air buzzed around us with that gamboge cricket sound. Living room lights were falling out golden onto the lawns. Everything seemed still and indifferent. Then I said, “No.”

            “No?”

            “Fuck you, Harry,” I said.

            “Sherry, I—”

            “I slept with your best friend.” I said it before I had any time to think about it. Because it was unjust that Harry should have the right to be reasonable, just then. “I slept with your best friend because he’s a better person than you and he deserves it. And because you never deserved it.”

             “Okay, Sherry,” he said. He turned the key in the ignition. “I think you should go.”

        “I think you should go,” I said, and then Harry reached across the console and pulled the passenger side door closed. “I think you should go, you asshole!” I shouted. I was crying. I wasn’t sure if I was crying because I was angry or if I was angry because I was crying. He backed out of the driveway with his arm draped across the passenger headrest, his tongue out slightly in concentration. And the thing that stuck with me about that sight of him, which was the last one I would ever have, was that he didn’t look angry or hurt or even upset. He looked like a man trying to back a pickup truck out of a driveway. And then he was gone.

            That night, I walked the mile across town to Cormac’s house. I don’t know why I didn’t drive. I told myself it was because I’d drank too much, but the truth was that I felt sober as a priest. By the time I got there it was properly late. I pounded on his door for about three minutes before he finally opened it up. He was wearing boxers and a white tee-shirt and his chin was covered in little outgrowths of stubble. His face fell when he saw me even as he continued to squint against the light.

            “Jesus, Sherry. It’s 3am.”

            I slapped him across the face. “God damn it, Cormac.”

            He wiped a hand across his cheek and looked down at it as though he was checking for blood. He seemed earnestly surprised. Then he looked up at me.

            “You stupid goddamn idiot,” I said to him. I was crying again. “You stupid goddamn idiot.”

            “I’m not an idiot, Sherry.” His voice was quiet. Neutral.

            “Fuck you.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “You stupid idiot.”

            “What do you want, Sherry?”

           “I want you to fucking want something!” I shoved him in the chest, with two hands. He stumbled backwards a bit into his foyer. “For once in your life I want you to fucking want something!”

            “Sherry.”

            “This place is going to kill you, Cormac.” I looked down at the ground and let my hands, which I had raised again to push him, fall limp. “If you don’t leave soon it’s going to tear through you like wind. You’re going to spend your life working stupid little jobs in stupid little towns and waiting for some big moment to come and knock on your door. But it’s not coming, Cormac. You’ve got to get back out there or you’re never going to. He’s going to—they’re going to treat you this way forever. Over and over and over. And then you’re not going to realize it until it’s too late.” I held out my hands like sieves. “Until it’s slipped through your fingers.”

            “Sherry.”

I looked at him. His features were impassive except for his eyes. They were flickering with something I had never seen in Cormac before. It was a kind of fury and righteousness that I hadn’t thought he was capable of. He seemed prepared, for the first time in his life, to say something actual. But then he closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. And when he opened them it was gone.

            “Do you need a ride home?”

            I shook my head as tears began to well up in my eyes. “No,” I said thickly. “I’m good.”

           On that walk back, through the Kansas dark, I thought a lot about my father, and the things he’d never said before he left. I supposed my best guess at what the wrathful thing that had nearly snuck out of Cormac was would have to take up residence next to them. I also thought a lot about what Cormac had mentioned at the baseball game, about why he liked it so much. About how it was the only sport where you could always buy more time. I thought about it for just about the entire walk before I remembered that Cormac hadn’t said it at all. That certain things belonged to me.

—

           When I called my mother to tell her I was heading back to Pennsylvania, she seemed distracted. She was delighted to learn that I had broken up with Harry, though. She claimed this was really good for me. That I would finally be able to find something worth doing.

“You must be so relieved,” she said.  

           And I was, in a sense. But in another I was missing something that I seemed to have abandoned before I could even begin to understand it.

I think differently now about the field fires, about the beauty and the cruelty of them, about the intoxicating possibility that comes from being surrounded by fallible things, by nights that thrum with self-conception in the same way that people do, bold, awful, beautiful people, people who hurt you, people who have names. Sometimes, in the mirror, toward dusk, I catch sight of an expression I thought belonged to someone else, a lost, wide-eyed one that washes me in a warm chill of recognition, one that says, linger a while, stay, have a beer, life will be here in due time. And sometimes, for a moment, I do. I stay. Then, in a gesture so brief it could be a flicker, I regain my balance, I steady my breath, and whatever was there is lost behind the trees.