Snake in the Road

“Time Thieves” by Carella Keil (originally published in Skyie Magazine, Vol. 4)

Sam and I had been up for a day or two when he asked if I wanted to go on a trip with him, to this auction he’d been invited to. Another dead, rich woman with no family to inherit her shit. Another amazing opportunity. I didn’t understand his question at first, I was so tired and so high that even sound was heavy.

He exhaled smoke, repeated himself. His smile drooped over his chin.

“What’s gonna be there?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were glassy, narrowed at the television. He didn’t teach on Fridays, so we usually spent the day sinking into his couch and smoking weed, sucking hummus off our fingertips and watching movies like Chungking Express in our underwear. Sam’s parents still paid for his subscription to the Criterion Collection.

I was home on Fridays because I was unemployed again. I’d barbacked for a while, I’d nannied for one of Sam’s colleagues, I’d walked neighborhood dogs through an app on my phone, but I couldn’t seem to stick to anything. Most recently, up until a few weeks ago, I was a waitress at a brunch place downtown. We got a lot of bachelorette parties and hungover college students whose parents were visiting for the weekend. Sam wasn’t mad when I told him I quit. He was just confused when I couldn’t explain why I did it. He thought I liked it, and I did like it, until I didn’t anymore. That’s it. I just couldn’t write down the orders and report them to the cooks and clear my tables any longer. I would stare at my notepad, at the lined pages, physically unable to move my hand and write the words “bottomless mimosas” and “egg white combo.” I would have gotten fired soon enough, so I just stopped showing up before it happened. Sam blamed it on depression, which he was sure I had. “Everyone has it,” he’d said. “It’s the scourge of our generation.”

 It was late afternoon, and through the windows in Sam’s apartment, beyond the low Savannah skyline, the sun was setting. I had to squint to see the television. 

I repeated my question. “What’s gonna be there?”

“I don’t know any specifics,” Sam said, finally, one finger in his mouth to dig in his molars. “But from what my guy’s heard, there could be some really cool shit. A lot of Chippendales and Hepplewhites and a cabinet full of Fenton and Steuban glassware. And it’s not confirmed, but there might be a Bechstein piano in pretty good condition. I’d lose my fucking mind. I’ve never seen one in person.”

Sam had a PhD in American history. He’d written his dissertation on the antebellum American home, which came in handy for his side venture: trading and dealing in antique junk. He mostly did coins and dishware, sometimes jewelry. He didn’t handle much big stuff, like art or furniture, but he was working his way up to it. Around his apartment, there were boxes full of bubble-wrapped vases and teapots, precious objects I wasn’t allowed to touch. He was trying to teach me how to do it for myself, and I wasn’t that bad. With his help, I’d even made a little money. We went to estate sales and private auctions all over the place, and I would watch what I earned sit in the bank account my parents set up for me years ago, knowing there was nothing in the entire world I wanted to buy.

I asked Sam where the auction would be.

“Arlington. Just outside of D.C.” He paused to smile and shake his head. “I can’t believe I got the invite. There’s gonna be, like, legit collectors there.”

I tried to map it out in my mind, how we’d climb up the East Coast in Sam’s Subaru, but I couldn’t get the cities in the correct order – Raleigh and Charlotte and Richmond, none of it was stacking up right. I was so confused I forgot how to form words. After the movie ended, Sam pulled my face toward his and pushed my bangs out of my eyes. My hair was shaggy back then, faded from bright, box red into thin-blooded pink. I looked at Sam. The edges of his face and all of his features were muddled, like a finger-painting. If he hadn’t been holding me, I wouldn’t have believed him to be solid.

He asked what I thought of the idea.

“That’s pretty far,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been that far north. Since moving into Sam’s place and slipping through the service industry, time had unwound and tangled, like a long, frayed ribbon. I went days without going outside. It was easy.

“I was thinking we’d break it up in North Carolina,” he said. “I have a friend who lives in the country, outside Fayetteville. She’s fine with us staying the night.” Sam was always trying to save money like this. If he couldn’t find someone for us to crash with, we’d sleep in the backseat of his car on the side of the highway, fighting for warmth under the Canada Goose jacket his parents gave him for Christmas. He didn’t seem to find this ironic.

“You’ve done your research,” I said. 

He smiled, his lips just parted. “Well, think of it as a vacation,” he said. “As well as a business opportunity.”

We would get ourselves together on Saturday and leave Sunday morning. It would be a tight turnaround. The auction was Monday afternoon, and he had to be back by Wednesday. His students had a midterm.  

Sam packed light. He brought his camera, several notebooks, a small, zippered bag for pens and paperclips and his mini stapler, a suit and loafers for the day of the auction. I packed light too, but only because I didn’t have very many things. I slept in Sam’s old boxers and sweatshirts, and I usually wore his least favorite button-downs out in public, tying them up around my waist or letting them hang down my legs. I had one dress I always wore to the auctions—I’d stolen it from Target a while ago. Except for a pair of heels Sam bought me to match the dress, my only shoes were those white Adidas sneakers everyone wore back then. I’d borrowed them from my last roommate and took them with me when I left. I filled the backpack I’d had since high school with mostly Sam’s clothes, a tube of mascara, and a phone charger I’d found at the Savannah Greyhound station. And that was it. We were ready.

Sam slept like death the night before we left for the auction, collapsing into the mattress chin-first, heels-up. Most of his limbs were stretched out heavy on top of me, his skin a sheet between the sheet. I closed my eyes and waited to sleep, but it only happened in fits, like blinking but for longer. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want Sam to wake up and try to comfort me or nudge me into sex.

I wasn’t sleeping back then because I couldn’t. Sam wasn’t sleeping because he needed to get high and stay up late grading papers and doing research on the early American settlers, their currency and trade patterns, so he could get tenure someday. He seemed to enjoy the routine. The sun would rise, and he would come up behind me to stretch his arms around my body, bucking his head down into my shoulder blades to tell me good morning in this jokey way. Like, can you believe it? We did it again. I would be almost feverish, my stomach wrung out like an old towel, saying nothing with my dry mouth until he went to take a shower.

I did think about leaving sometimes. Most nights, most mornings, every afternoon before he got home from work. But I didn’t have the tools to make it happen – no money, no car, no next destination. And by that point, I was too tired to come up with a plan.

On the way out of town, Sam bought us iced coffees, greasy hash browns, bagels that turned to glue in our mouths – a luxury. He was in a good mood. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, bobbing his head to a playlist of ‘70s hits, and I watched Savannah shrink into a blur of palm trees, rainbow-colored houses, canopy roads, cobblestone.

“Music isn’t good like this anymore,” Sam said. “I mean, don’t you just wish you could’ve seen him live?” The song was “Higher Ground.” Sam mumbled the lyrics in a soft, ashamed falsetto. He was tone-deaf and knew it.

“Stevie Wonder’s not dead,” I said. “You could still see him live if you wanted.”

Sam pushed his glasses up his nose and wrinkled his eyebrows together. “Yeah, but it’s not like it would be the same. His voice is, like, old now.” He started skipping through his music.

A few miles later, he drove over a thin black snake coiling across the road. The wheels went over it like anything else in the way. Sam didn’t flinch.

“Oops,” he said. “Poor guy.”

“My grandmother always told us that was bad luck,” I said. “To drive over a snake on your way out of town.” I hadn’t even remembered her saying it until I repeated it out loud, but she did. I could hear it. She was the only former Southerner in a family full of New Yorkers, and living here, I felt her presence stronger than ever. My family rarely went on road trips, but any time we did, I would go stiff with fear, hunting snakes out the windshield for hours.

“Huh. I have literally never heard that before,” Sam said.

We took one break at a rest stop outside of Charleston. Families ate their Subway and Arby’s and Wendy’s at picnic tables in sweating silence, tapping at their phones. Sam bought us granola bars from the vending machines. When we were back on the road, I opened the granola bar and ate half in one sawdusty bite.

“Don’t ruin your appetite,” Sam said. “I think we’re doing lunch once we get there.” He put his right hand on my thigh and flexed out his fingers.

“You just bought this,” I said. “I thought you wanted me to eat it.”

“I just don’t want Ruby to get offended if you aren’t hungry.” He took a break from the road to smile at me. Like he was just begging me to get it. 

My neck went hot. “Ruby?” I asked. “Ruby who?”

“Ruby Greenwald,” he said, as if that wasn’t his own last name.

“Ruby, Ruby? Ex-wife Ruby?” I asked. “We’re staying with your ex-wife?”

Sam blinked at the road. “Didn’t I say that?”

“No. You said a friend.”

“Well, she is a friend,” he said, all calmness and rightness. “A marriage doesn’t just end, Cass.” He took a sip of his murky iced coffee and smacked his lips.

“Marriages just end all the time. What the hell are you talking about?” My own parents, two wilted people who hadn’t spoken since that last day in court, once shared three kids, a purebred French Bulldog, and actual property in Brooklyn, and their marriage ended almost overnight. I’d told him all these facts. It felt like something he should have remembered.

I stared at Sam and out my window and into the backseat. No escape. I strained against the strap of my seatbelt. “Are you being serious right now? Is this a joke?”

Sam took a deep, huffing breath and started messing with the AC. “Look. Sorry I didn’t tell you, but it’s really not that big a deal. Once you go through something like what Ruby and I went through, you can’t just not be part of each other’s lives.” He sighed like I was being very unkind. “And I want her to meet the new person I’m in love with. I don’t expect you to understand, but that matters to me.”

I didn’t know what I wasn’t understanding. Sam talked about Ruby whenever he was drunk and feeling somber, which was almost every time he got drunk. I knew all about the meet-cute at freshman orientation with the icebreakers, the mixer at Theta Chi, the college relationship that almost ended but never did, the on-the-cheap wedding at twenty-three, the heartbreaking but very mature decision to divorce at twenty-eight. Several failed attempts to get pregnant and brief, meaningless affairs in the middle, and there you had it: Sam and Ruby.

There was no way to talk about Ruby without pissing Sam off, but if I didn’t engage with the endless processing of his failed marriage, I would also piss him off. His depiction of Ruby wasn’t wistful or longing but worshipful. Fossilized. He didn’t love her in the same way he used to, I didn’t think, but he still admired her – her opinions, her beliefs, her sacrifices for causes and friends and art. She was a worthwhile person, he’d told me. She had so much to offer.

He once told me this story where Ruby publicly contradicted him, humiliated him really, in front of his favorite professor and a bunch of his classmates their junior year of college at a reception for some American Studies speaker. He told me what happened in a slow, careful voice and then went silent. I was stupid. I thought he was revealing a wound for me to tend to.

“That’s horrible,” I said. “She shouldn’t have done that to you.” We were sitting in his bathtub in soapy, chilling water, just a few weeks into becoming what we were. I reached out to touch his kneecap, peeking above the water, and he recoiled.

“She was right to call me out. I didn’t know what I was talking about.” He looked away from me, unwilling to let me take it back. Ruby was good and I was wrong and he was foolish, even in a memory I hadn’t been around to make.

We spent hours in almost-silence. The less I spoke, the more Sam fidgeted, the more he scoffed, the more he rubbed my thigh to make peace and yanked his hand back when it didn’t work. South Carolina became North in a blur of green grass, yellow dirt, and thin, cottony clouds flattening into sky. I finished the granola bar in small, loud bites and read billboards in my head: It’s Never Too Late to Repent, Call Now for Hot Girls, Fireworks in 20 Miles.

We were about thirty minutes away when Sam slapped the steering wheel. “You can be so fucking immature sometimes. Do you want to go back? Is that what you want?” His face was red. “What do you want from me? Seriously?”

I crossed my arms. “You just should have told me,” I said.

Sam ran his fingers through his hair and breathed loudly, his mouth open.

“I know,” he said. “Sorry. I just want this to go well.”

I didn’t ask why. He took the exit, and at the next red light, he yanked my body toward him so he could kiss me, palming the underside of my skull with both hands.

“Sorry,” he said. “Really.” I nodded to make it done.

***

Ruby’s house was a small, brick ranch-style on a one-lane road, tucked against a scraggly thicket of trees and tall grass that needed cutting. Her closest neighbor was a quarter mile away, some shirtless guy on a mower who waved when we drove past. When we pulled up, Ruby was sitting on a wicker chair in her driveway with her back to the road, painting a large canvas on an easel. She looked behind her, saw Sam’s car, and threw her head back to laugh. She was barefoot and wearing a long, paint-stained smock over her clothes. The canvas was completely white, primed and wet. She took a long time moving the easel and chair out of our way. Sam pulled into the driveway and cleared his throat before turning off the car. He got out without looking at me. Ruby stood a few feet away from him, shaking her head with this teasing grin, and hugged him with her hands on the back of his neck.

“Hey, babe,” she said, startling me already. I hadn’t expected such familiarity.

“Hey, Rube,” he said back, his voice muffled by her tight curly hair. I watched them hug and sway like that for some of the longest seconds of my life. I got the bags out of the back seat, and when I came back, they’d broken apart. Sam turned away from me – his eyes were damp. Ruby’s weren’t.

“Oh, wow,” she said, looking at me like I was the beautiful one. She pulled me in just like she had with Sam and held me almost as long. I felt my body go rigid against her, but she only clutched tighter and tighter. She said how much she’d been looking forward to meeting me. When she pulled away from me, finally, I was out of breath.

“Well, let’s get inside,” she said. “Away from all this heat.”

Ruby’s home smelled like old paper and soil, and every room was painted a different color – the kitchen moss green, the dining room hot pink, the foyer a creamy lavender. The furniture was all mismatched – bamboo bar stools, antique side tables, quilted armchairs. There were things everywhere. Plants dying and sprouting, piles of books and then shelves of books, all sorts of sculptures and souvenirs and small bowls filled with coins and pins and even smaller things. Paintings dominated her many-colored walls. All by her, all with the giant, looping R in the bottom right corner, all the same style: color-blocking, abstract faces caught in the middle of a moan or a scream, sometimes actual handprints muddying up the brushstrokes. I had never been in a house with so much stuff. I was taking it all in when a skinny black cat rubbed up against my legs and dug its claws into my jeans. I shook it loose, and it bit my ankle. We frowned at each other.

Ruby told us to leave our bags by her staircase and led us into the kitchen. She poured three full glasses of sour white wine. I drank, and Sam and Ruby talked: about the drive, how gorgeous it had been, how much they loved road trips, and what about the one they took to Wyoming their senior year of college for the parks and the mountains because who really wants to go to Miami or Cabo for spring break, how magnificent that had been, how not enough people drove like that anymore and made themselves uncomfortable with their surroundings. They spoke beautifully together, their intonations and pitches not overlapping but harmonizing. One sentence finished, and the next began in a seamless verbal leap, no moment wasted in silence where syllables could be engaged instead.

I had nothing to add. I drained my glass in minutes.

And then Ruby turned to me. “So, what about you? Are you a fan of the classic American road trip?” She shimmied around a lot while she talked. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

Sam snorted. “Cass can’t even drive.” He sipped and remembered himself. “But she might try for her license soon.”

“Oh?” Ruby asked. “Just never wanted to learn?”

“I grew up in New York,” I said. “Not much need.”

Ruby smiled. “I’d love to know how you ended up down here.”

“It’s not very interesting,” I said, and then, because I didn’t want her to think I was being cute about it, “I’m surprised you aren’t in a bigger city with some thriving art scene.”

Ruby topped off all our glasses and opened another bottle. “You’d be shocked how much scene there is out here. Away from that urban mess. I don’t think I’ll ever live in a city again.” 

“You always talked about running away to Paris,” Sam said from the rim of his glass.

“I don’t think so?” said Ruby. “I’ve never really liked Paris. There’s trash everywhere. How can anyone call such a dirty place the city of love?” She gave me a confiding look I couldn’t return. I’d only been to Paris once, years ago when my family was still together, but I’d fallen for every inch of it, even the dirty ones.

Sam smiled benignly. “I’m sure you said it.”

“No, babe, I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe you’re thinking of someone else.”

He just shook his head and kept smiling.

Ruby turned back toward me and leaned in close. She reached out and curled a piece of my hair between her fingers. There was something dark and rusty beneath her nails, dirt or paint or blood. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you a natural redhead?”

 “Nope,” I said. “Totally artificial.” I was trying hard to not look shocked.

 Ruby nodded, serious-like, but her lips were twitching. “Yeah, just one of those genes that’s dying out, I guess.” She let go of my hair and brushed her hand against my shoulder.

“Apparently,” I said. “Recessive.”

Her face was still only inches away from mine. She smelled herbal and floral with a tangy bodily musk beneath it all. She turned back to Sam. His eyes were locked onto us, his mouth wet and gaping slightly. I should have smacked him.

“Well, she’s a total dream, Samuel,” Ruby said. It was almost funny. Compared to her I was nothing, and we all knew it.

“She’s something,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. I could taste the wine we’d all been drinking. It wasn’t any better on someone else’s lips.

“I’m so happy you two could stay with me.” She turned to Sam. “And even happier you haven’t given up on your antiquing hobby, babe. I’m sure it helps to relieve some of that publication frustration.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a few pubs, actually. Recently.”

“Oh. That’s so great.” She smiled. “And it’s so important. What you do.”

“Couldn’t agree with you more. Obviously.” Sam smiled back. “So. What are you thinking for lunch?” he asked, arm around my shoulder.

“Oh, yeah. I’m sure you’re both starving,” she said. “Sorry, I already ate. But I have lots here. Maybe a salad? Sandwiches?” She opened her fridge. A half-wilted head of lettuce, a stick of butter in its wrapper, and more wine.

Sam let go of me. “Oh, I thought – sorry, no. You said you were making something. That’s why I asked.”

“Did I?” she asked, eyes wide. She brought her finger to her lips. “I don’t remember saying that. I barely have time to cook for myself.” She laughed.

Ruby stood with her finger still on her lips, and Sam rubbed his bearded neck. The cat trilled and prodded at the three of us, but no one stirred.

“Maybe we could go out?” I asked.

Ruby undid her smock and threw it on a crowded table. “Perfect,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

***

I sat in the backseat, wedged against a crate overflowing with things Ruby had bought at a thrift store: broken picture frames, ceramic models of Betty Boop, planters with geometric patterns, an old cotillion handbook, several pairs of reading glasses with various prescriptions.

Ruby and Sam, allies once more, rolled down their windows and started laughing again about the old days. They talked about Baltimore, where Sam had finished grad school, where life had been blissful, apparently. I was already tipsy, and the outside air made me hot and fidgety.

“What about that shitty little apartment on Union?” asked Ruby. 

“You loved that place,” said Sam, protesting, grinning.

“No, I loved that you loved that place. I mean, the rats were big as dogs. Seriously. And remember our landlord?” She pointed and started speaking with a garbled accent I couldn’t place, imitating this landlord, and Sam batted her hand away, wheezing. They kept touching each other, and I felt things I didn’t understand.

“How long have you lived here, Ruby?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

I looked out the window and saw the country like I’d come to know it in the South: ugly grass, bushy pine trees, hearty oaks, long stretches of road curving between woods, and miles of nothing at all. We passed a post office, a Dollar General, a country store with boarded-up windows, a McDonalds. Cows behind fences, staring out with their dopey eyes, more houses just like Ruby’s, yards full of bare-legged children, women letting out dogs, men on farm equipment.

After almost half an hour, Ruby pulled into the parking lot of a place called Slim’s Kitchen. There was a small stage and sticky dance floor in the middle and filmy metal tables rounding out the edges. It was just four p.m., and the only people there were men, the all-day drinking crowd. Sam looked around skeptically, trying to pretend he was charmed, while Ruby kissed the cheeks of two older guys on their way out, greeting them by name. She glanced back at us with a smug sort of smile.

I didn’t want to be left alone with either Sam or Ruby, so I offered to get the drinks. Sam handed me money, and Ruby ordered for all three of us. The two of them sat down at a table by the stage. Sam had that look on his face, like there was some sort of issue to address.

There was one younger guy finishing a beer at the bar. He wore a baseball cap browned with sweat, branded with a team name that meant nothing to me. I ordered, feeling him watch me the way Sam had once watched me, with a certainty that eventually I would turn my head and let him make his case. So I turned. He was ready.

“You’re with the art lady?” he asked, gravel-voiced, placidly handsome. He nodded to my boyfriend and his ex-wife.

“I have the honor, yes,” I said.

He nodded like he knew exactly what I meant. “How long you in town for?”

“Just until morning,” I said. “You?”

“I’m also out of here tomorrow. I start a ranching job in Colorado on Tuesday.” This was disappointing. I’d hoped he’d be someone like Ruby, doing something just as annoying and misplaced. I wanted to be able to make fun of him.

The bartender placed three whiskeys before me in a neat little triangle.

“Shouldn’t you be packing up or something? This seems like a bad use of your time.”

He smiled again, like he was winning. “I’m Gavin.” He held out his hand.

I shook. I didn’t say my name. “Well, good luck. Be safe. There’s all sorts of danger out there. Snakes.” It was his hand that let go first.

“There’s snakes here too,” he said. “You have a nice one.”

I walked back to the table with the glasses balanced preciously. Sam and Ruby weren’t speaking to each other. Sam took his glass without speaking and finished it in one gulp, glaring around the room, at anything but Ruby. She sipped and swirled her drink around before dropping her glass back on the tabletop. Her face was masklike, cool and unbothered. I drank slowly, still feeling the heat from Gavin’s hand on my mine, the cracks in his palm like gullies in the earth. I turned my neck to look at him. He wasn’t looking back.

“So how did you two meet? I’m dying to know,” Ruby said to me. There was a smear of white paint beneath her chin.

“At a bar, actually,” said Sam. He clasped his hand on my shoulder, and I felt my body buckle beneath it. “We got to talking, and I knew. I knew just like that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We knew.” But I hadn’t known anything. I was all kinds of fucked up that night. I don’t remember a word I said to Sam. Some friends and I had bailed on Nashville a few weeks earlier, but I split with them in Atlanta. I met and dropped people until I got to Savannah to meet up with an ex-boyfriend’s brother and his girlfriend. They gave me coke but told me I couldn’t stay at their apartment. I was in a bind, broke, with nowhere I was meaning to be. That was five months earlier, and not much had changed for me since then, except for Sam, who I saw looking. That I do remember. I went back to his apartment because he didn’t seem like the type to murder me, and he never asked me to leave, so I didn’t.

“How old are you?” Ruby smiled. Sam squirmed.

“Twenty-four last December,” I said. “Sagittarius.”

“Did you go to school?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I didn’t finish.”

“Why not?”

“Couldn’t see the point in the academia thing,” I said. Sam’s smile turned plastic, and even Ruby flinched with well-educated shame.

“Okay. So what’s next? What are you passionate about? What fuels your inner fire?”

I looked at Sam, who wasn’t going to help me. I looked back at Gavin, who was talking to the bartender, drinking another beer, not any sort of savior. I looked at Ruby, who was hungry for something I wouldn’t be able to give her. I’ve tried your way and failed, I wanted to tell her. I’ve tried music and writing and photography and even math and science and history, too. I’ve tried computers. I’ve tried stars and planets and plants. I used to be like you, I used to believe I had something to give, something only I could do. But I couldn’t find it, and even if I did, I couldn’t express it with any means, not through auction houses or education or putting broken things back together to fill up my hutches and shelves. I have nothing to give to this world. All I can do is take as little as possible, to maintain balance as best I can.

“I’m thinking about getting into painting,” is what I said.

Ruby laughed wildly, a glorious rushing sound like boiling water spilling out of a pot. She touched my hand, rubbing her thumb along the ridge of my knuckles. Sam smacked the table, his college ring making a tinny noise against the metal surface, and I jumped.

“She doesn’t have to defend herself to you,” he said.

“Sorry for taking an interest in your partner,” she said. “You’d do exactly the same.”

“You don’t need to use your success as a weapon, that’s all I’m getting at.”

“Why?” asked Ruby. “Wouldn’t you if you had it?” I half-expected her to growl. Sam made a small, choking noise.

I looked back at Gavin. He was walking toward the bathrooms, down a dark, angled hallway past the bar. I finished my whiskey. It burned through me, to the tip of my spine.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I waited outside the men’s bathroom door, smelling urine and beer and bleach. The walls were cool and stained with mildew and water damage. I couldn’t see the rest of the bar or hear any of its noise. I shut my eyes. It wouldn’t ever end. It would go on like this forever, I would accumulate them, the Sams and Rubys of this world, like mercury, getting fuller and heavier while they shed me like sunburned skin. I would die untangling this human knot inside me, prying fingers apart, begging them to just shut up, please. Just so I could think for a second.

I held my breath until Gavin came out. I didn’t wait long, but I was still lightheaded when he opened the door. I inhaled. He was unsurprised and smiling, looking at me in that same knowing way. He stood before me and touched his hand, the one he shook with, behind my ear. He positioned himself in front of me, opening his body to shield me from the hallway, nudging my legs between his. I kissed him first. We stayed there for a long time, pushing back and forth, mostly silent. The floor was sticky, anchoring our shoes in place before each other. I felt his free hand reach for the button on my jeans and I moved my hips forward until I could feel his fingers beneath my clothes. Sometime later, he released me. He stared me right in the eyes and squared my shoulders up against the wall and walked away. I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and combed my fingers through my hair. I went back to the main room feeling lighter. Gavin was gone. His bottles were cleared.

Sam and Ruby had ordered another round of drinks and a plate of wings for the table.

“You were a while,” Sam said, pouting.

“There was a line,” I said. Ruby cocked her head. We were the only women in the bar.

I picked up my whisky and toasted to my new friend.

***

We drank for hours, throwing back shot after shot until Ruby announced it was time to go home. Sam drove her car back, his eyes laser-focused on the road to keep from swerving and speeding more than he already was. Ruby was giggly and liquid, leaning forward to massage Sam’s earlobes, using my fist as a microphone to sing along with Sam’s music, shaking her hair all over the place. She was enchanting and enraging and impossible to stop. I would open my mouth to yell at her, call her out, and the words died in my mouth, subdued by the pleasure of watching such a beautiful woman possess the entire space she occupied, even if it meant there was no room for me inside it.

When we got out of the car at her house, she leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I jumped, and she lurched forward to kiss me again on the lips. I let her, I leaned in, and then I stopped. She covered her mouth, feigning surprise.

Sam was standing at the front door watching us, keys in hand.

“I’m gonna change,” I said, pushing past them both.

I went upstairs and found a room with two folded towels on a bed. The comforter was lime green and rough to the touch. The room was brimming with Ruby’s things, like everywhere else. The walls were noisy with her art. Sam joined me minutes later. I didn’t want to look at him.

“Look, I’m not bothered by that. Like, it’s not a big deal. I’m not mad at you,” he said. He patted the bed for me to sit beside him.

I took the deepest breath I could. “Okay. If you brought me here to fuck her in front of you, or fuck her with you, or watch you fuck her, just know I’m not doing it,” I said, as if he wouldn’t have been able to convince me. “Keep me out of your shit.”

“What?” he asked, an edgy, drunk whisper. He was just sincere enough to make me sound crazy. He shook his head like an old nun. 

“I’m just saying, I’m not getting involved.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”

I rubbed my face. “She’s just so touchy, Sam. It freaks me out.”

He peeled off his t-shirt. I watched the moles on his stomach stretch with his arms. “She’s always been like that. With everyone. It’s her love language.”

“Ew,” I said.

“Don’t be so judgmental. Just because you aren’t… warm, doesn’t mean something’s, like, wrong with her. She’s just trying to be nice to you.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Look, this is awkward for everyone. I knew it would be.”

“Why did you bring us here, then? If you knew it would be like this?”

“I’m just trying to make you a part of my life.”

“If this is your life, actually, I’m not sure that’s possible for me.”

He stared. “I don’t know why you make it so hard for me to be good to you.” He pulled on a new shirt and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Paintings rattled in their frames.

I was so tired then, more tired than I could ever remember being. It was beyond the not sleeping, and beyond that day, and beyond the next. I lay on top of the covers and closed my eyes. When I woke up, an antique-y looking alarm clock told me it was one in the morning, but Sam wasn’t there. My head was pounding.

I could hear voices, his and hers, so I followed them down the hallway to a shut door. The hardwood creaked, so I walked on my toes. I pressed my ear against the door and listened. Their sounds were muffled, all I could hear were the sharpened ends of sentences and rare, angry words: joke, over, child, time, mistake, fuck, fault. I never heard my name. I sat down outside the door. Ruby’s cat joined me, circling my body before puddling out in my lap. We sat there for a long time. I don’t know what I was waiting for, and I never got it anyways. They just kept going.

I went back to the guest room and got into bed. The cat settled at my feet. My head was still aching, caught in the limbo state between drunk and hungover. I stayed awake until four. Sam never came to bed, but eventually I stopped hearing them fight.

I woke with the sun filtering into the room through a pair of yellowed curtains. There was a cooling spot where the cat had been. Sam’s side of the bed was still made up. I walked downstairs to the smell of coffee, burnt bread, and Ruby. She sat at the kitchen table in a large t-shirt with her hair tied back. She was reading a magazine and digging a spoon through a bowl of yogurt, looking so harmless and domestic I barely recognized her.

“Where’s Sam?” I asked.

“’Morning,” she said. “Hungry? I actually do have breakfast food.” She smiled.

“Where is he?” It was too bright in there. Sunlight bounced against the white tile floors, directly into my eyes.

“Oh, long gone. He left a couple hours ago.”

 I stared at the clock – it was almost ten.

“What? Is he coming back?”

Ruby clicked her tongue. “He didn’t say. But I wouldn’t count on it. I think he’d just hit his limit. He’s like that. Trust me.” 

“What happened?” I asked. “What the fuck did you do?”

Ruby flipped a page of her magazine. “You should be grateful, honestly. You don’t even know what kind of favor I’ve just done you.”

“I didn’t ask. Jesus Christ,” I said. I sat across from her, expecting anger that didn’t come. “What now? I mean, really? What am I supposed to do?”

“Whatever you want,” she said. She got up to refill her coffee and grabbed an extra mug for me. “You could stay. With me.” She handed me the coffee. 

I sipped. We looked at each other. She was right, I could have stayed, and I was tempted. I wouldn’t get in her way more than anything else she owned. What an exhilarating game to play, to see if I could do for her what Sam couldn’t. But there was no getting around the fact that eventually I would be crowded out or replaced or painted over, and one way or another, I’d be abandoned again. It was easier to never let it happen.

I said no, and Ruby took it well. She said I was going to be fine. People leave you or they stay. They come back or they don’t. It’s only as personal as you make it.

I gathered my stuff and stole toothpaste and facewash from the bathroom. Ruby left me at the door with a side-hug and twenty dollars she had in her wallet. She offered me a ride to the bus station, but I said no. I started walking in the direction she pointed me toward, remembering, like a jolt, Sam and his apartment and Savannah and the auction. It didn’t feel like it had happened to me. It was already hard to see him with any real clarity. I almost laughed.

Only a few minutes into my walk, I heard a car horn behind me and the skid of tire on pavement. When I turned, Gavin was at the helm of a dusty, red Silverado. Same hat, same shirt, same hands gripping the wheel like it was flesh. He rolled down his window.

“I thought you might be staying out here,” he said. “At the art lady’s house.” I looked at him and into the bed of his truck – two cardboard boxes, a duffel bag, a guitar case. Nothing else. He shrugged and jerked his head at the empty passenger seat. “Come on, then,” he said.

My grandmother used to say what a lot of grandmothers say, about God and doors and windows. I looked at Gavin, the roughness, the tenderness beneath that was probably only imaginary, not a window because no one can be, but maybe a rope to cling to for a while.

I threw my bag in the back with his stuff. I walked around the truck to the passenger door, and Gavin leaned over to unlock it for me. He took his foot off the brake, and we drove until day turned into night and the dashboard clock stopped matching the time zone, and I felt the rest of my life opening up before me like a gift, like an accident, like nothing I could control, widening the gap between me and all those past, unpleasant things. 

About the Author

Sophia Shealy received her MFA in Fiction from Florida State University in 2023. She was recently named a finalist in the Sewanee Review's fifth annual Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction contest. 

About the Artist

Carella Keil is a Canadian writer and digital artist. In 2023 her artwork has appeared on the covers of Glassworks Magazine, Colors: The Magazine and Frost Meadow Review and is forthcoming on the covers of Nightingale & Sparrow and Straylight Magazine. Find her on instagram.com/catalogue.of.dreams and twitter.com/catalogofdream.