We looked around as if we expected to be caught when the kiss was over. We looked for anyone who might have seen. It was just the old black man with the mustache who looked, hat tilted back on his skull, leaning on that three-pronged cane.
Jacq returned from Savannah the next afternoon. She wanted to tell me about her time with the collector, but I wouldn’t listen. I told her I’d be staying in Atlanta. She would not be. I told her there was a return ticket booked in her name. She’d fly back to Alliance without me. Jacq didn’t care for the idea. She threw a fit in the cab, and I had to check her bag for her. It wasn’t until she was in line at security that she finally relented. Jacq couldn’t resist a parting shot, not in an airport. She said she was happy to be rid of me for a few days. “Even if the plane crashes and I die,” she said, “I’ll be glad to do it alone.”
I knew Anna would be waiting on the terrace the next morning. She knew I’d come sit with her. We lounged in the patio chairs and killed time and ate hungrily from a plate of melon and avocado slices. The air was heavy with smog and vapor, the sun already high. Plants had shot up all over the place, broad-leafed and waxy. Trees of heaven at the edges of parking lots, along the roadside, on the tops of hills. You couldn’t stop them, it seemed. They grew too fast to get rid of. They sprouted everywhere.
Anna played her radio that morning. We talked some, but didn’t have all that much to say. We’d seen each other again the night before for a movie at a mall theater near the hotel. There were drinks after that. We stayed up late talking. I didn’t mention that Jacq went home. Anna didn’t ask about my wife anymore, she didn’t question where Jacq was. Anna was uncomfortable thinking about it. It was easier to talk about her husband, to talk about Jon, since she couldn’t stop. I didn’t mind talking about him then, not at breakfast anyway, since there were open spaces to stare off into, a busy thoroughfare nearby to watch cars. I’d listen enough to respond now and then, although it wasn’t necessary. Anna just wanted to work her mouth.
I was thinking about pet names for pricks when I saw a Pomeranian wander out into the thoroughfare. I laughed when I saw it come out of the trees, a bouncing white puff of fur.
There was a neighborhood across the road, behind a trees of heaven clutch. The Pomeranian must have escaped from its yard and found its way to the thoroughfare, drawn by the noise. It looked pleased with itself as it approached the road, the way dogs do when they think they’re getting away with something, when they’re doing something stupid.
A woman gasped when she saw the dog, then everyone turned to the road, the traffic. Anna spun in time to see the Pomeranian struck by a car. We all saw. We all heard. The dog caught in the undercarriage of a gray Cadillac and spit out the back to tumble along the pavement. The Cadillac didn’t stop. The cars behind slowed and bowed around the dog once they saw it heaped in the center lane. Anna wondered why no one stopped to help. She asked how the driver could do that.
“Maybe they didn’t notice,” I said. She didn’t buy that.
“How couldn’t they?”
Some hotel workers went out and circled the dog. They helped direct traffic and gave the appearance that things were under control. No one wanted to touch the dog. They surrounded it and talked. We couldn’t hear what they said. “They’re deciding who will pick it up,” I guessed.
Eventually a man in a burgundy-red uniform came out and wrapped the dog in a pillowcase. He lifted it off the road and carried it to the parking garage.
We stayed in Anna’s room after that. She turned on the TV. I took my shoes and socks off.
It was three days like that. Anna curled under the hotel comforter to watch basic cable, the air conditioning on full blast, while I typed on my laptop at the Lucite bureau. I had to catch up on work, but I crawled in next to her when I was bored and hugged her from behind. She wore pajamas, black and furry, that zipped up in the front. Anna and I never slept together. I enjoyed her body like I did comfort food, like too much might make me sick. We napped and dozed. I laid my hand on her tummy and felt how soft it was. I rested my head on her shoulder and smelled her hair. Sometimes she reared into me to spoon, but that was as far as it went.
We hardly even talked. Anna didn’t mention Jon, not after what happened with the Pomeranian. She asked questions like we’d just met — which, I realized, was precisely the case.
“What’s it like there, where you live?” Anna asked. “Are there any people in Nebraska? I couldn’t live like that, out in the middle of nowhere. I get the creeps just thinking of all those cows out there, chewing grass.”
Jacq and I had been married seven years by then. We met in New York and were married there. She’s nine years older than me, from northwest Ohio originally. I grew up in Connecticut, in a banal, middle-class neighborhood, but the tiny travel agency I operated was in Chelsea. That’s where I lived when we met. My parents started the agency in the seventies and it wasn’t a bad business. We were a small outfit with regular clients. Then 9/11 happened. Almost all small agencies went out of business the next couple years. We were no different. My parents started the agency; it was shuttered on my watch. Then I started writing product descriptions for the online novelty mall. Then I married Jacq.
Once we were married Jacq convinced me to move out to the ranch she’d bought near Alliance. I had nothing else going. The agency was closed. My job with the Internet people was flexible. I felt like I might be getting a little old for New York. The idea of settling on the Ponderosa to grow into middle age sounded romantic. So we moved.
I liked it right away. There was a new house on the ranch — the hunting lodge, I called it — a guest house Jacq turned into her studio, plus lots of open valleys of dirt and rock I hiked in. I bought a pistol and a holster because there were coyotes, and damn if that didn’t excite me. Alliance had a country club where we’d go for drinks sometimes if we wanted to trade stories with locals, and a RadioShack and a pharmacy and a pizza place. Most of our food was shipped to us from an organic market run by a disembodied poet in Boulder, but we frequented the greasy cafes and steakhouses if we felt tolerant of shredded iceberg lettuce and Folgers crystals. There was a swimming pool, a track at the high school. There was more than that, but those were the places we went to. The nearest Wal-Mart was in Scottsbluff, an hour away, so a few of the local stores in Alliance avoided being run out of business. I appreciated that.
There was lots of time on the ranch. I learned how to use it. I answered e-mails, worked on my descriptions. I began expansive, free-form landscape projects I never intended to finish, left mounds of worm castings and hardwood mulch to erode across the prairie. I talked to my parents an hour every Sunday evening, something we did ever since I took over the agency from them. We didn’t really know what to say anymore. Mostly they bitched about the commercials for Priceline and Travelocity they saw on TV. If I was bored, I trawled airfares on my computer, in the old system, a black screen with green characters. It was all prompt commands, no windows, no clicking a mouse. I loved it. It was like traveling back to a time when you had to be an expert to run a computer, the good old days.
It wasn’t something I saw coming, but I liked living in a small town. (This is what I explained to Anna when she asked how I could stand a place like Alliance.) There’s something essentially decent about walking on Main Street with the rumble of pickup trucks circling to cruise a highway drag, or happening into a park when the Legion team is on the diamond. You can stand at the fence and watch the game. “We love that,” I said, sitting up out of Anna’s blankets. “The little kids race into the weeds after foul balls. The fathers chain-smoke and lean into the backstop to grumble. At night you can see the dome of light from the highway.”