Peter stepped from the car onto the sidewalk, stuck his thumb in the straps of his overalls, and gave a long, low whistle. The old oak had been wrenched from the ground, and the garage was a heap of splinters. The sit-down mower had survived the crash; it stood naked in the drizzle. The house looked generally intact, though some of the upstairs shutters had been torn away. Lucy barked from the back seat, and he turned and opened the car door to let her join him.

A flock of papers fluttered across the grass. He stooped to pick up a few soaked pages: tax returns, medical records from when Joanne was alive, and, he saw with a terrible shudder, the draft of the novel he’d typed by hand. The urge to collect the pages seized him, but the futility of the exercise drew him back into himself. He let the pages drop, another casualty of the storm.

The tour inside the house was sobering. The back door had blown open, and water was dripping from the landing down the stairs into the basement. Broken glass littered the deck. The view into the backyard made him wince—Joanne’s precious rose bushes were stripped bare and the ground was ponding. He had to yank Lucy back from exploring lest she cut her paws or fall into a hole. He put her in the bathroom, where she barked and whined.

His bed was unmade as he’d left it; the bathroom mirror hung open from when he’d grabbed his toothbrush and Cymbalta on the way out the door. He was glad this adventure hadn’t been complicated by fuzzy teeth and a fuzzy brain. More water damage in the upstairs front bedroom where Joanne had spent her last weeks. It had been months since he’d looked inside that room, and unwelcome images flooded his mind: the pallor, the sores, her moans of confusion. He shook them off and forced himself to enter the room.

A framed photo of the two of them had blown off the dresser. The glass had shattered. A shard sliced his thumb as he picked it up. A few drops of blood landed on the picture, right where his chin rested on the top of her head.

Peter looked out the window and saw his neighbor, Sal, who looked as lost as he felt. She was staring up at her house from the driveway, shading her eyes with her hand. He meant to call out to her, but blood was starting to drip on the carpet. He walked to the hall closet and grabbed a washcloth. By the time he returned to the window, she was gone.

Lucy’s barks from the bathroom were getting frantic. When he let her out, she dashed around the kitchen like a crazy dog, then bounded up to him and tried to lick his hands.

“Easy girl, it’s okay. It’s nothing we can’t fix,” he consoled her, trying not to think of his novel. “Let’s go see how Sal is holding up.”

 

He found her sitting on the steps of her back deck, staring blankly into her yard. Behind her, half the house was gone. An upstairs door dangled by one hinge. She gave a half smile when Lucy ran up to her.

“Glad you’re okay, yellow dog,” she murmured. “Hell of a storm, huh?”

They exchanged their storm stories. They’d both spent the previous night on opposite sides of the high school auditorium. She’d been afflicted with a snoring neighbor. He’d had to leave Lucy in his truck and had tossed and turned all night worrying about her.

Both of Sal’s cats were missing. She had left them in the house, hoping for the best. Peter looked down at the ground for a long moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said uselessly. “That’s hard.” He resisted suggesting they’d return.

She glanced up at her house and snorted a laugh.

“Plus, I threw out my back last week when I was trying to clean up some old boxes in the attic. I had an appointment with the orthopedist today.”

Peter raised his eyebrows and blew out a long breath that puffed his cheeks.

“And the office is still closed—I checked.”

“Yeah, that’s like, a real perfect—.” He stopped himself. “Oh jeez.”

“Yes, well,” she said with fake but friendly brightness, “at least now the boxes in the attic are gone.”

He laughed this time. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Back at the school, I guess. I don’t have it in me to drive as far as it would take to find a motel room.”

The idea of inviting her to stay in his house sprouted in his mind like an absurd weed. Not that they were even allowed to stay in the neighborhood after dark; they’d only been permitted a few hours to survey the damage and gather essential items.

“How about you?” Her voice called him back to the present.

“I’ll probably just sleep in the truck with Lucy. I won’t be able to stretch out, but at least I’ll know she’s okay. Oh, shoot, I mean—”

She gave a rueful laugh. “No, it’s okay. I get it!”

“You probably want to stay close, in case the cats turn up?”

Her face told him she didn’t expect them to turn up.

“Gosh, I’m so sorry—”

A breeze picked up, and the upstairs door flapped back and forth in empty space. The air smelled of the torn grass and turned earth.

“You know how things happen, and then your brain just can’t quite compute, so it all seems like some hilarious joke,” she said. “Seriously, the worst part of all of it is imagining that lady snoring on the cot next to me. Everything else—the house, the cats, my shoulder—it’s like I can handle all of that, but the idea of lying awake another night, wanting to strangle an innocent woman—”

“Maybe we should go together to find a better place to stay. I can drive. I mean, if you don’t mind the smell of dog.”

 

They drove and they drove, away from their ruined neighborhood, past scene after scene of calamity, on for hour after hour, into nightfall, into places less harshly marked by the disaster. They talked little. At 1 am, the wheels crunched into the gravel parking lot of the Land of Honey Motel, where the sign said “Vacancy.”  Peter hoped it wasn’t because the light in the “No” sign was broken. He was exhausted, and it wouldn’t be safe to keep driving. Sal was staring tiredly straight ahead. She didn’t move when he stopped the car in front of the office.

“I’ll just go inside and check.”

Sal gave a small nod. A few minutes later, he sat back in the car, put a hand on the wheel, and turned to her.

“They only have one room left. So, you go sleep there and I’ll stay here with Lucy.”

This seemed to wake her from her trance.

“What? No, you can’t do that. We can share the room.”

“Sal, it’s got just one queen bed.”

She paused and looked up at the roof of the car, then flicked her eyes over to him.

“That’s fine. A queen bed is wide enough for 2 people.”

Peter pursed his lips to contain an unexpected smile that threatened to burst from his face.

“Well, that’s mighty liberal-minded of you, but I still don’t think it’s going to work, because I’ve been told that I snore. I might just find myself strangled to death by morning.”

Sal gave a barking laugh that made Lucy lift her head from the back seat.

“I have it on good authority that I only strangle people who snore two nights in a row. Everyone gets one free night.”

“But I’m not sure what to do with Lucy.”

“We smuggle her in, of course.”

“Well, then, I guess that settles it.”  The smile broke through and spread across his face.

 

It turned out Sal was the one who snored. Peter let his eyes trace the whirled patterns in the cheap plaster as Sal’s sawing in-breath alternated with Lucy’s soft nose whistle. It was hot despite the wheezing air conditioning, and both Peter and Sal had a leg thrust out, the blanket bunched in the middle between them. He hadn’t had a single sexual thought in months, and his erection (kept discreetly under the bunched blanket) felt like an alien visitation, though not an unwelcome one. His penis, at least, had hopes for the future, even if they were wildly inappropriate. His gaze drifted to her bare leg, and then hastily back to the plaster.

He and Sal had been friendly neighbors for quite a few years, waving across the lawn, chatting briefly if they happened to meet up on the sidewalk. Her husband had died of a heart attack several years ago—he’d seen him wheeled out to an ambulance. After that Sal’s mother had moved in for a year before she too had died. He and Sal had shared some advice about in-home care. He found it curious how little they really knew each other. He chided himself that he hadn’t sent her any condolences, but then again, she hadn’t sent him any either.

Peter edged off the bed and into the bathroom for the first shower as soon as Sal started stirring, but his efforts at subtlety were for naught, as Lucy started barking as soon as he closed the bathroom door. He stuck his head out and gave an apologetic wince to Sal’s sleepy grimace and let Lucy into the bathroom with him.

“Can’t stand being on the wrong side of a door, can you, love?” he chided her. She sat and panted patiently as he stripped down, turned on the water, and then stepped in the shower, his hand outstretched to test the water.

Another weary morning, another unstructured day with no clear endpoint. His thoughts drifted back to the house and his novel scattered across the lawn. He closed his eyes and leaned his back against the chipped tile, letting the water pulse over his head. Maybe when he opened his eyes, the world would be a different one.

 

Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom back in his dirty T-shirt, holding the stingy hotel towel around his waist. Sal was sitting up reading from a crumpled page.

“Oh, hi, good morning,” she said, once she noticed him.

“What you got there?”

“I’m not sure. It was stuck to my shoe, and I noticed it was typewritten, like from an old typewriter.”

A page from his novel. She must have picked it up with her shoe as they walked to his truck.

“It must be part of a story—a rather racy story to judge by the action on this page.”

“It’s mine!” he blurted, seized by an urge to leap across the bed and grab the paper from her hand. He managed to halt himself halfway through the impulse, causing him to lurch awkwardly and bang his shin against the nightstand. He emitted a sound that was half bark, half grunt. Twisting sideways to regain his balance, he stumbled over the lump of his overalls at the side of the bed. He flung out his arms, dropped the towel, and landed with a sprawl on the bunched coverlet, his face in Sal’s crotch.

Sal appeared remarkably calm given that a man she barely knew, who apparently wrote erotic fiction, had half-stripped and launched himself at her.

Sal shifted herself and Peter slithered backward on the bed until his knees were on the floor. He thrust out an arm to reach for the fallen towel.

“Oh God, did I hurt you?”

Sal laughed, “No, I’m fine. Though that was, well, that was unexpected. Are you okay?”

“Except for being completely and utterly mortified, I seem to be intact,” Peter replied, calling dignity to his person like a skittish cat hidden under the bed as he wrapped the towel around himself and stood up gingerly. “And given that you are unharmed, I believe I might be even more embarrassed that you were reading my writing.”

“What’s the point of writing if you don’t want people to read what you’ve written?”

He’d always written, though he’d never called himself a writer. He’d get snatches of ideas and jot them down on a 3×5 card he kept folded in his wallet, and then during an hour stolen here or there, he’d sketch out scenes, and every year he’d manage to finish a story or two. Most of his writing ended up in a set of spiral notebooks, which thickened on a shelf in the bedroom closet. When their sex life came to a halt after Joanne’s diagnosis, Peter vented his frustrations into erotic scenes that often involved 3 to 4 people and sometimes a family dog, and that energy drove him beyond stories into the novel project. At some point, her illness became all-preoccupying for both of them, and he put the novel into a box and tucked it in the garage. The sharp thrum of unsatiated desire faded into a dull buzzing and then petered out entirely, replaced by an aching numbness.

 

The numbness, however, was now gone. Sal wasn’t beautiful by typical standards. She had a strap of a double chin and there were dark circles under her eyes, but her eyes were so large and round he wanted to lick them, and they were looking at him with an expression of such interest and care that he realized with a third tsunami of shame that his erection was back, and was likely visible through the towel.

He looked down and then realized the mistake of drawing further attention to his offending member, and then looked up again, to see her eyes traveling from down to up to meet his.

“Excuse me,” he coughed. “I’ll just be another moment—” He pointed to the bathroom, and then pushed inside, nearly slamming the door behind him. He sat on the toilet and held his head in his hands.

 

She didn’t knock. She just pushed open the door, shut it behind her, then leaned her back against it.

She was completely naked. His hands dropped away from his face, and he stared up at her in wonder. The right half of her mouth lifted in a wry smile as he took her in. Her breasts were ample, with large brown nipples that pointed in different directions like a confused intersection sign. A pad of fat hung down over the bottom half of her belly, and her wide hips and thighs came together around a scraggly patch of brown streaked with gray.

She tilted her head in a question of invitation. He nodded slowly. She stepped forward, pausing before him. Her hair fell forward around her face as she bent to kiss him, and he felt another bloom of desire at the muscular softness of her lips and the playful curiosity of her tongue. Her smell was of sweat and dust and somehow also like carrots.

She maneuvered to mount him, one hand gripping the sink as the other guided his penis toward her vagina. She leaned on one foot, then another, searching for her opening, her face in studied concentration mostly hidden behind the wall of hair. And then she found the spot, and she was already wet, and he slipped inside her. His eyes opened wide at the piercing shock of pleasure. She raised her head and shook back her hair, laughing at the small whimpers that emerged from him as she pulsed the walls of her pussy over his cock.

“Good God,” he moaned.

Twice they nearly tumbled; his foot slipped, he banged his head on the back of the toilet, his flailing arm found a shower grab bar, and the thrusting began in earnest, the mounting pleasure inside him matched by the pain and awkwardness of the position.

Eventually, they moved to the bed, where they pleasured each other in creative combinations. Sensing the excited energy, Lucy barked a bit, but they ignored her, and she became bored and curled up in the corner. Sun leaked around the blackout curtains of the motel room, creating afterimage jags across Peter’s visual field.

There was nothing to do and everything to do. Large-scale cleanup was needed: hauling and sorting, tearing down and putting back up, and there were none of the tools or materials or energy or logistics needed. And that was just for his house. Sal’s house was beyond repair, a total loss, though it probably needed to be searched for keepsakes. If it was even safe to enter. So instead, they spent the day fucking.

 

By evening, Peter had grown hungry, and also a bit chafed. He propped his head on his hand, elbow on the pillow. Her hair was wild, her wrist pressed to her forehead over her eyes.

“Hey,” he said.

After a long pause, she replied, “Mmmhhhph.”

“That was pretty good for someone who threw out her back.”

She burped a laugh. “Heh. Well, that was better than a chiropractor adjustment.”

“We should get some food.”

“Hmm. Yeah.”

“Addressing that need would mean, you know, getting upright and dressing ourselves.”

She sighed and turned to look at him, then closed her eyes again. “Only marginally worth it.”

She lay quiet. His stomach grumbled.

“I could go hunt for something. Vending machine peanuts. Gas station meat sticks.”

“No, that’s alright.” She sat up and shook out her hair. “We need to find actual food. And something for Lucy.” He leaned forward and kissed her shoulder blade.

“That isn’t making it any easier!” she laughed.

 

In the end, actual food proved hard to come by, as no restaurants were open and the grocery store was closing as they pulled up. They found a convenience store with dog food in stock, and they listened to Lucy snarf energetically in the backseat while they plucked rice crackers from a package and passed a can of Cheese Wiz back and forth.

The motel had charged them a fee for checking out late and didn’t have another room for them for the upcoming night. Peter’s gas tank was nearly empty. It was raining again. But as Sal fixed her dark eyes on him, Peter surprised himself to realize he was happy.

“So, tell me about your novel,” she asked him with a grin.

Peter nearly choked on his cracker.

“Ghphph,” he shook his head.

“Uh-huh,” she kept smiling.

He swallowed and took a swig of their diet Dr. Pepper.

“It’s just, well, it was, I mean, now it’s scattered across what used to be our neighborhood.”

“At least, the raciest part of it,” she laughed.

He laughed too and then stopped laughing. A spattering of raindrops prickled the windshield. He had rarely shown his work to anyone. Once he’d joined a writing group, but then things got busy. He’d shown a few stories to Joanne, who was blandly encouraging, but that didn’t feel the way it felt to have Sal’s intent gaze on him, which made him feel that what he was doing wasn’t a joke, wasn’t something to be embarrassed about, wasn’t just a perverted form of self-soothing.

“I actually have quite a few stories,” he said slowly.

She didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“They aren’t all as racy as the page you read.”

“Disappointing, but that’s okay,” she said, and they both laughed again, and then let their faces grow serious. He held her gaze. She didn’t move to speak.

“But I mean, we need to figure out – where we’ll go tonight, about your house—”

“Don’t change the subject, Peter.”

This time, his laugh had a yelp in it. “Damn. I’m not sure what I did to earn this treatment!” She was still holding him with her eyes. “Okay, okay, I guess we’ll figure all that out soon enough. Well. The writing has always been a hidden, sideways, in-the-corner kind of thing.”

“Is that how you want it to be?”

“No. Yes? It makes it easier to pretend I don’t really care about it, which makes it easier to write, somehow. But lately, it’s made it easier not to write. And that’s no good.”

She shifted in her seat. “Will you show me one of your stories?” she asked.

“With all that is happening, you really want to spend time reading my stories?”  He thought again of her house, her cats, her dead husband, her dead mother.

A crack appeared in the bubble that had been holding them. She turned to look out the windshield into the darkness.

What would have happened if he’d kept writing through the end of Joanne’s illness? On the days when he’d felt resentful and sorry for himself, when some part of him had wanted her to die, so the painful, ugly process could be over? Perhaps what scared him most about writing was the same thing that made it so important—the inevitability that he’d be revealed by what emerged on the page.

“You got me. It is important to me. I’ll show you one when we can get back to the houses.”

He saw that her face was marked with tears. She didn’t turn her head but closed her eyes and smiled.