"Stew in the fridge. Eggs. Bread. If I'm back by ten, I'll make dinner. If I'm not back by ten, don't wait."
"All right."
I stand in the doorway. I do not cross to the bed. I do not say any of the words I want to say. I do the last thing I have left to do, which is leave.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"I don't know when I'll be back."
"I know."
"I'll be back."
"I know."
I close the door.
I pick up my boots at the mat. I put them on. I put on the jacket on the peg. I take my phone off the counter. I lift the truck keys out of the drawer where I just put them, because they were not for me to leave behind today, they were for her. I stand in the kitchen with my truck keys in one hand and hers on the hook and the spare on the hook next to them, and I leave the spare. The spare fits the truck. It fits the cabin. It fits the shed.
I walk out of the cabin in the cold pink morning with a woman in my bed behind me and a fire down in the city in front of me, and I get in my truck and I start the engine, and I sit with my hand on the wheel for the length of three breaths, and then I drive.
Halfway to the county road I realize I did not eat this morning and I am not hungry. I don't know when I last wasn't hungry in the morning. I drive on.
8
EVANGELINE
Ido not get out of the bed for forty minutes after she leaves.
I hear her boots on the porch and then the porch and then the gravel and then the cough of the truck and the truck moving down the drive and then the truck gone. I hear the house settle into the quiet it has when she is not in it. I lie on my side with the quilt pulled up to my collarbone and the henley still on the floor where I left it last night, and I stare at the armchair.
She sat in that armchair.
She sat in that armchair and watched me sleep naked. How long for, I do not know. Her eyes were looking at my body as though she wanted to devour me.
And I want her to.
She saidnot today.
Not todayhas atomorrowin it.
I sit up in the bed.
The cabin is cold in the places Max's body is not standing in. I get up. I pick the henley off the floor. I do not put it on. I walk to the bathroom naked in a cabin that belongs to a woman I met four days ago, and I look at myself in the small mirror overthe sink, which I have not done in a mirror longer than three seconds in a decade.
I look at my face.
I look at my collarbone and the little scrape on it. I look at my breasts, which are my mother's breasts, shape-wise, smaller than a decade of magazines would have liked, nipples up in the cold. I look at my stomach, which is soft like a woman's stomach is soft when she has not been made to apologize for it for twenty-four hours. I look at my hips. I look at the pale band on my ring finger that is already beginning to fade. I look at the cut on my palm. I look at my mouth.
I think, she saw all of this.
I think, she looked at all of this, all of me.
A heat comes up from low in me, under my sternum, and climbs into my throat.
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