Page 34 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

We freeze like burglars. Full stop, everything, her heels still hooked behind me, both of us staring at the laundry room ceiling as if it can explain. It’s past ten at night.

It rings again. Then knuckles, brisk, and through the door, faint but unmistakable: “Augustus? The porch light’s out. I can see the kitchen light on.”

Carol.

I have never seen a human being dress as fast as June dresses. It’s not even dressing — it’s a magic trick, sweatshirt, jeans, hair into some instant configuration that says I have been reading quietly all evening. She points at me, then at the stairs, a full sentence of pointing: you, shirt, go around, I was never here. I’m still buttoning with one hand when I open the front door to my mother-in-law. She’s holding a casserole dish and looking at me like she doesn’t entirely believe what she’s seeing.

“Carol. It’s ten o’clock.”

“The church does the memorial luncheon Sunday. I made too much.” She hands me the dish and looks past me into the house — the lamp, the stove light, the schedule marker uncapped on the counter. “You’re flushed.”

“You rang the doorbell at ten o’clock. I ran down the stairs.”

“Hm,” Carol says, which from Carol is a complete cross-examination. She looks at me one beat longer than the porch light merits. “Fix that bulb. This neighborhood isn’t what it was.” And she goes down the walk to her car, a woman with all the time in the world. I stand in my doorway holding a cold casserole against a heart that’s going harder than it has in years.

June is in the kitchen when I get back, capping the marker, not laughing. Then laughing — silently, helplessly, folded over the counter with one fist against her mouth. I put down the casserole and lose it too, both of us wheezing in the stove light like two idiots who got away with it.

“We have maybe ten minutes of dryer,” I remind her, in her voice.

“Shut up.” She wipes her eyes. “Go check the porch light. She’ll be back if it’s still out.”

Later — much later, kids checked, doors done, bulb changed, the house dark and still — her door clicks shut behind me. June is sitting up against the headboard in the dark with the quilt across her lap. She lifts one edge of it.

“Come here,” she whispers. “Shirt off.”

We finish what the doorbell interrupted, and it’s nothing like the dryer. That was all speed. This June undresses me one button at a time, no hurry left anywhere in her — the hungry version got scared off the property by a casserole. She pushes me onto my back and takes her time, hands and mouth, learning what changes my breathing and then doing it again, twice, because she can. When I reach for her she laces her fingers through mine and pins them to the mattress. She can only pin me because I let her. We both know it, and that’s what makes it good.

She swings a leg over and sinks onto me by slow degrees, letting herself feel every one of them, watching my face while she does it. The quilt slides off her shoulders. She barely moves — deep, grinding, patient, her head tipped back.

“Quiet,” she reminds me, in a whisper, wrecked herself.

“You’re the one who—”

“Quiet.” And she leans down and takes my mouth so neither of us has a choice.

We stay like that a long time, hands laced against the pillow, her breath going ragged a little at a time. The narrow bed doesn’t creak. She told me once she tested it before the first night she let me through this door — sat on the edge and bounced, twice, an inspection. That’s the woman I’m inside of, and I could laugh with the whole feeling of it if laughing were allowed. When she comes apart it’s with her face pressed into my neck and her whole body pulling tight around me, one long shudder with no sound in it anywhere. I follow her over with her name never quite making it out of my mouth.

We’re lying there after, tangled and warm and stupid with it, when a sound comes up through the floor from the kitchen. A grinding. Then a rattle. Then — unmistakable, physical, real — the sound of ice, actual ice, dropping into the bin.

June lifts her head off my chest. We listen. Brenda grinds again, deposits a second round like she’s been doing it for years, and hums off.

“Two years,” I whisper. “Two years of nothing for me. And she picks tonight.”

“She’s covering for us,” June whispers back, awed. “She waited until Carol left. She’s on our side.”

“She’s on your side. I’ve had a guy out twice.”

“Loyalty can’t be purchased, Gus. It has to be earned.” She settles back onto my chest, one hand flat over my heart like she’s holding it still, and down in the dark kitchen the ice maker finishes her shift.

Three weeks. Here’s what I know at the end of them, lying in a narrow bed I have no business fitting in, listening to an appliance choose sides. I’m not being careful. Careful was the first week. What I’m being now is happy — happier than I have any right to be, in my own house, in total secrecy. Happy is not a thing you can hide for long. It’s loud. It leaks out of a man in doorways, at dinner tables, across ballrooms.

Somebody’s going to see it. The only question left is who sees it first.

June

Margot appears in my doorway at seven-forty in the morning holding a hairbrush, two elastics, and a face that says she’s about to ask for a kidney.

I know that doorway stance. I invented that doorway stance. You hover at the exact edge of a room so that if it goes badly, you were technically never in it.