My stomach starts to churn and I flee, out of the Empire Room, out the front door, through the square, down alongside the boats. Cold air slaps me and I suck in a chest full. People are here, happy people gawking at the water, and I hate them because they keep on when it all should stop. I hurry along the quay toward container cranes that loom like giant four-legged beasts and only when I stop do I realize Frank has followed me. He touches my sleeve and I start to cry, fall into his arms. “Let it go,” he soothes. “Let it go.”

  I do just that, shudder and sob as he holds me. “Tighter,” I tell him and he adjusts his grip, holds on until I start to hiccup. “Oh, god,” I say, pulling back. He hands me a handkerchief. I mop up.

  We stand side by side looking at the ocean. “He took part of me with him,” I say when the hiccups stop. “I didn’t know it until just now. There’s a history only he knew and in a way that’s gone too. How could he do it?” My voice escalates in volume, my hands shake as they grip the iron railing. “How could he?” I demand.

  “He made a choice and we have to respect it,” Frank says. “An awful choice but it was his to make.”

  “And nobody else matters.”

  “I doubt he thought of it that way. He had to have been in a lot of pain to do what he did. It was bigger than all of us put together.”

  “Self-centered little shit.”

  Frank chuckles. “You know better than that.”

  He’s right of course but instead of getting me refocused on Richie, he’s made me wonder about him. “How did you know him?”

  “We met two years ago when his company came in to fix our computer problems. You know how he was, personable, absolute genius with computers, great listener. Everyone loved him and he did a great job. We hit it off right away, found we both liked mountain biking. For the last two years we’ve biked up Mount Diablo every Saturday morning, rain or shine.”

  “I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving,” I offer. “He seemed fine then, just bought the condo, was hiring more employees, totally up.”

  “Depression isn’t a constant,” Frank replies. “Every time I saw him he seemed happy, full of energy. Even with the biking he still went to the gym three times a week.”

  Memories of now push me back to memories of then. I go all the way back. “I remember being six, in a wading pool with him, trying to sink toy trucks.”

  Frank sighs, looks up at the idle cranes. A couple of inches taller than me, heavier but solid. Attractive. And he knows what’s going on in me because he says, “We weren’t involved, it didn’t work that way between us. We were just good friends.”

  I nod because this clears the way, or at least it’s supposed to. I start to cry again. “I can’t do this,” I tell him. “But god I want to.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, then,” I say and I walk away because that’s all that’s left. Back inside I feel suddenly exhausted. I’d gotten the call Monday, was told about services on Thursday, flew up Friday. It’s Saturday now, one week to the day since Richie did it. It’s been him all week and the vise that clamped onto my gut when I got the news hasn’t let go. I nibble a bit of cheese from the buffet. It is tasteless. I chew and swallow, get a glass of wine at the bar.

  People are starting to leave. I see them talking to Estelle who barely speaks. Her gray curls nod. She wants this done more than any of us. I want to leave but can’t bring myself to do the necessary good-byes so I sit at an unoccupied table, allow the fatigue to wash over me. I think about later, back at Lisa’s, wish I’d gotten a hotel room. I think about the plane tomorrow, how I’ll remain silent for the one-hour flight.

  Tony comes over, sits down. His eyes are red and puffy. “I’ll never get over him,” he tells me with a heaviness I understand. Tony is younger, maybe twenty-five. I know it was hot and heavy between them for several years. Richie wouldn’t talk about the breakup.

  “What happened with you guys?” I ask. My tone is accusatory. I don’t care.

  “I wanted to be exclusive and he didn’t. The whole time we were together he saw other people. I finally couldn’t stand it.”

  I think of Frank. Was he “other people”? I can see them going up Mount Diablo on their bikes, sweaty after the ride, getting it on at the summit then riding back down and life goes on. It makes me hate the arrangements of life, the need to take up with people on different levels.

  “I was so in love with him,” Tony says when I offer no comment. “God, this is agony.”

  Part of me wants to offer consolation but it’s too small a part, buried under everything else. Frank is at the bar talking to people I don’t know. I stare openly at the back of him, not listening to Tony anymore. I gulp my wine, hope it will loosen something in me, anything in me. Tony gets up, walks out of my periphery.

  Andy, Lisa’s husband, sits down beside me. “You okay?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Yeah, it’s rough. If there’s anything we can do or if you just want to talk, we’re here for you.”

  “Thanks.” I’ve heard this line from everyone I know and for a second they all run together and I’m back in my life in L.A. and Tim and Mark and Paul and Marcy are all saying it over and over. It bounces off me, rolls down my sleeve. Andy pats me, gets up, moves on. I look down as if there will be residue. Then movement catches my eye. It’s Frank shaking hands, making the rounds as he prepares to leave. I feel numb as I see him talk to Lisa, Andy, Phil, Estelle. He’s wonderful with my aunt. His hand on her cheek pierces me, lets my last breath escape. I sit absolutely deflated, watch as he rises from her and turns to go.

  I wait for him to look at me but he doesn’t. He strides out the door into the main hall and I feel a hundred things, urgency and desperation uppermost. But I also feel paralyzed, weighted. He disappears and I let the loss roll over me, feel my bones crunch. But when I finally raise my head I catch sight of him out front lighting a cigarette and I let out an involuntary cry. And I get up and without saying good-bye to anyone I go out to him.

  COMING HOME

  Shanna Germain

  It’s the first time I’ve been home in four years and no one seems to be around. I’m a day early, but it’s odd to come up the long driveway and find the house and barns quiet. Even the horses are hidden from view, probably down in the low pasture taking shelter under the apple trees.

  The only thing that looks occupied is the big hay barn. The door is open and a green T-shirt hangs from the water pump handle. It’s haying time, so likely my stepmom hired whatever teenage football hero they could find to help stack. A football hero’s ass is as good a diversion as any around here, so I head that way while I wait for the family to come back.

  I walk through the grass, loving the way it reaches up and touches my feet around my sandals. Whatever my dad and step-mom think of me living in the city, however much I defend it when I talk to them on the phone, I miss the farm, the way it connects me with the truth. You spend enough damn time in the city and you think the world is made of concrete and pretty boys who like to suck your dick and buy your art. You forget the world isn’t like that at all; the world is like this: slanted summer sun in late July, the sweet scent of clover and first-cut hay, a walk across shaded grass from house to barn.

  Inside, the barn’s hot. That’s something you don’t forget, how the heat comes through the walls and off the bales of hay and into your skin. It smells like yellow sunshine and the tang of sweat from whoever’s throwing bales up in the loft. A memory stirs in the back of my mind, tries to harden into something, but I push it away. I pull myself hand-over-hand up the rickety ladder and hoist myself onto the wooden floor of the hayloft.

  And then I’m face-to-ass not with some high school boy whose butt I can secretly ogle while he stacks bales. No. I’m face-to-ass with my stepbrother, who I haven’t seen since the day I left here.

  That’s his green T-shirt down on the pump. I try not to stare at his bare back, the dotted line of his spine, the way his lats wing out when he picks up a bale of hay. Just these few years have widened and flattened him, given him the broad shoulders of someone who does manual labor for a living. His forearms are wiry muscle laid over bone, the kind of build you never find on city boys.

  “Matt?” I say it like maybe it’s not really him. Like maybe I can make him disappear if I say his name. Wishing in reverse.

  “Yet,” he says. Which in the language of the farm means, “yes.” Or “who the fuck’s asking?”

  He turns. His hat shadows his face, but I can see the same spattering of freckles across his chin and cheeks, the same intense green eyes. Same color as uncut clover, as corn husks, as the best green grass that kisses your feet.

  He heaves the bale he’s holding against the far wall. It thuds against the others, sending up a shower of chaff. Dry dust coats my throat.

  “What…” I swallow the scratch in my throat. “What are you doing here?”

  Last I’d heard, he’d gone off to Wyoming or Montana or some-such. Looking for work on a real ranch. Not a two-bit pony farm like his mother owned. No one had mentioned anything about his being back.

  “What’s it look like?” He doesn’t stop. Bale after bale. Sweat makes a dark semicircle above the ass of his jeans, and his skin is coated with so much moisture and green chaff it looks like he’s been dipped in antifreeze.

  I’ve been gone for four years. I thought it was safe to come home. I could visit, spend some quality time with Dad and my stepmom, ease the wounds that I inflicted when I left, abruptly, without explanation. I could come and then I could go back to the city, to the life I’d made. Not an amazing life, but a decent one. But no. Matt is here. My stepbrother is home and I don’t know why.

  He slides his fingers beneath the baling twine, heaves another bale, and I tell myself that I’m not staring at his ass and his thighs in his tight, worn jeans. I tell myself that I don’t want to be that bale, fingered and tossed. I don’t.

  “Dad and…” I hesitate. I usually call my stepmom “Mom” but with Matt here, I can’t say that. “They know you’re doing this?”

  “Asked me to.” Matt finally stops moving. He’s bigger when he’s still. I have to take a step back, toward the edge of the loft, to make space for my breath.

  Matt pulls a gallon jug of water from behind a bale and lifts it to his lips. His Adam’s apple bobs while he drinks and I have the sudden taste of October in my mouth, his spit flavored with apples and whiskey. A vision of him naked, slim hips and hard cock bathed in the candlelight of pumpkin smiles. The scrape of my knees afterward, from kneeling on the concrete in my costume.

  I shake the image away and focus on the sweat rolling down the back of my neck. A diversion. “Jesus Christ, it’s hot up here.” I fan myself by pulling the fabric of my T-shirt away from my chest.

  “Yet,” he says again. And this time, it doesn’t mean anything close to yes. It means, “fuck you, city boy.” And he’s right to say it. He’s probably been up here for hours. All I’ve done is climb the ladder.

  He gestures with the half-full jug at my shorts and leather sandals.

  “Gonna’ work in those?”

  “Wasn’t planning on it.” I realize I’ve dropped back into the language of the farm, words of thrust and grab. Half sentences and dangled meanings. You think you get away from it, but how quickly it comes back.

  “Cut your pretty legs all to hell.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, and then wish I hadn’t.

  He spits into the hay and tosses me a pair of leather gloves. I manage to catch them, more out of sheer determination than out of any skill. The scent of him fills the air—leather and tang and oil. The parts of me that are not breaking have hardened to stone.

  “Fine,” I say. I yank on the gloves and slap them together, hard. Matt grunts in response and holds out the water jug. I remember the taste of it: lukewarm water inside plastic, the salt of Matt’s lips on the opening. If I took that jug, I would suck it like a man dying of thirst.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “You stacking or throwing?”

  “Stacking.” It’s the wrong choice, the hard choice. But I have to take it.

  “Good.”

  The hayloft’s big, but it’s half-filled with hay, and there’s no way for us to get past each other without nearly touching. I fuck with my gloves as we pass, pretending they don’t fit quite right. I look at Matt’s work boots and I don’t inhale as he goes by, like you might at a graveyard, until he is safely past and the ghost of him cannot get inside my mouth.

  It doesn’t work. My tongue prickles for his salt and sweat skin, my hands ache to feel those haying muscles pressed beneath them. I thought miles and years would be enough to save me. I was wrong. If he offered himself to me now, I could not say no. The only relief I have is that he will not offer.

  I step in front of the wall Matt’s been building and I lift the first bale. Bales are fucking heavy. You don’t forget that either, but somehow I forgot what heavy meant. The first bale tears the shit out of the top of my thighs. “Mother fuck,” I say as I swing it up and stack it. Matt doesn’t look over; he just starts heaving bales in my general direction.

  We work like that for a while, me swearing every other bale or so, the hay cutting into my tender skin, Matt throwing the bales long-ways across the barn to me like they’re crabapples and not sixty pounds of clover. I stack the bales three, four high in time to Matt’s grunt and their thud behind me.

  We were, what, nineteen, last time we did this together? But just like the language, there’s a rhythm here you fall back into. Roles that have been assigned, that you can’t escape. Roles like stacker, thrower, brother, lover.

  With my back to him, with the bales pressing against thigh and cock to keep things contained, I can remember. The first time, after his pony died and he hid himself up here, crying so softly no one could find him, but I did. And I held him until our mouths found each other and I tasted his salt tears, licked them from his cheeks and lips. That year the corn was tall enough to hide us, and my skin smelled like sweet, white corn for an entire summer. The last time, here, right here, between loads of hay, quick and hot, as if we knew it was our last, as if we were trying to hold something together that was already falling apart.

  And then it was over. I told Matt I couldn’t look my dad in the eye anymore, that I was tired of thirty-second blow jobs in the back of the tractor, of always watching over my shoulder. It was the only time I heard him say, “faggot.” So much fucking contempt, the way he spit it out.

  He wasn’t talking about me.

  I finish a row and step up on it to look out the high window. I can see the horses from here, standing in the shade of the apple orchard. The foals play-fight, rearing up with their baby teeth and hooves, instinctually preparing themselves for whatever the future might hold.

  “You working or standing?” Matt tosses a bale, hard. It banks off the stacked bales and catches me in the side of the leg. My knee buckles, and I try to catch myself on the way down, but the only contact I manage is chin to bale. The stems rug-burn my cheek as I land.

  I lie on the wooden floor, breathing heavily, waiting to see if any of the throbbing pain moves into something higher, something broken. The throbs stay steady and I push myself up to a sitting position.

  “Christ, Matt,” I say.

  Matt steps toward me, head lowered. There’s something in his eyes that I’m afraid to see.

  “Damn,” he says. “I didn’t mean…”

  Matt leans his hat back to wipe his brow with green-tinged fingers. His dark bangs are sweat-plastered to his forehead. The wrinkles across his forehead are lined with green sweat the same color as his eyes.

  “You’re bleeding,” he says.

  I look down; pinpricks of blood have popped up along my thighs.

  “No, your face,” he says.

  It’s not bad, just a dark smear on my fingers. Still, my arms shake when I push myself up. I pretend I don’t notice Matt’s hand, held out to help me. My legs are weak, wobbly.

  “Let’s just finish this,” I say.

  “We’ll both stack,” he says. “ ’sfaster.”

  I nod. I reach down to pick up a bale. I throw it up, into the air, but it’s heavy, too heavy, and I have to let it fall. The bale lands sideways, breaks apart a section of the careful wall I’ve built. Chaff darkens the air and makes it hard to breathe.

  “Matt, fuck, why are you here?” I ask.

  Matt stacks two more bales, forcing them to fit against each other, tight blocks of bodies pressed unwillingly together. The last one won’t go, and he tries to hip-thrust it into place before he finally pulls it out, throws it down on the ground. His triceps muscle swells.

  He looks at me from under the rim of his hat, clover eyes gone dark, and I’m afraid my knee’s going to give again, just from the weight of his stare.

  I reach for something to hold on to, but before I can, he answers.

  “ ’Cause I heard you were coming home.”

  And then my knees do give, both of them. Matt steps forward as I go down in the hay. His hand, his big, heavy hand, is gentle on my head. I lean my tender cheek to the front of his jeans, feel his hard heat through the fabric.

  He joins me in the chaff until we’re face-to-face, so close I can see the flecks of yellow that hide in his eyes.

  “Was hoping it was true,” he says. And I try to say that it wasn’t true, that I’m not back, that this isn’t home, but his lips are pressed against mine, and his tongue is telling me the truth.

  THE BELT

 

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