AT THE BEGINNING OF June we were finally able to keep the windows open. There was hardly a spring. One day it was forty degrees; the next day it reached eighty. The sound of birdsong and the smell of clipped grass filled the warm air. After the insufferable, long winter, I thought that summer would never arrive, but here it was at last. Even the leaves on the trees seemed to have sprouted overnight. But it was a blessing and a curse; without the buffer of the windows, sleeping through the trains was like sleeping through a hurricane. We elected to battle the noise rather than the heat. Neither of us made it through a night without waking at least once. Carolyn suggested we buy fans. I objected. I didn’t want fans and didn’t feel like going into why; nor did she ask. In our time together, she had learned to simply take my eccentricities at face value.

On the first few really hot days, the wind blew in and filled the room with smells of creosote and oil and worn steel that had baked in the sun. The smell made it just as hard to sleep as did the trains, penetrating our dreams, becoming a part of them just as the smell of manure had during the August months when I was a kid. It was a dreadful smell, but it was hot and we had little choice but to tolerate it. Without my working we didn’t really have the money for an air conditioner.

On a particularly hot night when the open windows only marginally helped, I lay on my back staring through the darkness. It was the middle of June. My birthday was the ninth of July. I could never get used to birthdays, hadn’t enjoyed them in a good twelve years. Not while I knew what was right around the corner. My mother’s birthday was the twenty-fifth, my father’s the thirtieth. And then there was August, which always made things worse.

“Do you want to talk about it, or are you going to keep us both up all night?” Carolyn asked beside me.

“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

She propped herself up on her elbow and touched the side of my face.

“So what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know, just thinking about my birthday in a few weeks.”

“Okay.” She ran her fingers through my chest hair, up my neck, then traced my brows with her thumb.

“You ever think back to all your birthdays to try remembering what you did on each?” I asked.

“Sometimes. Is that what you were doing?”