The girl nodded, and turned her face up to the man hovering over her—her eyebrows drawn toward each other in an absurd laughing apology. The concentrated unsmiling way he looked down at her made me feel terrified.

“Eva!” A tall woman with dreadlocks and a Caribbean accent came marching over to the swing set, dragging a little blue-eyed boy behind her, Eva’s little brother. “You were supposed to be home an hour ago, your mother is about to kill both of us, you get over here right now.”

The girl still couldn’t stop her breathy laughter, but she climbed up off the ground and ran to the woman, who seized her by the arm. The girl looked back—I expected her to shout goodbye to her friend—but she didn’t shout anything and she didn’t look at her friend, she just flashed a big white-toothed grin at the man, her adult teeth still a little too big in her head. At first I thought this Eva was the closest I had gotten to Lonnie’s incarnation but then, watching the friend amble off with her shoulders down, I questioned it. Was Lonnie’s sexual prowess as inborn as I imagined, or could she have been more like the friend at some point—watching, studying, waiting? Self-conscious and then later, feeling like she needed to make up for something?

THE FLOOR OF LONNIE’S OFFICE: A LITTLE PUDDLE, I WROTE IN MY notebook, marveling at the innocence of the noun, but there was no other way to describe it—not a dripping or gush anymore, just the sad little result. Too thin and clear to have come from him, and too much of it anyway—this was hers, pooled next to her writing desk like spilled ink.

I dabbed a finger at the edge—marveled at the way liquid molecules attract, despite a lack of container. The smooth slick between my thumb and forefinger. I tasted it. Finger to my lip like I was trying to get a feverish baby to drink. The saline sweetness reached the tip of my tongue. Why had she left that there? Had she simply forgotten about it? Had she wanted to save it for herself? Had she been trying to leave something for her husband to find? Was it completely crazy to wonder, just for a fleeting moment, if she had left it there for me?

11

THE PICTURE WAS THE NEXT THING I STOLE. SULTRY TEENAGE Lonnie next to an unmade bed. I wanted it. I took it. I kept it. I never thought about putting it back. I plucked a piece of used chewing gum from her bathroom’s wastebasket, placed it in my own mouth to make it soft again, and stuck the picture to a page in my route-mapping notebook.