I first saw him getting out of a truck. He had been sitting in the back with a horde of men. The others spit, adjusted their jeans when they hopped down from the truck bed, but he didn’t. And when he got back into the truck a few hours later, he smiled at me, gave a little wave. I guess that was enough, that was as good as I might find in the holler.

The next time he came over, I watched him from the yard where I was weeding. It was summer then. We did things like that, knelt in the earth and pulled things from it, things that had grown green and warm. Too many things had grown, so many that we could be choosy about what we kept and what we uprooted to toss and rot in a pile; we could be careless. He must have noticed me, too. When the teal truck, dented with dings, rolled to a stop in front of the farmhouse in a show of dust and gravel, he came over to me. The others went inside.

“Too hot to do that in the daytime, huh?” he said, nodding at my pile of weeds.

Twilight gave everything a fluid outline: the weeds; my arms; the man’s arms in his T-shirt, lined with hair. It was like we were being rubbed away. He had long, straggly brown hair, home-cut from a pocketknife, and a beard that was red.

“Yeah,” I said. “Too hot to do much of anything.”

It must have been June. The tomatoes were stalky and fragrant but still green and hard. He unscrewed the lid and took a swig from a plastic bottle of water. Nobody around here drank just water, but that’s what it was.

I had a window AC unit at my shack then. Maybe that’s what I used to get him there, the lure of the cool chemical air. I couldn’t remember. Probably I didn’t need to use or say much of anything. It was like the girls always said: men fell into bed with you. It was harder, much harder, to resist than to give in.

I didn’t have to do much of anything. He didn’t want me to. He wanted to do things to me. But what was I supposed to do, what were we supposed to talk about while I was just lying there, naked from the waist down, and he was kneeling over me in my loft. You just get into it, girls in the holler said. You just let your body take over. But mine didn’t.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

What did that mean? I felt like he meant that I was skinny. I felt like he meant that I was young, which was nothing to do with me. Just an accident that I was in the middle of.