The water stops running. She cuts the light off in there and then she steps out. I don’t look around. I’m watching a hardware store commercial. Hammers and Skilsaws are on the wall. They always have this pretty girl with large breasts selling their hardware. The big special this week is garden hose. You can buy a hundred feet, she says, for less than four dollars.

The TV is just a dim gray spot between my socks. She’s getting on the bed, setting one knee down and pulling up the hem of her gown. She can’t wait. I’m thinking of it again, how the woman’s breasts looked, how she looked in her shirt before she took it off, how I could tell she had something nice underneath, and how wonderful it was to be drunk in that moment when I knew what she was going to do.

It’s time now. She’s touching me. Her hands are moving, sliding all over me. Everywhere. Ray is typing with two fingers somewhere, just the title and his name. I can hear the pecking of his keys. That old boy, he’s trying to do what he knows he should. He has responsibilities to people who love him and need him; he can’t let them down. But he’s scared to death. He doesn’t know where to start.

“You going to keep watching this?” she says, but dreamy-like, kissing me, as if she doesn’t care one way or the other.

I don’t say anything when I cut the TV off. I can’t speak. I’m thinking of how it was on our honeymoon, in that little room at Hattiesburg, when she bent her arms behind her back and slumped her shoulders forward, how the cups loosened and fell as the straps slid off her arms. I’m thinking that your first love is your best love, that you’ll never find any better. The way she did it was like she was saying, here I am, I’m all yours, all of me, forever. Nothing’s changed. She turns the light off, and we reach to find each other in the darkness like people who are blind.

Kubuku Rides
(This Is It)

Angel hear the back door slam. It Alan, in from work. She start to hide the glass and then she don’t hide the glass, he got a nose like a bloodhound and gonna smell it anyway, so she just keep sitting on the couch. She gonna act like nothing happening, like everything cool. Little boy in the yard playing, he don’t know nothing. He think Mama in here watching Andy Griffith. Cooking supper. She better now anyway. Just wine, beer, no whiskey, no vodka. No gin. She getting well, she gonna make it. He have to be patient with her. She trying. He no rose garden himself anyway.