head turned oddly, newspaper drifting lower and lower as I became absorbed. Melody stood up straight and did something that, in a most unexpected way, modified my personality. As she looked at her reflection, even though her hair was very short, she tucked her hair behind her ears. Her movement was slow and gentle, an act performed with the tips of the middle fingers of both hands, the motions occurring simultaneously, and from my distance it looked as though she were trying to trace the delicate shape of her ears. I immediately replayed it in my head two or three times. I wanted to watch her do it again, live. How odd it is the way a man’s mind is randomly shaped toward preference; it’s impossible to predict the triggers. My brother Jimmy, for example, would never admit it but he’s a people-watcher with a real preference for young women. His obsession manifests itself in the movement of a girl’s legs as she crosses them, in the sound as the skin of one leg rubs against the other, and the slower and more seductively it occurs, the more likely he will turn to me and say, “Man, I love it when a woman does that.” But his statement is hardly true; he really means that some woman he knew at some time in his life did that thing, it flipped some irreversible switch in his head, and he spent the rest of his days trying to find another woman who could replicate the motion that left this permanent predilection in his mind and desire in his heart. Every guy has them buried somewhere, things that had little business entering the realm of sensuality—the crossing of your legs, the chewing on the end of a pen while you think, the way your hand rushes to your chest with a hearty laugh, how you close your eyes when you whisper in a friend’s ear, the motions that compose the act of putting your hair in a ponytail or the way your hair gently falls to your face when you pull the band back out—somewhere a man is mad for it. As for me, for many years to follow, when I would see a girl tuck her hair behind her ears in nothing more than a vaguely similar manner, that delicate trace of the ears, I would think, She’s really cute, and never understand exactly why.
The paper had dropped all the way to my lap.
Melody started her car and after a few seconds she pulled out of her space, made her way down the gravel road. Her car became enveloped in a white burst of limestone dust, the loud crunching as she drove over the rocks overpowering the birds and distant machinery, and as the powdery air disappeared, so had Melody.
I turned the ignition of the Mustang; that was as far as I got.
For all the hours I had spent idle in the parking lot outside Melody’s apartment building, you’d think I would’ve found any excuse to move on, but I remained in that spot for too long, paper dropped in my lap, newsprint-stained fingers on the steering wheel at ten and two, head-cocked and blurry-eyed and openmouthed like a catatonic fool.
I had some sense that I should follow her, but common sense trumped it, helped me to realize that there was little point in further visiting and staking out various parking lots of rural Kentucky. The only windows of her existence that I could see through, the insignificant glimpses of her life between starting points and destinations, offered nothing but a rising tide of questions that always remained unanswered, with the ultimate question, the point of it all, never being heard: Is she okay?
Yet I could not surrender the obsession. I would never be at peace until I knew.
I called home, spoke briefly with Peter, even briefer with my father. I never found her, I said. Sat outside her place for two days, I said. Never surfaced, I said.
I’d try again soon, I said.
And as I made my way to the east, following the now familiar path toward Lexington, I began the reconciliation of the past two days.
Around the time I’d driven deep into the eastern Kentucky countryside, I finally conceded that this journey had done nothing for my paranoia except elevate it, that Melody was not okay, that she was always at risk. If I’d come out to bring rest to my conscience, to somehow convince myself that despite all her