go in and out. I put a finger into his belly button, and he got so loud about it, like the women I heard him with through the wall of the apartment. I was quiet, breathing, taking everything in. Then he gasped like something was about to happen to him. He sat up and pulled me closer. He kissed me very hard and did not pull away. We continued like that, face to face. I love you, he kept saying.
He asked me to sleep over, but I didn’t want to. I watched him with a sadness he couldn’t see. I didn’t want to be with someone who could do that—who could deny what I was. He had the time to have regrets, to be stupid. I didn’t. And when he turned away from me, I don’t know why I did what I did. I reached out and grabbed a piece from inside the anatomy man. It was his stomach. A small plastic thing. It wasn’t real, of course, but it was there, and it was something.
I went home and was surprised to find Rose there. She asked me where I had been, said she knew that I was spending a lot of time with that guy next door. She said, “He’s never going to love you, you know. Have you forgotten how old you are? Look at all your wrinkles.” That’s the thing about being old. We don’t know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside. A thing other people see about us. I didn’t know why she was talking to me this way. Maybe it had nothing, really, to do with me. I didn’t say anything. It seemed to me she’d been drinking, so I let her talk. After a while, I didn’t hear anything she said.
I DID SEE RICHARD one last time, later that year, in October. It was at Daniel’s funeral. Richard was there, with Eve, supporting her, holding her, like a partner. It seemed strange to me to see him go back to her. And it seemed strange to me for us to have done the things people who loved each other did, and for it to seem now like none of it had ever happened. But it was not just him. What kind of person was Eve, to see someone else’s love and agree to see it wasn’t there. But after a while, it didn’t matter.
I looked over at the closed casket and thought of what I’d read in the newspaper about Daniel, how he died. He was a strong swimmer, in excellent shape, but it had been very cold, and he must have gotten a cramp, and drowned. I thought of him and his whole life, how short it was. Forty. That isn’t much time. I was there with him when he loved someone, and he was willing to wait it out. I wondered whether, in life, you get one big role, some message you need to deliver to someone, and when it’s done, it’s time to go. I thought of what Daniel had said about tornadoes. He was wrong about me. We weren’t the same. I did not wait. I am not the kind of person who watches something happen in the distance.
Daniel’s family and friends stood up and told stories about him. I did not tell mine. It was for no one to know, and I left. I looked back at the black everyone was wearing. I could not tell which figure in the crowd was Richard. I was beginning to forget his face.
ONCE, WHEN I was walking down the street in front of my old building, Richard called out to me. I must have been closing in on eighty then. I looked through him and spun around. I wanted to be in the distance, beautiful and dark, spinning all by myself, in the clear. I didn’t want him to come close. Nothing, not even the call of my name, could make me stop.
Randy Travis
THE ONLY THING my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the refugee settlement program. There were other items in the box, such as snow pants, mittens, and new underwear, but it was the radio she cherished most. A metal box with a dial that picked up a few channels. The volume button had only three ticks, and then