less frequently. Sexual desire had been a part of me since I had become a woman; I was uncertain of how to be a woman without it. Who would I be if it fell away completely?
And even though I had not wanted a child for years, the final impossibility of it made the act less consequential in some way. But its meaning had changed rather than diminished. Lovemaking became a distillation of the bond between Adam and me. Now it was pure touch, pure connection without the tincture of other possibilities.
When I entered the room of Adam’s body, everything else fell away. There was only him, his body, his mouth, his hands. Then the moment of sweet, bright harmonics bound us. That remained unchanged.
During the days, Adam seemed a normal man. A normal, young man. I could feel, almost smell, the stallion on him.
One day, as I weeded the garden, the tall, blond girl who had come home from school with Sarah wandered out our back door and toward the stables. She had wide hips and a full figure, what people would have once called voluptuous, and a kind of brightness surrounded her. Her youth was heavy on her, like sweat. She walked into the open stable door. I heard the swish of Adam’s rasp stop. Then his voice, followed by hers.
I walked past the stable a few minutes later, with a bushel basket of spent basil stems and roots for the compost pile, when Sarah rushed the girl out of the stable and toward the house, hissing, “Jesus, he’s my father!” She shook her head at the girl, whose voice rose defensively as the back door shut behind them.
Adam stood inside the stable, wiping his hands and watching their retreat. I tried to read his face. We looked at each other. I walked up to him, pushed his hair up out of his eyes, and studied his face. Not a day over thirty he looked. I was fifty-two. He could easily have passed for my son. I thought of how other women must see him. For a moment, I imagined him in the world without me, outliving me.
He touched my hair, ran his hand down my cheek. He took my hand and pressed it to his breastbone. “Don’t leave,” he said.
Keeping my fingertips on his chest, I bent to put down my basket and pretended that he wanted me to stay with him in the stable. I did not want to think of what he saw—my graying hair and the lines on my face that told him I was far closer to my end than he to his.
I unbuttoned and opened his shirt. The skin on his bare chest did not have the slight crepe-like quality of age. There was no sinking of the pectorals that I saw on other men my age, no gray hair. But the horse-kick scar remained. I traced it, wanting to press my tongue to it and feel its smoothness. I closed my eyes for a second and saw the pale star in the X-ray of his chest as the doctor had held it up for me to see.
I licked my finger and added the dots and circle that would make a smiling face. “Remember those first months in Florida when Sarah drew that? It took days to wear off. You came to bed each night with it fainter and fainter. Then she would redraw it and the vanishing process would start again. She did that for months.”
He nodded and looked down at himself, tapping his sternum with his fingertips, a gesture as old as Addie. “I think of it as a U.”
“U for unknown.”
We kissed and the odor of his sweat blended with the basil resin on me. He smelled different lately.
“U for what I don’t know,” he said.
I heard something new in his voice, a lack of ease.
“Will you age at all? Will you change that way?” Then the question I did not say out loud, because I knew the answer: “Will I have to grow old alone while you remain young?”
He looked down at his chest again, then past me, his eyes scanning the house and the land behind me. “I don’t know, Evelyn. I changed myself to be this.” He ran his hand over his youthful face. “But I don’t know how to become a middle-aged Roy Hope.”
Anxiety rippled up my chest. I pulled him closer and lay my head against his neck.
“Don’t go away,” he whispered.
“No one is going