top of me. Her face always looked pained during sex. I didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was up until she stopped mid-sprint and started to cry.
“What is it?”
“This,” she said. “This.” She opened her arms, presenting the moment and beyond.
“What about it?” She brushed the hair away from her eyes to make sure I could see a deathlike inevitability in them. “One of these times really is going to be the last time.”
“Jesus Christ,” I sighed.
“Well, it’s true.”
“And guess what? We’re all going to die.”
She fell onto her side. “I know. We are.”
FROM WHEN I was about six until I started high school, my parents rented a house in the town of Dennis for two weeks most summers. When we were savvy enough to catch the pun, Pamela and I would crack up as my old man pointed out triumphantly upon approaching it, the sign that read Entering Dennis.
During one of the energy crisis summers—I must have been eight or nine—they had odd/even days. You could buy gasoline only on an odd day if your license plate ended in an odd number, and only on an even day if your plate ended in an even number. I don’t remember if our Mercury Monarch was odd or even, but it was our day. My old man made an adventure out of it. He got me up at five to beat the rush, and it worked. We lined up at the Arco station behind a short queue. My father nudged me. “We—you and I—are very smart people.” Arco had a sales promotion going back then. If you filled up, you got whichever free miniature Noah’s Ark animal they were giving away that week. It didn’t make sense to me, and I was only a kid. We were in the middle of an energy crunch. People were dying to overpay for gas. They didn’t need a biblical myth to bring in the punters.
I was sitting on the sofa-sized front seat, feasting on leaded gasoline fumes. My old man stuffed his change into a pocket of his new Bermuda shorts as he walked back to the car. He tossed a pack of Hostess Donut Gems and a plastic animal onto my lap through the open window.
“It’s a zebra,” he said. “Next week’s its mate.” I couldn’t care less. I’d just seen my dream purchase: A cluster of goatskin wineskins hung on an outdoor rack. Six dollars and ninety-five cents was a lot of cash.
“Well, it’s your money,” my old man said. When we got back to our rented cottage, my mother looked at the wineskin like it was still bloody. She told me to soak it in soapy water before I used it. After that, every drink tasted like Lemon Fresh Joy. It gave me headaches, so I stopped drinking out of it. I broached the subject of buying another one with my old man. This time he put his foot down.
SINCE OPENING IN 1949, Donnelly’s Outfitters had been just over the Bourne Bridge into Cape Cod. We always stopped there either at the beginning or end of our family vacations. It was a tradition.
Donnelly’s will have a wineskin.
The building was an army Quonset hut painted to look like a “Go west, young man” - era trading post. The anachronistic-by-design visage was accentuated by Precision Auto-Cad Fabricators, Inc., with which Donnelly’s shared a chain-link fence. When I was a kid coming here to ride the go-karts and rummage through the shelves packed with cool shit, it really seemed like the place was out in the sticks. Like the person who’d buy the bear trap from above the faux fireplace might actually get some local intended use out of it.
I pulled on the locked door. The lights were on inside, but I couldn’t see any people. The same sad man-sized mechanical flying fish hung on a wire fixed to an exposed ceiling rib. I knocked a few times. Nothing. I followed a mulch path around the side of the building to a side entrance. I could hear someone out back riding a go-kart. I followed the noise.
The lone go-kart darting around the track was piloted by the original Mr. Donnelly’s son, Mr. Donnelly Jr. He must have been in his seventies. He looked like a dehydrated version of his younger self. His decimated white comb-over stood up like a ragged flap of dead skin. His knees were in his armpits. He was wearing a snowflake-patterned red cardigan I know was from Lands’ End