to feel the loss of whatever relationship he and I had missed out on. But for a long time, I didn’t feel anything at all.
And then one Monday night, a few days after the money came through, I left the library, stopped at the Great Northern for a drink, and had a few too many.
On my walk home from the bar, I broke down and called Bob’s cell phone, which still went to his voicemail. I left him a long, blubbering message about how sorry I was that we hadn’t mended fences. I told him how gorgeous Glacier National Park was. I told him about October and what I’d done to her. I told him about the birdcage I’d built and the cabin I was living in, and everything else I could think of that I’d kept bottled up inside for the last twenty years.
Then I did something even more stupid.
I texted Cal.
Bob died, I wrote. Heart attack.
He didn’t write back.
TWENTY-FIVE.
Only two people ever showed up at my cabin uninvited: Sid and his teenage daughter, Maggie, usually to coax me over for dinner or out to a movie.
It was mid-September, early evening, still warm, and dry enough that the mosquitoes were all but gone for the season. Bob had died four months earlier, and October’s big Sorrow exhibit at SFMoMA was a couple of weeks away. I was in the kitchen about to make coffee when I heard knocking.
I opened the door without thinking, expecting Sid or Maggie.
It was Cal. In a slim-fitted, denim button-down shirt with a distinctive, Western-style yoke and stitching, like he’d thought to dress for Montana.
Stunned, I stuttered his name, not quite sure he was real.
The look on his face was very real, however, and unambiguous. His mouth was taut and severe, his left hand in the air, index finger pointing to an invisible thought bubble above his head. He had something to say and had come to say it. But before he said a word, his face cracked like a windshield hit by a stone, and he hauled off and punched me, his fist hitting my right cheekbone, eye, and nose in one sliding blow.
I heard my teeth rattle inside my head like Tic Tacs in a packet, and I cupped my hand around my nose to catch the blood I could already taste in the back of my throat.
“What the fuck,” I spat.
A second later Cal hit me again, this time in the gut. He knocked the wind out of me, and I doubled over, gasping for air.
“Goddamn it, Harp,” he said, immediately helping me stand back up. “I did not come here to do that.”
He walked me to the couch and I sat down, dizzy and nauseous.
“Fuck,” I said again, coughing.
“I mean it. I don’t know what came over me.” He rubbed his knuckles, shook out his hand. “I’ve never punched anyone before. It hurts.”
Blood dripped down my face, and I wiped it off with the bottom of my T-shirt. It was warm and sticky. “I’ve never been punched before. That hurts too.”
Cal walked to my kitchen, wrapped a bunch of ice in a dishtowel, and handed it to me. He told me to press it to my cheek and I did. The right side of my face throbbed, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
Cal sat in the armchair diagonal from me, glowering in my direction with his head tilted back and to the side, arms crossed over his chest like a hip-hop star in repose.
I was still struggling to get a full breath, and the pain in my face made my eyes water. Blood continued to drip down my throat, and it tasted like I was sucking on a guitar string. I leaned my head against the couch to stop the room from spinning, and when I sat back up, Cal’s beady eyes were trained hard on me.
We looked at each other for a long time without saying anything.
The right side of my face was burning cold, and I took the ice away. I fingered my nose and Cal said, “Is it broken?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Your eye is pretty swollen. Gonna have a nice shiner there.”
My cheek started to ache again, and I put the ice back.
Cal was sitting on the edge of the chair now, legs spread, left elbow on left knee, chin in his palm. It could have been an album cover: Callahan Goes Country.
“That first punch was for fucking my girlfriend,” he said. “The