Madison Cyr’s writing has been previously published in Leon Literary Review, The Cape Rock Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson. She lives in Southern Indiana where she is at work on a novel.

My mother died alone even though she didn’t have to. She was spiteful that way. We’d been at her bedside for two weeks, me and Dan, this dipshit she insisted on marrying. And she waited until Dan was on the can and I was out walking laps around the block. It was a statement. Like, how dare we attend to our lesser human needs when she was doing the biggest thing a human could do by dying. I was two houses away when Dan called and said she wasn’t breathing.

I ran back to the house and that’s when I knew it was for real. I could hear his keening from outside the front door—these big, loud, wet cries like little kids have. I went in and he was on his knees at her bedside. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He was wearing gray sweatpants with elasticated ankles and a tight yellow t-shirt that he tucked over his belly and into the waistband of his pants. Seeing him like that kissing her hand in that fucking outfit and the shiny skin on his bald head, well that was just about the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

. . .

My mother’s been dead three days. Angelique is standing in the bathroom now, brushing her teeth. We’ve been married for almost four years. We were one of the drunk over-eager couples who lined up all over the city the day same-sex marriage was legalized. We weren’t even engaged.

She’s French-Canadian and plays the violin in a string quartet with the very clever name “Going for Baroque.” Her hair is long and straight and blond. In our bathroom, there’s a stained-glass window of purple irises. When the sun shines through it in the evening, the light fills up her hair with color. I never thought anyone would want to marry me, especially not someone so beautiful and smart and cultured. I never thought I’d live in a house with a stained-glass window.

I dipped in to nuzzle her neck and smell her hair. It happens sometimes. I can’t control myself. I’m like a Labrador and she’s a pool of clear water. She laughed and a stream of minty froth streaked her chin.

“Oh god!” she said as she pushed me back. “Look what you made me do!” But she was laughing when she said it, so I knew she wasn’t angry. This was an issue early in our relationship, my tendency to take everything personally.

“You are always on defense,” she used to say to me. “I don’t know who you’re fighting, but it’s not me.” Then she met my mother.

My mother was a psychic. I don’t mean she saw the future, but she read tarot and palms and all that stuff. She never read mine though. I wouldn’t let her and it drove her crazy. I should have, probably. What would it have hurt? And I always sort of wanted to, the same way I’d wanted to talk to her about my crushes but didn’t because my mother’s brain was a rolodex of my weak spots and she’d pull out a card when I least expected it. 

My mother never referred to Angelique as my wife. “Where’s your friend, Angel?” she’d ask when I showed up alone. Or, “How’s my Angel? You’re so lucky to have a friend like Angel.” As if she could rewrite everything. 

“She can’t love you like you want her to,” my wife was fond of reminding me. “You have to accept that and move on.” And I know she’s right but Angelique’s family has a group text. Her phone pings all day long. Sometimes at night she wakes me up laughing at some dumb GIF or inside joke. Her mother calls me Annie Banannie and sweetie pie and sugar plum. They included me in the family group text, but I got so annoyed by the constant notifications that I had to silence it. There are things about my mother and me Angelique will never understand. My mother and I don’t need a group text. We have wormholes; mysterious portals into each other’s bodies. Sometimes I dream as her. I’m me inside her body, both of us at the same time. The combination is always explosive. I wake up inexplicably angry or sad, but hardly ever laughing. But my wife is the opposite of all of that. When I’m around Angelique, I’m not even a better version of myself, I am just better than myself; a changeling Annie possessed by patience and compassion and a certain stillness I cannot define. Mostly it’s nice, but sometimes it gets to me and I have to go out for a long run along the Greenway to the fossil beds where I just stand and scream across the water until I’m empty.

“Are you going to say something?” Angelique was asking about the service again as she worked a comb through her hair. The lower the sun got, the more concentrated the purple looked in her hair. The funeral was a week away, and each time I remembered that fact it surprised me all over again. Angelique had taken time off from the college where she teaches French. I hadn’t asked her to do that which sort of annoyed me. I hadn’t changed any of my plans. I was still working on the rebrand design for a local brewery due soon, and I hadn’t asked for an extension. I hadn’t told any of my clients. I didn’t see the point. I already worked from home as a freelancer. What would I be doing if I wasn’t working? Angelique thought I should be doing something, or maybe she thought I should be doing nothing. I don’t know, but I could tell it was bothering her because she would creep into my office and ask if she could get me anything, if I was okay. She came in so softly, so quietly, like I was something forbidden, like she was afraid of what she would find. But it was just me on my computer like always.

She keeps bringing up the eulogy like it’s going to close some karmic circle or something, me eulogizing my dead mother. She’s rubbing a jade roller vigorously over her face making the skin pink. She thinks it will give me closure. She wants that for me, for us. She wants to be done with it. “I just think you’ll regret it if you don’t,” she continued, and she kissed me on the cheek as she walked out of the bathroom, turning off the light as she went.

. . .

Everything was pretty much taken care of. My mom always knew what she wanted. The only thing she didn’t plan was the headstone. “Well, I’m not the one who has to visit it!” was her argument, which I had to admit was pretty airtight. She did have a whole Pinterest board devoted to the topic though. She showed it to Dan a few weeks before she died, and he kept me up half the night before our appointment at the monument company texting screenshots of the ones he liked the best—gaudy ones carved from pink marble with engravings of roses and fat baby cherubs; it was the kind of thing she was into in her last few years.

The morning we actually go to pick the headstone, Dan seems practically giddy. Inside his little gray Tacoma, it smells like him, like Winter Fresh Speed Stick and Skoal and the buck piss he sprays on his boots during hunting season. Being in Dan’s truck always makes me feel conspicuously female. Especially today since my period came, a ridiculous reminder each month of a part of my biology I’m not interested in using. Once inside the cab, the cramps really ramp up, like my uterus is pickling in all the salinized toxic masculinity.

“It your time?” he asks. It comes out as “yer,” a Hoosier colloquialism Angelique trained out of me. I’ve got a protective arm over my abdomen, which I hadn’t realized, but still weird that he knew.

“Yeah.”

“You got that endometriosis like your momma?”

“No, thank god.”

“That’s good,” he said, patting my knee.

My mother’s periods were events. Five days of bed rest and hot water bottles and cold compresses and precisely timed Percocet doses. She’d go through two boxes of super-plus tampons like cigarettes. I said once she chained-smoked tampons, which she thought was really funny. All the doctors said there was no correlation between the endometriosis and the cancer. But maybe it’s not the kind of correlation that scientists can find. Maybe it has something to do with us, with her and me and all the women before and after us waging war on each other and ourselves, or the thousands of tampons we put inside of us with all of their mysterious fibers and whiteness.

I’d been getting my period for five years before my mom knew anything about it. When it happened the first time, I was eleven. She always kept lots of supplies around the house, pads and tampons and a 1982 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves that she encouraged me to study if I ever had any questions about sex or any of that stuff. All I really remember about that book is a picture of a pretty girl with a seventies perm squatting naked over a mirror examining her own vagina. “It’s important to become familiar with your body,” the caption read. I never squatted over a mirror, but I did look at that picture over and over again to feel the hot little pang it caused in my crotch. But at least when it happened, I knew what it was, what to do. It was an inconvenience more than anything. The most important thing was making sure my mom didn’t know and I don’t even know why. Why it felt like a crime every month. Why I stole tampons and buried the evidence at the bottom of the trash. Why it felt so necessary to prolong her idea of me as a child.

Then, when I was sixteen, she found the condom. That was way before Dan. We were living in the trailer park behind the Walmart in Corydon. My mom was working at the casino then, waiting tables and reading palms every night. I don’t even remember whose condom it was. Back then it could have been anyone’s. There was a new boy every night. I thought if I fucked enough boys I would stop thinking about Mallory Bryson and her curly red hair and scratchy laugh. I thought they could knock her out of me. And maybe I’d gotten cocky and careless, or maybe I wanted her to find it, to shock her into being interested in me. I don’t know, but when I came home from school that day, she flung it at me as I came through the front door. It missed me and fell at my feet in a pathetic little slump

“What the fuck?” I said, stepping over it.

She’d been chain-smoking. The trailer was hazy with it. She was wearing a short red satin robe from Victoria’s Secret and a pair of my terry-cloth volleyball shorts. The shorts looked better on her than they did on me. They showed off her strong little legs. At sixteen I was already a head taller than her and had another four inches to grow.

“You tell me.”

She was pointing her coffin-shaped acrylic nail at the sad wormy shape on the carpet. The carpet was thick and matted and brown. I wore socks all the time, even in summer, so I’d never have to touch it.

“Oh my god. I’m sixteen. Did you think I’d be a virgin forever?” I tossed my backpack on the faded blue recliner and walked past her to the fridge. I wanted a beer. I knew if I could drink one fast enough on an empty stomach there would be a short span of time where I didn’t want to die. Since she was there, I settled for a SunnyD.

“There are things you don’t understand,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette in one of her dozen ashtrays and crossed her arms tight over her chest. “Things that can happen. Thank god you haven’t started your period yet.”

I laughed at that because I figured by that point it was a secret we were both keeping from each other.

“I got my period when I was like, eleven,” I said as I stepped purposefully over the condom on the way to my room. 

“And that is not the first time,” I said, turning back to look at her. “The neighbors probably think we’re whores with how many guys come in and out of here.”

I could tell I’d caught her off guard, but the shock quickly transformed into rage and then she was on me. There wasn’t any pride in it. We scratched each other’s soft inner thighs and pulled hair and bit the insides of elbows. We fought like sisters or lovers. Hurting each other was the same as hurting ourselves. Sometimes I miss it.

That day was the last time. She went right in for the face, usually, so I threw my arms up and turned my face away, and she used the opportunity to sink her hard little fist into my belly. It took the breath right out of me and I fell to my knees. She grabbed fistfuls of my hair at the scalp and yanked my head back so I was staring up at her.

“You’re disgusting,” she said.

My breath returned, I reared up. Pushing from the hips, I drove the crown of my head between her ribs so hard she was flung back and landed with a thud on her ass. I stood then, unsteadily, and made my way to my room where I would lock the door and wait her out, but she was spry and quick to recover or just indifferent to pain, and she got to me before I could shut the door. That’s where it ended, on my bedroom floor where we scratched and kicked and wrestled for purchase among my school books and dirty clothes and CDs. I found myself on top of her, my knees pinning down her arms as I let my full weight sink onto her chest. That’s when I wrapped my hands around her neck and tightened them just long enough to scare her, to let her know this could be the end if I wanted it to be. She was immobilized. I was so much bigger than her. Her eyes began to water and I let go and stood up, sat down on my bed, felt drugged with exhaustion. She just lay there staring at the ceiling, water gathering at the corners of her eyes and then falling down into her ears. She got up, eventually. Neither of us, it seemed, was really hurt. She pulled a crumpled pack out of the pocket of her robe and looked around my room for a lighter. I reached into my pillowcase and pulled out a little pink Bic, the one I used to light the little glass pipe I packed with cheap weed. I handed it to her. She looked a little surprised but didn’t say anything. What was the point of hiding anything? She must have felt the same because she lit a cigarette and then offered me one, which I took.

We stretched across my bed on our backs and blew smoke at the ceiling. She exhaled through her nose. It looked effortlessly cool, and I tried to emulate it but just ended up coughing. She patted my head absent-mindedly.

“I think you should know,” she started, then pulled extra hard on her cigarette.

“What?”

“Your daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“I went to a party and woke up in a cornfield. Couldn’t remember how I got there. All I remembered was dancing with some boy, drinking beer. I tried to just forget about it but then I didn’t get my monthly.”

“He raped you?”

She shrugged.

“Maybe I wanted it. Who knows. I can’t remember.”

“Why did you keep me?”

“Oh god, Annie. I don’t know,” she said, annoyed.

“Are you glad you did?”

She thought about it for a minute.

“Most of the time.”

. . .

Rachel, the owner of Greystone Monument, was shockingly hot. Her skin was very white and her hair was very dark. A real Morticia Adams vibe, which probably worked in her favor. We were inside the little building that had obviously been a house before. The office area was contained to the former living room and all the doors which led, presumably, to the other more domestic areas of the house, were shut. Dan and I shared a sofa. On the low table in front of us were albums full of pictures of gravestones. Rachel sat in a chair to my left. Dan had just pulled out his Pinterest board of dream headstones and was scrolling through them, reaching over me to show Rachel the ones he really liked.

“Look,” she said. “I know everyone comes in with a vision, but sometimes it’s an instinct thing. Why don’t you all follow me out back and take a look around.”

Greystone Monument was off a main road across from a self-storage place and next to a McDonald’s. I’d passed it probably a hundred times without it ever really registering. It’s the sort of place you don’t think about existing until you need it.

It was April and the ground squelched under our feet. It was chilly still, but the air was full of that rich earth smell that comes in spring. Dan walked slowly up and down the rows of headstones while cars whizzed by. We were so close to the McDonald’s I could hear people placing their drive-thru orders. Dan seemed oblivious to everything but the stones. Some of them he touched, letting his fingertips sweep lightly over the cold marble.

“He must have really loved her,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. Rachel was standing close enough I could smell her. She smelled like almonds. Like warm almonds. Sweet and woody.

“So, is this, like, a family business?” I was trying to put it together, her, in this place, doing this work which didn’t seem like the kind of thing anyone would set out to do.

She laughed. “I know. It’s weird. I wanted to be a coroner, but turns out I’m very squeamish. I’m also a stone worker. This seemed like a nice compromise.”

In profile, her lips made a perfect red heart. I thought about laying her down right there in the muddy grass between the rows of blank headstones and fucking her. It was suddenly all I wanted. I get this way sometimes, instantly obsessed with someone. It hits me so fast and so hard I can forget Angelique exists. I can forget everything about myself except the thing I want. But it’s a moment. I never strayed.

We left without making a decision. Dan said he needed to sleep on it. He was really blowing it out of proportion. Like if he didn’t pick the exact right thing my mom was going to haunt him or something.

On our way out, Rachel pressed her card into my hand. She’d written her cell on the back. The ink was still wet.

“Text or call whenever,” she said. “It’s a big decision.”

She looked at me when she said it, squeezed my bicep just above the elbow.

. . .

When I got home, Angelique was in the yard picking up twigs that had fallen in the storm the night before. She waved to us clutching a little stick in her hand, some acorns still attached. Angel liked Dan and Dan liked Angel and I did not understand why the fuck that was. It was an argument we had over and over again.

“I don’t understand your contempt for him. He’s nice and he loves you and Judy.”

“He is literally everything that’s wrong with this country,” I’d reply. I had to think her idyllic Canadian upbringing had something to do with her tendency to give everyone the benefit of the doubt even when they didn’t deserve it. But Dan also made a point of collecting sticks out of his own yard and maybe that had something to do with it, too; that they both cared so much about such weird pointless things. 

“Did you pick a stone?” she asked.

“Nada,” I said, gesturing to Dan with my right thumb. He shrugged.

“Nothing I saw screamed ‘Judy’ to me, ya know?”

Angelique nodded, her face locked in an expression of empathy and understanding. This had been her default expression since my mother died and it was starting to annoy me.

“Oh my god, why is everyone making such a big deal about this? She didn’t give a fuck. That’s why she left it up to us.”

Dan laughed and elbowed Angelique like they had some joke I wasn’t in on.

“She left it up to me,” Dan said. “As a test.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“You really don’t know women,” he said, still chuckling. My mother and Dan were always saying stuff like that, making me out to be some dopey lesbian sitcom husband, as if liking cunt meant the same as not having one.

“I know my mom. If she cared she would have done it herself.”

I went inside and tried not to think about Rachel.

. . .

We had to get the coffin made custom. The only ready-made coffins in the color she wanted were for children. And even those were lined with ivory satin. She wanted the lining to match. Both a pale dusty pink.

“God Mom. Could you be any tackier?” I said. I was painting her nails. They were thin and brittle.

“Excuse me,” she said from beneath her sheet mask, “when you die you can do it however you want.”

We were having a spa day. One of the day-nurses suggested it when I asked her what I was supposed to do.

“Just treat her like you normally would,” was her advice. “Have a spa day. Eat ice cream and watch movies.” We’d never done any of those things. My mom peeled off her mask and held it up for Dan to throw away, which he did right away. Her face glistened. I tapped the serum into her skin with my fingertips, the way I’d seen Angelique do it. Her skin was weirdly taut and youthful in the weeks before she died, and it gave me a creepy cold feeling. It was like she was rotting and being born at the same time, and what the fuck are you supposed to do with that? She closed her eyes while I touched her face. Her eyelids were blue and nearly transparent.

“How can you stand being in here? It’s like a Barbie hellscape.”

She clicked her tongue softly on the roof of her mouth. “You’re just jealous.”

Once she’d decided to die at home, she was obsessed with redecorating the bedroom. She had the wood floor covered in thick white pile carpet. She bought a massive four-poster bed and fine linens in pink and white, a dozen down throw pillows, a down comforter, and piles of chenille blankets. She had the walls papered in a pattern of antique roses. It was hideous. Not to mention it didn’t even match the rest of the house, which was also hideous but in a normal, Midwestern, middle-class way: a white leather sofa set, all black appliances, and meaningless hotel art, that sort of thing. In all the places we’d lived, the apartments and the trailers and the rental homes, she’d never done up a room like this. It was like the disease sent her into a kind of regression. Or maybe, it had always been there? This lacy pink girl fever always inside of her, but circumstances had never allowed it to emerge. The cancer made her fearless in her desires. After the room was how she wanted it, she moved on to the coffin. We spent a lot of time in her last few months going over colors and fabric samples. The casket, when all was said and done, cost over ten-grand. And that’s not even counting whatever she paid them to deliver it to the house so she could try it out. We found her stash after she was gone—thick folds of bills in a shoebox at the top of her closet. Dan ran a successful die and mold business and had more than enough money, but she’d continued to hoard away whatever scraps she made off tarot readings. For what, who can say. I think she just liked knowing it was there.

She had arranged the whole casket thing herself with her infuriating brand of secret confidence. When the men arrived from Farley’s Funeral Home, we had no warning. Dan and I had to shove couches and chairs out of the way so they could fit it in the living room.

“What the hell, Judy!” Dan yelled once the men left.

Mom dismissed his comment with a wave of her hand and began to shift beneath her pile of blankets. By this time, she was too weak to stand, let alone walk. Any movement caused her pain. “Oh, my bones,” she would cry out when we moved her. There was no flesh to her at all. Her body was tiny and desiccated and bruised-brown.

“I want to try it,” she said.

“I’m not putting you in that thing,” Dan said.

“You’re going to say no to a dying woman?” She used this line a lot because it always worked.

“Judy, baby, you can’t ask me to do that,” he said.

“Annie. Come here. Help your momma.” She knew I would do it. I don’t know why she asked Dan in the first place. Her room smelled like baby powder and lilies and the cherry Jergens lotion that I warmed under the faucet before I worked it into her crepey skin. The room smelled that way but she didn’t. Her smell was a secret, but when we peeled the covers away it was there—a combination of piss and mucus and something mustier, like a dog’s coat. It wasn’t as easy as scooping her up. I had to stand there with my arms outstretched so Dan could layer them in blankets, otherwise my bones would rub against her bones and every step I took would be agony for her. Once the blankets were in place, I crouched so I was level with the bed, and Dan would slide her into my arms.

“My little baby,” I cooed once she was safely held. “My little Benjamin Button.” She always cracked up when I said that. I could tell Dan didn’t want to watch, but he wouldn’t leave until she was safely in the casket, because I guess he didn’t totally trust me not to drop her or something, even though she weighed less than a full-grown German Shepherd.

A thousand of the ten-grand was for the memory foam padding. Four inches of foam on the bottom, one inch on the sides. It was so soft and dense I felt like I was lowering her into the mouth of some sweet pink animal. She let out a little sigh once she was inside.

“Want me to close it?” I asked, and she flipped me the bird. “Oh, I like this. This is nice,” she said, burrowing her little body into the satin folds. I draped blanket after blanket over her, nestled feather pillows under and around her head.

“Yep, this will do.”

“That’s good,” I said, “cause you’re gonna be there awhile.”

“Jesus, Annie!” Dan said, and left the house out the back, letting the screen door slam behind him. 

“You can’t talk like that in front of him, baby. He’s not like us.”

I sat down on the floor beside the casket. “What do you mean?” I asked.

She sighed, fingering the lace edge of one of her blankets, “He’s nice.”

“I’m nice,” I said. But I knew what she meant.

“Babe?” she asked. “Will you get my cards?”

She kept all her tarot decks in a big walnut box on her vanity. As a girl, I loved to go through the decks. The minor arcana always interested me more than the trump cards because their meanings were murkier, harder to interpret, and therefore, I thought, more closely aligned with the subconscious. I liked chalices best. The suit, my mother told me, was associated with feelings and intuition. I hadn’t thought about any of that in a long time. I sat down and shuffled them, softly, like she taught me, trying not to let any thoughts or feelings pass into them through my fingertips.

“Which deck did you pick?” she asked.

“Golden tarot. The art nouveau one.”

“You always loved that one.”

I spread the deck into a horseshoe shape on the floor and began to trace my hand over them. When I reached the right one, she would tell me to stop, and I’d flip the card and tell her the result. I never knew what the readings meant or what she asked. But sometimes after a reading, she’d get sad and quiet for a few days and I knew she was working something out. But this time she seemed satisfied with the results. She’d drawn The Empress as her signifier and smiled when I told her. Usually, when a client drew The Empress, my mom would ask about their kids, or, if they didn’t have any kids, their mothers. The Empress had something to do with fertility and feminine power and the mother goddess. But in this context, I wasn’t sure what she had to be happy about. When I’d drawn all the cards and she was done, I stacked the deck and slid it into its soft worn box.

“What was your question?” I asked.

“I just wanted to know what it would be like.”

“What?”

“What comes after.”

She lay there in her coffin, her blankets pulled up to her chin gazing at the ceiling.

“Did you like the answer?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. I had the urge to crawl into the casket with her, to pull her little body against my own. And then she reached a little shriveled hand out to me and said, “I love you, babygirl.” It was the third time she’d ever said it. One “I love you” for each decade of my life.

. . .

Angelique wants me to get a total hysterectomy. She wants me to get tested for the BRCA gene. She wants to cut away any part of my body that might kill me later.

Women my mother’s age are rarely diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer. More than half of those diagnosed are over sixty-five years old. My mother was forty-five at the time of her diagnosis and forty-eight when she died. I am almost thirty-one years old. I know that my wife is doing constant arithmetic in her head. She is counting back the years from the diagnosis to the day the cancer was born. How long had it lived quietly inside of my mother? Five years? More? Less? Was it already inside me? Were our years together already ticking down? I know this is what she’s thinking. I can tell by the slow tender way she strokes my breasts and belly, the way she looks into my eyes before she kisses me.

. . .

Dan decided on a white marble heart. It was not cheap. It had been sanded so smooth it looked like a pool of milk and was wonderfully cool to the touch. Dan wanted the edge of the heart engraved with the same filigree that edged her favorite tarot deck. For the text, we decided to keep it simple, to let the marker speak for itself. Just her name, Judy Alma Greer, and the dates, June 1, 1971 – April 9, 2019. Then, in an italicized script, “Empress”—Dan liked that. He looked at me with weepy eyes that I pretended not to notice. Rachel was excited by the filigree, which she said would be a new challenge.

“But you can do it though?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m very good.”

I wondered if Dan could pick up on the note of insinuation in her voice. We’d been texting on and off. At first, it was just about the headstone, but then she started to ask about my mom and it turned out she’d had her palms read by her a few years prior.

“One of those weird things you do after a break-up,” she said. Obvious bait.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied.

“I’m not sorry. I LOVE being single!!!” She followed that text up with a GIF of Mel Gibson from that famous scene in Braveheart, the word “freedom” blinking in big capital letters.

Now was the part in the exchange when I was supposed to bring up Angelique, after which the conversation could fizzle out naturally, only I didn’t. But I didn’t lie either. I just went to the bathroom and lifted my t-shirt up over my boobs and took a picture and sent it to her. The three minutes spent waiting for her response were pure agony. I could hear Angelique puttering around in the kitchen, humming along to an Amanda Palmer song.

“Hot Damn!” she finally replied. “LOVE the tat.” I have a spiderweb tattooed on my sternum. In the center of the web, it says “Bad Girl.” It was my first tattoo and the ink has spread with age so that the lines are no longer as black or crisp as they used to be. It had been the most rebellious thing I could think of at the time. I got it two days after the condom fight. A few minutes later, Rachel sends her own picture; she’s sitting in bed with her knees up and the phone is propped so that the angle is the same as if my head were between her legs and I were gazing up at her. She’s biting her bottom lip and her right hand is half-hidden by her red lace thong. My whole body feels flushed.

“Babe!” Angelique called from the kitchen, “Dinner is ready!” She’d made roast chicken. I could smell the rosemary, the garlic, the crisp, caramelized skin. 

. . .

I met Rachel at a bar the night before the funeral. A bar I’d never been to before, would never go to. There were peanut shells all over the floor. The barstools were red vinyl and slick with grease. People were smoking even though it’s been illegal for years. It’s one of those places that exists as a tribute to the past, to a time of greater mystery, before we knew cigarettes caused cancer, or before we pretended to care. Angelique would hate it.

Rachel hugged me and I could smell her perfume; something dark and musky and expensive smelling. 

“Okay,” she said, sitting down on a barstool and sipping her beer. “Big day tomorrow. How you feeling?” She rested a hand on my thigh and my skin burned beneath my jeans.

“I don’t know,” I said. The truth was that I didn’t feel anything at all. I hadn’t shed one tear over my dead mother, but that’s not something you say to someone if you want to fuck them. “I think I’m still in shock, honestly. I think it will really hit me tomorrow.” Rachel nodded slowly.

Because we both knew where we wanted it to go, but didn’t want to say it, we switched from beer to whiskey and after about an hour were good and wasted. When Rachel went to the restroom I followed. She had her skirt up and her tights pulled down before I could even get the door locked behind me. The first thirty seconds spent eating her out were heaven; that blank buzzy feeling you get from wanting something so bad, from imagining it over and over again and then, finally, magically, getting it. With Angelique, it was over a year before that feeling went away. Every time with her was a shock to my system. And then I found myself thinking about my wife and her full hips and her hair full of purple light, and then I thought about my mother in her pale pink coffin with its four inches of pointless memory foam, and I did start to cry, which is just about the least sexy thing a person can do. It took Rachel a second to notice at first, but then I was crying so hard it was impossible to keep the tempo right.

“Whoa, whoa, babe,” she said, as she pulled up her tights. “Is it hitting you now?” she asked, a hand on my shoulder. I wiped my eyes over and over again with the cuff of my jacket.

“Fuck! I’m sorry!” I said. I couldn’t catch my breath. The smell of her on my face was making me feel dizzy. I licked my lips and they were slick with her and my own snot. I watched her pupils shrink, my own face growing smaller in the dying black.

. . .

I spent a good ten minutes in the driveway blotting my face with tissues and pressing my cold fingers against my puffy eyelids. Angelique could always tell when I’d been crying.

She was waiting for me. She’d never admit it, but it was almost midnight and she was always in bed by ten-thirty. There was a book propped open between her knees, a cup of tea gone cold on the bedside table. I smelled like smoke and liquor and grease. I was afraid I still smelled like Rachel. I caught a whiff of her every now and then even though I’d washed my face half a dozen times with the brutal pink hand soap at the bar. My face was so clean and tight it hurt. But if Angelique noticed she didn’t let on. She just closed her book and waited for me. I sat on the edge of the bed and worked my sneakers off with the toes of the opposite foot. We didn’t say anything. The only sound was the swoosh-swoosh of fabric rubbing fabric as I undressed, and the soft thunk of my shoes as they fell, one after the other, onto the hardwood floor. Then she pulled me into her, into the warm sweet-smelling pocket made up of her body and the bed and the blankets. She curled herself around me and I tried to let go, to force each little muscle to unclench, to let myself be held.