kisses of love and sour menu's

“Will you promise me something? That it is you and no one else that talks to him.”

Love, hope, and motherhood cannot be rushed. Certainly, it was the truth once. I said, “Please tell me that you have no regrets.”

Her hand went through her hair, and she looked out the window. It was raining, and her hair was beautiful. I can describe it, but I always feel like I'm stepping on something if I do.

“It’s too late,” she said.

I disagreed.

“You reached out to me.”

She lay on her white duvet. The rain pelted the windows. “This was my grandmother’s,” she said. “I know,” I said, quietly but with nothing to hide. The roar of thunder without a flash of light reminded me of when my grandmother used to blow out the candle beside my bed. She always said, “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I stepped onto the porch, still dry under the old wood of the old house, but I did look at where I was going—the slanted rain and swaying trees. The sun was somewhere, but I didn’t bother looking at that. I did see where I stood at prom. It’s gravel now.

I put on my Stetson and walked into it, soaked immediately. Though I did not turn around, I knew she was not watching me; to her, I was a man of my word.

Through a necessary corner of sharp corn stock, I happened upon the old shed. No light was on, but no light had ever been on in there. I smirked, thinking about candles.

“Walter?” I shouted.

It’s a funny thing when a man identifies your soaked boots, trotting across the mud-grass before you shout his name. Just by the commotion my voice harkened, I knew he had been drinking, and that pleased me, for it had been a while, though I’d have to get a cup of coffee on the way home. Carla doesn’t like the smell.

I slid open the red wooden door. He said I looked concerned.

“What in the rat’s ass, monkey hell you got going on in here?”

It looked like someone gorilla-glued all the hay to the roof, and he had been grabbing his crotch. I touched mine, but that was a habit. I sat.

“You starting an ant farm?” I chuckled.

Walter sat behind his workbench, beside the red vice and dry shavings. I propped myself right up—boots up, hands behind my head, and a yawn from my big mouth. Walter said, “It’s burning,” but I believed he was talking to himself. I dropped my elbows and leaned toward him.

“What’s going on? You got Mack scared half to death.”

Walter wasn’t heavy, but he also didn’t look like a large turkey. He shook, and his neck skin swung from side to side like a Looney Tunes Character fillerbusting against civil rights.

“Did you see the pills?” he asked.

I said I hadn’t.

“She’s crazy for them. Diet this, diet that. That doctor down in Decorah is trying to get her all cuckoo.”

I asked for a drink, but Walter was worked up. It was like a Thanksgiving day parade wobbled down his throat.

“You’ve been gone!” he said. “Decorah is different.”

“How so?”

“Pill doctors. Just handing them out like candy. It’s awful, Robbie, I could turn my saw on!”

What he planned to do with that saw was never discovered. I said, “Hold on, now. What about the Chicago Bears?”

He had a light brown mustache that accentuated his frown before pointing at me. “You are beating around the bush! Always have, and always will!”

“You're sort of bamboozling me, Walter.”

He looked me in the eye, as he always had, but now it was on the menu of mean expressions. He asked, “What do you think you’re doing? One minute you’re here, and then you’re off! Bamboozling? Psh!”

I thought he was right, but did not tell him. I spoke.

“I saw Mack. Beautiful as ever. Why are you hiding down here?”

My words produced blood beneath the light blue and white checkered long sleeve, and he found the high ground.

“How dare you come into my shed and talk to me that way?”

I had things I wanted and needed to say, but no answer to that, at that moment. I was in his shed.

“I’m sorry, but do you have any idea what she is going through?”

He uncrossed his arms like a tulip on a hot summer day. Red as a rose. Full of turkey.

“Plenty.”

Thunder distracted us, but I still don’t know if it’s true. It is the only time I remember raising my voice in another’s shed, but there may be others who disagree.

“Your wife!”

“What about her, you duffle cow!”

“Duffle cow?”

Walter pointed his finger as close as it ever got to my nose.

“You may think you’re big shit, but in Winneshiek County, you're just a bag of goose droppings.”

He itched his crotch, and I wondered if his recent visit to Reno had anything to do with this, but when I asked him again, it was Mack, soft, beautiful Mack, that sent a bolt of lightning through my feet and got me up.

“I asked for a drink, and you offered me nothing, you accused me of being away while I was cross town, and in the meantime, your wife is tapering, and all you can do is tell me about Decorah doctors while you scratch the STD you won in Reno?”

He grabbed a pair of channel locks and wiped whatever he thought was on his thin lips. The lips of generations of tobacco farmers in Estill County, Kentucky. When he came to Iowa, no one knew because I never asked Mack, his wife. He laughed and poured me a shot of bourbon. We took one, and once it had reached our stomachs, it was understood he would never be seen again. I’ve been here before, and never again. I tore it down as soon as I moved in. The last I heard, the last I knew, was that he had found their son, and asked, “Will you promise me something? That it is you and no one else that talks to him.”