Prelude

Three years he’d been in the ground and I was still sticking my face in his coat every morning like a dog with a bone.

Before the boys came down. That was the rule. I’d get the coffee going and go to the hook by the back door where his old canvas chore coat hung, the one nobody else in this house was allowed to touch, and I’d lift the collar and put my nose right in the seam and breathe. Cedar. Bar oil. Him. And under that, so faint now I really had to work for it, that warm thick smell that used to fill the whole house when he came in from outside, fur that’s been lying in the sun. “mmm...”, right into his collar. My nipples went hard under my nightgown. My thighs pressed together all on their own and there it was, that slow warm slide, my pussy getting wet over a coat on a hook with the coffee maker gurgling behind me.

You’re a widow, Dell. Three grown sons asleep upstairs and you’re creaming over a coat.

Every breath I took left a little less of him in that seam. I took one more. Then another one, a greedy one, and my hips actually moved, a little roll against my own nightgown. The wet fabric dragged over my swollen folds. That was so pathetic I laughed into the canvas.

The stairs creaked. I hung it back up so fast the hook rattled.

Jace. Shirtless, scratching his belly, hair sticking up on one side. He reached past me for a mug and his bare chest brushed my arm, like he hadn’t just caught his mother humping the air in front of his dead father’s coat. He’d caught it. Nobody gets away with anything in this house. Their noses are worse than mine.

“Morning, Ma.”

“There’s coffee.”

Don’t you dare blush. Pour the man his coffee.

I poured the man his coffee. And my eyes went where they had no business going, down his stomach, flat and hard and brown from the truck, past those three pale scars low on his side, the ones he got the night we ran, down that line of dark hair into the waistband of his sleep shorts. The shorts sat low. I could see the soft heavy outline of his cock resting against the fabric, the head of it making a little ridge. My pussy clenched and more wet slid out of me.

No. Absolutely not. That’s your son, you disgusting old woman. Look at the coffee.

I looked at the coffee. My face went hot, and hating myself didn’t dry one thing up. It never once has, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

He took the milk out and drank it straight from the jug.

“Glass,” I said. Too high.

He grinned at me over his shoulder like he could smell exactly what kind of morning I was having. He probably could.

I should tell you how we got here, because you’re going to wonder.

They killed Pascal three springs ago. The family across the lake, up north where we lived before. Them. One night in April he went out to see about something on the lake road and didn’t come back, and I found him by the culvert in the morning with his throat torn open.

We ran that same night. I grabbed his coat off the hook and that’s all I grabbed. Cal wouldn’t let anybody write on a single box, not even KITCHEN, because a word on a box is something somebody can read. Me, who used to label the spice rack. Now it’s a white house at the end of a gravel road north of the city, and the boys run a moving company, and Jace painted PASCAL in big navy letters down the side of the truck. I yelled at all three of them in the driveway. Anybody with a nose can follow a name.

Cal didn’t even turn around. “It stays.”

It stayed. That was the first time.

Rook came down next and I swear the stairs complained.

He had on an old undershirt because yesterday’s work shirt was in my wash basket split straight down the back seam. That happens with them when the change sits close under the skin all week and their shoulders won’t stay the size of a shirt. The undershirt was stretched so tight I could see every slab of muscle through it, and when he reached up to the cupboard for a bowl it rode up. All this skin. His belly thick and brown over the waistband of his work pants, and the start of that same dark trail of hair his father had. He stood there with his arm up and his nose in my cupboard, sniffing around for the cereal.

Look at the stove. The stove, Dell.

I looked at his shoulder instead. That big round cap of muscle where the arm goes in, the exact same shoulder his father had, and I used to put my teeth right there when Pascal was buried deep in me so I wouldn’t scream the whole lake awake. My pussy clenched so hard I had to grab the counter. “hh...” It came out of me before I could stop it. Rook’s head turned. Just his head, the way he does, before his eyes catch up.

“You okay, Ma?”

“Fine. Hot. It’s hot.”

He looked at me one second too long and went back to his cereal, and I went to the sink and ran the cold water over my wrists like an idiot. I could smell myself. Sweet and thick. They could too.

Cal came down last. Dressed already. Navy shirt with PASCAL RELOCATION across the chest in white and CAL stitched over the pocket, sleeves rolled up, and his forearms, oh, his forearms. Thick, roped, dark hair running down over the backs of his hands almost to the knuckles. His father’s arms. He took Pascal’s old clipboard down off the nail by the back door, the clip still bent where Pascal used to chew on it, and tucked it under that arm like it was his.

The gray had come in at his temples the summer after we ran. All at once, right at the sides, the same place Pascal went gray, and every time I looked at it something in my belly went soft and hot and stupid.

He walked past the coat. He didn’t look at it. His nostrils moved once.

“You were in it,” he said.

Not a question.

“Drink your coffee,” I said.

He drank his coffee and looked at me over the cup. I turned and faced the sink with my thighs pressed together and my pussy throbbing and all three of my sons in that kitchen with their noses, and I thought, they can smell you. Every one of them can smell what you are. And right on the heels of it, worse, Good. God, let them.

We ate on the back porch that night because the kitchen was an oven. Steaks barely cooked, the way they like them, blood running out on the platter, tomatoes from my buckets cut thick with salt. And Pascal’s chair at the head of the table. The ladderback with the split seat. Nobody had sat in it for three years.

The boys came up the steps smelling like other people’s apartments. Cardboard, sweat, somebody’s cat. And on Cal’s collar, sweet, a drugstore body spray, cucumber melon. I’d smelled it across the Agway counter on the woman who rings up my chicken feed and calls everybody hon.

Good for him. That’s none of your business. Good for her.

I picked up the platter. Rook took it right out of my hands, both hands under it the way he takes a box off somebody on the stairs, and walked it past the empty chair and past me and set it down in front of Cal.

Cal first.

Cal forked his steak and passed it on like that was just how it went. The juice ran down the side of his hand to his wrist and he licked it off, quick, without thinking, and I felt it on my own wrist. Pascal used to take my hand on nights like this and lick the juice off the inside of my wrist, right on the pulse, looking at me the whole time, and I’d have to change my underwear before the dishes.

My pussy remembered. It clenched right there on the porch bench, a slow thick squeeze, and “mmm ... oh, that’s...” a warm trickle slid out of me into my underwear, and I put a tomato in my mouth to shut myself up.

Steak juice on a wrist, Dell. You need a cold shower and a priest.

“Website one for Saturday,” Jace said, thumbing his phone. “Fourth floor walk up, no elevator. Marie something.”

He said it to Cal. I opened my mouth to tell him Saturday was open, and Jace didn’t even look at me. They were all looking at Cal.

“Keep it,” Cal said.

Rook wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Car at the end of the road again,” he said. “Same one.”

“I know,” Cal said.

Nobody looked at me. And I smelled it, or I thought I did, that smell I hadn’t had in my nose since the lake. Cold ash. A woodstove somebody let go out in the rain. Them. My stomach dropped right through the bench and I got up for the salt that nobody needed.

“Sit down, Ma.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even look up from his plate. And I sat. My knees just did it, and my pussy clenched on those three words, one squeeze for every word, “hhn...”, because that was Pascal’s voice. Sit down, Dell. My body has been doing what that voice tells it since the diner on the lake road.

That’s your SON telling you to sit.

I ate my steak and didn’t taste one bite of it. I sat on that bench so swollen I could feel my own pulse down there every time I chewed, and I looked at the empty chair so I wouldn’t look at the man to the right of it.

Thursday is sheets and town. I had mine on the line by eight, white cotton off my bed flapping in the hot wind, and I drove in for groceries and the bank. Then the freezers went down at the Price Chopper and they shut the doors on everybody and sent us home, and I came up the gravel two hours early with a gallon of milk sweating through the bag onto my thigh.

The truck was in the drive. It shouldn’t have been. And a silver Corolla was pulled up on the shoulder by the stockade fence with a big dent in the back quarter panel, and before I even got the engine off I heard her.

A woman. Over the cicadas. Over the whole house. High and broken and absolutely, completely not hurt.

Oh no. Oh no no no.

I went in the front door. I put the bags on the counter. I went to the window over the sink because I am apparently that kind of woman now. A gallon of milk, a box of Raisin Bran, and my son’s bare ass in my kitchen window. Thick and flexing, his work pants shoved down his thighs.

My sheet was in the grass. Pulled off the line, one corner still clothespinned, dragged down into the clover, and the Agway woman was on her hands and knees on it with her yellow sundress shoved up to her shoulder blades and her cheek right on my clean cotton. My sheet. Off my bed.

And his shirt was on the picnic table. Folded. Square, with CAL facing up.

Pascal folded his shirt exactly like that. Before anything. Before he’d even kiss me.

Rook was at the stockade fence by the road with his arms crossed and his back to the yard. Jace was leaning on the wire fence at the woods line chewing a piece of grass, watching the trees. Guarding him. Nobody told them to. And Rook’s head turned. His head first, then his eyes, and they came right to the kitchen window and found me standing there with my groceries, and he looked at me for one long breath.

Then he turned back to the road.

He let me stay. Or he left me to it. I stayed.

Cal was behind her on his knees in the clover with nothing on top, and God forgive me, I looked. I looked at all of him.

His back was right there in the sun. Brown and wet, sweat running down the long groove of his spine, and on either side of it those two thick ropes of muscle working every time his hips went, in, out, in, out, and his shoulders, Pascal’s shoulders, wide and heavy and bunching up every time he pulled her back onto him. A drop of sweat started at his shoulder blade and ran all the way down into the hollow above his ass and I watched that drop the whole way like my life depended on it, my mouth hanging open, my cunt throbbing so hard it hurt.

That’s your son, you sick, filthy woman. Turn around.

I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t make my body do it. So I made myself look at her instead, like that was any better.

Her face was turned toward the house. Right toward me. Her cheek was mashed flat on my sheet and her eyes were wide open, big and shocked, staring straight at my window and not seeing one thing in it, and her mouth was hanging open in a round O. Pink frosted lipstick, the same pink she wears at the register, and it was smearing off on my clean cotton every time he shoved her forward. Her bleached hair had come out of the clip and it was stuck to her forehead, the dark roots wet with sweat. Every time he went in, her eyes went wider. “ohhh ... oh my God ... oh hon ... oh my God, hon...” Like he surprised her. Like every single stroke was the first one and she couldn’t get over how much of him there was.

I’ve made that face. On the boathouse planks with my cheek on the boards, the first time Pascal went all the way in, I made that same stupid face, eyes popping, mouth open, no sound coming out. And “mmhh ... oh God, he’s so ... hhn...” my pussy clenched right along with her, on his stroke, like it was me he was going into.

That’s not you out there. That’s the Agway woman. She rings up your chicken feed.

“Don’t ... don’t you stop ... don’t you ffffucking stop...”

He didn’t stop. He had one hand spread on the back of her neck, the whole hand, his thumb up under her ear, his fingers in her hair, holding her face down in my sheet, and the other hand on her hip with the fingertips dug in so deep I could see the dents from the window. And that was Pascal. That was how Pascal held a woman down. Like she was his and she wasn’t going anywhere till he said so. I’d had that hand on my own neck more nights than I could count and I felt it there right then, standing at my kitchen sink, a hot heavy weight on the back of my neck, and the wet came out of me so fast, so fuckin fast, I felt it soak through my underwear into the seam of my jeans. “nnh ... fuck...”

And she quit being shocked. I watched it happen. Her eyes went half shut and she bit down on her bottom lip and she started shoving back at him. Meeting him. Every time he drove in she threw her ass back to take it, hard, so the slap came twice as loud, and her whole body rocked on the cotton. Her tits had come out the sides of that yellow dress, big and soft and pale under the tan lines from her straps, swinging under her and slapping together on every stroke, her nipples dark and dragging on the cotton. Her soft belly was shaking. She had her knees spread wider in the clover than I’d ever have thought that woman could get her knees, and the insides of her thighs were wet all the way down, shining in the sun. And her hands were grabbing at everything. My sheet. The clover. She tore up a whole fistful of clover and grabbed my sheet again and yanked on it so hard the corner on the line popped the clothespin right off.

My clothespin. I heard it ping off the line.