Mary Alice is at the sink washing cups in the double-wide that used to be the snack stand. Her dark hair is up and she’s wearing a white button-down of Gaines’. She’s surrounded by morning light but even so there’s a darkness about her he recognizes from the droop of her shoulders. Out the window in front of her tall weeds shoot up out of gravel. A few of the metal poles people used to hang the speakers on still stand among the weeds. Most rusted half away and some bent over by vandals.
He leans in the doorway and follows the backs of her legs up from her ankles to the tapered hem of his shirt. He’s naked because he slept that way and hard because he woke up that way. His large, rough hand wraps around his cock and strokes while he tries to discern if she’s wearing panties. He feels bad about tugging his swollen crank while her shoulders are drooping like that but he doesn’t stop until her body suddenly shivers with sobs.
Another panic attack over buying her grandparents’ old drive-in. He slips back to the bedroom where he pulls on a clean pair of boxers and sits on the bed to wait for the sobbing to pass. It’s always too easy to fail her and burn down from inside again.
Or maybe it’s one of those times she looks up and out of the blue insists she’s not enough. For him. For the kids she has yet to bear. To bring the drive-in back as a flea market. Her parents and friends who say it’s a bad idea and Gaines is a worse idea. He knows they take his faraway reticence for stupidity and doesn’t entirely blame them.
He gets up and goes back to the kitchen even knowing all that dark honey she’s turning into is only going to drip through his fingers when he tries to catch her.
In the doorway the boxers feel ridiculous with the remains of his erection distorting the fabric. He starts to think he should go back and put on something else but the idea evaporates before his mind can bring it to a conclusion. She isn’t sobbing anymore so he pads across the worn linoleum and puts his hands on her shoulders. He’s careful to keep his lump from touching her. He leans in to smell her hair. The morning air is all shampoo and dish soap.
“Everything okay?” His voice reminds him of an egg cracking.
“Yeah.”
Her voice reminds him of running water. He leans down to smell the back of her neck.
“The whole idea,” she says without turning, “is just make a go of it. You know? Make it work. The flea market. Keep it going long enough to pay it all off. Then we can just rip out all that dirty old cement and plant trees everywhere. Just imagine how green it’ll look, Gaines. We’ll be old by then and we’ll sit outside on folding chairs at dusk and watch the leaves flip back and forth in the wind. Can we do that? Is it so much?”