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?”

“Course not, Mary Alice,” he lies. It’s always about letting her have the moment and leaving the future to worry about itself except he’s already lived up more of his own future than she’s lived of hers and the one thing that always makes him panic is the thought of her finding out how unmerciful it is.

“It’s not like I don’t expect it’s gonna be hard sometimes, Gaines. I know that. But isn’t that what makes it so …”

“Yes, Mary Alice, yes.”

He slides his hands under the shirt onto her hips and finds she’s not wearing panties after all. His fingers search along her carriage joints toward the dream-inducing warmth of her mound and he believes her skin is made of something more than skin.

“It’s gonna be beautiful,” he says. Then he touches the satin texture of her mound because he doesn’t think she wants to hear him explain it doesn’t matter whether it turns out easy or hard. He knows she’s not even sure of him still being there at the ending she imagines culminating in folding chairs among gently quivering trees.

The warm shape of her mound makes his hand feel like a clumsy invasion but she moves backward until the burgeoning lump in his boxers snags on the shirt as it bunches in the crease between her buttocks. He squeezes and pulls his hand away, takes her by the elbow and leads her outside.

Barefoot, he has to step carefully around broken glass while she follows in flip flops until he can find a patch of gravel free enough of broken bottles to lie down. She kneels astride his hips and brings the tender meat of her sex onto the hard spine jutting up in his boxers. Her eyes are on his face but he can see her mind is back in the kitchen trying to keep from breaking down under choices that will be years in turning out to be right or wrong.

He touches her face and the softening of her gaze sets a fire to whatever language he spoke before now. Pushing his boxers down to his thighs she lifts up and then settles onto his shaft. She’s wet and holds him inside without moving. Her hands splay onto his chest as if he’s all there is to hold on to. He reaches up to unbutton the shirt. Traps her distended nipples between his fingers and worries the tips with his thumbs.

He is watching the way breath goes in and out of her body like something uncommon because she is Mary Alice and she is the simplest kind of beautiful as her eyes close and she begins to ride. The sun streaks off her dark hair and she is everything he’s going to find years from now at the end of her dream.