The Lost Husband (20 page)

“Let’s fire ’em up,” he said.

We turned toward the house.

“I washed it last night,” he said, tousling the top of his head “Just to get all the fleas and cockroaches and old sandwiches out.”

“Thoughtful,” I said.

“I wasn’t certain I’d really make it over here,” he added, “but Jean sure has made things easy.”

“Jean always makes things easy if you do what she wants.”

O’Connor nodded. “Or even if you don’t.”

His hair did not look very washed to me, but maybe that was just the tangles. We walked toward the house together, and on the way I said, “You’re sure you washed it?”

“Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I used a fancy shampoo that smelled like green apples.” He leaned his head toward me, in case I wanted to sniff it. Which I didn’t.

Minutes later, he was straddling a dinette chair on the front porch, gazing out at the farmyard while I stood behind him with the clippers, feeling oddly hesitant. I’d cut Tank’s hair a gazillion times, and before Tank, I’d cut Danny’s. But those were the only two people whose hair I had ever cut. My two guys. And now, in the moment, it felt like a big deal to let O’Connor into the club.

But here we were. He was waiting. And it was just a haircut, after all.

I flipped the switch and started mowing his head, starting at the crown and working from front to back. A buzz seemed like the best solution, given our starting place, and O’Connor said he didn’t care what I did. But the change was radical. It reminded me of movies about hippies who joined the army and got sheared for boot camp—the starkness of the change, the
nakedness
as the long hair fell away.

O’Connor sat perfectly still, and we did not talk. I was pleased to find once I started cutting that he’d been telling the truth about the shampoo: He did smell like green apples.

I pressed my fingers against his neck to steady him and stood just inches away—paying attention to my work, which meant, by default, paying attention to his body. I realized now, as the hair
disappeared, that I’d been thinking of him more like a Muppet than a man. But now I saw many new things. The tendons that connected the back of his head to his shoulders, for example. And the lumps of the vertebrae in his neck as he bent forward. And his ears: well proportioned and flat against his head. He had a little scar at his hairline near his right temple, and I wondered how he’d gotten it.

“You’re very symmetrical,” I said at last, worrying I’d been quiet for too long.

“People are always telling me that,” he said.

To trim above his ears, I had to fold them down. That tickled him a bit, and he wriggled. So I put my eyes in front of his the way I sometimes did with Tank and said, “Gotta be still, okay? Otherwise you’ll get a zigzag.”

You can’t stand that close to someone for any length of time without creating a tangible relationship between bodies. I could see his chest rising and falling as he drew his breaths in and out, and that made me aware of my own. I could see his arms resting and still as he waited, and that made me aware of my own arms as they worked. I could feel him averting his gaze from my body. I, on the other hand, had to look. I had to stand close, pay attention, and run my hands all over his head and neck in a way that you never do normally.

Still, I tried to focus on the head, not the person. I had a job to do. I was radically changing his appearance, and I wanted to do it right. Or, at least, I wanted not to do it wrong.

Soon we were ready to move on to his beard. I had him tilt his head back and I started low on his neck. Before I knew it, I was edging around his jaw, then his lips. His face emerged section by section as I went. And when I was done, I stood back and beheld his face for the first time.

I clicked off the clippers and stared.

“What?” he asked.

“I’ve just never seen you before,” I said.

“Guess not.”

“I always figured there must be a face under there somewhere.”

He smiled as he brushed hairs off his shirt. “Can’t put anything past you.”

He was ready to see for himself, and so I led him inside to my bathroom, noting, even as we walked down the hall, that I could just as easily have taken him to the half bath by the kitchen, and wondering if he was noting the same thing. I knew that he was not free—and that just because the two of us were alone in the house with no one around for miles, it didn’t change anything about our situation. All the same, I enjoyed the moment.

As we passed the open door to my bedroom, an image flashed through my head of the two of us sinking onto the bed in a totally luxurious kiss. It was so vivid that I actually paused to check the bedroom and make sure that it was still empty—that we were, in fact, still out in the hallway and it hadn’t actually happened. When I turned back, O’Connor was already in the bathroom, inspecting my work.

“There I am,” he said, checking himself out in the mirror. The hair was gone, the beard was gone. He had a newborn quality—so much skin. Meeting my eyes, he said, “Haven’t seen myself in a while.”

“It’s okay?” I asked.

“Jean’s going to love it,” he said. Then he bent his head down to scratch it with the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever. He reminded me so much of Tank and how he hated the “hair sprinkles”
that haircuts left all over him. I always put him in the bath after a haircut so he wouldn’t itch.

“Let’s get that shirt off,” I said to O’Connor, turning the shower knobs to high. Of course, that’s when I noticed the dangling black bra I’d hung to dry over the shower rod. I pulled it down and stuffed it in my pocket. And then, because everything about the time we’d spent together so far seemed loaded with unintended meaning, the bathroom seemed to shrink, and the two of us stood there, unsure of what to say next, for easily the longest three seconds in the history of time.

“It’s okay,” he said then. “I can just hose off outside.”

“That’s crazy,” I said, now refusing to buckle to the idea that there was anything suggestive about instructing him to get naked in my bathroom. “Shower,” I said, using my mom voice on him, “and I’ll go out front. And clean up.”

I handed him a towel through the door—without looking—and he handed me his hair-sprinkled shirt to pop in the washer. I didn’t think about how Jean didn’t have a dryer until I’d already started the load, and so he’d either have to wait for it to dry or put it back on wet.

So washing the shirt might have been a mistake. But a little later, when he emerged from my bathroom all scrubbed clean and shirtless, I did have to admit that some mistakes turn out better than others.

O’Connor lingered a good while before going home. He mended a rusted hinge and changed the oil in Jean’s truck. He stacked up some bags of feed, checked on the goats, and changed a lightbulb up high on the barn. He did a good many of these activities shirtless, but even after he put the shirt back on, I still kept sneaking peeks at him. I had gotten so used to him all overgrown
and hairy. For there to have been a person under all that fur all along, it had my attention, for sure.

He kept feeling me staring. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’re watching me.”

“You just look different,” I told him. “Really, really different.”

“Better or worse?”

“Human,” I said. “You were more like a farm animal before.”

He met my eyes, and I wondered if I’d been too mean. Here he was, all shorn and naked like a baby sheep. Maybe his feelings were, too. “I think I just made you handsome,” I said, to make up for it.

He laughed. And when he did, the edges of his eyes crinkled into those fans they made when he smiled. I’d missed seeing them.

When it was time for him to go, I followed him out to the car the way you do with people you won’t see again for a while.

“See you tonight,” he said, starting the ignition, and it seemed like a long time away.

But Jean returned with the kids not too long after O’Connor left, and the afternoon sped up again. Tank ran across the yard when they arrived and threw himself at me using his new invention: the “cannon hug,” a cross between a cannonball, like you do at the pool, and a hug. This time his knee got me in the diaphragm, and we both hit the ground as I fell.

“You’ve got to warn me, man,” I said. “What if I didn’t manage to catch you?”

“You’ll always catch me,” he said, wrapping his little arms around my neck. And I so loved that idea that I didn’t have the heart to set him straight.

By the time the kids had played and had a snack, we had an hour to get ready.

Jean’s party was at the dance hall downtown, a hundred-year-old wooden structure. I’d driven by many times but had never been in. I asked Jean what I should wear, and she said, “Oh, something pretty.”

The kids picked out “party clothes” themselves. For Abby, that meant a sundress with butterflies, and, for Tank, it meant a dragon costume leftover from two Halloweens before. When they’d made their selections, I said, “Perfect.”

Abby gave me a hug around the middle, took a deep breath, and said, “Mama? You smell like the goats. No offense.”

Time to shower. Down in my room, Abby read to Tank on the bed, and then, when I started to dress, Tank squinted at the sight and said, “I’m sorry we don’t have a dragon costume in a mama size.”

“That
would
be awesome,” I said.

“If I were magic,” Tank said, “I’d make this one enormous so you could borrow it.”

“Thanks, pal,” I said.

Abby helped zip up my dress—a blue one with a flouncy hem. I put on mascara and lipstick for the first time since moving here, and I let Abby dab some perfume on me. I even blow-dried my hair.

Tank watched me looking at myself in the mirror. “Why are you getting so fancy?” he asked.

Abby answered for me. “It’s a sign of respect to the birthday girl.”

“Correct,” I said.

Tank frowned a little, like he did with his big questions. “I didn’t think old people had birthdays.”

“Everyone has birthdays,” I explained.

“Even Daddy?” Tank asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Even Daddy.”

“He just doesn’t celebrate his anymore,” Abby added.

“And neither do we,” Tank said.

“We celebrate it in a different way now,” I said, feeling all kinds of pressure to handle this moment right. “Now we celebrate by remembering Daddy and feeling so lucky that we got to have him in our lives.”

Abby looked at me. “And crying.”

I held her gaze. “Yes,” I said. “That too.”

“Mama!” Tank burst out then. “I don’t have a present for Aunt Jean!”

“Yes, you do,” Abby corrected. “Don’t you remember how we found that dead dragonfly?”

Tank looked stricken. “But—” he started, and then didn’t seem to know how to finish. Finally he said, “That dragonfly is for me to keep.”

“No,” Abby said. “You collected it for Jean.”

“But I need to keep him!” he said, voice thick with emotion. “He’s my best friend.”

“A dead dragonfly can’t be your best friend, Tank,” Abby said with a sigh well beyond her years. “But if you don’t want to give it away, we’ll have to find something else for Aunt Jean.”

With that, they scrambled off down the hallway as the sound of my voice calling “Do not get dirty!” went unheard.

I had one pair of shoes with heels, and as I stood up from strapping them on, I caught my reflection in the mirror. It had been a long time since I’d gotten dressed up for anything, and the sight of my lips in lipstick and my hair up on my head caught me by surprise. Maybe I looked too nice. What if Jean was wearing
her overalls? What if I was the only one taking trouble over my appearance? I didn’t know exactly how birthdays were done around here, and so I decided to scoot out to the kitchen and ask Jean if I was too fancy.

I had my answer as soon as I saw her. I was definitely too fancy. She was in her overalls.

She turned around at the knock of my heels on the floor, looked me up and down, and said, “Perfection!”

“I’m too dressed up,” I said. “I’ll go change.”

“You will not,” Jean said. “You’re just right.”

She promised that everyone else would be wearing something nice. “I just don’t really have anything other than overalls,” she said. “If I owned a dress, I’d be in it.” In the end, I found myself under the “birthday girl’s orders” not to change a thing, and so it was settled.

“Where are the kids?” Jean asked as she glanced out the window.

“Last-minute gift emergency,” I said. “I’ll go find them.”

I stepped out onto the front porch and stood up tall to look around the yard. In that moment, I marveled at how quickly we’d adapted to life there. Before we came, I never would have let them disappear like that. Nor would they have had any idea how to do it—or any motivation to want to. But so many adventures with Jean had taught them how to work the farmyard for every variety of fun and adventure. It made me feel proud of all of us.

I didn’t see them anywhere, and I was just about to ring the dinner bell when something else caught my attention.

It was O’Connor, coming out of the milking barn door and walking toward the house. He was dressed for the party in a trim western shirt and Levi’s with a silver belt buckle styled like a cattle brand. He was looking down as he walked, watching his boots,
and he didn’t see me. The starkness of his haircut was still shocking, and I had to admit that he could really pull off a buzz, something that wasn’t true for everyone. The clean-shaven version of him was mesmerizing.
The hot farmer
. I got it at last. I watched him make his way closer, and I had this crazy, almost datelike feeling. I told myself that he was just walking up to the house. Still, in some very real way, despite everything and not only because I happened to be standing there, it felt like he was walking toward me.

He was just a few feet from the steps where I stood when a gust of wind blew across the yard, and the tickle of it made him look up. When he saw me in my blue party frock and my red lipstick, his eyes caught there and he didn’t look away. I felt a wash of shyness come over me—as though he knew somehow that when I was getting dressed, I’d been thinking not only of honoring the birthday girl but also, a little bit, of him: the tender skin on the back of his neck and what it had felt like under the pads of my fingers.