Trying Too Hard

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Jimmy's white Dodge pick-up sat parked in front of his house, but he wasn't answering the door, and even though it had been nearly a month since he'd given Emily a key to his two story bungalow, a month since he'd said she should let herself inside and make herself at home any time she felt like it, she hesitated, not wanting to startle him or to be intrusive. In the small mirrored window in Jimmy's oak door Emily studied her flushed face, pleased that her brown eyes seemed intelligent and bright today. The blue-gray circles from eating too much wheat and sugar had finally gone away after she'd stayed on a gluten-free diet for several days. Leaning against her bare leg sat a canvas bag full of carrots, fennel, Swiss chard and other vegetables from the farmer's market where she worked four days a week selling pots of herbs and recipes for making herbal remedies. Planning to bake a potato-fennel casserole for Jimmy tonight, she'd snuck away a few minutes early while neighboring booths were still loading unsold leftovers back into their trucks.

Over the summer, the owner of "Herbal Ways" had taught Emily to blend elderberry and astralgus to shorten colds and influenza viruses, to use dandelion flowers, parsley and nettles for low energy, and valerian root and passion flower to ease nervous complaints. In Emily's studio apartment near the market, hidden behind cans of tomatoes and organic beans or bags of rice, her cupboards were filled with murky bottles of liquids labeled carefully with both the common and scientific names, the dates she had mixed them, and the ratio of measured herb to alcohol. Emily used her boss's recipes for mixing vodka with dry herbs and letting them sit for six weeks before adding droppers full of the dangerous-looking substances to warm water to drink as tea.

"Always label carefully," Alex had warned, "because you will never remember what you've made if you don't. You are playing with ancient secrets here, and must be respectful." Alex had told her not to hide the darkly-colored jars in order to be secretive, but to keep sunlight from destroying the sensitive healing molecules. From the metal brackets lining the sides of his market booth, Alex let Emily display photographs she'd taken of sunflowers and downtown bridges. He seemed pleased to have hanging beside tea balls and ceramic pots, the kitchen towels she made from recycled fabric she found at thrift stores. Alex said he would only keep twenty percent of the profits if she made a few sales.

Because so many people at the market could not afford payments to doctors, other market vendors were the most frequent customers to "Herbal Ways." Emily's boss taught her to carefully choose when it was safe to sell his non-FDA-approved, homemade remedies, and when to stick with selling only bulk herbs, and instead, describing to customers methods for making in their own kitchens the tinctures and extracts.

After knocking on Jimmy's door again, Emily smoothed her bangs to the side, wiped away eye-liner streaked by misty rain that had cooled her warm face while pedaling from the market quickly downhill along the bluff overlooking the Willamette River. A strong spring wind had twisted Emily's skirt off kilter, and her long hair had blown out of the barrettes she had neatly pinned behind her ears. She pushed bits and pieces of her hair back into bobby pins and noticed the dried mud coating the sides of her shoes. To remove it, she bent down and used a stray branch to dust her shoes off before standing again to brush away stray cotton pieces on her blouse from the blooming cottonwood trees. Because Jimmy didn't believe in herbal remedies, Emily reminded herself not to bore him today by spending too much time talking about the secret benefits of eating lots of turmeric and ginger, how onion skins could help arthritis and sinus pain. Instead of talking to Jimmy about herbal cures, she would instead silently save the leftover onion skins in plastic bags in the freezer to make her own soup stocks with, adding herbs and spices she felt would heal Jimmy's aches and pains.

Emily wouldn't use the key yet. She would sit on the porch and wait for ten minutes longer, knock one more time, and then, if he hadn't answered, she would think about letting herself inside. As she backed away from behind the screen door to gently close it again, she noticed a tear in the tin netting about a foot above the door latch. She couldn't remember ever having seen the damaged area before, and she became instantly worried that she might have torn the screen door herself. For a split second, she imagined Jimmy becoming so angry with her for damaging his property that he would stand to the side waiting, and, as she walked in the door, he would grab her and slap her. The image of Jimmy's hand striking her face was as clear as the new red paint he'd brushed on the door last week, and the broken door bell etched with an image of a ship's bell. As fast as she could manage, Emily reminded herself that Jimmy had never even raised his voice at her, that he loved her, and that he would never hurt her, even if she accidentally shoved her foot through the netting and tore the screen in two.

She reached into her pocket for the small notebook she used to help control fearful thoughts. Nearly a year ago, her counselor, William Mack, had pressed a six-inch yellow binder into her hand and explained the three-column system he had invented for patients suffering flashbacks from "previous traumatic incidents that were no longer a threat to their lives". One column on the notebook page was for the scary thought, another column for why it was irrational, and a third column was where she was to write the rational statement she must use to replace the scary image.

In the beginning, Emily had difficulty creating a "calming rational statement." But during each counseling session, William painstakingly reminded her of the categories she should use to label scary thoughts to help slow them down so that she might feel more in control: "irrational thinking,", "mind reading"," negating the positive", "hanging onto old fears because they feel safe". Emily hated going to these appointments with William. He was a thin, leggy man that reminded her of a neglected spider plant, healthy thick leaves mixed with gangly, thin dry areas. But his eyes were the kindest eyes she thought she might have ever looked into in her life, large and blue and ordinary, until he began to ask her questions, and then the slow light they emitted always got her to sobbing and crying out with anger by the time the hour was over. During the following two days, she would feel exhausted and irritable. But over the last few months, she felt she was finally getting better at controlling the flashbacks that often added themselves to her real life like reflections from street scenes superimposed on images seen through shop windows. It was watching other women walking down the street with their husbands that kept Emily going to her appointments with William. She studied the couples carefully and tried to imagine what it must be like to walk arm in arm with a husband you trusted and loved and knew for sure would never hurt you.

Now, on the porch, Emily took a deep breath, knowing she should take the time to do her homework, knowing that the success of her relationship with Jimmy depended on this simple action of writing in her small notebook and talking back to her irrational thoughts. As she reached into her pocket to retrieve her pencil and paper, simply feeling the cool paper from the notebook on her fingertips made the image of Jimmy's hand striking her face, pushing her against his hallway wall and holding her there, go away.

A white moth, caught between the screen and the door, buzzed frantically, and she opened the door again to set the moth free. She sat down on Jimmy's porch bench to write, able to breathe easier as soon as the pen touched the page. She looked up for a moment, trying to put the image that had scared her into words, and then noticed the passion flower vine Jimmy had moved a few days earlier, concerned the intrusive climber would embed itself into the woodwork of his house. She felt relieved to see the small nubs of green already coloring the grey-white branches. He had been so worried he had killed the passion flower vine by not digging for deeper roots, but it was already starting to thrive in its new place in the sun on the fence near the sidewalk, and she knew how much the signs of a living vine would please Jimmy.

"There is a tear in the screen door and Jimmy will think I caused it," she wrote. "He will slap me in the face." She drew a line down the paper to make a new column and wrote "Thought category: made-up worries, fictional reality, filling out the unknown with the worst."

She stopped writing when she got to the column labeled "rational thought." She touched her face instead-the image of Jimmy hitting her had been so clear that she could nearly feel the sting of his hand on her face. The hair on her arms bristled and she felt a chill run across her shoulders, down her arms and across her low back. She shuddered. "Jimmy would never hurt me," she wrote as fast as she could, knowing that seeing the words written down on the page would help her believe them. "Jimmy has never raised his voice at me. Jimmy tells me every day that he loves me."

She put the notebook back into her pocket and then took out a small amber-colored bottle. The hand-written label said valerian-cammomile, 1:4 40% menstrum. She squeezed the black rubber dropper to fill the small glass vial and then slid the drops onto her tongue before she swallowed the bitter liquid. It could take several hours for the uneasy feelings to finally go away. She would have to sneak away into the bathroom and read her notebook several times before she would feel normal again.

At the front door, she knocked again, wondering if she would scare Jimmy if he came out of the shower and found her standing there, or woke up suddenly to an unexpected visitor. She pulled the key from the special pouch in her purse where she kept it, worried that adding it to her key ring would bring bad luck to her relationship, but also feeling a thrill that next year at this time in spring she would be letting herself into the house she would be living in after she and Jimmy were married.

"Jimmy," she called out after walking through the doorway. "Jimmy, are you here? Jimmy, its Emily."

She held still for a moment, at the bottom of the staircase, before listening for any movement coming from the bare wood floor upstairs. Across the street, a neighbor cutting up a tree that had fallen over in the last spring wind storm struggled to restart a chainsaw. The door of a UPS truck slammed shut and the quiet motor started as the driver pulled away. A ticking clock Jimmy had long ago taken from a school classroom, one that no longer kept time, sat on the red tile in his kitchen. In the hallway, a slight smell of mildew lingered.

Emily walked through the dining room, continuing to listen for any sounds of his presence, toward the bedroom, expecting to find him napping there after his eight hours of work on the docks. But his bed was empty, the gray Alpaca blankets, woven with a repeating pattern of small unshorn animals bordering the edges, were pulled up over the sheets, his bed made up in a rush like it always was when he was a little late for work.

She remembered the first night she stayed over with him. He had made her a pot of chai-spiced tea and removed one of the blankets from the bed to wrap around her. He had tugged her leg over his lap and pulled her close by wrapping his arm around her shoulders as he began to tell her about his high school friend, Andy McGuire, who had joined the Navy in the late sixties and been stationed in Peru for several months. While living in South America, Andy had purchased from beach peddlers one hand-woven Alpaca blanket after the next. Each week, on his day off from ship work, he had given away more and more of his personal belongings to make room in his military footlockers for them. Andy had insisted that Jimmy take two, and Jimmy had given Andy one hundred dollars each for them.

It had become a ritual for them now. Each night Emily stayed over, Jimmy brought her a cup of tea and then walked to the bedroom to remove one of the Peruvian blankets from his bed to wrap around her as they watched foreign movies together. She had become used to the rough texture of the wool against her bare arms and legs as he held her. "This is the warmest wool in the entire world," he always told her. "You will never be cold in my drafty old house as long as you are wrapped up in one of these things."

Emily knew that an unmade bed would have meant that Jimmy had already come home and taken a short nap. And the fact that it was still made up meant working at the grain dock today hadn't tired him as much as usual. The wind that usually blew through the metal building where he drove a train back and forth, moving wheat from the rail cars to the grain elevators, must not have chilled him as much as it usually did. Jimmy must have worked in the truck dump where he was in charge of weighing the farm trucks that brought in bushels of wheat from their storage silos when the wheat prices were raised to a fair rate. Spring time in the truck dump was not very busy, and Jimmy had plenty of time for reading magazines or history books about Early American anarchists. "There is a huge difference between anarchy philosophy, in the belief of every individual's right to freedom, and modern day anarchists who break Starbucks' windows," he had told her. "I believe wholeheartedly in anarchy, but I am not, and never will be, an anarchist."

Emily enjoyed being in Jimmy's room among his belongings without him there. She studied his dresser top, the collection of socks and scribbled notes, the nylon belt he had to wear because he was allergic to zinc, a common metal added to most belt buckles, even those labeled "gold filled." The bottle of sandalwood lotion she used to massage his low back and shoulders was nearly empty. Emily stroked the neck of the fat old gray cat that lay near the pillow, instead of at the foot of the bed where he was supposed to.

Jimmy would more than likely be outside working in the yard if he wasn't taking a nap or in the shower, she knew. On the way to the kitchen, she stopped in the living room to study the windows he wanted her to make curtains for. Jimmy preferred plush velveteen that would make the refinished woodwork stand out like a "French whorehouse," he told her. At first, Emily had preferred small prints or gingham, but over the months, the French whorehouse look was beginning to grow on her as she also began wearing her blouses unbuttoned lower and lower whenever she was alone in the house with him.

In the dining room, his squeaky old table was filled with history books, a rusty metal bowl with three dividers brimming over with pocket change, at least fifty dollars worth it looked to her, and she suddenly remembered stealing money from her parents' dresser to buy cigarettes. A wave of guilt washed over her at a memory she hadn't had in years. She wondered if she could ever steal anything from Jimmy and hoped that she never would. If her daughter were living without health insurance and he refused to help her pay for treatment she needed, she might steal from him, she imagined. Or if she wanted to buy him a present she couldn't afford, but knew he would never buy for himself, she might collect some of his change to help pay for the present. She also wondered if, after many years of marriage, she would ever find herself wanting to have an affair, and if she would ever steal to do it, like Tucker had. He had taken money from their joint checking account to take his lover to a bluegrass festival in Toledo, Washington. She wondered if he would ever have an affair, and since her own mother and father had been divorced after her father fell in love with the woman who owned the lumber company where her father had worked, Emily lived with the uneasy feeling that all men would be unfaithful in the end.

The high ceilings in his dining room had been painted off-white, even though the walls were still coated with the blue-gray primer he had brushed on with rollers six years earlier before his father had died and his mother had gotten sick with dementia. Out of five brothers and sisters, he had become his mother's only caregiver, and he had developed the habit of visiting her nearly every other evening in the rest home on the other side of town in Hillsboro.

Emily studied the dust collected on the floor, in the corners, near the old ornate, hand-beveled baseboards, and followed the swirling patterns of dirt and cat hair reflecting sunlight and etching shadows on the scratched old oak floors. She had gotten used to his home the way it was and wondered if she would really be happy when the walls were painted, their belongings neatly stacked away in cupboards. She felt that the mess was part of what made them feel so at ease with each other. She wondered what he would think if he watched her study his home like she was, like a detective looking for clues that would tell her secrets he wasn't willing to speak out loud.

She knew he was embarrassed about the state of his house. But she secretly loved the mess so much that she tried to invent reasons for keeping him from building shelves where he planned to organize his belongings. All of the men she had ever loved had tables that looked like his, filled with tools and books and change and socks. His table reminded her all at once of her grandfather and boyfriends who had been mechanics and millwrights and motorcycle repairmen. The table even reminded her of Tucker, of the good things about Tucker, the smell of dust and grease and sweat. Every time she ate breakfast with Jimmy and sat at the table where the drill, and screws and nails, the mail and week's worth of newspapers were pushed to the side to make room for two floral placemats, their silverware, and a wildflower, she knew she had finally found a place that would be her home.

In the kitchen, the breakfast dishes were done, resting in the rack near the microwave. Lying in the same place they had been since she met him were the tools he had collected for decades and hadn't used since his mother got ill: an electric saw, two sanders, and five different grades of sand paper. Old pill bottles were tipped over against the white tile, pills he took for high blood pressure and diabetes along with a plastic sack full of garbage. The old gas stove sat where he had left it months ago, in the middle of the kitchen. He wanted to sand the wall and paint it before he bought a newer gas range to replace the old one. His bottle of Viagra rested near an old cup of coffee, and she thought about taking off the lid to count the pills to be sure he hadn't used one of the pills with another lover, but decided against that intrusion.

From the kitchen window, she finally spotted Jimmy where she had suspected he would be all along, even though she had searched for him in the other rooms first. Before she went out to greet him, she watched him standing in the one well-organized place on his property, a place he called his "shade garden." His empty left hand was open as if he were gesturing to an imaginary friend, and he was watering the fica and geranium starts they had planted a few days earlier into green, plastic, six-inch pots. Sunlight reaching through the maple trees drew delicate lacy shapes across his face, colored with a day's growth of beard. The top strap of the right side of his overalls was undone, exposing his grey-black chest hair and a nipple, erect in the spring breeze. As she walked out on the porch, the sweet smell of marijuana was fading so she knew he couldn't have been home very long. It was one of the first things he did after his shift on the grain dock: smoke two or three hits of pot from a bronze glass pipe that he kept on his desk in the living room. Perhaps he would need a nap after all, and she felt her skin warming, a tingling down her legs and back at the thought of them climbing into bed together so early in the evening. She saw his leg wrapped over her and felt his kiss on the back of her neck, his hands searching for the spot on the bottom of her tailbone that he liked to rub softly with his knuckle.

He turned as he heard her and smiled a huge grin, without a hint of being startled or surprised, greeting her as if she always let herself in with the key he had given her, as if she lived there and had simply returned home. He pulled the aluminum water nozzle out of the small pot he was watering and leaned over to turn off the water. The bald spot on the top of his head was sunburned and there was a new scratch on his arm. It was when she saw his shoulders that she remembered how much she loved him. They were strong and broad and soft at the same time. There was the younger fearless strong man in the older wiser man right there in his shoulders. Jimmy's shoulders reminded her of her uncle standing in the kitchen making pie crusts in his overalls after working all day as an electrician. Emily had lived with her uncle and her grandfather after her grandmother had died from leukemia. Her uncle had taught her how to put ice cubes in the water she was going to add to the flour for crusts, taught her to use two pieces of wax paper to roll out the dough to make it easier to transfer pie crusts to aluminum pans.

In an instant, he had his arms wrapped around her, hugging her as tightly as if she were the only tree left standing in a tornado, his chin pressed against the top of her head. She tilted her head up so he could kiss her, and he softened his hold, and then stroked her hair away from her forehead before he kissed her again.

"Was it you and Freddy and Cactus Mouth again?" she asked.

"Yup, and Johnny Vegas: The Three Musketeers, but Freddy and Cactus Mouth were at each other's throats and Johnny Vegas had a hangover, so they pretty much left me alone. "

On the docks everyone had nicknames, and Jimmy had worked hard to get them to stop calling him "Heart Attack Harry." Six years earlier, during night shift, while cleaning out one of the rooms filled with grain dust, he had felt a pain in his chest worse than anything he had ever experienced before. Jimmy had shared with Emily that he'd told Cactus Mouth and Johnny Vegas that if they wanted to keep him alive a few more years, they better stop reminding him of one of the most traumatic experiences of his life. "What if I called you, 'Night your father was killed in a car wreck', or 'the day your brother hung himself, Hildie'. Or what about 'Mary who loved being beaten by her husband?' " The year he met Emily, the cardiologist had told him that annual treadmill tests and echocardiograms were no longer justifiable to insurance companies because his heart had completely healed.

Cactus Mouth had gotten his nickname because every other word he spoke was a cuss word and he was always bitching about something. Johnny Vegas had told everyone he had gone to an expensive business school in Las Vegas, made a million dollars, and gone broke after a divorce. Jimmy respected Vegas because he had read Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio . Vegas studied labor history and understood the hard work the Longshoreman before them had done to get the benefits they now enjoyed. Jimmy said he and Vegas stuck together when the Killer Bee team showed up at the grain facility to tie the container ships up to the dock and harass the younger union workers. The Killer Bees were some of the oldest longshoremen in Portland, Jimmy said, "and they are mean as hell. Vegas and I stick together on Killer Bee days."

"We must have unloaded fifty railcars today," Jimmy said. "The cars rolled ass-end to ass-end all damn day. But I'm not too tired for you babe. I stink, though. Can you smell the mildew on me?" Emily took a sniff and realized that the mildew she had smelled as soon as she walked into his house had come from his work clothes.

She backed away and then hugged him tight again. "Too late now. I guess I'll just have to take a shower with you."

"That's what I was hoping for," he said, slapping her gently on the rear. "I had to clean out a rotten pile of wheat in the elevator. How's the photo business. Did you sell anything today?"

"No," she said, flinching without meaning to and quickly standing up straight again, hoping he hadn't seen her first reaction to his comment. "Not since last week, but a woman from Eugene told my boss to ask me to hurry up with the tea towels. She wants to see them." Emily pushed her hand into the pocket in his overalls.

He put his own hand into his pocket and moved her fingers so they would stroke his cock. She felt it getting harder as soon as she touched him, but it still wasn't hard enough for him to fuck her. She knew how much it bothered him although she liked the way his soft erections forced them to make love.

"Are you feeling sad about your photographs?" he said. "Things will pick up soon. They say things will get better by the middle of next year. That's good about the tea towels. How many does she want?" He pulled her hand out of his pocket and lifted it to his shoulders so she would rub his neck muscles.

Emily wished that she could give him a number, wished that someone had written to her ordering two dozen tea towels, or two hundred, but it wasn't even a sale yet.

"Whitney's been selling her chutney online at etsy.com," Jimmy said, bringing her hand to his low back where, after weighing grain all day, he often felt the most pain. "She asked if you want to try and start selling your stuff online with her? Whitney gave her number to me so you could call if you were interested."

"Did you work with Whitney today?" Emily said stiffly. She could hear the fear infect the sound of her own voice, making it higher. It was starting again, the same fear she had felt earlier on Jimmy's porch. She reached into her pocket for the notebook, for the short yellow pencil from the library that tucked away neatly into her pocket. She reached for William's appointment card while she reminded herself that accusing Jimmy of things he hadn't done was considered verbal abuse. William had told Emily that the behavior of people in her past did not give her the excuse to verbally abuse Jimmy by accusing him of things she had no evidence was true. Threatening to leave him unless he did what she wanted was just as abusive to Jimmy as her husband had been to her. Emily had described to William how jealous she had become when Jimmy spoke about one of the women he worked with.

"Yes, I worked with Whitney, today," Jimmy said. "I always work with Whitney." He removed his arms from around her shoulders and stood back to look her into the eyes. His voice hardened. "She sits about three feet away from me all day long and barely says a word. I think something's up with her husband. I told you her husband has prostate cancer, didn't I?"

"And is she still telling you that she's saving you up to be her back-up husband?" Emily felt her voice rise. Her lips felt chapped and she felt a pain in her jaw near her cheekbone as if her tooth were hurting. "Is she still calling you on your days off? Is she still bringing you little presents that she isn't supposed to be giving people she works with?"

Jimmy moved quickly to the other side of the garden putting the tomato plants between them. His shoulders had curled up toward his ears, as if chilled, and he was talking too fast now. She hated herself for making him feel this way again, wanted so desperately to trust him. "Are you going to start in on me with this? Is this how the night is going to go again? I come home to my garden dreaming about our weekend alone, about the vegetable garden that we planted together, about our plans for a future, and you're bringing up this crazy lady I work with again? What's wrong with you? Are you afraid of being happy? I thought Whitney was a crisis junkie, but look at you. You're doing it, too?" He sat on the porch step and put his face in his hands. He looked up at her and yelled. "What is it going to take for you to trust me? What is it that I have to do?"

She sat beside him on the porch, her hands shaking. "I'm sorry, Jimmy. You didn't do anything wrong." She felt a deep panic now, as if she had pushed them somewhere they might never be able to return from, a feeling she knew too well.

He stood up and moved farther away from her. As she approached him to get closer, he backed away. She remembered him telling her about the fact that when he moved away from someone like he was, it meant he didn't like them, and she realized he had never before done this with her. She wanted to reach for him, to have him hold her, even while he was angry, but forced herself to stay put.

"Whitney doesn't talk to me." He said. "Her and Peterson are off acting like teenagers. He's got that scoliosis and a hunchback in the middle of his back--that hunchback is in love with a married woman who has been taking care of her sick husband with prostate cancer, and she isn't doing anything to stop him from falling in love with her. Can we please stop talking about Whitney?"

Jimmy had told Emily on their first date together that before she had met him, he had slept in his living room. The three bedrooms upstairs and the one bedroom downstairs and been filled up with the belongings no one had wanted after his aunt had died and his father had died and his mother had to be moved into a rest home. Emily had offered him her phone number on the very first day she had met him. It was one of the worst snowstorms Portland had seen in the last century, and their neighborhood had been snowed in for more than two weeks. She had been walking slowly home from the small corner market where she had stepped carefully over the ice-crusted snow to buy a half gallon of milk because she had been drinking her coffee without milk for nearly a week and living on a pot of beans and rice and some leftover frozen vegetables. He had been one of the only people she'd seen out on the sidewalks, shoveling a path in front of his house. On the way home, she thanked him for the small patch of dry pavement, and he had begun talking to her in a flood of words that didn't stop for nearly forty-five minutes. She learned about his mother in the rest home, about his worries that she was suffering because he hadn't been able to drive the fifteen miles to the only decent place they had been able to find after the doctors insisted that the Alzheimers had gotten bad enough that she required twenty-four hour professional care. Jimmy described his work on the docks as a longshoreman, his life as a bachelor with diabetes, who'd had a heart attack six years earlier and now ate nearly every meal at the local health food store alone. She was barely able to get a few words in about herself, and she tried to stay as far away from him as she could because her pipes had frozen and she hadn't had hot water for nearly three days and she hadn't been able to bring herself to take a cold shower. It was close to twenty degrees outside, and while she stood talking with him, her toes had gotten so cold that she feared they would get frostbite, but his need to talk to her had been so great, his loneliness so evident in his bright intelligent eyes, that she couldn't bear to leave him standing there alone. Finally, she had taken a piece of paper out of her pocket and written her number on it, had told him to call her, so she could leave without feeling guilty, and go home to get warm again. It wasn't until that evening, after she had heated water on the stove to pour into a hot bath, after her toes had thawed out and she had warmed up, that she realized how much she had enjoyed listening to him speak about his life.

It had taken three weeks for him to call her back, and by that time, she had given up on ever hearing from him. On their first date together, he had told her what he had done, that his sister had said that he couldn't have a woman over for dinner with his house looking the way it was, so he had taken one load after the next to the Goodwill or the landfill. After he had called her, and taken her across the Interstate Bridge to walk along the Columbia River to see the sculpture of Lewis and Clark his friend Nate had carved, they had only spent two or three days apart. Every night after work he called her as soon as he got home. She cooked dinners for him to help him get his blood sugar under control, and he gave her back rubs.

She sometimes wondered if she should tell him about her lover who brought a magnolia flower to their first date in the coffee shop where the doorway and entry stairwell had been carved to look like the inside of a tree. Jimmy's magnolia tree was overgrown and not in bloom yet. He had let it go, like he had let the yard get overgrown and the dust accumulate in the upstairs bedrooms, like he had let the vines he had bought over the years wind their way into the porch balusters and through the crawl spaces under his house and up over the fence gates. If she were going to tell him about her earlier lover and what that magnolia flower had meant to her, she knew she should wait until his magnolia tree was in full bloom and they'd finished their garden and moved the vines away from the house so they wouldn't destroy the woodwork.

And maybe she would never tell him.

With previous lovers she had often told them too much, told them stories they had no need of hearing; she had needed, for reasons she never understood, to air her resentments about hurts and shames. There had been so many bad moments from her past that always seemed to surface when she fell in love again. Like oil rising to the top of ponds so it could be scraped away, like fat surfacing on the top of cooled soups so it was easier to remove and keep the soup eater healthy. Emily had read enough self-help books. People at the beginning of relationships were always handing their baggage off to each other to get the weight off their own shoulders. And with Tucker, any mention of other men would always end in a drunken fight and sometimes with him hitting her and telling her that he would kill her if she ever spoke to another man in front of him again.

So she tried to control herself, to tell Jimmy only the good parts, not the parts that would scare him or make him feel badly for her, or pity her. She wondered how they could even speak to each other with all of the memories from the years they had lived before they met each other going on inside their minds, the layers of things unsaid, the things wanting to be said, the words being hidden and even the moments that had been forgotten but would resurface again at the worst times. All of it would make a person crazy if you tried to see the whole of a person at one moment in time. You could never stand to be in the same room with anyone, if you saw in an instant, everything about them: their past and present, and all of the bad things they had done along with the good things squashed together in an instant. It would be horrible and scary to understand the entire life of another human being all in one moment. She couldn't even stand to understand herself in that way? Why was there always the desire for an understanding no one should ever be allowed. Yet, she felt she must know Jimmy from the inside out in order to feel the trust he seemed to need.

Emily stood up to sit on the step above Jimmy to rub his neck muscles in the tender concave dip beneath his skull. She felt him release the weight of his head into her hands and her own breath flowed easier, then. Jimmy believed his head was too small for his large shoulders, but, in fact, it felt to her like a large, heavy head. In a massage class she'd taken at a community college, one of her teachers had told her that the moment you hold another person's head in your own hands was one of the most sacred moments you could ever experience. As Jimmy leaned back, his eyes were closed and peaceful, as if, at that moment, all thoughts of her being either good or bad had dissolved from his mind.