“What about adopting? I mean, now? I mean, after she passed?”
“They don’t look at farmers as foster parents so much as employers.”
“That’s sad,” Charitye said. “You’re acting the role well. Of a dad, I mean.”
For a moment, Reggie let himself feel pride, the steam of it, before cooling. “You know, I’ve got the kids at your high school. I get it out of my system with them.”
“You deserve better.”
He let out a little laugh. “They do act up a bit, don’t they? Especially when I mention the aqueduct. What’s so funny about the aqueduct?”
“Well,” Charitye said, “for one thing, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to an adventure out here. The river’s man-made, obviously, but there’s fish, so there’s fishing. People spread out on the cement slopes so they can tan. A lot of couples go out there to do, as you’ve said, whatever they can with each other that they can’t do by themselves. And then, there are the swimmers.”
“That current’s pretty strong, though.”
“That’s the point. It’s a dare. If you can swim from one side to the other without getting dragged to Long Beach, you win.”
“What do you win?”
“The prize of not dying.”
“See,” Reggie said, “a benefit of not being a parent: I never have to worry about my kid doing something so stupid.”
“I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“Don’t, please.”
“I bet I could,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned how I am a prih-tee good swimmer.”
Again the phone rang.
“Hold that stupid thought,” Reggie told her, leaving to answer the phone. For the second time that afternoon, it was Keith.
Charitye took the phone. After a minute, she put her hand against the receiver so her dad couldn’t hear her. “Apparently, he’s coming to pick me up now,” she told Reggie.
Reggie felt a brief but unshareable disappointment, like being alone the one time you see a UFO zigzag between the clouds. Before Charitye arrived, he’d just gotten used to living alone, and now he was just getting used to having someone else around. For how many people, he wondered, was life only a succession of moments you were just getting used to?
“Keith,” he said, having taken the phone from Charitye.
“Sorry,” Keith said, “for the sudden change of plans. Lucy’s decided to leave for a few weeks in the morning. She’s come around to the popular opinion of women everywhere of hating me. She wants Charitye home tonight so they can leave together first thing.”
“Hate to hear you couldn’t work it out.”
“Tell him I still have work to do here,” Charitye said from her tiptoes, loud enough for her dad to hear.
“Look,” said Reggie, “the girl wants to stick around for a bit longer. She’s getting some poetry written out here, is the thing.”
“I respect the arts, Reggie, I do. But she can jot down her feelings anywhere, so poetry’s not the best excuse you could’ve come up with. Anyway, Lucy’s got this plan—”
“What about one more night?” Reggie said. “Her mother can pick her up first thing in the morning, no hitch in the plan.”
Charitye nodded approvingly.
From Keith: “Hold.”
“Reggie?” A woman’s vaguely European voice.
“Hi, Lucy.”
“She can spend the night so long as you promise me she’ll be packed and waiting for me outside at seven in the morning. If I have to so much as honk, I’ll crash my car into your house and drag her out of the wreckage.”
“Okay, Lucy, thank you.”
“Oh, and Reggie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do I have to tell you again to keep her away from that horse?”
* * *
Reggie lived far enough from what we call society to feel sorry for himself with neither shame nor showmanship. His thoughts on the matter were: If the only person you love gets a fatal kick in the head from a horse, you’ve got that right. Feeling sorry for yourself is a problem only if you do it around other people who don’t feel sorry for you (as you intended), but start feeling sorry for themselves. It turns out self-pity is contagious, but not in the way you want it to be.
For this reason, Reggie preferred to feel sorry for himself in the privacy of his own bedroom. On Charitye’s last night, he stayed awake in bed, staring up at the stray hairs in his eyebrows, remembering Allison. This was an insomniac pastime he’d grown to resent and rely on.
One thing he resented: the beginning, the time spent waiting behind her in the small (God, how short the lines used to be in the Antelope Valley!) registrar’s line at the community college. Allison kept turning around, this sunburned and goofy farm-girl-turned-student. Certain freckles on her face were illuminated by the holes in her straw hat. Nineteen eighty, and he was wearing a Reagan button on his denim jacket. Allison said, “Reagan, huh? Plays a cowboy on TV, but he’s too goddamn slick to be good for farmers.” She reached out and unfolded the list Reggie had been carrying at his chest so she could see which classes he was signing up for. Skeptically, she said, “Beginning Poetry. Next semester you’ll take the course on finishing a poem, that how it works?” Reggie started to correct her, but Allison interrupted. “A joke,” she said. “I know you Republicans ain’t heard many, but they’re called jokes.” Later, over coffee, she described her father’s farm, and Reggie asked her to repeat the word “weevils” a hundred times—“Way-vulls, way-vulls, what’s so funny about way-vulls?”
He was resentful, too, of the end. He’d found her in the stable, her eyes open and crossed like a child’s funny-face. A surprising lack of blood (flooding, as it did, to the inside of her skull). The seat of her pants was covered in shit — he’d figured, wrongly, that she fell in horse dung. She’d gone to the hospital then, alive in no way but a technicality, until her body made the decision for everyone and just quit. When he returned home, Reggie thought of nothing so much as beating Genie to death with a shovel. He must have held the spade so tight, it bruised the back of his hands. How long did he look that animal square in its enormous, intelligent eyes before telling it — out loud, like he’d just realized—“You’re a fucking horse.” He resented the end because Allison’s death brought with it a severe loneliness, a reminder of his own impending death, of not having children in the world to sweeten the tasteless batter of mortality.
It occurred to Reggie that every time he thought he was remembering Allison, he was actually remembering the way she’d made him feel at different points in their entangled lives — that anytime we try to remember anyone we’ve loved, what we’re really remembering is ourselves.
Of course, a man can think in this way for only so long before it becomes tedious. So Reggie willed himself out of bed. The sun wouldn’t be up for another three hours or so. He felt his way along the dark hallway into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge, searching for juice. The light from inside the refrigerator hurt his eyes. To let them adjust, he turned away. That’s when he saw the sheet of paper — frills along the left edge where it had been torn from the spiral notebook — on the kitchen table:
Uncle Reggie,
Here’s that poem I promised. It’s called “The Costs and Benefits of Desert Agriculture,” and it’s a draft so don’t judge it too harshly.
Men built a river so that desert girls can finger
the nutrient-heavy leaves of alfalfa
in the summertime. Chickens clamor
while horses eat six-dollar bales
of hay. If men built the river so that water