The Green Within

My name is Virginia, I'm twenty-three, and I drive a long-haul truck for a living. That last part matters, because when you spend eleven hours a day alone in a cab, your standards for human company either go up or go completely sideways. Mine went sideways.

Trevor, my coworker and occasional conscience, has been with the same guy since he was twenty-three. Five years. He doesn't get me at all.

"You've been on what, nine dates this year?" he asked me at the dispatch office in March, eating a sandwich like it had wronged him.

"Eleven."

"Eleven dates in fourteen months and zero seconds. What's your system?"

"I don't have a system. I have a phone and bad judgment." I stole a chip off his plate. "It's not like it's all bad. It's just all nothing."

He looked at me the way people look at a truck with a weird rattle, like the problem was real but not worth the estimate. "You keep saying nothing like that's a small thing."

"It is a small thing. It's the smallest thing."

It wasn't, though, and I knew it. A year of dating since the thing with Miles, and I could count the good parts on one hand with fingers left over. Miles was a coworker, two years ago now, and it was one of those hookups that happens because a Tuesday night is long and both people are bored. Six weeks of awkward elevator rides afterward. Nobody's fault. Just nothing there, under the skin of it.

After Miles I did the apps like everyone does. There was a guy in Boise who talked about his ex for ninety minutes and then asked if I wanted to come back to his place. There was a woman in Tacoma who was great for one dinner and then ghosted me so thoroughly I started to wonder if I'd imagined her. There was the firefighter, the one my mother would have liked, who was polite and handsome and asked me exactly zero questions about myself across four hours. I drove home from that one doing the math. Four hours. He'd told me his whole résumé and never once said my name out loud. He'd called me "buddy" twice.

That's the flavor of it. Nothing mean, nothing criminal, just a long flat stretch of people who wanted company the way you want a radio on. Background noise with a face.

So when the app matched me with someone named Evelyn in late March, I almost didn't open it. I was in a truck stop outside The Dalles, eating soup I didn't like, and my thumb was already moving toward closing the thing out of habit.

Her profile photo was unusual, and that's what stopped me. Not unusual the way half these profiles are, all angles and filters. Unusual like the picture had been taken by someone who didn't care about making her look normal. Dark hair, a shy half-smile, and eyes that were honestly a little strange. Pale, with a greenish cast, like looking into shallow water over moss. The caption said "I don't photograph well. The eyes are real. I promise."

I typed before I could talk myself out of it.

"The eyes caught my attention. In a good way, I think."

Her reply came the next morning, which was already a good sign. People who answer instantly are performing. People who answer the next morning are living a life.

"Thank you. Most people assume it's a filter and swipe past. You're the first person in a while who asked about them first."

"Are they contacts?"

"No. I know how that sounds. I'd show you a better photo but I genuinely don't take good ones. Ferns photograph better than I do."

"Ferns?"

"I like plants. I grow them badly, which they forgive."

We messaged for three weeks after that, and I keep circling back to this, because it's the thing I've never had before. It was slow. Neither of us pushed. She asked me about routes and I asked her about plants, and we traded small facts like kids trading baseball cards, and neither of us ever once sent the digital equivalent of a leer. I told her about the truck, about the stretch of I-84 through the Blue Mountains that I consider the prettiest ten miles in Oregon. She told me she lived way out on the edges of Portland, near where the city stops pretending and turns back into forest.

"Can I ask something?" she wrote one night. "And please don't take it wrong."

"Ask."

"I don't usually meet people in person. I've tried it a few times and it always goes badly, mostly my fault. Would it be all right if we took it slow? Like, slower than slow?"

"How slow are we talking?"

"I'd like to come to your place and cook you dinner, if you'd let me. Talk. Nothing past that unless you want it, and even then I'd want to go at the speed of molasses."

I sat with that one for a while in the cab, parked at a rest area with the heater ticking. Most people would read that message and get suspicious. I read it and felt my chest do something it hadn't done in two years, which was loosen.

"I'd like that," I wrote. "Molasses speed. I'm home the second Saturday of April."

"I'll bring a fern," she said, and I laughed alone in the truck at one in the morning like an idiot.

The second weekend of April I cleaned my house, I moved the mess from one surface to a different surface, and I panicked twice about the whole arrangement. A stranger from the internet, coming to my house, no bar in between, no exit ramp. Trevor was opinionated about it when I told him.

"Home on the first date? Gin, come on."

"She asked to cook for me. She asked before she asked."

"That's either very sweet or the opening chapter of a true crime book."

"Thanks, Trev."

"I'm serious. Text me when she arrives and text me at nine. If you don't text at nine I'm calling."

"Deal."

She arrived at four in the afternoon, Saturday, in a car so old and muddy it looked like it had been driven through a river, which maybe it had. She stood at my gate for a second before knocking, and I watched her through the window and thought, okay, the photos undersold her and oversold her at the same time. She was tall and narrow, mid-twenties to look at, with that dark hair down past her shoulders, and she moved careful, like she wasn't sure of the ground.

She was holding a small potted fern.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Evelyn. I said I'd bring a fern and I want you to know I agonized over that joke for three days."

"It's a good fern," I said, taking it. It was a real one, small and perfect, roots just barely showing at the pot's edge. "Come in. Fair warning, my house is small and my cooking is worse than my housekeeping."

"Then it's good I brought my own dinner plan." She came in and stood in my living room taking it in, the worn sofa, the desktop computer humming in the corner like it always does at night. "This is nice. It looks lived in. Mine looks like nobody lives there, which I keep meaning to fix."

We cooked together, and I don't use that phrase lightly, because I've cooked near people before and it's a different thing. She made a mushroom thing in my one good pan, and she directed me without directing me, handing me a knife when I reached for the wrong drawer, telling me where the thyme lived in my own kitchen before I'd found it. The whole time we talked. About her garden that keeps dying. About the time I drove through a hailstorm in Wyoming and cried from boredom, not fear. About Miles, eventually, because she asked about my dating history with the patience of someone doing an archaeological dig.

"And it was nothing?" she said, stirring.

"Nothing. A year of nothing. I keep thinking I'm the problem, but I can't figure out what the problem would be."

"Maybe you're not the problem. Maybe you just haven't met a thing that fits yet." She said it easy, no weight on it, and went back to the pan, and I stood there holding a wooden spoon and feeling like the floor had shifted one degree.

The fern sat on my windowsill. Dinner was, and I say this as someone with low standards, genuinely good. Outside, the light went long and gold over the fence, and the ferns in my overgrown backyard moved a little in the wind, like they were paying attention.

"So," I said. "Molasses speed. What's the next step at molasses speed?"

"Well," she said, and smiled that shy half-smile from the photo. "Next is we do the dishes. Slowly."

We did the dishes slowly, which turned out to mean she washed and I dried and we ran out of things to say about the dishes in about ninety seconds and had to fill the rest with other stuff. She asked about my routes. I told her about the night drive from Boise to Twin Falls, how the fog sits in the valleys like it pays rent there. She told me her garden keeps dying because she "waters it wrong on purpose," and when I asked what that meant she just said, "Long story," and smiled at the suds.

After that we took our drinks out back. The porch is nothing, two steps and a railing, but the yard goes wild past it, ferns and moss and one maple the previous owners left behind. The evening had cooled to that Portland temperature where a sweater is optional and regretted either way.

"This is the part I like," Evelyn said, settling on the step. "The green part. Cities are fine but they hum wrong."

"Hum wrong how?"

"Too many frequencies. Out here it's just wind and bugs and your fridge." She nodded toward the house. "And your computer. That thing never sleeps, huh?"

"It hums like it's telling me a secret. I've stopped hearing it."

We sat quiet a minute. Then she reached over, slow enough that I could have moved, and put her fingers on my wrist, right over the pulse. Her hand was cool at first contact, and then it wasn't. The warmth came up through her fingers and into mine and kept going, up the arm, into the shoulder, somewhere behind the ribs. I don't have a better word for it. It wasn't body heat. It was like when you park the truck after eleven hours and turn the engine off and the silence settles in and your whole body goes, oh, finally.

"That's not just skin," I said. My voice came out lower than I planned.