The Last Night Before Dawn

*I wanted to write something for women in their sixties, because desire doesn't retire. This story was a quiet, mischievous pleasure to write. Thank you for spending a night with Kirsten and Molly.*

The house had been quiet for three weeks before I finally admitted the quiet was the problem, and not just the ordinary quiet of a Thursday evening in August when the air conditioner hums and the refrigerator hums and everything else in Pendleton Flats settles into the dark like it always does. This was the other kind, the kind with edges to it, the kind that comes when a person who filled a certain amount of space with her voice and her laugh and her annoying habit of singing commercial jingles is suddenly not there, and every room she left has a shape in it you can almost see. Deborah moved out on the ninth of July, a Monday, and she took the good coffeemaker and the blue ceramic bowl and twelve years of accumulated certainty with her, and what she left behind was a feed store loader named Kirsten, sixty-four years old, sitting on the couch at nine in the evening listening to a house not talk to her.

I handled it with dignity, because this is my story and I get to shape it, but the honest shape is that I talked to the dog more than usual, and the dog died two years ago, and I knew that, and I talked to her anyway. I ate dinner standing at the counter because the table was a Deborah table, four chairs, Sunday breakfasts, the whole architecture of a shared life, and I couldn't look at it without doing arithmetic I didn't want to do. Twelve years. I was fifty-two when we got together and I thought that was the last act, the whole remaining show, and then it wasn't, and here I was at sixty-four learning that you can be too old to start over and too stubborn to just sit down and stop, both at once, which is a miserable combination.

The loneliness has a physical feel to it, and I don't mean that poetically. It's an itch, low down, somewhere under the ribs, and scratching it doesn't work because it isn't on the skin. What worked, the last few weeks, was movement. I loaded feed sacks all day at the store, fifty-pound bags of laying mash and cracked corn, and my shoulders ached in a way I was grateful for, because an aching shoulder is a simple problem with a simple solution, and the other thing was not. So when the itch got bad on this particular Thursday evening I did what I'd been doing, which was take my restlessness outside, out the back door and down the porch steps into the humid dark of my yard, thinking I'd walk to the green and back and look at the fairground lights going up for the weekend fair, and then come home and go to bed and do the same thing Friday.

Except the night was one of those thick August ones where the air is heavy and damp and walking feels like an opinion you'll regret, so I only made it as far as the fence line between my yard and the yard next door, and I was standing there in the dark like an idiot, leaning on the fence post, when I heard a crash and then a string of swearing from the direction of Molly's porch.

Now, Molly. I should explain Molly before I get further, because I hadn't explained her to myself yet at that point. She moved in three years ago, retired from a decade of long-haul trucking that she talks about the way other people talk about a war, with pride and horror in the same breath, and she bought the clapboard house next door with its sagging porch and its yard that went to seed the moment she signed the papers. Sixty-one years old, silver hair cut short as a hedge, forearms like a dockworker, and we'd exchanged maybe four hundred words in three years, all of them functional. Borrowed ladder. Returned ladder. Your dog got out, he's under my porch, he came out. That caliber of thing. She was the neighbor, and in a town the size of Pendleton Flats the neighbor is a fixed feature, like the water tower, and you don't think about the water tower having an interior life.

But that night I heard her swearing at something, and then I heard her laugh, a real laugh, and I was so starved for the sound of another human being being amused that I crossed the fence line before I'd decided to, and there she was on her porch with a flashlight in one hand and a beer in the other, glaring into her own trash can, which was knocked over and thoroughly looted.

"Raccoon," she said, before I'd even said hello, like we'd been mid-conversation for an hour. "Same raccoon, third night. I think he lives in the walls of my house now. I think he pays no rent and considers the place his."

"That's the one that got my garbage last week," I said, and heard my own voice come out rusty, like a gate that hadn't swung all summer.

"Then he's got two addresses," she said, and tipped the beer can toward me in something between a salute and an invitation. "You want a beer? I've got maybe six left and I'm retired, so six is a problem I need to solve before morning."

I stood there in the dark for a second longer than the situation required, because I'd come out here to walk to the green, and standing in your neighbor's yard at nine at night drinking beer was not on the itinerary, and also because some part of me had done the math already, the part under the ribs, and it had said yes before I had. "Sure," I said. "Why not."

She went in and came back with two cans, and she handed me one and sat down on the top step, and after a moment of my standing there motionless she said, "Sit, Kirsten, I don't bite," and so I sat, and the steps were warm from the day and the beer was cold from the fridge and both of those things felt like a small mercy.

We talked about nothing for a while, and I mean that as the highest compliment. We talked about the raccoon, who she had named, apparently, Gerald. We talked about the fair going up on the green, and whether the Tilt-A-Whirl would kill anyone this year, and she said she'd driven a rig through worse geometry than a Tilt-A-Whirl so she'd probably ride it. We talked about the feed store, because I mentioned I worked there and she said she bought cracked corn there for no reason she could name, she just liked having it, which is a thing a person who owns an overgrown yard says, and I laughed and she looked pleased about having caused it.

And then somewhere in the second beer the conversation slid, the way conversations do at night when the light is low and neither person is in a hurry, from nothing into something. She asked how long I'd lived alone and I said three weeks, and she heard the three weeks in a way I hadn't meant to let it be heard, and she said, "Recently, then," and I said yes, twelve years, gone in July, and she didn't say sorry or any of the words people say, she just nodded and drank and let the silence be a kind of company instead of a hole, and that was the first time in three weeks the silence had done that.

"Trucking does that to you," she said, after a while. "Twelve years out there alone, well, ten for me, you get so you can hear a house talk or not talk. Mine doesn't talk much. Gerald does his best but he's not a conversationalist."

"You could get a cat," I said.

"I could get a cat," she agreed, and we let that sit, and the night hummed, and the fairground lights down the street stood half-built against the sky like the town was slowly remembering something.

I finished my second beer and didn't want to leave, and I could see she wasn't in any rush to send me off either, and we were both adults, sixty-one and sixty-four, old enough that neither of us was going to pretend we didn't notice the noticing. She looked at me once, sidelong, in the porch light, an open look, nothing sly about it, and I felt it land somewhere under the ribs where the itch lives, and I didn't look away, and she smiled the way a woman does who has driven a long way and is glad to see a lit porch.

"Well," she said, and it stretched out, a word with a whole night folded in it, and I sat there on her warm step with my empty can and my rusted-open voice and the fair lights blinking down the street, and I thought, this is either a very good idea or the only idea I've had in three weeks, and those might be the same thing.

We sat there a while longer, and the porch light made a little yellow island around us, and Gerald, or a Gerald, or possibly Gerald's cousin, rustled along the fence line like he had business to attend to, and Molly said, "You still hauling at the feed store? I see your truck there mornings when I walk." I told her I was, twenty-two years now, fifty-pound bags of cracked corn and layer pellets and salt blocks, which are a special kind of cruelty, and that my back had opinions about all of it by Thursday, and tonight was Thursday, so I was sitting on a hard porch step leaning against a post because the alternative was lying flat on the floor of my empty house, which I had done twice this week already, once in the kitchen and once in the living room, like a beached thing waiting for the tide. She laughed at that, a low laugh, unbothered, and said, "Salt blocks. Lord. Those are the ones they ought to make the young guys do, but it's always the sixty-year-old woman with the dolly, isn't it."

"It's always me," I said. "Young guys come and go, I'm the one who holds the place together by now."

And then she told me about the trucking, which she'd only ever sketched at before, in the four hundred words we'd traded over three years, mostly about weather. Ten years of it, she said, starting at forty-eight after the plant shut, because a woman her age with strong arms and no degree had exactly two options in that economy and she picked the one with a windshield. She talked about the nights the way other people talk about vacations, the rest stops in Nebraska where the wind never stopped, the cab dark and the engine ticking as it cooled, the bunk narrow as a coffin and about as sociable, how she learned to sleep with her boots by her head because that's what everybody does, and how you get so you can fall asleep in ninety seconds and wake exactly when you choose to, like some kind of half-broke superpower that's completely useless in civilian life. "I still wake at four-thirty every morning ready to drive," she said. "To where, is the question. There's nowhere to be. I drink coffee and watch the yard come on and Gerald waddling around like a small angry landlord." She shook her head at her own yard, fond and irritated at the same time.

"You ever miss it?" I asked her. "The road, I mean."

"Every day and not at all," she said, which is the kind of answer that sounds like a contradiction until you've lived one. "I miss the horizon doing something. I don't miss eating gas station food for a decade or talking to dispatch on a headset like some kind of space mission. Mostly I don't miss being nobody's neighbor." She glanced over at me. "Which took three years to fix, apparently, because you and I have said maybe four hundred words to each other since I moved in, and half of those were about raccoons."

"Gerald did the introductions," I said. "He's a good diplomat."

"He is. He works cheap." She stretched her legs out and crossed her boots at the ankle, and her forearms caught the porch light, those dockworker forearms of hers, and she looked at the strand of fair lights down the street and said, out of nowhere and completely somewhere, "You know, three years I've been next door to you, and I always had you figured for a tough old bird. Never smiles, hauls feed like it insulted her family, storms around her yard at six in the morning in a coat that means business." She turned her head and looked at me straight, no slyness in it, just an open kind of amusement. "And then you came over my fence tonight chasing a raccoon in your slippers, and it turns out I was right, and I like being right, and I like the bird."

Well. I don't know what to tell you about that except that something under my ribs did a thing it had not done in years, some small involuntary flutter, like a bird itself, like the whole aviary waking up, and I sat there holding a dead beer can and felt twenty-five for about three seconds, which is a long time at my age. I'd been Deborah's for twelve years and before that I'd been other people's, and somewhere in there I'd stopped being somebody that anybody looked at sidelong in a porch light, and I hadn't known I missed it until it happened. "Tough old bird," I said, aiming for dry and landing