Kamikazes Maggie Gerrity Your mother swears the first time she met your father, at the Palmer House, two blocks from the rear apartment where you lived for most of your first six years, she knew she’d marry him. She believes she’s passed this intuition on to you, that one day you’ll spot a man with dark hair or a chiseled jaw and know—without a touch, perhaps without a single word—that he will be the man with whom you’ll stay. Of course you don’t believe her, though sometimes you remind yourself she’s always right and you wonder. You thought you met him the summer you were twenty-two, in early July, in that city in northern Florida that had taken you days to learn how to spell. His eyes, brown and wide like a cat’s, gleamed when he smiled. He wore a light blue shirt, long-sleeved in summer, and khakis tight enough that you thanked God and Gap for your fortune. One smile and you forgot you weren’t home. Days later, in an email to your best friend back in Pennsylvania, as faraway to you then as those nights you danced on top of your father’s feet at the Palmer House, you confessed: I wish I could just marry him and get on with things… That best friend abandoned you, a rainy night on Bourbon Street you can’t forget, but he became a mainstay in that strange new world of palm trees and palmetto bugs and blinding, sudden storms: coffee growing cold in black mugs, his too-loud laugh, late afternoon sunlight glinting off the lake. For the first six months, you only saw him biweekly, afraid to get any closer, afraid to give him the chance to leave. Because that was what always happened, wasn’t it? A humid night: almost summer and almost morning, closing time, the longest short walk of your life, pavement tilting, feet refusing to rise and fall in dependable steps. He unlaced his heavy boots and walked home in white socks, iridescent against the pavement of streets whose residents you both knew. He was wearing those same khakis, the ones you knew by then he’d probably eaten nothing but mustard sandwiches for three weeks just so he could afford. God bless Rolling Rock. God bless kamikazes, the lemon-flavored gasoline you drank from highball glasses in honor of Blondie while your friends shimmied to “Heart of Glass” on the cramped dance floor. Thank God for the angel who guided the two of you home, who kept traffic out of the intersections and the cop in his cruiser in the lot of the gas station while you staggered arm-in-arm, drunk and disorderly, across the pavement and into the dewy grass. You would’ve fallen if he’d have let you go. How would you have explained six stitches in your chin to your mother? In his living room, you told him to stay awake, to keep talking, to take aspirin. You thought you could shoo a hangover away from him the way you would a fly. When you went to the kitchen to get him water, did you realize you knew where he kept his glasses as if guided by radar? Sprawled on the couch, he wouldn’t sit up, so you drank from the thick, blue-rimmed glass yourself, the water cool and tasting faintly of chlorine. You circled your fingers through the coarse hair on his forearm. The forked tongue of the invisible devil perched on your shoulder flicked your earlobe as she whispered Kiss him, kiss him. You tried his arm first, a small peck, then turned, pressed a hand against his ribcage, and leaned in. His eyes, closed; his lips, slightly parted; his chest, rising and falling in the cadence of sleep. You woke him and offered to help him to bed. But when he pulled you into a good night hug in the dining room, you blurted out I love you, stammered that you’d needed him to know for months but never knew how to say it. Disaster. He didn’t get angry then, as you expected, didn’t ask why you kept the truth from him all these months. He did not say I’m gay, a confession you’d been trying to prepare yourself for, something neither of you seemed quite willing to believe, not then. Not even a year later, when he left Tallahassee in the middle of the night and turned up teaching at a Christian college months later. Not ever. He’d already given you a t-shirt to sleep in, and you couldn’t stop thinking how perfectly it fit, how soft the worn cotton had become. He did not do what he always did, change the subject or offer you another glass of water or walk into another room. He hugged you more tightly. He did not let you go, and you pressed your forehead against his neck, inhaling his sweet musky scent of sweat and beer. He said I love you, too. He called you honey and scolded you for ever thinking that he didn’t. And for a moment, you believed him. He let go, finally, and nudged you toward the white pillow and tan comforter he’d arranged on the couch. He closed his bedroom door. When he opened it half an hour later to go to the bathroom, bare feet padding on the hard wood floor, you thought he was coming to offer the other half of his bed. An innocent offer: he knew how the couch cushions slid apart, leaving a gap wide enough to engulf a knee or a hip. You didn’t hear the bedroom door close again. Instead, awake until dawn, you stared at the ceiling, at the bookshelves, at the paintings neatly spaced over the couch, trying to figure out what would happen next. In the morning, you drank your coffee quickly, then wrapped him in an awkward hug. Said you’d call. Didn’t apologize. Left. Drove home slowly, your mind still fogged from barely sleeping and all those Rolling Rocks, your heart sloshing in your stomach like a ship lost during a storm. At Tennessee and Monroe, you looked down and saw you were still wearing his shirt.