Diane
Liko had views on arriving somewhere empty handed, so after buying a new phone to replace the one he destroyed last night, he came back to Schoenfeld’s with a box of doughnuts. He rang the doorbell and waited. No bark of the dog from within and no answer.
It was another cold day, but the sun shone strong and Liko was wisely layered up.
He sat in one of the Adirondack chairs and put the doughnuts down on a small table.
He laced his fingers, closed his eyes. Took a few deep breaths.
Opened his eyes and reached for the pastry box.
The doughnuts were still warm, sparkling with granulated sugar and cinnamon. He took a bite.
His throat seized, his stomach and chest hit the panic button. He spit the sodden, sweet bite into a napkin, balled it up, stuffed it in his fist and pressed the fist to his mouth.
“God fucking dammit,” he whispered.
It wouldn’t ever stop. A doughnut couldn’t be a doughnut anymore. No. It was an IED along the roadside of his life, reminding him of all that had been lost.
“Doughnuts on dicks,” Liko muttered, rubbing knuckles into his damp eyes like he was punching himself in the face. His tongue flicked the last granules of sugar off his teeth as he sat miserably and remembered.
Kyle was six and in his naked phase, meaning it was twenty-two degrees out and you couldn’t keep clothes on the punk.
After days of battle, the Greenmans reached an impasse where Kyle was allowed to breakfast in the nude in return for uncomplaining cooperation in getting dressed afterward.
He sat at the table, nary a goosebump on his skin, while Liko and Janelle were fleeced up and huddled over their coffee cups for warmth.
“What are you up to, kiddo?” Janelle asked.
“I’m seeing how many doughnuts I can stack on my penis,” Kyle said.
Nobody warned you about these things when you became a parent.
It was a trademarked look that passed between mother and father: a quick reckoning to see whose turn it was to run interference.
Not it, Liko thought, and then all his coffee came out his nose. Coughing and choking, sinuses burning, he stumbled toward the kitchen sink.
“Amateur,” Janelle yelled after him. “All right. Ky, my love, I adore your quest for knowledge but now nobody can eat those doughnuts because they’ve been on your penis. Take them off, please.”
“It’s only one,” Kyle said, putting it on his plate. “I could stack more if it was har—”
“I’m sure you could,” Janelle said loudly. “Now look, you have sugar all over your junk.”
“You’re not supposed to call it junk.”
“You’re not supposed to stack doughnuts on it. Go wash off or the ants will use you for a snack. Then get dressed.”
Kyle slid off his seat and walked away, his pert, bare tush affronted and misunderstood.
“Hang up the washcloth and towel,” Liko managed to say.
Janelle turned in her chair. “Oh thanks for joining us.”
Their eyes met. Their ears counted Kyle’s soft footsteps up the stairs.
Then they died.
Janelle doubled over in her chair. Liko folded in half by the sink. The tears streaming down their faces. And the jokes afterward. Christ, for a week they couldn’t say the word doughnut without leering.
“How many?” Janelle asked, with a hot side-eye over the pastry box.
Liko stretched out his waistband and contemplated therein. “Right now, I’m good for three.”
“I don’t know, these are awfully big holes.”
“Challenge accepted.”
When in a mood, they texted DODT: Doughnuts on Dicks Tonight?
They couldn’t drive by a Dunkin’ without mumbling “Dickin’.
” When the last doughnut went stale in the box, Janelle brought it to bed and crammed it onto the crown of Liko’s manhood.
They brayed laughing—“Dude, it looks like the Seattle Space Tower”—then Janelle ate it off him, licked the bits of sugar away, climbed aboard and absolutely railed him into oblivion, her mouth full of cinnamon and giggles.
It was so them. Liko counted it among the top five defining moments of their marriage because certainly no one else in their circle was stacking doughnuts on dicks.
He stood around at sports practice and birthday parties and school assemblies, smugly judging.
He’d elbow Janelle’s side, jerk his chin at an unsuspecting couple and mumble, “Think they stack?”
“Oh God no,” she’d say. “Please.”
Please. No other couple could fuck as good as they did while asphyxiating with laughter.
Except later Liko found out Janelle was fucking George Heritage, dying laughing in a hotel room, possibly with a dozen doughnuts at the ready.
George Heritage, for God’s sake.
Their fucking accountant.
Granted the man was a specimen, which was another of Liko and Janelle’s inside jokes. “God, he’s hot,” one would always muse after a meeting with George.
“I love tax season,” the other would sigh.
Hell, Liko would’ve eaten a doughnut off George’s dick, and there were a few financial sessions when some sustained eye contact made him think George might rather enjoy it.
Liko thought about it sometimes. That was all, he just thought about it.
His bisexuality wasn’t a secret. He and Janelle met because he occasionally messed around with her co-worker’s brother.
But you were supposed to put childish things away when you got married.
You could crush, sure. And if you had a partner with whom you could share a mutual crush, so much the better.
God, George is hot. Right? Look at that ass…
Liko only crushed.
While Janelle was…
“Hello there.”
Liko shook his head out of the past and scrambled to his feet.
A woman stood at the foot of the porch steps, along with the dog Liko had met last night.
The woman wore a tan down jacket over a bright red sweater.
A matching red wool hat under which fell dark blonde hair with long bangs.
Round sunglasses hid her eyes. He couldn’t quite tell her age but she was dressed, groomed, made up and outfitted in such a deliberate way, he wondered if she were a social media influencer.
“Hello,” she said again. “You looked asleep.”
“Hi. Almost.” Liko picked up the still-open pastry box and came down the stairs. The dog put paws on Liko’s hip and lifted its half-white, half-brown face to get a good sniff. Liko hadn’t noticed last night, but the dog also had two different colored eyes: one pale blue, the other golden brown.
The woman smiled broadly. “My mother always said, If you meet a strange man carrying doughnuts, marry him.”
“Did she?”
“No. But I’ll take one?”
“I’m Liko,” he said, just as the woman took an enormous bite. She chewed and chewed, then put a concealing fist to her mouth and said, “I’m Diane.”
“I’m looking for Dane.”
“He’s my brother,” she said, and finally swallowed.
“Is he home?”
“No, he had to run out.”
“Oh.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Yeah, we met last night. He said he’d be home today and I could come by.”
“Well isn’t he the fucking asshole?”
Liko gave a single, nervous laugh. “Do you live here?”
“I come and go,” she said, a little elusively. “Well, Mr. Asshole should be back soon. Do you want to come in, have a cup of coffee and wait? Or just leave a note telling him to piss off?”
“I’ll wait a bit.” He felt a strange reluctance to go back into the house if Dane wasn’t there. “I wouldn’t mind looking at the farm. I can walk myself around.”
“I’ll give you the tour. Come on. Leave the doughnuts. Take the gun.”
She laughed loudly at her own joke and Liko’s Spidey Senses shivered down his neck.
Something about Diane was forced and artificial and more than a little weird, and he kept a good two feet of distance as he followed her up the road.
The dog dashed ahead, then doubled back to herd its pokey charges along.
“What’s her name,” Liko asked.
“Salma.”
“Selma?”
“Salma. With an A.”
“Who are the Schoenfelds?”
“Of late, it’s John and Mary Schoenfeld. They owned all the land at this intersection,” Diane said. “Well, actually, just three of the corners. They sold the parcel that has the pub.”
“What’s it called?”
“Officially it’s The Pub at Schoenfeld’s, but around these parts, just the Pub. Capital P.” She turned back and pointed out across the road. “You see that flat, paved extension of the parking lot? That’s where the farmer’s market is. Every Saturday at the Pub, May to November.”
“I see.”
Her finger moved to point across the road.
“The pond with the big pine tree? That gets lit up every December. Schoenfeld’s has some decades-old agreement with the fire department and every other year or so, they’re out here with ladders to maintenance the lights.
There’s a lottery and the winner gets to take a ride in the truck with Santa and throw the switch to light the tree.
Big party after. Skating if it’s safe, otherwise we booze it up and deck the Pub halls. Fa la la.”
“Sounds fun. What’s that barn in the field across the road?”
“It’s where we store plans that never came to fruition.”
They were walking down a long flagstone path, beneath a strong trellis of concrete-footed posts and iron bars covered with ropy, twisted, woody vines.
Diane reached to lay a hand on a branch.
“Doesn’t look like much now,” she said. “But these are wisteria vines. In May, this whole walkway is covered with blooms.”
O wisteria hares turning, Liko thought, but said nothing. He wasn’t going to grill this strange woman for clues about the game. He’d look, listen, and wait for Dane.
“The vines are kind of special,” Diane was saying.
“Mary Schoenfeld’s father was a horticulture professor at Oberlin college.
Somehow… I forgot the connection, anyway, Japan gifted the department wisteria vines that survived Hiroshima.
When Mary’s father retired, the college gave him cuttings from those vines.
He planted them here. They took fifteen years to bloom. ”
“Is that typical? Taking fifteen years, I mean, not the gift.”
“Yes. Wisteria is a lesson in patience. It won’t bloom until it decides it likes the place. Here’s the spa…”
Diane pointed to a stone outbuilding with a sign reading The Spa at Schoenfeld’s.
Then she walked Liko a bit further uphill to where they could see three stone cottages spaced equidistant around a small pond.
“Every summer, Schoenfeld’s hosts three artists in residence.
Artist being a loose term. Anything from painters to musicians to pastry cooks to someone working on a dissertation. ”
“Do the Schoenfelds still live here?”
“No, John and Mary retired to France. Dane owns it all now.”
“Ah.”
“But everything about this place… The farm, the CSA, the market, the Pub, the spa, the tree lighting—it’s all Mary’s creation. John did come up with the idea for the artist residencies, but Mary executed it.”
“Must be a shit ton of work running this place,” Liko said.
Diane nodded, then wobbled her head side to side.
“One of Mary’s many talents was picking good managers.
She was the empress of delegation. And she also knew when it was time to downsize—like when she sold the Pub.
She has a file of people with right of first refusal for the spa and the artist cottages. She guides Dane from afar.”
“What about John?”
Diane laughed. “John’s basically a kept man. Lovely guy, don’t get me wrong. But he’s your quintessential absent-minded professor. Mary built the farm around him while he did his academic thing. Classes, lecture circuits, books.”
“Sounds like you grew up here?”
“No. I just heard about it from Dane.”
“He grew up here?”
“He married in.”
She showed Liko the barn, the greenhouses, the fields, the chicken coop.
Liko asked polite questions and took mental notes.
After last night, he didn’t harbor much doubt he was in the right place, but this tour seemed intent on letting him know, yes, whatever he was meant to do here, this was the place.
Liko saw the Green Man’s foliate face in all sizes, adorning walls, fixed into a paving stone, painted on the side of a wheelbarrow.
Little statues of rabbits dotted the flower beds—sleeping, sitting, listening, bounding.
Two stone hares were up on their hind legs, boxing with teeth bared and long ears laid back.
The Three Hares motif was designed as a copper wind spinner, either turning lazily to illustrate the optical illusion of the three shared ears, or catching a gust and whirling into a blur.
Get it, the farm kept elbowing Liko’s side. See? This is the place.
I got it, Liko thought dryly.
Diane looked back and smiled. “At the risk of sounding like a dumb American, where are you from?”
“London. My father’s work transferred him to New York when I was fifteen.”
Liko had worked hard to shed his accent during high school, just to fit in.
By the end of his sophomore year he had it dialed way down.
By the time he graduated he could turn it off and on at will.
But once at college, he kept it on. Partly because he was older, wiser, less needful of fitting in.
But mostly because older, wiser college students seemed to find his accent irresistible.
“Are your parents still here?”
“No, they went back when Dad retired. I stayed.”
“For work?”
“For love.”
“Ah,” Diane said slowly. Then declared she was cold and wanted that coffee.