9. Nine
Nine
My mom was devoutly religious, a southern Baptist through and through. We went to church every Sunday. When she died, we buried the habit right along with her body. My dad has always believed religion happens outside of a building, saying, “God would never box himself in with four walls.”
I always agreed.
For whatever reason, I agree to go with Bo to his athletic-wear version of church without any questions. As promised, he shows up at nine, and I meet him outside in my yoga pants, T-shirt, and tennis shoes while carrying a large hat and a contingency bag. He’s so aggressively handsome in a ball cap, slightly fitted joggers, and T-shirt my neck flushes from the sight of him alone.
“Birdie,” he says with a lift of his lips—free of the usual toothpick today.
“Bo,” I reply, smiling despite myself .
He hands me a pink sticky note with Break Routine written across it.
When I look at him, he grins. “Today’s task.”
Before I can question it, we’re standing at his Jeep, and my eyes widen.
“Where are the rest of the pieces of your car?” I demand, balking at the missing doors and roof.
His eyebrows pinch. “I took them off. It’s gorgeous out.”
“Is it safe to drive around without doors?” I ask, strained.
His laugh dies when he realizes I’m serious. He clears his throat. “Umm, yeah, it’s safe, Birdie. They sell the Jeep so it can be driven like this.”
I nod slowly. Then, “What if it rains?”
We both look up at the clear blue sky, and he looks at me like he’s not sure how to answer my question.
I look from him to the Jeep with all its missing components, to the sky, back to him. Tension creeps in my shoulders, taking its hold on me. I stretch my neck. Consider my options. Stay or go. Go or stay.
“Fine,” I relent, putting my bag on the floor, get into the seat, and hope I don’t blow away on the highway.
When he’s in his seat, he glances over at me, then the bag, as he starts to back out of my driveway. “What’s all that?”
“Contingency items.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“You were all cryptic and I didn’t know what I’d need. I have grass-fed beef sticks if I need a snack, nontoxic bug spray, my sandals with a copper grounding plug if I want different shoes—oh!” I lift the large straw hat. “I didn’t know if we would be in the sun...”
His eyes widen. “Not really, but a little. The hat seems a bit…large.” His teeth work over his bottom lip as though he’s physically fighting a smile from showing. “I have sunscreen.”
I scoff. “Do you know what they put in that stuff?”
At the question, he puffs out a laugh but doesn’t respond.
I take in the Jeep as he starts to drive—it’s very him. Casual. Fun. In the cup holder, there are toothpicks wrapped individually in clear plastic sleeves, a couple Lincoln Logs, butterfly clips, and three princess Band-Aids.
I pick one up; he notices. “For boo-boos,” he says with a small smile.
I nod, putting it back into the cup holder along with the rest of his Bo paraphernalia. Relics of life. Pieces of him.
Then, as if we’ve said all we need to say, we ride in silence as he drives us out of town and toward the mountains, the warm wind from all directions blowing our hair around.
When he parks at a trailhead, I wait for a Gotcha! that never comes.
“A trail?” I ask, unbuckling.
“Mhm.” He grabs a backpack from the back seat and two water bottles. “I hike to church; didn’t I mention that?” he asks with mock confusion.
I climb out of my doorless seat and look around. “Like Machu Picchu? ”
He laughs, says, “Something like that,” then tilts his head toward the trail, already walking.
I assess the situation. There are trees, but I can see on the trail there’s light shining through. Before leaving the Jeep—and my bag of stuff that can’t be locked in so I’m sure will be stolen—I grab my hat, securing it with the strings beneath my chin.
We’re quiet as we start. Finding a rhythm both with each other and the roots and rocks of the trail beneath the soles of our shoes. Big trees and boulders line the path on both sides. The smell is fresh, but also distinct. The color green if it had a scent. A nuanced combination of soil, leaves, and elevated air.
When we stop for water, Bo watches me with an uncomfortable intensity as I drink from one of the bottles, cicadas loudly buzzing in the summer air.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, self-conscious.
“What?” I demand, dropping my water bottle into the backpack.
“That hat is ridiculous,” he says.
“So is skin cancer,” I deadpan.
He makes a sound that’s softer than a laugh as we start to walk again.
After a bird sings a song for so long in the distance I wonder how its lungs have the capacity for such work, he says, “Why did you come into Libby’s the way you did?”
My mouth clamps shut, eyes glued to the ground.
“This is called sharing, Birdie. It’s what friends do. ”
I pin him with a look but relent when I realize there’s nowhere for me to go to avoid this conversation.
“Fine.” I sigh heavily, looking anywhere but at him as I walk. “My thirty-seventh birthday has been a looming date on the calendar since my mom died. I know myself well enough to know that no matter what I’ve done to prepare for it, I’ll never stop believing it’s the year I’ll get cancer. The year I’ll die. So I told myself, fuck it, if this is the beginning of the end, for just once, I’m doing something that I never do.”
He huffs a laugh. “A one-night stand?”
“Sex.” The word pops out of my mouth like a jack-in-the-box and his step falters on the trail next to me.
“You don’t have sex ?” If he’s trying to mask his shock, he fails. “ Ever ?”
I laugh through my exhale. “Not actual sex, no. At thirty I…” I shake my head—he doesn’t need to hear that . “Anyway, it doesn’t matter why. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want to pass this burden”—I gesture toward my chest—“onto another generation. The best way to avoid that and keep everyone around me safe is to just…not.” I shrug. I may not love my reality, but I have come to accept it. Since most people don’t understand it, staying alone is always the easier option.
The thing is, I actually like sex—evident by what I recklessly did in the back of my minivan with a stranger, I really like it—but it’s not worth the risk. So I figure out ways to stay…pleased…without it. The few men I’ve casually dated are happy with that—until they aren’t. And now, with my age, even casual dating is off the table .
We cross a shallow rocky creek when he says, “There’s birth control.”
I scoff. “Filled with synthetic chemicals and hormones that will wreak havoc on my body? Pass.”
“Condoms? You…” His voice trails off with the unspoken used one with me .
“They fail,” I argue sharply.
“Everything has a risk, Birdie. Hell, even this hike could be where it ends!” When he laughs incredulously, something inside me snaps.
The rage triggered with those words is as intense as it is instant, and it stops my legs in the middle of the trail.
“You know what—people that say shit like that have no clue what risk is.” His eyes flash with regret, but it’s too late. I can’t control the anger in my voice any more than the words that come with it. “I went to a doctor once who told me genetics loads the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger. Well guess what, Bo? The gun is pointed at my head and it’s fully loaded!” I realize I’m yelling but don’t seem to care because I keep going. “Don’t you dare tell me about risks. If history is any indication, there’s a chance I won’t live to see my next birthday. When you think every cold—every ache—is cancer coming to kill you, come talk to me about risk. This hike is the least of my goddamn concerns.”
Before he can respond, I’m at a near jog up the trail trying to get away from him .
“Birdie, I’m sorry— wait!— I didn’t mean it like that.” There’s a plea in his voice that tugs at me as he hurries beside me, but I don’t give in.
The trail gets steep, my breath wheezing like a broken harmonica, but I can’t shake him, and he doesn’t slow down.
His mouth is on a constant replay of, “Stop, Birdie! I want to talk about this.”
Trying to keep my oversized hat on my head as I work to out-hike him, I can barely breathe.
When a branch snags my hat, anger zips through me. Worse is knowing that I’m not even mad at him, I’m pissed at whoever it is that deals out gene pools.
I want to scream, roar even. I’m jealous of every wild animal that gets to come loudly unhinged without being judged.
When the thick trees we’ve been walking under fade to a rocky ledge, we reach the summit. We’re standing on a cliff that overlooks the lush Blue Ridge Mountains as far as the eye can see. It’s so beautiful I feel it in my fingertips, eyelids, and between every rib.
The peaks closest to us are bright green, but as the lines move into the distance, curving and lifting from the earth, they turn to a blueish purple before completely blurring into the sky at the horizon line.
I’ve seen these mountains a thousand times, but for some reason the emotion that has no place to go makes my chest so tight my skin might rip. Desperate. Restless. Even the forever-reaching valleys around us aren’t big enough to hold everything I have bottled up .
I stop fighting it. Mouth open, head back, eyes closed, I yell—scream. The visceral call comes from my belly, lungs, throat, and mouth. My hat slips off my head, hanging by the cord around my neck to the middle of my back. My toes curl in my shoes and my fists clench at my side.
It’s simple—a long, loud, ahh!— but says everything I don’t know how to. It’s cathartic, and I need it so badly I do it again.
Somewhere in that next primal yell, Bo’s hands are cupped around his mouth, and he joins me with a howl that turns my yell to a laugh.
The echo of our calls bounces off the trees, mountaintops, and into the deepest parts of my soul.
When the last whispers of us are gone, it’s serenely quiet. A calm after a storm.
I blink back a tear before it can roll down my cheek.
“Tell me something you like,” he says.
I smile, not pulling my eyes off the mountains. “This view… You?”
“You,” he says, sliding my hat up from where it hangs down my back to the top of my head again.
I snort a laugh.
“I ruined church,” I say, staring at the bigness around us.
He bumps his shoulder against mine. “Not even close, Pam Beesly.”
“So I told you more about me than I’m sure you cared to know. If we are going to be friends, I assume you need to tell me something about you,” I say, staring out the windshield as we drive out of the mountains.
He chuckles, wind blowing his hair in twenty-seven directions as one hand casually drapes over the steering wheel. “What do you want to know?”
I consider this. What do I want to know?
“Why are you called Bo?”
“Ah, that’s a good story. My grandad always wanted a dog—that he wanted to name Bo—but Gran said the dog hair would get in her clay. As you can imagine, she got her way with that.” He grins. “When I came along, I got the name.” He shakes his head, hair whipping across his face. “Old man never did get a dog.”
When he shrugs, I laugh. “Named after the dog that never was. I like it.”
“What else?” he asks, shifting in his seat, running a hand through his hair and glancing over at me. His brown eyes look almost gold as the sun shines through the open roof of the Jeep.
“Do you date?” I ask. “Women, I mean. Other women.”
Again, he laughs, but there’s a more serious undertow when he answers. “I tried to, a couple of times. It’s complicated. I have a wife, and there’s a guilt associated with that even though I don’t want to be with her. Even though she left me and Lucy. Especially Lucy. Most women don’t want to date a man who’s legally married. I’m bound to another woman, it’s hard to see a future in that.” He shakes his head. “And then there’s Lucy, my priority.” With both hands now on the steering wheel, he twists his fingers around it. “I just don’t know how it fits.”
As we pull up to my house, I stay silent, considering his situation. How strange it must be. I’ll never have a spouse, but he has one that essentially doesn’t exist. I’ll never know love, but in some ways, neither will he. At least not anymore.
When he parks in my driveway, Huck’s waiting on my porch. I smile and wave at him through the open doorway of the Jeep, and he mirrors me from where he sits. He’s wearing a shirt with grasshoppers on it today.
“Who’s that?” Bo asks as I climb out of his Jeep with my oversized hat in one hand, bag that didn’t get stolen in the other.
“Huck. My neighbor. And friend ,” I say, my emphasis trying to prove a point. “Do you want to meet him?”
His answer is in the form of him sliding out of the driver’s seat and rounding the front of the vehicle.
“Birdie! Birdie!” Huck’s too-loud voice calls as he hops from the step and runs toward me, a blocky smile, more rectangular than curved, plastered on his face. The sight of it makes me grin.
When Huck gives me a high-five, Bo is standing next to me.
“Huck wonders where Birdie’s been!” he shouts.
I smile. “I went hiking with my friend Bo today.”
Bo and Huck study each other like they are trying to solve a riddle.
“Hi, Huck,” Bo says.
Huck shakes his head, mouth clamped shut .
“I wonder if Huck could tell Bo something about insects,” I say, trying to break the ice between them.
His eyes light up. “Grasshoppers were alive before dinosaurs.”
“They must be really old!” Bo says with such an obnoxiously terrible old man impression it makes Huck bark out a laugh.
“I wonder if Huck would like to walk George Strait with me.”
He nods, and I hand him my key. “Let him out, please.”
He doesn’t hesitate before taking the key and sprinting toward the door.
“George Strait?” Bo asks, eyes still on Huck.
“It’s my dog,” I tell him. “He was my mom’s favorite singer.”
We watch as he opens the door and the dog storms out, licking Huck in the face before bouncing down the steps.
“He’s autistic,” I say. “The speech patterns, that’s part of it. He doesn’t like questions.”
“You’re good with him.” The observation unknowingly lashes a million cuts across my heart.
A bouncing, barking George Strait pounces toward me when Huck says loudly, “Huck wonders if Bo is coming on a walk with us.”
Bo glances at me before kneeling next to him. “I would love that, but I have to go home right now.” He pauses. “But Bo wonders”—his eyes flick to mine, as if asking if he’s doing it right and I nod—“if Huck and Birdie would like to have dinner with Bo sometime.” They both look up at me.
What ?
I swallow hard, concurrently wanting to say Yes! and Absolutely not .
“I will have to think about it.” For a long time. “And ask Miss Alice if Huck’s allowed.”
Bo leans closer to Huck and loudly whispers, “That means yes, Huck.”
At this, Huck laughs.
Then, like he didn’t just make my heart expand to the point of pressing against bone, Bo gets in his Jeep, flicks a casual two-finger wave and grin in my direction, and drives away.