Love Medicine

M

wood Then she does just that. She settles back. She puts her arm out the window. The air is mild. She looks down on the spread of trees and sloughs. Then she shuts her eyes.

“It’s a damn pretty place,” she says. Her voice is blurred and contented. She does not seem angry with me anymore, and because of this, I can ask her what I didn’t know I wanted to ask all along. It surprises me by falling off my lips.

“Will you forgive me?”

She doesn’t answer right away, which is fine, because I have to get used to the fact that I said it.

“Maybe,” she says at last, “but I’m not the same girl.”

I’m about to say she hasn’t changed, and then I realize how much she has changed. She has gotten smarter than I am by a long shot, to understand she is different.

“I’m different now, too,” I am able to admit.

She looks at me, and then something wonderful happens to her face.

It opens, as if a flower bloomed all at once or the moon rode out from behind a cloud. She is smiling.

“So your butter’s going to melt,” she says, then she is laughing outright. She reaches into the backseat and grabs a block. It is wrapped in waxed paper, squashed and soft, but still fresh. She smears some on my face. I’m so surprised that I just sit there for a moment, feeling stupid. Then I wive the butter off my cheek. I take the block from her-andA put it’on the dash. When we grab each other and kiss there is butter on our hands. It wears off as we touch, then undo, each other’s clothes. All those buttons! I make her turn around so I won’t rip any off, then I carefully unbsten them.

“You’re different,” she agrees now, “better.”

I do not want her to say anything else. I tell her to lay quiet. Be still. I get the backrest down with levers. I know how to do this because I thought of it, offhand, as we were driving. I did not plan what happened, though. How could I have planned? How could I have known that I would take the butter from the dash? I home, rub a handful along her collarbone, then circle her breasts, then let it slide down between them and over the rough little tips. I rub the butter in a circle on her stomach.

“You look pretty like that,” I say. “All greased up.”

She laughs, laying there, and touches the place I should put more. I do. Then she guides me forward into her body with her hands.

Midnight found me in my pickup, that night in July. I was surprised, worn out, more than a little frightened of what we’d done, and I felt so good. I felt loose limbed and strong in the dark breeze, roaring home, the cold air sucking the sweat through my clothes and my veins full of warm, sweet water.

As I turned down our road I saw the lamp, still glowing. That meant Marie was probably sitting up to make sure I slept out in the shack if I was drunk.

I walked in, letting the screen whine softly shut behind me.

“Hello,” I whispered, hoping to get on into the next dark room and hide myself in bed. She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading an old catalog. She did not look up from the pictures.

“Hungry?”

“No,” I said.

Already she knew, from my walk or the sound of my voice, that I had not been drinking. She flipped some pages.

“Look at this washer,” she said. I bent close to study it. She said I smelled like a churn. I told her about the seventeen tons of melting butter and how I’d been hauling it since first thing that afternoon.

“Swam in it too,” she said, glancing at my clothes. “Where’s ours?”

“What?”

“Our butter.”

I’d forgotten it in Lulu’s car. My tongue was stuck. I was speechless to realize my sudden guilt.