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She leaves that damn cup on the side table for the rest of the day, lets what’s left of the coffee sit and grow stale. It chafes at her nerves to have it sit there, but she can’t bear to move it, either. Something about that cup haunts her as she goes to bed that night, lingering Wyoming scent still hanging in the other room, and she dreams about that dusty old cowboy crying on her couch, her’s and Jack’s. The next morning she has a blinding headache, so she calls in sick and sends Bobby over to her mama’s to paint that shed in the backyard that’s been needing a whitewash since her rodeoing days. It’s a big job, especially for a fidgety teenage boy, and it’ll keep him out of the house for the better part of the day.
Her headache keeps her in bed until well after noon; since the sky outside is gray as an old nickel, she doesn’t worry about the sun waking her and leaves the curtains open, the front window facing the road. The neighbors across the street, the ones whose first names she can never recall, are packing their car like they’re heading somewhere, but only the man leaves, driving off toward the interstate. Goddamn men, she thinks, her head swimming, they’re the ones that do this to you.
The throbbing behind her eyes finally dulls off, and she gets out of bed with a sense of profound regret. If Jack weren’t coming home today, she’d say to hell with it and roll back over, throw a pillow over her head and sleep until tomorrow morning, but he always likes to have supper with Bobby when he gets back from one of his trips, and that’s one thing she can’t begrudge him, no matter how bad she feels.
The coffee cup, so out of place, catches her eye as she makes her way to the kitchen, out of place herself.
She doesn’t pick it up and hurl it against the wall, though she’d like to; she doesn’t even wash it out and put it away, which honestly she’d like to do more. She stares hard at it for long minutes, and leaves it right where it is. Jack will notice.
She starts frying chicken and shaping biscuits before one thirty and doesn’t finish with the whole thing until nearly four. Her mama calls and says she’ll drive Bobby home after he finishes, so she sets the table, already knowing to expect Jack around five. She’s stepping out of the shower, fresh-scrubbed of chicken smell, when she hears the sound of the truck engine as it dies down in their driveway, the slam of the car door, and Jack’s soft tread, still more boy than man at thirty-five, coming through the front door.
“H’lo?” he calls.
She doesn’t reply to the too-light tone of his voice, thinks instead of the chipped coffee cup and the faded man holding fast to it like a drowning man to a life preserver.
“H’lo?” he calls again. “Bobby, you here, son? Lureen? Lureen, you in here?”
“In here, Jack,” she calls, finding her voice at last. The moments that pass before he reaches their bedroom don’t give her enough time to get the coffee cup out of her mind, so she busies herself with applying lotion to her legs, head down, hair falling around her face protectively.
He pauses at the door, watches her slide the lotion on in smooth strokes, grins. “If this how you welcome me home, maybe I oughta go away more often.”
“How’s that?”
“Fried chicken, fresh biscuits, your pretty little self all clean an’ smellin’ good—”
“Bobby’ll be home soon,” she says, finally looking up at him. He looks better than he did when he left, the beard-growth around his jaw taking away some of the ridiculousness of that mustache. She doesn’t know why he doesn’t shave it off, be done with it. “So you just save your sweet-talk for some other time.”
He grins again, relieved, though to his credit, he makes some attempt to hide it. “Mayhap I’ll save it for some other gal, what you think ‘bout that?”
“Don’t make no difference to me,” she replies, laying aside the lotion and moving toward the closet to dress. Behind her back, he crosses to the bed, sits to remove his boots, then flops bonelessly across the mattress. “Be doin’ me a favor, wouldn’t she?” She hears him chuckle low and loose.
“Yeah, I reckon that’s so,” he mutters, with almost no undertone to it. “You need some help with that?” A moment later, she feels his hand across her back for a fraction of a second as he zips the back of her dress, a green thing she knew he’d always liked, simple and no frills to bother with when it came off.
She turns to him with a small, tight smile. “Thank you,” she says, reminds herself that they are business partners who share a bedroom, that’s all.
“Not even a kiss for your ol’ man?”
“You implyin’ that I’m an ol’ lady?”
He laughs, still high on fishing-mood. “Never, Lureen. I value my dick too much.”
She leans forward, kisses his lips lightly, is relieved to taste only herself on them. “I’m kinda fond of it myself,” she answers dryly.
He cups her face with his big hands and pulls back just far enough to stare at her. “How’s everythin’ ‘round here?”
“Good enough,” she shrugs. “Bobby didn’t get in no trouble. Daddy an’ Mama took him to look at horses. They say they’re gonna get him one for his birthday.”
Jack’s face clouds. “Like hell.”
“Now, Jack—-”
“Lureen, if he wants a damn horse, we’ll get him one. But L.D. goddamn Newsome is not buyin’ Bobby nothin’ that I can give to him myself.”
She keeps silent. No point in fighting this particular battle, not when she already knows she’ll win the war. Win it not with yells and pistols, but with cold coffee grounds and words not said aloud.
“I’m gonna go dry my hair, Jack. Dinner’ll be when Bobby gets home.”
He nods but doesn’t look at her, the way it’s always been.
She’s running a comb through her hair, noticing dark roots, when she hears Bobby stomping through the front door. He must notice his daddy, though, because she hears their voices, just streams of words flowing toward her, nothing she can make out, like talking to a horse, low and not much sense to it, comforting only because you know the voice.
She goes to the kitchen, finds Bobby and Jack already sitting down at the table, ready to be served, which she does. The meal is good—Jack’s in high spirits, Bobby’s happy to have his dad back, only she feels off, all because of that hint of Wyoming in the air. She wishes, suddenly, that she hadn’t left the cup there. And that she hadn’t opened the door yesterday, that her hair was still brown like it was when she first got married, that she’d danced with that other man in the bar the night she met Jack. So much in her life was all because she couldn’t get away from those big blue eyes, the pain behind them like a punch to the gut, completely irresistible to a twenty-year-old girl used to getting what she wanted.
There was a boy back in high school that she’d been half-crazy over. He’d been tall and skinny, bright blonde hair and green eyes like summer grass, and she thought she’d never get over him, him and his thin boy-lips, that clean first-date smell. Drunk as a mule and a curve in the road got him, dead before the car stopped rolling. She’d cried for two weeks solid after that, barely looked at another man for two years, then Jack.
“Lureen, you make any coffee?” Jack’s words pull her out of her thoughts sharp as a slap to the face.
She pours them both a cup and doesn’t ask about his trip.
“What about you, Lureen? Anythin’ excitin’ happen while I was gone?”
Her grip on the coffee cup tightens imperceptibly. “What you mean?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You make a sale? Buy somethin’ pretty? Have comp’ny over?”
The coffee cup.
“Company?”
He smiles, world-weary. “Yeah. Guests. You have any?”
Yeah, Jack Twist, she thinks. That cowboy you never talk on, he come down here to chat with me. Had us a right good talk.
She looks at him, looks right in those pretty blue eyes still holding onto that sucker-punch pain that’ll be the death of her one day, sees that he has no idea what she knows. Takes a long sip of coffee before answering, “No, no one came ‘round. In fact, it was right lonesome ‘round here without your jabberin’ to fill up the day.”
Her husband nods, satisfied, goes back to talking sports with her son. The late afternoon sun slants through the window like a secret, casting shadows where none should be, and Lureen pours herself another cup of coffee.