“You still don’t want to know my name?”  She stepped into her jeans.

            
            “It would kill a lot of the mystery.  Let’s stay anonymous.”

            He reclined, uncovered, across two hay bales. 

            The rain picked up.  On the tin, it sounded heavier than the drizzle he knew it to be.  He stretched the blankets over the hay and lied down flat, intending to nap as the tuliptree outside mingled a downpour of yellow leaves with the rain.

            “Live a good one.”  She smiled in a way that erased any traces of guilt that still clung to him.  It was an honest-to-God smile.

            This particular day started like this: 

            He drove out of the boot heel of Missouri just after sun-up, at the end of what he assumed would be his last seasonal job before he carried his crisp, new bachelor’s degree into that real world he had heard so much about.  His hometown in Tennessee and the job in Missouri -- where he dressed in 19^th Century garb and spent the day shearing sheep or milling sorghum under the watchful eyes of tourists -- lay six hours apart if he chose the most direct route.  Today, though, he hugged the backroads and prophesied about the next few months:  living with his parents, mailing resumes, traveling to interviews.  On weekends, he’d sit with his old high school buddies, drink beer and talk about the future.  But today, before any of that process began, he would stretch the six hours into ten.  He would avoid chain restaurants and four-lane highways.

            En route, he stopped at an apple orchard with a big, hand-painted sign out front.  In a building that wasn’t quite a barn and hardly a warehouse, he walked among travelers with Harley-Davidson t-shirts and Branson hats and women he guessed to be school teachers wearing sweaters with jack-o-lanterns and scarecrows printed or pinned on the front.  He and these strangers zigzagged up and down the concrete floors beside bins of green, gold, and burgundy apples, coolers filled with gallon jugs of cider, shelves of honey, sorghum, and preserves.

            The thought occurred to him that a person could survive for at least a year on an apple-based diet.

            When he noticed the red-haired girl behind the counter, he grabbed a plastic sack of Granny Smiths and fell in line.  The girl smiled up at two khaki-clad retirees, and a strand of hair hung across her eye.

            “Hello,” he said when his turn came up.

            “Hi.”

            “Looks busy in here.”

            She studied him, or at least, she slowed her gaze as her eyes moved from one side of the market, across him, to the other.  “Yeah, no shit.”

            He chuckled, surprised at the profanity.  Then, he processed this input and interpreted it – right or wrong – as a willingness to befriend, a calculated display of human weakness. 

            “You’re very attractive,” he told her.  He was clumsy with the compliment, but he did a fair job of keeping his voice from quaking.

            “Thank you, sweetie.” 

            “I like your red hair.”

            She tilted her head and tugged at the strand across her face.  “Thank you.  My mom gave it to me.”

            
            He leveled his eyes on her and smiled.  “How much you charge to let me stand here all day and stare at you?  At that great hair and those pretty green eyes?”

            
            She rolled her eyes and whispered, “It’d be okay with me, but I don’t think my daddy would like it much,” and she winked.

            
            Before he backed out of his parking space, she moved into his rearview mirror.  He watched as she leaned against the side of the building and smoked a cigarette.  He felt his throat go dry, and he tried not to think about the dusty New Testament on his dash.

            
            “If I lived here, I’d ask you for a phone number or something,” he said when he stepped back over to her.

            
            A line of smoke poured out of her mouth.

            
            “But since I don’t,” he continued, “well – just let me say this, just to get it over with – and please, please, don’t get insulted or think I’m a jerk.  I’d like to go someplace with you.”  He swallowed hard.  “For a couple of hours.”

            
            She straightened as he spoke, but when she finished, she leaned her back against the building again.  She stared at him and dragged on her cigarette without a word.  Then, “be right back.”  He gnawed on a Granny Smith until she returned, and then they walked down a row of trees that hung with what look, like a thousand scattered traffic lights – reds, greens, and yellows.  And the trees herded them along, up one hill, sideways along a slope, down and up again.  The dense layout of the orchard funneled them right into a large black barn.

            
            A flock of pigeons slapped their wings at the air when the two entered, and white tufts of feather snowed down in the barn’s dry space.

            
            “Aaah, filthy things!” she said.

            
            He had worried about getting caught, but once inside, the barn felt as isolated as anyplace he had ever stepped foot.  When it started to rain, the barn felt even farther from the civilized world.

            
            She positioned herself on a bale of hay.  “You really like my hair?  I want to dye it black or bleach it out.  Anything would be better than clown hair.”  

            
            He settled beside her.  “Your hair’s perfect.  It was the first thing I noticed about you.”

            
            She studied a weed seedhead she had been twirling.  “What else do you like about me?”  She leaned into him, and the spiced cider fragrance of her hair flowed into his sinuses and leached from there into his bloodstream.

            
            His impulse was to first apologize for using her body for his own, one-time entertainment, but he resisted.  He pulled her to him and mumbled something even he didn’t understand as they lay back on the hay.

                                                                                   
                                                                                   ***

 
            “How old are you, Daddy?”  Kyle bends a ketchup-coated French fry into his mouth.

            
            “Old.”

            
            “But how old, though?”

           
             Lori winks at him as she holds up a spoonful of baked potato to Sarah’s lips.

            
            “Your daddy is thirty-three today,” she tells Kyle.  “That’s your age plus Mommy’s age plus Sarah’s age.”

            
            “When you put it that way, I do sound old.”

            
            Lori turns her attention back to Sarah’s meal as he watches her.  Kyle has her personality, but she has given her features to little Sarah:  the narrow eyes, the blonde hair (would this be Sarah’s permanent color?), the slender hands, the wry expression of the mouth at all the right times.

            
            He adds up the ages of his wife and children again.  What thought process would bring her to such a discovery?

            
            That means he’s lived inLouisville – let’s see – nine years.  Kyle was born five years ago.  He and Lori married seven years ago.  He met her downtown at a music store eight years ago.  So, yes, for a third of his life, he’s been a city boy.

            
            He and Lori talk about her thesis defense that’s coming up in just over a month.  If all goes well, as he suspects it will, she’ll have her master’s.  Their plan has been to use her raise to pay on the principle of the mortgage.

            
            “What exactly is involved in a thesis defense?” he asks her.

            
            “Well, I’ll stand in a smoky room, looking around a walnut veneer table at a bunch of cantankerous old men, and they’ll ask me what I’ve learned.”

            
            “What have you learned?”

            
            “I’ve learned that, if I had it to do over again, I’d have used all this time and money to learn to play piano.  Or bobsled.  I could have gone to the Olympics.”

            
            He tells her she’s too unfocused to compete in the Olympics, and that athletes don’t wear nearly as much make-up as she likes, and she pinches his cheek and makes a smacking, kissing sound.