Let’s forebear the usual drift.

Billy, the main guy in all this, has trouble of female origins. His dally this time entails no tangible scram. Never up, never in. But the attempt, her name is Karen, carries the same wave, and his old lady gives him the stroll. Which is what sends him to me. Back when I was one hundred per, I was the female organs Billy troubled.

He comes calling here with nickels in his packet and a plaintiff, he tells me, that still won’t stand, even with a video in the mouth and women taking off their robes right and left on the big scream Mitsubishi. “My body,” he says to me, “kept the faith.”

Did I convention how Billy and I were a pair for ten years? And he, I’m told, pulled the same stunt without me, and couldn’t get it up then, either. Even with my sister, who, I can tell you, has beauty.

“Why did you take him back?” she asks me.

I say, “Ten years is a big chump of your life.”

He arrives on the porch, hands in his golfing pockets, staring out through the mosquito screens at the groves of lemon backdrop and oriental oranges. I live in the citrus desert of Arizona, where, with enough laughter, anything will flourish. Billy used to live here with me. When I push open my door, he turns and stares. No one can believe I live alone.

“You know,” he says, and his voice is one of those familiar things, like the way some people recall music, “who I am?” I go, “Billy,” and wonder how dressed I am for a man who used to be the one I was wife to. His car is clocking out by the porch steps, time running down as it cools. I’m in a nightgown but have a skirt under it, as if ready for the ball.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, and says more literal things that orbit my ears like the popsicle sticks and candy wrappers that swirm the dense water next to the canal gate. Suitcases lashed to the roof of his car make the picture crystal. He loves me again and he’s got no other bed to rest his buddy, which can, after a workout, have a sour effect, like that bathroom in some car station I can’t remember where, that had a wooden Indian ten feet tall and not made of wood.

“All of my parts still work,” I say, smiling at what it means and how it must sound to people who cannot, anymore, wonder about such things aloud. Whenever I get irrigated with my life, I remind myself of all they can’t say either.

Billy shows the teeth he’s been hiding just as the sun dips under the wooden eaves of my porch, making him like that god people talk about. But how often do they see him ablaze on a porch with suitcases tied to his car?

A zithering rush of movement. And the dizzying things that take us to bed do their work—in the him-on-top-of-me fashion—his cheeks juggling with each ricochet, and the candy going on in my middle like it always has, that memory a part of my gravitation, and it builds and sifts into something almost horticultural.

It feels so much I scream.

When I wake up, he’s got the car things in my drawers. “I never,” he says to me in that same voice he has, “should have left you.”

I had sort of forgotten that he fled like a hat from a hive when the wind goes crying through. The memory winces down my atrium until I hear the timer that reminds me to eat. Food is one of the things not to do alone if you don’t have to. We park at either end of the tableau, Billy skinning the plastic wrap from the scheming platters. “I’ll cook for you,” he says, which makes me happy and worried for my timer.

That is a fine day, the day he parks by my porch and disgorges his car into my—what is it when it’s more than a house? And the fellow days are the same—the good bright hallows and light-hearted skew. Nothing gets in the way of how he puts his hands on my round bottles and rubs a small circus. “Sweet Cheeks,” he calls me, which makes me look at the cobbler around my wrist with the letters of my name. “Valerie,” I say aloud, while he does with his mouth’s finger my one thing and then my other, a whole alphabet of pleasure.

Early one deepening, we watch from the porch as a coyote crosses the swath, a black kitten striving in its mouth. “My god,” says Billy. “This place is a wonder.” He begins happily dissembling our past, our years in this house—the hawk coughed in chicken-wire, the cumulus of rain that throttled the road, the tracing chill of splintered mornings. I pretend to remember more than I hold onto. But the taste of flesh on my mouth when he kisses me is wish-making and longed for, like the satisfaction of eating when you don’t know you’re hungry.

Even if I can’t frame what I’m missing, I can tell it’s gone, and that makes it mine.

Billy was driving when the tree came through the window’s shield. He has in his soft place beneath the pit of one arm, a skashing seam, crooked as a burble in a brook. I don’t have mark one on me. Except the smile hidden by my trick of hair. Hair doesn’t have to remember. It goes on like nothing ever tarnished the pot it grows in. Mine is wavy when it gets long, like a sketch of highway on the nap of a mountain.

It’s a different day altogether when the fireplug—his recent ex—comes and returns his things to the roof of his Dodge. I don’t get it for a while and even help with a few loafs. When it hits me, I’m at the car, divulging a black boom box.

“Oh,” I say, “you’re moving up.”

“Out,” he says, “not up.” Which makes me think for one monument that I have it all wrong. But, no, on this particular invasion, I’ve got it right.

Before they go, they show me how people look when they carry on in my bed. A more gentle stack than you might think. She offers me her bare hand. They disarray me kindly.

And they sleep, the three of us, in the following light. I dream a dream of waking, and flowers in the room, a set of shiny tools latched to the wall—silver pliers and bullet-peen hammer and a shiny crushing wrench.

When I really wake, it’s to the scrubbing sound of Billy reaming the tub. “Everything is clean,” he says, streaks on his face as he erases me his arms. They have dressed. The girl skates my hand while he holds me.

Then wouldn’t you if you weren’t me know it? They and the car both papoose.

It’s not “dravel,” the little gray rockets that make up the road and hurt my feet, but all I have to offer is what’s prattling around in my bag, and “dravel” keeps enlisting. So . . .

I stand in my dravel drive-away umbrella a sky as wide and dark as the afterwards of a fire—a black with no bottom and yet scarred with light. It’s a cool night and I’m naked, but a steeling warmth comes over me. The green scent of the groves and the canal’s artificial water hole me still. In this fraction of the country, people staple ranches from the desert. They burn crops out of land most people wouldn’t bother tasting. It’s where I below. And where I’ll stave.

I know I will not come fully to.

But what I think right now is, This is beautiful.

I’m unsure that I’ve got it right, what all this means—Billy’s sudden aperture and the hostly gray of the road, the white shaft from the kitchen wind row, the green orange trees, and the way I posture naked and skinflint in the sky’s widening yawn. For tonight, anyway, I’m willing to cast my trademark on faith.

There’s no shortage of wander in my life.

It’s a big house and getting around in it can be surprising, like when you discover it’s the next day. Unless there’s evidence, how can you know the difference from one to the next? We all need evidence. We need a life that is evidence-making.

Anyway, what house this is I know is mine. And that dingling noise is the timer, which means it’s morning and I’m hungry. Even when you’re alone, you’re requested to eat. Or you’ll forget and become so thin even the wind won’t notice. And then nothing in the wide world can move you.

§ § §

Robert Boswell’s published work includes five novels, two story collections, and a science-fiction book under a pseudonym. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Prize Stories, The New Yorker, Esquire, and many other places. .

This piece was first published in INK POT #4- 2004, a literary journal.