Half in Love by Maile Meloy

Author:Maile Meloy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

At noon we eat sandwiches inside and I try to decide what to do with the tamarisk that has grown up around the cottonwoods. It’s an imported species and it’s everywhere, indestructible. Cutting it down won’t kill it, and poison might kill the birds, but if I leave it, it will choke out the cottonwoods. More Superfund trucks thunder by with their radioactive loads, wearing down the southbound side of a road not designed to carry that much weight.

The sun drops a little from directly overhead, and the clouds cast small, round shadows on the bluffs across the river. Jo gives Inger a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun off her face, and the two of them climb ahead of me over the neighbor’s fence to the field where he’s keeping a few cows and horses out for the summer. The dry burdock and the goatheads stick to our shoes, so we look for high ground and walk on the bare, uneven ridges left by the plow. Jo’s straw-colored braid swings between her shoulder blades. She wears sandals and a white cotton dress she’s had since we met. Her arms are bare and the definition is gone beneath the smooth, too-yellow skin. Her freckles look lighter.

I always thought Jo would grow out of me. She didn’t have a dad and I thought I was the replacement dad, and one day she would leave home. Or she’d decide she wanted kids and a guy who could pay for them. Or I thought I’d do something stupid on the river and she would be a young widow who gets to have another twenty or thirty years with someone else. I used to think who it might be: a doctor like my dad, a divorced guy with kids, one of our friends living in a converted garage in Telluride. But I didn’t plan for a second life without her.

We reach the cottonwoods along the river, and the bare spots between the trees are fine white sand like the well diggers dug up beneath the red dust and the knapweed. The summer drought has left the river running low, the color of coffee with milk, and shallow all the way across the channel. I take off my cap and my shorts. Jo pulls her dress over her head and tugs it free of her braid, and she is naked underneath. She hangs the dress on a young tamarisk and steps barefoot down the bank, up to her knees in the brown water, and then she turns to look at me and smiles. Her breasts are the same, the one thing about her body that hasn’t changed.

“It’s nice,” she says. “It’s cold.” She walks out into the river. The color of her skin is pale and even across her ass and down the backs of her legs, with a shadow of tan in the small of her back and on her shoulders.

It is cold, but the cold feels good. Inger slips off her tank top and shorts and leaves them on top of the straw hat.

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