A flannel shirt, blue with green plaid squares, hung loosely about the hips. It was warm for late October, and everything still smelled of fertilizer. She breathed into her hands, adding the scent of flesh.
When would he come?
It was 6 a.m. She had finished her chores and was now waiting for her friends in the Costco parking lot. She lit a cigarette. There was no one around. Beyond the lot was a lone road, stretching for miles and miles into the great nothing and everything of the cornfields. The ash of her cigarette glazed hot orange and then faded to gray against the concrete. From far away she heard music.
They were coming. She squinted her eyes and tried to count the heads, little specks in a red pick-up truck, but she could not tell if he was among them.
Something flutters inside her.
The vehicle pulls up to the curb where she stands, butt in hand. One by one they pile out like clowns. She does not bother to say hello because, like a vision, he's there before her. Kids at school called him Moses because he always wore sandals, but she thought he looked more like Jesus, that beautiful long-haired, doe-eyed man who haunted her Sunday school readers.
Fatties and forties are offered and rejected; she wants to keep her system empty out of respect for the miracle that may or may not occur this morning. She weaves her way through the chattering groups surrounding the truck. She is trapped sitting on the hood talking to someone she doesn't care to know. It takes an eternity to talk her way to the flatbed, where he lies smoking with an acquaintance. She is uncertain, sweaty, pained with desire to not let this go. Some contact must be made.
A smile. A hand. Success.
The others giggle, pile back into the truck, a parade of sad intoxicated clowns not yet ready for the drudgery of the rest of their lives. They speed away, back down that lonesome, endless road.
And now they are alone. She bites her tongue. No, don't say anything. She closes her eyes. She hears the power plant humming far away. Her father will be driving to his job there soon, and her mother will begin baking that pie that she will let cool on the windowsill. It's morning in America. For them.
Her eyes are still closed when he kisses her. They walk alone into the cornfields.
