By Dianne King

When I sit on Max's bed and look into the mirror over his dresser, I can see his wedding portrait on the wall behind me. His head is cut off in the reflection, so there is only a narrow body in a man's suit standing next to a red-headed woman in white, her face tipped up to where his head should be. The studio shot them in front of an obviously false background of greenery, and her forehead is shiny. I imagine what is on her face is a tentative happiness.

The woman in the picture, Max's ex-wife of four months, has a new boyfriend. "I'm sure he's not a boyfriend," I argue from my position on the bed. I don't know why I'm taking such a peculiar position, and whose feelings I'm trying to save. Of course he is. "Call him anything, then," comes Max's voice from the kitchen where he is making dinner. "Call him a duck."

Max says that he is happy that his ex-wife found somebody to be with, and I believe him, mostly. His head, balding on the temples and back, unruly black curls everywhere else, pokes around the corner. "What are you doing?" he says, and then disappears again before I can answer. Max is an elongated Pillsbury doughboy, lanky and raw around the edges.

He has a soft face. The first time I saw him I wondered what his wife looked like, who the person was who would find a man like him attractive.

For dinner he is making us his standard fare; broccoli and potatoes and tofu, all cooked in the microwave and covered with cheese. While he is busy grating medium cheddar all over our plates and his countertop, I look back in the mirror again, squinting at my own reflection. My hair, which I cut myself a few days ago, is wet and uncombed from our swim at Barton Springs, and sticks out in tufts. My face has broken out in red blotches from a reaction to a new sunscreen. I flop back on the bed, discouraged. "That stuff smells awful," I yell. I want a hamburger and French fries.

"It does not." He comes over and sits on the bed and pulls me up beside him. "You'll love it."

I look at our wild-haired reflection in the mirror, and the reflection of his wedding portrait behind us, and put my head on his shoulder. The kind of dinners I am used to eating are the kind you buy from fast food restaurants. I eat them sitting at my kitchen table, throwing scraps to the dog and the cat. When Max tells me sugar will give them worms, I stop feeding them ice cream and Skittles.

Max nudges my shoulder and I flop down again. He grabs my hand and pulls me standing. "It's got vitamins," he said. "It'll be a novelty for you." He takes my hand and leads me to the dining room table. Max's house is full of windows with no curtains. I wonder if he walks around naked or wears a robe at night. If he did walk around naked, his neighbors could see him. Max doesn't seem like the type of person to wear a robe, but you never know. His house is filled with a mishmash of colorful framed prints and hideous plaid Herculon furniture that he obviously bought in his bachelor days and failed to pass on to his ex-wife. Tonight, he has put out cloth napkins.      

Tofu has a strange clean smell. I spear the smallest piece that will fit onto my fork and sniff it more closely before I taste. "It doesn't taste like anything," I complain.

"I know," he says. "Isn't it wonderful?"

Max was my friend for years before he asked me out, and to him, I don't say anything about the wedding picture in the bedroom. He takes me swimming at midnight and pushes me away when I make bad jokes and leads me on walks in the woods where he talks to snails and pretends to make them talk back. I quiet the voice in me that points out the obvious unsuitability of a match with a man with a wedding portrait in his bedroom: shhhhhh, I say. Shhhhhhhh. When I leave his house that night in August's sullen heat to drive the 10 miles to mine, underneath all my flutter lies a sorrow, as if I already knew what I suspect, that this is only the latest in a lingering line of bad choices when it comes to men.

My ex-boyfriend Sam is generous with his money, now that he has finished his degree in social work and has a job. I lived with Sam and his daughter, Winnona, from the time I was 26 years old until I was 30. It has taken us the two years since then, occasionally poking at the bruise that had been us, before our tentative visits stopped being painful. We never said—we never said, even when we were together—why we kept trying.

Now when Sam and I go out to dinner or to the movies, we are formal, as if we were on first dates. He pulls out his wallet to pay. "Let me," we both say. More often than not, I let him. It is his turn, and we both know it. Tonight we are going to go watch a Chinese movie at the Village. I pick up Sam at the duplex where Winnona stays with him half time. She lives the other half of her life with her mother, three and a half days each place, split clean down the middle. The duplex is a box with windows, one of those prefabricated buildings with indoor-outdoor carpeting, and it is directly under the flight pattern of the airport. A plane is low overhead as I approach, and I wait to knock until Sam will be able to hear me. "Hi," he says, and gives me a peck on the cheek before he stands back and looks at me more closely. "God," he says. "You've been cutting your hair again, haven't you?" "Hush," I say. "I don't want to hear anything about it."

Before he closes the door behind him, I see a scatter of toys and clothes across the living room floor. A little girl's frilly slip hangs from a lamp. The sight of it makes my stomach lurch. When did Winnona start wearing ruffles? Sam sees my glance and misinterprets. "I'm going to clean up tomorrow," he says, his voice rising as if I was his mother, inspecting his life. "You know how messy kids are."

I don't though. I only knew Winnona.

I never knew whom I loved most, Winnona or Sam, but when we moved apart for the third time it was so clear that Sam and I could never even be stable together that I had already done my mourning for us. It was his daughter I grieved for. Grieve for. Lately, there is a phrase that repeats inside my head when my mind idles. “Do you think,” it goes, “do you think,” and if I let it go on I know the plea that will follow. “Do you think I could see Winnona again, do you think it would be all right?” The trouble is, I don't know whom I am asking. It was me who decided to stop seeing her almost a year ago. During our occasional outings, she had become more and more quiet, the silence of a child on visits to a parent with weekend visitation rights, except I wasn't even a parent. I started chattering too much to fill in her part. Now when I start yearning for Winnona and convincing myself we can start a different relationship with new roles, I try to counter with: Why? What would be the point? It is a wish without reason, but it keeps coming back.

Tonight, I surprise myself. Sam has convinced me that we have time to get dinner before the movie, and as we are standing in line at the barbecue restaurant, I say what has been in the back of my throat since I picked Sam up. "Do you think it would be stupid to try to see Winnona?"

Sam looks at me. "No," he says. His voice is too hearty, but I know that's the only indication I'll get that he's surprised. "I think that'd be fine." He nods at the counterman, a large man with a greasy white apron. "Sausage plate," he says.

I am not sure I want it to be this easy. The counterman looks at me. "Beef," I say, and turn to Sam. "Is it too selfish?" I ask, but I know it is.

"No," he says. He picks up a Shiner Bock. "You want a beer?"

"No." I stopped drinking when I stopped smoking, six months ago. Sam knows that, but he always asks anyway. "She's all settled into her new life. Is it unfair?" I ask. "Would it be too confusing for her?"

"Don't make a big deal out of it," he says. "Pick her up from school one day and take her for an ice cream." That is all he says.

As we eat, Sam tells me that he has a disease. His back might become as inflexible as a piece of bamboo, he says. He could look like one of those old men in New York City in their baggy suits and bent backs. He could bend over one day and not be able to stand up. He holds up an imaginary stick and pretends to try to make it flex. "I'm not worried about it," he says.

Underneath his blond beard, his face is fuller, and so is his stomach. He turns to face me, and pats at his stomach. "Am I fat?" he asks. "No," I say. Indulging vices together was our undoing, but I still take comfort in his.

As we leave the restaurant, I lean forward and clutch my stomach. "I'm so full I'm L-shaped," I say. It is my friend Louise's phrase.

"What?" he says. "What?"

"L-shaped," I say. "You know, full." I bend over and my body becomes the shape of an upside-down capital "L". Sam bends over too and clutches his stomach. "Don't say that," he says. I lean over and peer at his face. It is pink. After a minute I realize that I have been making the shape that he might become from this disease, and that he is laughing. I laugh too, until I start coughing. "L-SHAPED!", Sam keeps saying, which makes him start laughing again. I am so happy laughing with him -- did we ever laugh when we were together? -- that I start to feel sad for the way we used to be. After a minute, I start the car and drive us to the movie.

"Are you sure it's okay about Winnona?" I say when I stop the car.

"Don't be an idiot," he says.

I stumble on the way to Maplewood Elementary, and curse under my breath so furiously that I shock myself. I do not know what I am expecting. I see a little girl with short sand-colored hair on top of the slide, far off. Winnona, I think, but she is six now, not five. She would be bigger. But then the girl is down the slide and running toward me and I watch her run closer and closer, and the closer she gets the slower she runs, and when she is almost to me I drop my purse and hold out my arms, thinking this is like a movie what we are doing and she runs into them, and I say into her hair "God, it's good to see you," but that reminds me of what my Aunt Gladys might say, my tough aunt with her rangy emotions that had nothing to do with us, and maybe that is what Winnona thinks too because she backs off and looks at me with her sideways look. Her eyes are still frog-lidded, and she still doesn't have a chin to speak of. I thought I would cry when I saw her, but now that it is happening I don't.

"Hi," I say instead. "I like your hair cut." Her mother has had her hair cut into a wedge on top, short over her ears. It isn't stringy any more. Winnona ducks and runs on ahead. On her shirt is a button that says "Maplewood Rodeo Day", and she is carrying a horse made out of a stick. Bottle caps are strung onto her sneakers. She clinks when she runs, and her painted bandana leaves streaks of red and blue on her neck.

"I have a present for Mommy," she says, and jiggles something in her pocket. "It's a birthday present," she says. Sam had told me her mother has just left her second husband, Tom. I think all children are owed a minimum of two promises from adults: you will feel loved, and you will be safe. All of the adults in Winnona's life love her, and love her profoundly, yet none of us so far have been able to even give her the same address for more than six months at a time. I follow the jingle of bottle caps as Winnona runs ahead of me. I want to gather her up and hold her, but I know better. I wonder what I am doing, what I was thinking of, that I could just drop back into her life.

"I hear you have a cat," I tell her in the car, where she has climbed into the backseat. Sam and Winnona inherited a cat with the house they moved into. Sam, who finds animals useless, has threatened to take it to another neighborhood and leave it, but he won't.

"I have a cat and a dog and a fish," she says from the back. "But the dog and the fish live in Buda with Tom."

I met Tom once, when Winnona's mother first married him. They were sitting side by side on the patio when we dropped Winnona off, and her mother had just her fingertips poised on his shoulder, in manner that was both assured and proprietary. I turn around and look at Winnona in my backseat. I stop myself from asking her questions about her mother's marriage. The freckles across her nose are so beautiful they break my heart. "Ah," I say.

"Do you remember what you used to call me, Martha?" she asks.

"When?"

"When I would make this face—" I look in the mirror and she has wrinkled her nose. "Do you remember what you used to call me?"

I don't. "Winnona? Winnona-Piloma? Winnie?" Her head shakes sideways on each.

"Let me think," I say. I sang her songs, silly rhyming songs, but they are not nicknames.

"Onybird?" I offer. "I used to call you Onybird."

"No," she says. She settles her head back against the seat and looks out the window.

"Ah," I say. "How does your Daddy like your cat?"

The next Saturday, I make Max dinner. Shrimp scampi, shrimp and corn soup, fresh bread from the bakery, chocolate torte. Cleaning and cooking take me all afternoon, and by the time he gets there, late, I am grumpy. He is always late. I am always early. I putter at the stove with my back to him. "What's up with my duck," he says, scoots out a kitchen chair and pulls me onto his lap. I perch, self conscious, and then relax into him.

"Define duck," I ask. He turns my head and kisses me with lips that still feel unfamiliar in their softness. My stomach flips, a little, as if I was still in high school and this was all new. When he pulls his head back and smiles at me, the lines around his eyes are soft, too.

"You," he says. "You're a duck."

Max turns off the lights. We light candles, and I serve him in my salmon-colored kitchen on my grandmother's wooden table and pink-flowered plates. Our forks clink against the plates. Max keeps saying thank you and clearing his throat. I don't know this Max. The man I know is the friend who comes in my office and talks about his travels with his wife and the movies he's seen and advises me on the correct way to fix the windows in my little wood-framed house, which is very old. The heavy expectation of candlelight on the dinner table makes me nervous.

Finally, when I move it is almost with detachment, as if I were watching another couple stuck in an awkward mating dance in somebody else's pink kitchen. After he puts down his napkin, I take his hand and lead him out back. My backyard has eleven tall cottonwood trees and a new wooden privacy fence. The air is heavy with leftover heat from the day. It is dark except for a little glow from a streetlight across the street. All of the leaves on all of those trees wave black against the sky above us, a secret canopy.

Max looks down at the baby pool at his feet. I filled it with water this afternoon. "Is that for us?" he asks.

"If we want," I say, suddenly self-conscious. Sometimes when I come home from work I take a book and sit in it, under my trees.

"Well," he says. He puts his hands in the water. "Too hot," he says.

"Wait," I say, but he is already turning on the hose and putting fresh water in the pool.

"You are the bossiest man," I say, grabbing the hose from him and spraying his clothes deliberately. I put my thumb on it and spray over his head. Water condenses on his glasses. He takes them off before he comes rushing at me and pulls me down into the water, yelping. His knees feel bony against my knees. His forehead bumps mine. I feel the person inside me who is orchestrating all this from the outside, the headlong person, fading back, satisfied.

Max stays over for the first time that night. After we make love he holds me and says what are you thinking how do you feel. "Scared," I say, and I am, but he is warm and right against me. After he falls asleep, I get up and wander to the living room. I curl up in the overstuffed blue chair that I bought for $95 at a furniture factory outlet. My dog Franny jumps around on the hardwood floors with little clicky toenails and lands in my lap. I sit still, confused for a minute before I recognize the source of a numbness that starts at my head and works its way down to my fingers. I cup my hands around the dog's taut belly, and feel a unexpected siren wail of grief: “I've lost her again,” I think. “Now I can't have Winnona.”

Sam is the afterthought that brings me back to as much reason as I am capable of in the middle of the night after I have done something irrevocable. Of course I can't have

Winnona, not like a family again. Sam comes attached. The dog bites my finger and I swat her off. I turn on the stereo and put on Lou Reed, with the volume down low. I play Satellite of Love.

Until three months ago when he asked me out, Max had pictures of his ex-wife in his office, and even now when he talks about anything from movies to restaurants to vacations to movies, he uses the word we, meaning he and his ex-wife, when technically he should mean I. After eight years together, he says with his implacable logic when I point it out, what should I expect?

I understand all that. I understand why. I know about chambers of the heart.

I turn off the stereo and crawl back in bed with Max; like a lizard, he tells me, awake, and turn on my side and cup into the curve of his back. I pull his arm around me like a cover. His breath is warm on the back of my head. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I find him over on my side, wrapping me, and at once I feel like I am 18 again, poised on the edge of a giddy joy. We make little morning noises. His eyes are squeezed very nearly shut. Without his glasses, up close, he looks startlingly unfamiliar. His eyebrows are a labyrinth of curved black hairs, and his nose is fleshy. I touch his lips and he nips at my finger.

I want us to say something that we are not saying. I need to feel something that I am not feeling, something that will keep me safe today. Sometimes I think there is something hard and immoveable about him, and sometimes I think it is me.

After breakfast, we sit on the couch. I am holding onto his neck again. I do not want him to go, although I am the one who is late. "Are you always like this in the morning?" he asks.

"Yes," I say, but it's possibly not true. I want us to say something that we are not saying; I need to feel something that I am not feeling, something that will keep me safe today. Sometimes I think there is something hard and immoveable about him and sometimes I think it is me. I hold him tighter. "Don't pout," he says, and kisses me goodbye. "You're seeing Winnona today."

She is sitting on the sidewalk in front of Sam's duplex, skinny legs drawn up to her chin. She wears a dance leotard for a bathing suit. Sam probably put her summer clothes away and now can't find them. I pick her up and cuddle her, and she does not stiffen.

"WinnonaPilloma", I say. She tucks her head into my neck when I carry her into the house.

Sam is in the kitchen. Since Winnona is watching, I stop myself from kissing him on the cheek, pat him on the shoulder instead. We are driving an hour away to Wimberley to my favorite swimming hole. Sam puts a peanut butter sandwich for Winnona and our soft drinks in a big pot and fills it with ice while I try to find a hairbrush for her hair, which is sticking up all over her head. She looks like a dandelion. I finally give up looking through the clutter of her room and sit her on my lap and try to smooth it back with my hand.

Sam gives her a drink of water straight from the water jug. He grins when he sees me smile. "We don't need no glasses," he says, and he likes the way it sounds so much he starts singing in a rough pirate's voice and dancing around the room with the jug. "We don't need no glasses." I take it from him and take a swig, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Winnona watches our play without saying anything. Sam has argued that we don't need to tell her that we're just friends, that she doesn't question it. I let myself be persuaded.

At the river, big black flies start congregating the minute we open the barbecue we picked up in town. Winnona eats her peanut butter sandwich and drinks her grape soda with her head ducked in protection. "Shoo fly," I say.

"Don't bother me," she sings. Her voice is clear and small. "Shoo fly, don't bother me, for I belong to somebody."

"Do you remember," she says, as if she hasn't asked before. "Do you remember what you used to call me?"

It is a puzzle she is trying to solve, a missing piece of our time. "Angel?" I say.

"No. When I'd make a funny face, do you remember?"

"I don't," I say. I wonder if it is something she imagined. "Do you remember?"

"No," she says.

She stands at the riverbank and looks down into the green water a foot below her. "Is this where we are going swimming?" she asks doubtfully.

We tie our tubes together and Sam propels us down the river. He floats on his back and uses his arms as oars. I reach across Winnona's tube and touch her hair, uncertain of her reaction. She moves closer to me. I feel like a prisoner who has been locked away for a year. I stroke the fuzz on her back. I play with her fingers. Now I could cry, but instead I say to Sam, "Faster please." Winnona laughs. "Oh God," she says, and I am startled to hear a mild curse come out of her mouth. She points to a dragonfly on her arm. "Oh God," she says again. "My teacher had a dragonfly land on her arm in recess."

"What did she say?" I ask.

Winnona is staring at the dragonfly. "She said, 'Look, I have a friend.'"

We sit under the little dam at the end of the park and press our heads back against the concrete wall. The water shoots over our heads in a bubble and cascades furiously over our shoulders and onto our stomachs. I lean my head back and I am looking at the relentlessly pale Texas summer sky through a screen of water and I think of words. I think of the words her heart would burst, her heart was bursting, her heart, her heart.

Winnona's hand reaches in and touches my mouth. I hear her laugh through the rush, and hte water splashes over my face when I come out. She sticks her head under a bubble of water again, and Sam is looking at me from the other side of the damn, and I think, I truly think for a moment, that I will explode.

Winnona's hand reaches in and touches my mouth. I hear her laugh through the rush, and the water splashes over my face when I come out. She sticks her head back under a bubble of water again, and Sam is looking at me from the other side of the dam and I think, I truly think for a moment, that I will explode.

Our bodies are parched from an afternoon of sun. On the drive back, Winnona sings songs to herself in the back seat and Sam punches Nanci Griffith into the tape deck. I look back and she is lying on her side, her seatbelt still on. Dust spreads up behind us on the dirt road back to town. Winnona sleeps. I drop Sam off and take her to my house and put her in the bathtub. She climbs on the top of my tall bed to get dressed. "I remember that picture," she says, and points to a photograph taken in 1957 in Paris. A couple, obviously new to each other, and smug in a shiny kind of love, walk by an old man selling oranges, a cigarette between his index and middle fingers.

Winnona's shoulders are red. "Too much", she had said when I put the sunscreen on her, and wiped most of it off. I rub Noxema onto the fuzz of her back, on her shoulders. I slip her shirt over her head and her arms emerge and come around my waist and for a moment it is as if we are all living back on the house on Avenue H again and I am getting her ready for bed and after Sam reads a story we will kiss her goodnight and go out in the living room and read. I put my lips on her hair. "Onybird," I breathe.

Her voice is triumphant and muffled against my shirt. “You remembered,” she says. It was not the nickname she had lost, but the force behind it.

I take her back to Sam's. We put her to bed and put more Noxema on her shoulders. Sam lets her sleep in her underpants. "Stay here tonight," she tells me when I kiss her goodnight. "I can't," I say. "I have to go to my own house."

"Why?" she says.

"My cat," I say. "My dog. I have my own house now. I can't stay here, honey."

Sam and I watch The Last Picture Show in the dark. He makes nachos and we drink Diet Cokes and do not talk. I stop myself from giving into the strong impulse to go over to the couch and lean against his shoulder. It is too much, it is too little, it is taboo. We split the last nacho down the middle. When the movie is over, I get up and take the plate to the kitchen. "I need to get my butt home", I say and walk over and kiss his cheek. His arms slide around my waist, then lower. I hug him and am surprised to find his arms still around me when I try to move away. "Oh Sam," I say, and step back.

On the way home I realize what he was asking, in the only way he will ever ask it. As always with Sam, I don't know whether to be furious at his timing, always too late, never quite enough, or to be sad for us, or rueful. All the years that we were partners, Sam never knew if he wanted to be with me. He carved holes in me with his ambivalence, and filled them back in again with his regret.

Max and I are going to make an apple pie in his kitchen. When I pass his bedroom door, I stop. He has taken the wedding portrait down. "Oh," I say when I see the blank space on the wall. I turn away from him so he won't see me smile. "I put it in the spare room," he says. "I figured it would make you feel more comfortable here."

"Oh," I say again, and feel an almost physical droop. I move out of the room and stand in the doorway of the spare room. He's put the picture by the bookcase. "There it is," I say, and I don't try, this time, to hide anything.

"It's just it was a significant time in my life," he says from behind me. "It doesn't mean that I'm pining for it, just that it was."

"Okay," I say. I know the hazards of jumping into a relationship with a partner who is still disentangling himself from an old one. At night when I worry I comfort myself with the fact that much of his grieving, like mine, was done in the long slow years of the unraveling of his relationship and that he is, unlike Sam, a man who delights in having a mate. What I can't know is whether he might be, unlike Sam, now capable of knowing enough what he wants. I know everything and I don't know near enough. I want to turn to Max and put my head on his chest which is white like his belly like his arms and has some black crisp curls in the middle, and I want him to tell me I will be safe, with him.

But he can't say that. So instead, I put my hands on my hips and jerk my head at the portrait. "I hate that suit," I say. "I really do." I turn around abruptly and leave him in the spare room.

From the kitchen where I start assembling flour and salt, I hear Max's laugh, surprised and hearty.

Max is in charge of the filling for the apple pie, and I the crust. My friend Louise gave me a recipe. She said two tablespoons of salt, which seems like I lot but I put it in anyway. Max mixes up home canned apples and almond extract and brown sugar. He sticks his finger in and takes a lick, and then offers me a bite, sweet and tart. My crust falls apart and the dough is too salty, but we emerge from the bedroom as it is ready to emerge from the oven, brown and rich smelling. We eat a piece and fall asleep with the windows open and the ceiling fan spinning above us.

When I wake up, he is on my side of the bed, arms and legs around me. He is heavy. I squeeze out from underneath him and turn over and cradle his back. After a while, my arm falls asleep, and I move away to my side of the bed. He mumbles a protest in his half-sleep. I am not used to this tangling of bodies during sleep. Sam had an elaborate routine. He put a pillow under his legs and a pillow under his back, and none of our parts were allowed to touch while we slept. After a while I got used to it. Now I scoot my leg over to rest it against Max's warm left leg, and close my eyes again.

In the morning, I leave him standing in his kitchen in his shorts and teal shirt, both rumpled. He is smiling at me, and I look back at him and then get in my car and turn on the radio and start driving. At first, I am thinking with some wonder about how sweet Max's teeth feel against my tongue, and then I am crying, not the squenched-up kind of throat hurt crying, just tears slipping. By the time I reach the garage at work, I am calm. I park in the garage and look down at my cotton floral dress, as rumpled as Max's clothes. I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and picture us sitting at Max's wooden table last night. I was waving my arms around telling him about a great place to go hiking, and somewhere in my telling the lines around his eyes went tight, watching me, and whatever he was feeling made his face taut and as shiny as those people in the 1957 French photograph that hangs in my bedroom.

I lean my head back against the headrest, check my eyes in the rearview mirror. Still pink, but passable. I think of the quiet kinds of promises our faces make without us ever knowing it.

Winnona will not get into the big pool at the park near my house, and she will not put her head in the water. I am sympathetic to water fears; when I was her age, my Aunt Gladys coaxed me into the gulf with promises that a wave won't knock me over, and I developed a lifelong distrust of the sea when it did. Winnona splashes around in the cloudy water of the kiddie pool. "Oh, it's so deep," she says. She jumps from side to side into water that barely comes up to her knees.

"Winnona,” I say. I am sitting in water to my waist wondering how many kids have peed in this pool today. "I have to tell you something."

She keeps twirling around in her neon green tube, her body twisting. I feel her looking at me. "Winnona,” I say. She stops. "I wanted to tell you why Daddy and I and you are seeing each other again."

What I say to her is never what I want to say to her. "It's because," I say, and there is something brassy and false in my voice, "it took Daddy and I a long time before we could be friends again. And now that we are, we can all see each other." She keeps her face straight ahead. "We're not going to live together again," I say. "We're just going to be friends. Like you and I can be friends and do stuff, when you want."

Winnona is twirling in her tube again. "Does that make sense?" I ask. She doesn't answer. I have embarrassed her with adult things, badly stated.

I bribe her into the big pool with the promise of a ride on my back. She crouches on my knees and I crouch in the water and we both jump. We jump until the backs of my thighs hurt. The water is tepid and smells of chlorine.

"Look,” she says, and springs from my knees into water to her neck before she scrambles up my knees again. The sun is coming down to the horizon behind us, outlining the walnut trees in light. Winnona starts singing softly with that little voice and it is a moment before I remember the song, a silly song my father borrowed or made up for us kids. I, in turn, would sing to her at the top of my voice at the dining room table, changing the words to fit what was on our plates. “Do you love me, mon cherie? Eat your spinach and we will see.” Winnona's voice trails. She smiles and leans back from my arms, fingers outstretched to touch the tips to the water.

Duck, Duck, Goose was published in American Short Fiction 16, University of Texas Press.