I’m not too crazy about still being sad. Just a little crazy. The car — it was a Satellite — was so loaded down with spring water that it scraped bottom backing up onto the road. Kim made up a song about jugs in space that would bear repeating if I could remember it. Or maybe it was all in the presentation.

After she died, I shared the last of the water with Mudboy, pouring some into his red, plastic bowl. A gesture I believe she’d appreciate, she who loved dogs and children and —

It’s winter now, like when she died. Her nose would be running if she were here, pushing fifty, like me. Excuse me for believing she’d still be lighting up the world —

Let me throw it in reverse, though I can’t see out the back window: her long blonde hair hanging sideways from her tilted head as she bent toward the pipe, her throat open to the cold, cold earth-water. Her breasts hung loose under her peasant blouse, sweat trickling down between them. I was going to say something smart about that, but I just watched her neck as she swallowed. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: a neck swallowing water. Who could’ve predicted that?

When she’d had enough, she looked at me, a little trickle at the side of her mouth, and she smiled. Then we lived happily ever after…

“Charles, man, I’m sorry I kinda blew you off last night.”

“What am I gonna do, L.C?”

“Let’s smoke a bowl, drink some coffee, and eat some weighty pancakes.”

“After that.”

“Drive back home and tell Robin to fuck off.”

“Is that what you told Cathy?”

“Nah, I broke down and cried. I got down on my knees in the middle of the street in front of her house and begged her to come back. But that’s just me.”

“I don’t get it. There’s not even anybody else. It’s like being by herself is better than being with me.”

“Sure she ain’t got something on the back burner? Something cooking on the side? Somebody knocking on the back door? Somebody driving slow by her house, honking then speeding off?”

“What?” He shook his head. “Not Robin. You forget what it’s like back home. I’ve been over her house every night planning the fucking wedding, then yesterday she says, ‘No wedding. I need time to think.’ I says, ‘does that mean we’re still engaged while you’re thinking,’ then she doesn’t say anything, she just takes the ring off and…”

Charles pulled the ring out of his pocket for the hundredth time since he showed up and started to cry again. “Who needs time to think?” he murmured. “Thinking, man, it just don’t pay. Everybody knows that.”

“There’s a guy up here who hugs trees,” I said, hoping to change the subject. I knew Robin did indeed have someone else, having heard it from my brother on the phone right before Charles showed up.