Monkey wolfed down the steak in about two bites, almost taking part of my pinky with it. Well, it was dark. When he was done he burped and rolled over onto his back, sticking his belly in the air, and I sat down on the grass beside him.
It was a nice night, clear and cooler, perfect Fourth of July weather. A few people were popping off firecrackers a couple of streets over, the noise pinging in the dark. Monkey kept rolling closer to me, nudging my elbow, until I finally relented and scratched the matted fur on his belly. He needed a bath. Badly. Plus he had bad breath. But there was something sweet about him, nonetheless, and he was practically humming as I moved my fingers across him.
We sat there like that for a while until I heard the screen door slam and Dexter call out my name. At the sound of his voice, Monkey instantly sat up, ears perked, and then got to his feet, walking toward it until the leash was stretched to the limit.
“Hey,” Dexter said. I couldn’t see his face, just his outline in the brightness of the porch light. Monkey barked, as if he’d called him, and his tail wagging grew frenzied, like intense windmill action, and I wondered if he’d knock himself down with the sheer force of it.
“Hey,” I said back, and he started down the steps toward us. As he came closer across the grass, I watched Monkey, amazed at his full-body excitement to see this person he’d only been away from for an hour or so. What did it feel like, I wondered, to love someone that much? So much that you couldn’t even control yourself when they came close, as if you might just break free of whatever was holding you and throw yourself at them with enough force to easily overwhelm you both. I had to wonder, but Monkey clearly knew: you could see it, feel it coming off him, like a heat. I almost envied him that. Almost.
It was late that night, when I was lying in Dexter’s room on his bed, that he picked up the guitar. He wasn’t much of a player, he told me, as he sat across the room, shirtless, barefoot, his fingers finding the strings in the dark. He played a little riff of something, a Beatles song, then a few lines of the latest version of “The Potato Opus.” He didn’t play like Ted, of course: his chords seemed more hesitant, as if he was plucking by sheer luck. I leaned back against the pillows and listened as he sang to me. A bit of this, a bit of that. Nothing in full. And then, just as I felt I might be drifting off to sleep, something else.
“This lullaby is only a few words, a simple run of chords—” “No.” I sat up, now wide awake. “Don’t.”
Even in the dark, I could see he was surprised. He dropped his hands from the guitar and looked at me, and I hoped he couldn’t see my face either. Because it was all fun and games, so far. Just a few moments when I worried it might go deep enough to drown me. Like now. And I could pull back, would pull back, before it went that far.
I’d only told him about the song in a moment of weakness, a time of true confessions, which I usually avoided in relationships. The past was so sticky, full of land mines: I made it a point, usually, not to be so detailed in the map of myself I handed over to a guy. And the song, that song, was one of the biggest keys to me. Like a soft spot, a bruise that never quite healed right. The first place I was sure they would strike back, when the time came for them to do so.
“You don’t want to hear it?” he asked now.
“No,” I said again. “I don’t.”
He’d been so surprised when I told him. We’d been having our own challenge of sorts, a kind of Guess What You’d Never Know About Me. I found out that he was allergic to raspberries, that he’d busted out his front tooth running into a park bench in sixth grade, that his first girlfriend was a distant cousin of Elvis. And I’d told him that I’d come this close to piercing my belly button before fainting, that one year I’d sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone else in my troop, and that my father was Thomas Custer, and “This Lullaby” had been written for me.
Of course he knew the song, he said, and then hummed the opening chords, pulling the words out of thin air. They’d even sung it a couple of times at weddings, he said: some brides picked it for the dance with their father. Which seemed so stupid to me, considering the words. I will let you down, it says, right there in the first verse, plain as day. What kind of father says such a thing? But that, of course, was a question I’d long ago quit asking myself.
He was still strumming the chords, finding them in the dark.
“Dexter.”