“This one’s real,” I promised.
This was late May, maybe. The aspens and poplars were dropping their seeds in fluffy drifts that accumulated—the way snow did—along the dirt driveway. I coaxed him into the garage with a few pretzels and buckled him in the bike while he ate them, slouched, helmeted, serenely disenchanted, looking big headed and Buddha-like in his red plastic seat. I pulled the bike out onto the driveway and swung it a little menacingly when I climbed on. “Here we go!” I yelled, hoping to throw him off balance, hoping to thrill him into acting more like a kid. It was a long ride to the Nature Center, and the whole way there I told him wolf facts, wolf statistics, wolf stories. I intended to impress him with the taxidermy wolf in the lobby. I intended to point out the yellowed canines under her blue-hooded lip, the cherryred drips of blood painted on her coral claws. I remembered the first time I’d seen that wolf as a kid, how the feeling went beyond love, how it made me hungry, hungry, hungry.
But Paul had no interest in the wolf at all. He looked at it for a few seconds and shrugged. After eleven miles on the bike, all he had to say was, “That’s not real.”
What he liked best at the center were puzzles. He found one on a shelf in the corner that exactly matched one he had at home. It was a bucolic winter woodland scene: a snowy owl perched fatly on a black branch, eyes lidless and round as two open black pots. Paul knew how to put this puzzle together by heart, so instead of looking at the wolf or stuffed foxes, instead of fingering the rubber scat or dipping his little hand into one of the wooden boxes and guessing its contents, he sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner, piecing together the same puzzle he’d done dozens of times at home. I wandered around the center to kill time, read about the tea you could make from pine needles, watched goldfish circle Peg’s aquarium. Eventually, nothing left to do, I went over and squatted next to Paul, who was holding a Swiss cheese slice of the owl’s face in one hand.
At first it infuriated me that he didn’t look up when I approached. That he didn’t acknowledge me at all, or wonder what I was doing. He scooched over automatically, let his body flow into mine and work its way onto my lap. He never stopped studying the puzzle. He settled his body against mine, arranging leg over leg, till I finally had to sit down fully on the floor. He assumed I was available and interested; he always just assumed. He bent double at the waist to reach the puzzle from the perch he’d taken on my lap. And outside—outside the window and down the road—whole mountains of poplar fluff drifted past.
At first I was annoyed, but then I was less so. I felt his chest expand with each breath against his nylon jacket and against my ribs. I felt the heat of his body through my jeans. He moved his fingers very knowingly from piece to piece, leaning his head back into me occasionally to assess. When he’d finished, he broke the puzzle up to do it again.
“Nope,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure I meant it. By then the room was going golden in the early evening sun. It was something I thought I should say, though: “It’s time. Time to go.”
That’s when he yawned, his skull stoppering up the breath between my clavicles. There was something about that that made me regret suggesting we leave—something about the simple gift of his body, its closeness and its heat—that made me want to stay a little longer.
Then we were at the door—me zipping his jacket up, Peg handing him three gummy bears—and I asked him, proddingly, for Peg, “Did you have a nice time?”
He nodded in a way that moved his whole body up and down. “That was a great puzzle,” he said.
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