Philip was a divorced parent of one of her seniors. He’d split from the mother and moved two hundred miles away to the foothills of Tucson, so in between visits, they had phone sex, during which she often did the dishes or spackled her walls or worked on a sestina about a UN ambassador who was having sex from pay phones around the globe. When the boy graduated and Philip took his vacation in Sycamore, it was over by the end of the week. Sam gave her what she called the Eyebrow: the damn thing cranked up so high it disappeared into his hairline.
John was married, two kids, lived in Sedona. At the Sycamore Arts Festival, having told his wife he was at a conference, he bought her a silver ring and slid it on her left finger. Esther was old enough to know better, she was about to turn thirty (thirty, ha!), but she let him. In return, she bought him a leather bracelet. Sam unleashed the Eyebrow again but said nothing. On the night of her birthday, the married man didn’t show up for their clandestine date, and she sat alone in her bedroom, too embarrassed to tell Sam. The next day, she had what would turn out to be her last conversation with Jess Winters. Jess’s words ran through her mind as she drove fast down the back roads toward her house: Oh my god, fuck poetry. Why can’t you answer a question straight for once? If you can’t tell me what to do, tell me what you would do. What would she do? Without hesitating, she chucked the goddamn ring out of her sunroof.
She met Bartholomew in an online Scrabble group, and they took to chatting on IM though not in person. The sex was surprisingly good despite the typos and Times New Roman font. A comma splice here, a dangling participle there, but it did the job.
Simon the Zealot was a Scottish slam poet—awful teeth, a butterfly tattoo on his skinny rump—who wandered into town one summer during his travels. Six months in, he needed a green card and married a waitress in Phoenix. Late one night, she drove down there and contemplated setting fire to his garbage can but settled instead for tipping it over. The bastard didn’t recycle, which gave her a split second of comfort as she strewed beer bottles and soup cans and something resembling a human liver out onto his dusty lawn. Later, she told Sam, “I’m that woman now. I’m the woman out on the fucking lawn.” Sam rolled a joint and they knocked back a bottle of wine, and it was a good old-fashioned rip-roaring pity party, because, Jesus Christ on a Crutch. How hard was it to find someone, anyway? Sam said, “Hey. Why does Jesus have a crutch? I mean, he can heal lepers but not sprained ankles?” And with that, they lay on the kitchen floor in hysterics, contemplating holy injuries and knowing they were going straight to hell.
Simon Peter called Peter was short. Troll-short. Think jockey. One day he stopped calling. He disappeared so fast that for a few days she thought she had imagined the whole thing until she found his plaid flannel shirt in her laundry. When she held it to her face, it smelled of aftershave and cigarettes, a hint of something bitter, like marigolds. The truth of him emerged, again, when she was late, again, when her breasts swelled and the smell of coffee made bile rise in her throat. At thirty-six, she was the oldest woman in the Flagstaff clinic by a good decade. As she waited, she picked off her chipped lavender nail polish and fixed her gaze on the gardening magazine in her lap. She traced one of the titles, We Love Azaleas!, over and over, up and down the yellow letters. Months later, she wrote a poem of the same title, exclamation mark and all, though it wasn’t funny, that one. Not a joke in sight. She didn’t tell Sam. She told no one.
Judas. The last one, two years ago now, a customer new to town who showed up at Yum when she was up to her elbows in flour and debt and worry—what kind of maniac left a stable teaching job with a pension and weeks off in summers to open a bakery?—when her ovaries were in their last gasp and spewing hormones everywhere and she was swollen again, a sensation that harkened azaleas, and she thought her breasts might explode right there over the stainless steel prep table and new industrial mixer (she’d named the mixer Spinster. No one got the joke but her, but she thought it was hilarious. Spinster: Christ, what a word). Judas had gapped front teeth, an immunization scar on his left upper arm shaped like a clover. She often traced it as he slept. His hands were preposterously large; even now, she could feel the ghost of his colossal palm pressed flat against the small of her back, a sausage-sized thumb smoothing her eyebrows.
But he wasn’t a Judas, a name synonymous with betrayal, a man who took his life outside Jerusalem. It just ended. He moved home to Oregon, and she stayed put.
Story of her dating life. And Sam’s, too, till Kevin. All these years down the line.
A priest walked into a bar, carrying a ceramic duck under his arm. It was late, near closing. He sat next to a woman who doodled on a bar napkin, who didn’t seem to notice him or his duck, which he clunked down on the bar when he ordered a pint from the bartender with the large forehead. He took a long drink. The carbonation made his nose tingle.
The woman, clenching the napkin, turned to the priest. Her eyes gleamed like an icy road at dawn. She said, “Father Tom, did you hear the one about the woman who dated all the apostles?”
The priest sighed. He was tired. His clerical collar was chafing, his socks slipping. The duck, a gift from a parishioner he’d been visiting with for the last four hours, was heavy and cumbersome. “Hi Esther,” he said.
“Hey yourself.”
He heard it then. A hairline crack in her voice. He had spent his life listening, and he knew that universal sound. Injured hearts, broken souls, lost faith. He shook his head. He said, “I haven’t heard that one.”
She peered at him through the dim haze of the Pickaxe. She leaned down and pulled up a sagging white sock, and the priest glanced away from her ample cleavage, the dimpled thigh exposed by a deep slit in her dress. She said, “It isn’t much of a joke, to tell you the truth. No punch line.” She stuffed the ink-covered napkin inside her highball.
The priest nodded, waiting. He had learned that over time: just wait.
She reached out absently and petted the duck, rested her thumb on its beak. She started to talk then, but not about the apostles.
“I used to write poetry,” she said. “It was terrible, but you know, I used to have that impulse. To notice things.” Her head bobbed, and she pulled her shoulders back. “I used to think, No apologies, no regrets. Leave a trail of wreckage, and so what? That was living. But then I never did, you know.”
“Leave a trail of wreckage?”
“Live.”
She pointed at the wadded-up napkin. “I was going to save the world. Who wasn’t? Like it needed my help.” She laughed, but her eyes welled. “That girl, Tom. That kid. In a wash. And Maud.” She stopped.
He folded his hands. “I know it, Esther. It’s awful news.”
“Sam’s gone.” She twisted all her rings, one by one. “And she’s found.”