Hello, readers! If you are a paying subscriber, I promise you twelve pieces of writing a year. Usually I send out essays, but this time I wanted to send something different — a short story I originally wrote a few years ago that I rediscovered recently. I’ve changed it a lot from its original version, but with the help of my friend/ editor, the message I originally intended for this story is now much more crystallized. If you’re new to Maple Suggests, I send suggestions every Thursday based on things that have inspired me throughout the week, and (usually) an essay, approximately once a month. These essays/ longer pieces of writing are paywalled in the hopes I can make enough to cover the cost of my brilliant editor, so if you would like to support this newsletter, it’s $5/month, or $30/year. If you’d like to read some un-paywalled work, I have three essays you can read here in my About page. Thank you for everything.
The Walk
When, at 53 years old, Anne thinks about the bravest thing she’s ever done, she’s sitting in the stale air of her sedan idling in a Starbucks drive-through in a Dallas suburb. She’s looking at the bumper sticker of a stick figure family on the car ahead of her — identical to the one her mother-in-law gifted as a Christmas stocking-stuffer four years back — but she’s thinking only of Frank’s apartment all those years ago: his bookshelf loaded with twelve, thirteen titles on Eugene Debs, that awful carpet, sticky with the drinks from past parties he’d hosted. She’s visualizing the room awash with light from a disco ball tacked haphazardly to the ceiling with wire, the cigarette smoke, the far-away skyline of Manhattan over the tops of nearby industrial Bushwick structures. It was at Frank’s party all those years ago, that Charlie — her then-lover — made his precipitous decision.
She, Charlie, Peter, and Peter’s date had been standing together. Anne recalls they were drinking dirty martinis out of plastic cups. She remembers Peter slowly ran out of things to say about his dog’s giardia. And she'll never forget they somehow moved on to the moral imperatives of A-list celebrities.
It had started off casually enough: Why don’t more of them understand their responsibility? Isn’t it a shame they don’t use their power to really protest? Why don’t they march from their penthouses in New York to Washington D.C. and demand to speak to congress about detention centers for children? Et cetera.
At that point, there weren’t too many stragglers left at the party and the conversation was fizzling out. Anne will always remember the volume of the room because she could still hear Charlie as he barely whispered, “Imagine how many people would drop everything — their whole lives — and follow the Carters on a march like that.”
Peter chuckled, then shrugged. Anne thought maybe he didn’t know who the Carters were until he said Jay-Z is no Malcom X, but Charlie might have a point about Beyoncé. Charlie pushed his hands in his pockets and sighed. “Look, I'm serious. Let’s say I dropped my life for a week and went marching to the capital. Who would follow me on a walk like that? Celebrities have crazy power."
Anne ate a martini-soaked olive that had been dunked in her drink. “I’d fo-ollow you.”
She’d hiccuped like a cartoon drunk. “Excuse me!” she said, but as she did, a chunk of olive flew from her lips with terrifying speed and landed on Peter’s silk shirt, immediately sticking there like a tiny nipple and forming a juicy ring. Later, no matter how much time has passed, Anne will need to vigorously shake her head to forget the sound Peter made as the slobbery olive piece landed, as if he’d seen a cockroach crawl from his buttonhole to his chest. These were people Anne was supposed to impress — Charlie’s impossibly informed, Marxist-literature-can-belong-in-the-bathroom friends, each and every one of them some kind of cool intellectual — and she’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t drink too much or admit to keeping up with a single TV show that wasn’t a documentary mini-series. And she would absolutely not mention what she did for a living; “social media manager at a production house specializing in vapid housewives and racist alligator hunters” would not be her top line. “Charlie’s girlfriend.” That was her top line. If people knew she was Charlie’s chosen person, whatever blanks they filled in were more impressive than the truth.
As Peter rushed to the bathroom, ordering his boyfriend to find a Tide pen (or just something — anything!) Anne wheeled around, hiding her cheeks from the few people left at the party, pouring more gin into her cup to occupy her hands and cursing Peter for not only wearing silk to this casual gathering, but for pulling it off so effortlessly. She heard a guest approach Charlie and revert back to the conversation: he would definitely follow Beyoncé in a protest to Washington D.C.
“See?” Charlie asked. Anne could tell he was talking to her, but she was preoccupied with the worry Peter now considered her as poised as a ranch hand, that her sundress was a silly choice amongst all these vintage leather jackets, and that her own boyfriend was embarrassed he’d brought her to the party in the first place.
Now, in her sedan, as Anne sips her coffee from its plastic lid and peels from the drive-through to the wide Texas highway, she remembers Charlie’s young face, his calculating look in the cab ride home from the party, his eyes straight ahead as if he himself were driving, as if one look away would mean danger, disaster. The lights of the city had streaked his face like war paint.
And that next day, he’d been at it — walking to prove that no one would follow him.
—
Anne was in his shower when he opened the door and through the plump steam said, “I’m going to Washington. I have provisions.” She’d barely had time to pause lathering shampoo into her hair when the door shut.
“What? What are you doing?” she heaved when she caught up with him at the bottom of the Williamsburg Bridge. She hadn’t brought a change of clothes to his place the night before and was forced to wear her wrinkled dress from the party in the judgmental light of day.
“I’m walking from New York to Washington to protest children’s detention centers,” he said, the same way he could have said, “I’m going to the store.”
Of all the things she could have asked next, she chose: “Who will feed your fish?” He slowed a bit before he said, “If you can’t, then Marcus. I’ll call him now.”
If I can’t? Anne thought, and it occurred to her then that he had not asked her to come with him. But there she was, running after him in her smelly dress.
“What do you mean, ‘If I can’t’?” she asked. He was outpacing her. She was practically jogging. But he was already on a call with his roommate, Marcus, asking him to feed the fish.
Charlie had made himself a pendant that whipped smartly from a stick he’d plunged into the lattice of his backpack’s bungees. It read: SAVE THE CHILDREN. On the other side, JOIN ME. But in the wind, the words melted with the folding fabric. SAVE REN. THE CHIL. The red felt of each ironed-on letter peeled up like onion skins. Into his phone, Charlie said, “Yeah, sorry about the noise — I’m on top of a bridge. Thanks, bud.”
“Charlie,” she said, grabbing his arm, halting his walk. A group of runners split and funneled around them like a river. She met his eyes with a gaze as serious as she could muster with her vision still swimming from last night’s martinis. “Please — what are you doing, really?”
“I told you,” he said, slipping his phone back in his pocket. “I’m marching to Washington. My shifts at the bar are covered. I made some calls this morning.”
He took her hand and squeezed it like he was a man headed off to war. The absurdity of the situation was certainly not lost on Anne, who watched, frozen in the summer heat, as Charlie descended into Manhattan with a felt flag waving behind him, tiny and psychotic. Before she lost sight of him, she once again jogged to catch up.
It wasn’t until hours later when he had paid for a camping spot to stay the night that she realized what she’d gotten herself into. Yes, they’d taken the ferry, but it was a nice day for a ferry ride. And there were always returning boats. About an hour’s walk from the ferry’s berth she thought, well, if the boats stop service, we’ll call a car to take us home. When they stopped at a roadside pub for dinner, she asked Charlie, “How are we getting back?” and he said, “Eventually?” and they’d laughed like they’d shared a joke, even though Anne felt desperate for the punchline.
Now, as he tapped tent stakes into the semi-soft earth, she was numb. She could have helped stake the rain fly. She could have left. She could have gotten angry, she guessed, but she’d followed willingly, and now here they were, somewhere in Watchung, New Jersey, and it was plain as the big cream moon Charlie was not turning back.
He sat back on his haunches. “I’m glad you walked with me today,” he said. When the tent was taut, he crawled in, opened his sleeping bag, and looked up at her with deep, soft eyes.
Anne regarded the tent; two months ago, Charlie had found it lying on the sidewalk with a “FREE — NO BED BUGS” sign taped to it, and decided it was meant to be his. It was a safety-vest shade of yellow and was so narrow Charlie’s bony shoulders touched each nylon side when he was lying down on his back, but when Anne suggested buying a proper two-person tent for the both of them to use, Charlie didn’t seem to understand why he would need two tents. Eventually, Anne knew she would never camp in a properly-sized tent with her boyfriend, because that was Charlie: the world was suffering, and he always seemed determined to suffer in allegiance.
Now they squeezed together, balanced on their sides, stiff and straight like two books on an overstuffed shelf, with barely with room to pancake hands under cheeks. And as her chest pressed and released against his back in steady breaths, she whispered to him, “Why didn’t you ask me to come with you today?”
But he was sound asleep. And as her eyes fell heavy to the sounds of things clicking and humming in the trees, she heard echoes of herself in her speckled sundress, under the chatter and the music oozing from a record player in a Bushwick apartment just one night before, I’d follow you.
—
She woke abruptly the next morning. Her feet were asleep; the tent was thick with morning breath. A wave of claustrophobia overcame her so severely she nearly ripped the zipper crawling out to freedom.
The campground was quiet; no other tents in her line of sight. Then again, it was Monday — her own workday started at 10 a.m., miles away, in midtown Manhattan. Before anxiety could strike, she felt the cool, wet grass under her chapped feet and released a low, strange sound. The relief was unbelievable. My god, she thought. Her feet drank in the dew. All yesterday, she hadn’t thought to stop and buy new shoes and realized now, with a humiliated pang, she’d walked ten hours in faux leather mules.
Think. She hinged forward from her waist, reaching to her toes, wiggling her fingers a good six inches above them. Her mind spun like a top. She was in New Jersey. She was expected at work in a few hours. Phone. She turned back to the tent and rifled through her purse, pulling forth her lifeline. Eleven percent battery, 6:47 a.m. It would be an expensive car ride home, but it would just have to be done. She tapped her ride-share app. Searching for your location. Still searching.
She groaned. She’d have to walk somewhere more public. Or maybe there was a train? Her phone would be dead any moment; she needed help. She sat on a damp picnic bench to write her boss an email — she’d have to call in sick. But when her inbox opened, a feeling whipped into her gut like a kettlebell. Seventeen unread emails that must have landed when she had service last night. Six were from her boss, Jason.
Anne —
Night-in-the-Bog-A-Thon happening in seven minutes. Aren’t you on live-Tweet duty? I see it’s quiet on our Twitter front. Where are you?
Jason
Anne’s face went hot.
Anne —
I see you are definitely scheduled to live-tweet along with the marathon tonight. Your phone seems to be dead, too. Is everything okay?
Jason
More like this. She read each email gravely.
Anne —
You’re not online. Kelly stepping in for you. We need to check in tomorrow.
“Morning.” Charlie’s head poked from the tent.
“Hey,” she said, weak and wavering. She laid her phone face-down on the table, squeezed her eyes shut. Charlie frowned.
“What’s going on?” he asked. Anne’s forehead head dropped into her palms. She could already hear the click of Jason’s door before one of his grueling “check-ins,” with his long sighs and his watery eyes and his voice like he’d never learned to speak with his throat, all the words dripping from his nose.
She was kicking herself. How could she have forgotten? She knew she could only salvage the situation by extending her lie — something would had to have happened to her last night that explained why she missed tweeting from The Bog People Twitter account as the show’s three-hour marathon took place, plus why she would be late for work today. Her head flew from her hands as she reached back for her phone. She typed with wild fingers. Charlie busied himself with breaking down the tent.
As she crafted her elaborate lie, she thought back to when she interviewed for her job. Fed up with the grueling hours working as a bartender post-college, she was desperate for a job that seemed more “grown up.” Thanks to a connection through a regular at the bar, she nabbed an interview at WOW TV. She’d made sure to prepare her lies carefully for the interview; she loved social media, it was her passion. She was familiar with analytics software, of course. It’s great that people spend eight hours a day on their phones, it’s simply human evolution. She herself didn’t even have an Instagram account she used more than one a month, but she’d dazzled her soon-to-be-boss, Jason. At twenty-three, she wrote “Social Media Manager” on the top of her resume, and it had been parked there like a bus without wheels ever since.
When she first started at WOW, she found guilty pleasure in knowing which of her classmates from college — the moody graphic designers, the kids already in touring bands — privately engaged with the accounts of That Dress is the Best! and Penthouse Wives. But that was five long years ago. Now, it mostly pained her to follow anybody she used to know, to see what great thing they were doing with their day, or their life.
She felt Charlie’s warmth as he approached. He sat down next to her, kissed her temple. Despite herself, she smiled.
“All good?” he asked.
“Well,” she started. She kept her lips parted to explain, but softly closed them. Five percent battery now. The thick block of apologetic text became a blurry wad, meaningless. The blue light of her phone blended with the washed denim color of the early morning air.
Maybe it was because she was outside herself in that faded blue moment, sitting on that bench in a two-day-old dress, that the realities of her workday felt distant and improbable. The moon was still visible and high as though it longed to be a part of the daytime, to still have a purpose, and maybe Anne simply looked up and empathized.
She deleted her email in one satisfying touch. She wrote two simple sentences instead. She didn’t proofread them. She would send the message as soon as she had a phone charge and service again.
She hopped from the tabletop and picked up Charlie’s flag near the tent. Dirt stuck to the felt like pellets.
“Aren’t people supposed to be able to read this, so they can walk with you? Isn’t that the point?” she flicked the flag by its handle. Dirt sprayed over his face.
“They won’t follow me,” he spit. “That’s the point.”
At that moment, the “S” from “SAVE THE CHILDREN” peeled off the flag and fell to the ground. Anne smirked. “Think if we keep this off, they’ll think we’re marching for people to have the children?”
—
Charlie was very good at not asking questions. Sometimes this frustrated Anne, when she moped around his apartment waiting for him to ask her what was the matter, but that day, their second day walking, she was grateful for his discretion. Why she was not at work wasn’t something she wanted to discuss right now. Instead, she focused on the task at hand: following her boyfriend to Washington.
First, they found a superstore to collect supplies: walking shoes and more appropriate clothes for Anne, sunscreen, poster board to replace Charlie’s flag, etc. A ruddy woman named Kathryn walked them to a stack of glossy posters in the back-to-school aisle. “These are the best-sellers, right here,” she said, patting them like the hide of a horse. Charlie mused aloud the shiny surface might reflect the sun, and the last thing they needed was someone blinded by their propaganda and filing a lawsuit. Kathryn blinked. Propaganda was not a word she liked. A moment passed before she pointed them to the matte posters a few feet away. “Well. There’s flat ones over there. More colors in the flat ones, too.”
“You ready?" Charlie asked after they’d made their purchases, his new poster erect between two mop handles cleverly rigged to a belt he’d devised to fit under his gear. Anne threw her head back laughing. “Look at you!” she said. She kissed his cheekbone, right where he liked it.
The front of his new sign read, “END DETAINMENT OF IMMIGRANT CHILDREN.” The back read: “TAKE A STAND! WALK WITH US TO D.C. TO PROTEST.” The billboard contraption was so tall she guessed if he bent forward it would cantilever and topple him forward, but he’d probably already thought of how to avoid this. He always seemed to know a lot of things she didn't. Her stomach sank a half inch. She inhaled sharply, willed it to buoy back.
Charlie’s long strides had taken him far from her now. He yelled back at her, “You coming?”
His outline was huge and square, his face shadowed by his sign, that emblem of passion. She hiked her own sign high so it rested on her shoulder. She was going to walk to Washington, D.C. to protest the detainment of immigrant children. A toothy smile broke out across her face.
—
During Anne and Charlie’s walk, simple acts — jumping over a railroad track, snapping twigs from a tree to build a fire — filled Anne with a kind of romantic energy. They walked on back roads and sidewalks for the sake of the children. They walked through suburbs, marching around cul-de-sacs and pumping their signs like machinery for all the angsty teenagers in their rooms to see, waiting for a parent to call the police or shout at them to get lost. Charlie and Anne would laugh about this in whatever restaurant would allow them to charge their phones, or outside the tiny yellow tent, marveling at the glow of each other’s faces over fires they kept alive far after the rest of the campground had gone to sleep. Anne would carefully layer new tape over Charlie’s poles when the old tape began to fray, and Charlie would turn around on the side of the highway and kiss Anne’s eyelids without warning, sometimes simultaneously flicking off drivers who jeered from their cars.
One day, Anne and Charlie approached a large, fenced-in pasture that seemed to be part of an operating farm. There were greenhouses, multiple barns, rows of tilled earth. Anne drank it in, this bucolic scene — but when she saw two horses, tiny specks in the opposite corner of the field, her heart leapt.
“Charlie, oh my gosh!” she said, stopping in her tracks. Charlie halted, turned to her. Anne pointed to the distant animals, face flushing with delight. “Let’s take the long way around this fence and try to get up close to those horses. See them?”
Charlie opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. He looked at the horses, their flicking tails as small as flies from that distance, then made a show of checking his watch. “I don’t know,” he said. “That will add on another… hour to the walk today?”
“So?” Anne beamed at him, “There are so many wildflowers over there, too. Look! Maybe we can even pet the horses if they like us. It doesn’t look so far off—”
“Anne, please,” Charlie said. He pulled out his phone. He’d been planning their camping stops each night, routing their way to general stores for extra supplies. He pointed to his digital route. “Can you let this one go, please? I don’t want to walk another hour today if we can help it.”
The breeze tousled Anne’s hair. Suddenly, the flush of her face was not because of excitement at all — but soon enough, she felt her cheeks cool anyway, the sun having decided at that very moment to dip behind a fat, oppressive cloud.
All her young life, Anne’s family lived in a Texas suburb not far from a farm very similar to this one. She passed the farm every day on her way to school, ogling at the broad noses of the glossy horses near the road, and begged her parents for riding lessons she never got year after year. One day, when Anne was eleven, her mother picked her up from school and drove her to the farm.
The grass was manicured, the barn shaped like a chapel. A woman with tall boots helped Anne into the saddle of a small brown horse, and at first she felt silly, but the ranch was vast and welcoming. That day on the horse, as Anne felt the rush of crisp air past her ears, she smiled so wide she used muscles in her face she didn’t even know she had. Of course, the woman in the tall boots was simply leading Anne in a slow circle around the pen, but to Anne, she may as well have been galloping bareback through open plains.
At the end of the ride, Anne sat restless in the car, dreaming of what she would call her own horse. Apricot. Capricorn. Maybe Pumpkin. Her mother stood a distance away, nodding silently as the woman in the tall boots spoke with shakes of her head, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other, emphasizing a point.
That was the last time Anne rode a horse. Much later, Anne discovered her family could not afford the lessons; through a friend of her mother’s dentist, Anne had a chance to “audition” at the barn, to determine if she had any kind of preternatural skill that would warrant training at a discounted rate. Anne was not the kind of child who had preternatural skill for anything, it seemed — and years later, when Anne passed the barn on her way to school, she would redden at how dumb she must have looked, bouncing clumsily up and down on the saddle, grinning with a smile full of gaps to her mortified mother at the edge of the fence; she would ache to remember the disappointment in her mother’s face the night after the tryout, as she sat with Anne at the dinner table, avoiding her daughter’s gaze.
“It’s not like we can ride them anyway, you know?” Charlie said now. “Even if the owners of this place would let us, I don’t know how.”
Anne’s gut clenched as she glanced back at the spot where the horses had been, but they were on the move now, running side by side even farther away from where Anne watched, over a hill and out of sight. She’d never told Charlie about her experience riding a horse as a kid, she realized. It dawned on her that he had no idea whether she knew how to ride a horse, even if he couldn’t. But as she turned back to tell him — what exactly? That he was right? That neither of them could ride horses, even if they wanted to? — she realized no further conversation would happen on the subject anyway. He was already far ahead of her, his large sign lording over him, casting a light purple shadow over everything he passed.
—
A few nights later, lying head-to-foot in the tiny tent as they read a news article from their phones — Charlie had picked one they could both read at the same time — Anne stole a look at Charlie’s heavy eyelids and recalled the day they met. “That’s a lot of drinks for one person!” was the first thing Anne ever said to him. He was holding four.
They’d been leaning on the bar of a riverfront barge on the Brooklyn side of the East River. That summery Saturday, it was bright and balmy and the bar was packed with bright skirts and sunscreen-soaked skin. The Manhattan skyline was reflected in Charlie’s sunglasses.
“I’m waiting for my friends!” he’d laughed, and then, arching his eyebrows, “Only three of these are for me.”
It took about five minutes for Anne to fall in love with him. His banter was exciting and quick, he seemed to know everything there was about mixing cocktails (he was a bartender) and leftist politics (he was a Democrat, though he spent twenty minutes explaining why the Democratic party was an embarrassment). His friends eventually arrived but quickly left after meeting Anne, realizing Charlie was going to be occupied for the night.
“I’m really into football,” Charlie said to her at one point.
“Oh, I love the Chiefs!” she’d said. Her ex-boyfriend had grown up in Kansas City.
“No, no I mean — sorry. Soccer. I just call it football. I hang out with a lot of English people.”
“Oh, soccer is great,” she’d said. She tried to remember the year of the last World Cup.
“You think so?” he said, eyes alight with interest. She took the last swig of drink from her plastic cup, turned to the bartender, and waved it like a bell. As of that day, she was also interested in mixing cocktails and leftist politics. She wondered vaguely if she’d be taking Charlie back to her own room that night and prayed she’d be invited to his place instead; her ex, the Chiefs fan, decorated his room as meticulously as a prop stylist and always lit a candle before they had sex, so her room was never cleaner than when they were together, but slowly, in the months after they ended, clothes that were not dirty enough for the hamper piled like layers of melted wax on the back of her desk chair, water glasses collected in towers on her nightstand, and her ceiling fan outlined itself with a thin stroke of powdery dust.
Anne had never liked drugs, but the Chiefs fan had once convinced her to trip acid with him in a crowded Brooklyn apartment on New Year’s Eve, and it wasn’t that hard to sway her — people loved Anne for how willing she was to level with everybody. Once, a college acquaintance told her she could be dropped from a helicopter in the middle of the desert and make friends with a cactus. He’d said it in a group on the campus lawn, and everyone in earshot vigorously agreed.
But tripping acid was nothing like making a friend. At the peak of her trip, she was no longer human, but some kind of amorphous, flesh-colored mucus — a bodiless entity at risk of being absorbed, and in a group, she felt herself being pulled like pizza dough in multiple directions at once. The feeling became so acute she worried someone at the party might completely consume her. All at once, she needed to be alone, and clambered onto the apartment’s fire escape. But she had only been sitting outside for a minute before the Chiefs fan leaned out the window and yelled at her to come in, that it was too dangerous, that the fire escape looked like it was made of pipe cleaner, that it could fall off the building at any moment. The only comic relief Anne would see later was how he really didn’t need to yell; she only sat a few feet from the window he leaned out of.
But Anne didn’t want to come inside. It was dangerous in there, with all those people trying to ingest her. So she told him as such. “I’m sorry, but I need to be out here,” she’d said, “or I might disappear.”
He’d broken up with her the next day, not citing much other than he felt it just “wasn’t working.” Anne had called him every night for a week trying to apologize. When he refused to answer, she cried in a messy bundle on her bed for days, wishing angrily that she’d just gone back inside to that dumb party, even if it meant pressing herself against the walls, away from the crowd.
Every day since, as she went to work, came home, and hoped to god someone — a friend, a Hinge date, anyone — would want to spend the evening with her, this moment with Charlie was what she had longed for. Cute boy, warm air. Sex easing around them like a belly dancer circling. At the end of the night, he scooted to the edge of his barstool and touched his forehead to Anne’s, his breath like water down her lips.
“Do you want to come to my place?” he asked. Anne smiled, swallowed in his eyes.
“Yes, I do,” she said. And just like that, he took her hand and pulled her from the stool, twirled her once under his arm, and led her into his world.
—
By the time Anne and Charlie reached Washington, D.C., they had been walking and camping for two full weeks. They picked up no one along the way. This was a relief to Anne as she didn’t know how much conversation she really had in her about child detainees, and it didn’t seem to bother Charlie as he had proved himself correct.
Once they got to the capital, Charlie — who made sure his protest sign was in plain view — approached a buttoned-up man who looked like a Republican and asked for directions to the White House. Of course Charlie had a phone to map the way, but Anne assumed he hoped for some kind of significant moment, such as this man refusing them help on his own principle of wanting to keep children detained, because they’re all the spawn of drug-dealers, anyway. But instead, the man smiled like an old friend and gave them such scrupulous directions they could not remember them all and ended up using their phones anyway.
The road near the White House was busy with all varieties of rage. Feminists against the president, climate activists against the president. In fact, there were no groups who did not feel strong negative feelings towards the president, and to Anne and Charlie’s delight, there was a large group of people out that very day protesting the detainment of immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border. They exchanged a look that seemed to say, The serendipity! and approached cautiously, walking up to a woman whose shouting could not mask her kindness and asking if they could join the protest. “Yes!” she said, and moved closer into the crowd as if to make room for them on a raft in the middle of the sea.
They didn’t camp that night. They stayed with Marie, the woman with the kind face, who was awed by Anne and Charlie’s walk. They showered in her home, tossed their clothes in her washing machine, and Anne’s eyes welled with tears when Marie pulled the fitted sheet over her fold-out couch — she realized just how uncomfortable she’d been for two weeks straight.
While Marie took her own shower, Anne and Charlie sat at her kitchen table in t-shirts Marie had loaned them, drinking her beer. The kitchen was fascinating. Lots of interesting potholders and ramekins and magnets. Little bowls full of rice with a few grains spilled near, like a tableau. A dried-up bee on the windowsill, placed there on purpose.
Anne eased her foot over to touch Charlie’s. He smiled at her.
“That was good. That was important,” he said. Anne was not sure what exactly he was talking about — the walk itself, the protest, or the shower he just took — but she smiled back at him anyway.
“I know,” she said. And then, tranquilly, “Imagine what our kids will say when we tell them about all this one day.”
Charlie frowned. His brow furrowed. He pulled his foot back, pulled his beer into his chest.
“What?” he said.
Anne met his eyes. As if by instinct, she quickly said, “Not that, you know, it’s a thing we need to think about right now.”
But had they ever discussed it? They’d been dating now for four months. Had she ever brought it up?
“We don’t…” he started, swallowing. “I don’t want kids, Anne. I told you that like, right at the beginning.”
“We… uh, you did?”
“Yes,” he said.
“When?” she asked, as if pinpointing when they’d discussed it in the past would sway her now.
But Charlie didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up, looked at her with a strange expression, and turned to investigate a spice rack on a nearby wall, taking special interest in a shaker of yellow grain. Just then, Anne realized how much she looked at his back — how intimately she knew the shape of his shoulders, how if they ever found themselves lost in a crowd, she was sure she could find him by the curve of his back alone.
Just then, Marie waltzed into her kitchen to join them. She wore a loose tank top and loose pants. The muscles in her arms were shaped like she’d carried her sign of protest every day for ten years, not just two weeks. She took a beer from her fridge and popped it open with a lighter. Anne had never picked up this trick; she was used to Charlie popping open beers for her.
“So what’s next, Charlie?” Marie asked, rubbing the head of a dog that had materialized. Charlie spun around to face her, relieved.
“Well, I’ll sleep,” he joked, and laughed too loudly. Was that… flirtatious laughter? Anne bit the insides of her cheeks. The dog circled around to Anne and offered its head. Anne had never really liked dogs and always felt awkward interacting with them, but she patted it anyway. “I love your dog,” Anne said.
“Thanks!” Marie said. “This is Che, my sweet little rebel.” It dawned on Anne that this was the kind of dog — blue heeler — Charlie had once mentioned he’d like to consider as a pet, if he were ever to work fewer hours at the bar.
“What’s next for you, Anne?” Marie asked. Anne kept petting, noticing the shedding hairs flying, practically fleeing the dog’s scalp, with each movement of her fingers.
“Hm,” Anne looked up. “You know…” but her mind was blank, and all she could think about was the colorful ramekins on every possible surface of this kitchen, so many it was excessive, kaleidoscopic. She thought of her own kitchen that she shared with her roommate, a vision of minimalism, just like how Kennedy liked it. Suddenly, she realized how much she hated that kitchen. “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure.”
“What do you do?” Marie asked. Anne felt herself stiffen.
“Uh. Social media stuff,” she said, then paused to consider what she said next. “I actually just quit my job.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “Wait, seriously?”
“Two weeks ago,” Anne continued. “It was a social media management job at WOW TV.”
“Oh my gosh,” Marie laughed, “don’t they do that one show? Uh…” she pressed her fingers into her temples, “the one with the alligator hunters. River? No. Um…”
“Bog People,” Anne stated.
“That’s the one. Yikes,” she said, laughing and clinking Anne’s glass, an act of empathy. “I bet you’re glad to be done with that.”
“She hated it there,” Charlie offered. He fixed his eyes on Anne. “That’s amazing! Why didn’t you tell me?”
Anne barked a laugh. It was loud and jarring, and she cleared her throat to try and temper her reaction. She thought of her awful boss, Jason. But then she thought of Tiara, her now ex-colleague, who filled her workdays with laughter. Anne thought of their lunches together, gossiping about workplace dramas, trading secrets.
“I didn’t hate it there,” was all Anne could think to say.
But Marie and Charlie were already somehow engaged in a conversation about deforestation and the Pacific gyre, and how none of it might matter anyway, because of an impending nuclear threat from Russia. Charlie leaned into Marie; Marie gesticulated wildly. Anne stood up. Like a ghost undetected by the living, Anne weaved her way over a Turkish rug and around a Kenyan fertility sculpture to reach the front door. She slid on her shoes, grabbed her backpack by the now-faded protest posters crumpled by the door, and stepped out of the apartment into the cool night air.
The night was a deep blue, the lights of the neighborhood windows mimicking the yellow radiance of the stars above. Anne shut the door behind her and turned her eyes to focus on the end of Marie’s street, to what looked like a black hole, an unknowable void. She heard the muffled sounds of Marie and Charlie’s laughter as she descended the stairs. When she passed a neighbor two houses down, she heard the clunk of his trash bag plopped into his outside garbage bin. Two houses after that, she heard hammering inside a garage, something that sounded like the clip-clop of a horses hooves, and she was all at once snapped into a sharp, golden memory: sitting on the saddle of a horse, clutching the pommel, delirious with something like certainty. Like hope.
Seven houses away from Marie’s, she heard cars speeding, one after another, as they rushed down a nearby highway, each headed somewhere, a cacophony that meshed with her footsteps, her breath, her heartbeat racing — and the small prayer she whispered as she kept on going.