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in fact it probably did.
    In any case her recent letter, the first in a decade and a half, brought the intimacy back. It took only a few sentences:
    This feels crazy, this letter, but when I learned you don’t have email, and then picked up the phone to call you, I somehow couldn’t. It felt too abrupt, or rude, or invasive, and anyway I was nervous, not that I’m not nervous writing this, but it feels really familiar, doesn’t it? to be talking to you in a letter?
    It was her nervousness that excited him. Made him a kid, made everything uncertain and possible, and it made him horny, right off the top. It was mostly her voice, her letter voice, the magic little leap of
doesn’t it
, the assumption, the
knowledge
that he felt what she felt, that not only made him love her again, not only made him love him-and-her again, it made him understand he had never stopped.
    This understanding was a ready one. If his love was a monster he’d thought dead and buried, it had been buried alive. Launched by the giant spring under its back, Laura’s letter, it popped easily out of its shallow grave, and now the monster was in the room. There it was, in the mirror, tall, pale, pretending not to breathe. (Andy could joke about all this, and not. Because why did it feel like gallows humour?)
    It wasn’t simple, this matter of undying love. Eighteen years? Andy wasn’t stupid about it. Nor was he going to be stupid when she came. Nothing was simple here, nor was it the slightest bit predictable. If love was complicated when you were with each other, it was even more complicated when you weren’t. He’d done some thinking on this.
    A month after Laura had gone to Toronto, if he were asked if absence made the heart grow fonder, he would have said yes. God, yes. If asked the same question a year later, he’d have given the same painful answer, but with pause. If asked after ten years, Andy would have had to look inside and then say no. After that much time, fondness has absorbed much desperation and has stiffened up. If it can throb at all it throbs a little insanely. In the long run, fondness mutates. And forgetfulness gets into the mix: memories are smoothed over and fattened up. The quick bed of pleasure grows brass ornaments and rose silk sheets; her eyelashes lengthen absurdly when she shyly blinks; her breath after orgasm is the fig-and-pepper breeze drifting in off the desert. There were no fights; she had no freckles on her shoulders. After ten years, and now after eighteen, who knows what it had been like? Who knows what even happened?
    And of course her cancer added an unknowable mutation, an oddest spice. In remission, a breast removed, Laura had seemed cheerful enough in the letter.
    THEY LEFT THE LEGION after Drew pounded back maybe five pints, and Andy his two. They had a half-mile to walk together before Drew turned uphill and Andy down. It was one of the saddest stretches of town, with a third of the buildings empty. Most didn’t even have For Lease signs up, no point to it. A few still had Going Out of Business banners hanging diagonal inside a window, faded and yellowed. Some of the businesses still open on this stretch (Ling The Tailor, Spirit Tattoo’s, and The Northern: The Best Hamburger, The Freshest Fish) were damned by their shoddy charm, the very thing tourists stared at but passed by.
    What will Laura think. To the best of his knowledge, because her mother loved travelling south to visit her, in eighteen years Laura had been up only twice. Once with her hubby and three-year-old daughter, when PR was still doing okay. Then once alone, a few years later, when PR was coming apart. (Again he’d steered clear, learning after that she’d left word with no fewer than four friends to say hi to him.)
    The raindrops got bigger, could penetrate hair to the scalp, so Andy took his ball cap from his pocket and Drew pulled up his hood. He looked funny in that hood. It made