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afternoons helping my mother in her garden. Some nights I opened a bottle of wine and cooked pasta for myself over a burner in the communal kitchen. But when I’d considered where my life was headed, I had not particularly liked the prospects. The men I dated did not woo me, the girls I knew who’d started families did not inspire me. My job, although wholly adequate, did not light anything akin to a fire in my gut. I was not yet sad, but I believed I was headed for sadness, and I blamed myself for having waited to be swept into a more thrilling life. For the first time, after meeting Dennis, I saw in my own future bright, unknowable possibilities. I’m a bit ashamed to have been a person without much agency in life, but I credit myself with knowing something special when I saw it.
    In a period of six months, I’d visited Miami five times. I’d taken the train down twice, and three times Dennis had driven up to get me and stayed a night at the motel near my apartment house, then we had driven down to Miami together. During every visit, I saw Marse at least once or twice, for an afternoon shopping or on the boat. There are seven hundred miles of gray highway between Miami and Atlanta. The Sunshine State Parkway was barely a decade old, and it took more than twelve hours to drive each way. When I recall our courtship, I recall as much as anything else the landscape outside the windows of Dennis’s station wagon: the asphalt of the turnpike and the drone of the headlights and the stuttering orange groves. I’d fallen in love in Dennis’s car and under the fluorescent lights of truck stops. We’d spent so much of those six months in car seats that I knew his body as well seated as standing—the hard round caps of his knees, dimpled at the joint, and the bony elbows with which he jabbed me while shifting in his seat, unaware of his breadth.
    Between visits, we’d had phone calls. The telephone I shared with the other tenants of my building sat on a wicker table in the hallway outside my room. The phone was butter-yellow in color, the handset heavy as a dumbbell, and when it rang the whole unit rattled as if mocking my heart, which lurched every time. He called most mornings before I left for work, and he would list for me everything he could see from his apartment balcony: two girls surfing, three men standing on the corner smoking cigars in the heat, an old woman wearing a housedress walking a poodle. Or he’d call in the evenings from the pay phone at the law library. “It’s a hundred degrees in the shade here,” he’d said once, “and everyone is studying without shirts on. Will you please tell me why I’m working so hard?” When Dennis spoke of school, he sounded drained.
    “Even the girls?” I’d said. “No blouses?”
    “Some.”
    “Cover your eyes.”
    “I’m wearing blinders, so I can see the books.”
    He called late at night sometimes, too, and I dragged the telephone out to the porch so as not to disturb my neighbors. When we were together we spoke casually, about whatever happened to cross our minds, but on the phone he asked solemn, mining questions: What was my earliest memory? Did I prefer cats or dogs? Could I imagine myself living on a boat? What if it was a nice, big, clean boat? What was my favorite thing about my family? What was my favorite thing about him? Every thread of conversation stitched back to the topic of us.
    I told him I remembered taking my father’s cigarettes from the countertop in my parents’ bathroom and bringing them to my nose—I liked the smell, even at age three. My mother found me and slapped my hand. Dennis remembered being carried on his grandfather’s shoulders through orange groves down south. His grandfather—Grady’s father—sang cowboy songs and whistled. Dennis remembered the smell of the fruit and the feel of the pomade in his grandfather’s hair.
    I said I preferred dogs, and Dennis said he did, too. I said, “I would live on a boat for six