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clear air to forget Ward and all he stood for—that ancient history of mine that I’d rejected long ago. Instead, I felt his absence as bitterly as I might an extinguished fire in the dead of a winter.
    On the way to the house, I spotted Jake’s pickup pulling into a convenience-store gas station. I glanced at the clock. He was supposed to be in school. We’d named his beagle Regina, Latin for “queen,” with good reason. She rode in the queenly way she always did, her paws on the passenger windowsill, long beagle ears framing big beagle eyes, but she fell back as the truck bounced into the lot. He’d been driving too fast.
Hell-bent on having fun
, Dad would have said. What a sudden return to reality this was, being reminded, immediately after an absence that I thought was going to change my life, where my love really lay, and what the problems of that love were.
    My yard looked untended, buried in a week’s worth of leaves, and the house seemed cold and dingy. A plastic cup lay on its side on the coffee table, oozing Coke glue. McDonald’s wrappers littered the floor, licked clean by Regina. I leaned over the couch to open the drapes that Jake was always closing so he could watch TV in the daytime.
    To my surprise, a powder-blue car was pulling up to the curb. I’d been so convinced all was over between Ward and me that I hadn’t even considered the possibility he would follow me. Now I felt like a child in a movie, seeing a dead hero return to life.
    I ran to the bathroom to comb my hair. Calm down, I told myself. Even if he was gallant, driving 120 miles from Denver to Laramie to make things right, he was still clueless. And how could that be? Had relations between men and women really not changed one iota in Kansas since the 1960s? Didn’t the world leak in through television and films?
    I opened the door. He wore a long-sleeved, blue Levi’s shirt, and his belt buckle sat squarely in place again. “You left without saying good-bye.”
    “If Jake comes home, you’ll have to sneak out. I’m not ready to introduce you.”
    In my bedroom, I chose the wingback chair I’d bought recently at a used furniture store, thinking of weekends when Ward would be visiting me, if things had kept going the way I thought they were then.
    This put him on the corner of my bed. “I was afraid you wouldn’t let me in.”
    I probably shouldn’t have, I thought.
    “What did I do wrong?” He looked sad, his lips curved down under his mustache, his eyes still sexy in their extraordinary greenness.
    “You really don’t know?”
    “No.”
    That he didn’t think my sexuality was as important as his didn’t just infuriate me, I realized. It threatened me. It had taken years after leaving Kansas for me to develop the courage to accept that I had my own needs and to assert them. The repression was a prison I didn’t want to reenter. No way was I going back to that darkness. But I also remembered how I’d felt an hour ago, getting off the plane into thin, stinging snow. I remembered Jake careening into that parking lot and worry descending over me along with the gray light. If I wanted love, and if I wanted a man’s love for Jake before he was completely grown, this was my chance. But how I must look! Anguished, fragmented by tension, exhaustion, and indecision, I imagined myself as one of Picasso’s cubist women, my face pasted together at sharp angles.
    “I know I should apologize, but I don’t know for what,” Ward said.
    “It’s not what you did.” My voice was squeaky, which I hated. I motioned for a pause, gathered myself and began again in a more even tone. “It’s what you didn’t do. You don’t know how hard this is to say, Ward. But what about me? As soon as we started, I could see it was all going to be about you. That was like—” I closed my eyes to find the right words and blurted out what I saw—“a door slammed shut in my face.” That was it exactly. The door that had stood open the night