That day, I made did my best to make love to Mrs. Flanagan. I didn’t see it as fucking,
or sex, or even the more clinical intercourse. It was love, or the best approximation of it I could
muster at nineteen. She seemed suddenly fragile to me, no longer the domineering and
indomitable woman who lay in the sun as if cast in marble. I did my best, but she kept telling
me to “stop being so soft.”
“What’s with you?” she demanded.
I could only mumble, “Nothing,” and say no more.
She shrugged a sheet around herself and lit a cigarette. She went to the window and
stood there. Soon, I joined her. I stood behind her and we watched the neighbor teach his son
how to box on the lawn in the rain.
“Kid’s a psycho,” she murmured. “I caught him cutting up worms once just so he could
see the segments squirm.”
“Well, maybe boxing is a good outlet then,” I suggested.
“Or maybe it will turn him into an unstoppable psycho.” She glared at the neighbor and
exhaled her cigarette smoke loudly, shaking her head.
I guessed that look held a history and a weight that went beyond the neighbor and his
kid in his shorts and oversized gloves and I had a feeling that I was in way over my head.
It was a relief when my buddy Rooster visited from Colorado and spent a week at my
place. He’d been my freshman year roommate but he failed out and moved to Denver to start a
jam band. Rooster and Mrs. Flanagan got along great; they mostly chatted and laughed while I
twirled my whistle on the lifeguard chair. She would call out different dives while he bounced
on the diving board, even though all he knew how to do were jackknives, flips, and belly flops.
One day, Mrs. Flanagan didn’t show up.
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