I began to question all her stories.  Had she been a prostitute or a nurse-in-training?  When I wrote to the address she gave me, her grandmother's house, the letter came back to me.  I began to feel as though everything was moving away from me very fast; I no longer saw my old friends even inadvertently on the street although as far as I knew they all lived in the area.  In addition, a man I once worked for disappeared from his house.  When I called his wife she told me they had not even been fighting.  I could picture her squatting in the dirt (I had worked in their yard) as she straightened the stem of a plant with gloved hands.  They were nice to me but they owed me some money.  I went over to her house and she let me sit at the kitchen table while she waited for the telephone to ring.  She said, Anthony I'm not at my best.  But I thought she was at her best sitting there in her kitchen in love with her man.  There was once a little kid but I didn't ask where it was.  As I sat at her table I wished that I was the little kid and I wished that I could cry in her kitchen -- I knew this was selfish of me, but on the other hand I also knew her husband would come back which he did but not on that night.  She fixed me scrambled eggs while I told her about my problems with women, which seemed very important at that time since the letter to Betsey had come back only that morning.  I watched her slice chives by an open window then take a sip of tea with her hand still holding the knife.  She said she didn't think they owed me any money but she gave me some anyway.  She was really very nice, and as I ate her eggs I thought about the time when the two cigarette butts lay absolutely perfectly parallel on Betsey's front lawn and I decided that what it meant was we would have a journey together of fixed duration and that was cool. 

march  june

I used to watch her when she was embracing her husband.  Although I had only worked in their yard I often saw them touch each other's hand or hair (once they hugged in a doorway) and I could imagine a bedroom upstairs somewhere with an unmade bed.