Porch Song

A soft rain was falling when the letter carrier, snapping shut her cell phone, mounted the steps of Adam’s wide, L-shaped porch and approached the old green glider in which he sat reading. Another man might have missed what he saw when he put down his book, but he was adept at distinguishing tears from rainwater. He had shed more than enough of his own.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Just my ex-husband,” she said, sniffing.

“I understand,” he said, and he knew that she knew he did. It was she to whom he had given Lena’s change of address card. She had delivered every letter from his lawyer and the thick court envelopes that signaled the finality of his marriage. And whenever she saw him, which was often because teaching gave him the summer off, she never failed to ask how he was doing.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he said. “Tea maybe?”

“No,” she began. “I have a lot of…well, I…sure.”

Her name was Miranda. She spent twelve minutes on his porch, just over two waiting for him to microwave the tea and just under ten drinking it as she related pieces of the dispute that had caused her to cry. Afterward, as he thought about her haunted, hooded eyes and the curve of her legs in her regulation Postal Service shorts, she continued her rounds, walking faster to make up for lost time.

That night, as he sat sipping wine and gazing at the cloudless sky, she returned and sat beside him on the glider. Without her official cap to cover it, her hair was a mass of curls, and in the moonlight her teeth glistened as she smiled and accepted a glass of merlot.

“I wondered if you’d be out here,” she said. “I wanted to thank you.”

“Not necessary,” he said. “But you could’ve rung the bell.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I could.”

“Then I’m glad I came out.”

They talked for nearly three hours, about more things than either one would have imagined possible. Sometime after one he leaned over to kiss her, and even in the darkness he saw the corners of her eyes smile just before he closed his. Before long her blouse was open, her skirt was up, and his shorts were off. As they made long, slow love in the quiet of a summer night, barely hidden by the oversized shrubbery, the only sounds were their gasps and murmurs of gratitude and the rhythmic squeak of the glider.

This was how they began, and now, seven years later, the noise of the porch glider is still a song to them both.

—gary earl ross