Heat

The Long Saturday

Chapter 37: Heat

By the first week of June, my body has started reading the calendar through temperature.

Not the date on paper. The air itself. The angle of sun on the kitchen floor at Mom's. The particular smell of cut grass and lake water that arrives in town the same week every year and makes everyone with a boat suddenly believe in urgency.

It starts in the shoulders.

A tightening I don't notice until I'm halfway through a Tuesday staff meeting at church and Jude is saying something about copier toner like it matters and my jaw hurts from holding itself shut.

"You're glaring at office supplies," he says afterward.

"They're provocative."

"No, you're spooked."

I lean against the copy room door and look out at the hall where Maria is taping flyers for the summer food drive with all the solemn incompetence of a teenage volunteer.

"Maybe."

Jude waits.

He does not ask what date it is.

He doesn't need to.

"You sleeping?" he says.

"Sort of."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I wake up before my alarm and my body behaves like it's late for something terrible."

Jude nods like a man hearing a weather report.

"You told Norah?"

"Not properly."

"Why not?"

"Because saying June out loud makes it worse."

"Doesn't it just make it louder?"

I look at him.

He shrugs.

"Same thing to some people. Different thing to me."

"Fine," I say. "Louder."

"Good."

"You enjoy this too much."

"Not true. I enjoy being right."

That night I lie awake in my apartment with the windows open and listen to Mercer turn itself toward summer.

Someone revving an engine on Main.

Teenagers laughing too hard behind the florist.

A dog that has confused midnight for principle.

No fan. No lavender. No loop.

Still, when I finally sleep, I dream water.

Not the lake exactly. Worse. The sensation of water without location, all pressure and green light and the body remembering panic faster than the mind can attach it to a scene.

I wake with my hand locked around the sheet and the pillow damp under my face.

6:12.

June 6.

I say the date out loud to the empty room because Jude is probably right and volume is sometimes better than fog.

"June 6."

The room does not answer.

Good.

---

Norah notices before I tell her.

We are at Lark on Thursday evening, too hot even for coffee but drinking it anyway because habit outranks meteorology. The window is open. Main Street is full of people moving as if summer has just been invented.

"You're half an inch away from your own skin," she says.

"That seems medically unlikely."

"And yet."

She stirs iced coffee she does not need to stir.

"June?" she says.

"Yeah."

She nods once.

"Okay."

"That's all?"

"Do you want a parade?"

"No."

"Then no."

I look out at the sidewalk because that is easier than looking directly at the part of my life that has learned to ask clean questions.

"I keep feeling like my body knows before I do," I say. "Like every hot afternoon is trying to tell me what week it is."

"Bodies are obnoxious that way."

"Mine's getting very confident."

"Rude."

"Deeply."

She lets the silence sit. Not because she's unsure. Because she isn't.

"What do you need?" she says after a while.

"I don't know yet."

"Okay."

"I might want to be alone. Which isn't about you."

"I know."

"I might also not."

"Also fine."

I laugh once because only Norah could make uncertainty sound administratively manageable.

"You should put that on a mug."

"It would sell terribly."

We walk back to her studio after because movement sometimes lets language catch up. The heat is still in the sidewalks. Somebody down the block is burning something leafy and irresponsible.

At her door she says, "You know the day itself doesn't get a vote, right?"

"What?"

"June 14." She leans one shoulder against the frame. "It doesn't get to decide what kind of man you are now."

I stare at her.

"That feels like something you rehearsed."

"Please. I improvised."

"Menace."

"Yes."

She kisses me once and sends me home before I can convert the sentence into a doctrine.

---

On Saturday Mom is in the garden by seven with pruning shears and hostility.

"You going to murder the roses?" I ask from the porch.

"Just their ambitions."

She looks up at me.

"You slept badly."

"Apparently everyone got issued the same powers."

"No," she says. "Just me and Norah. The rest of the town is unprotected."

I go down into the yard because if the week is going to feel like weather, I might as well stand in weather with my mother.

The roses have gone extravagant. The lavender is thick. The patch by the fence looks like dirt unless you know better.

Mom hands me the yard bag.

"Hold this open."

So I do.

We work in companionable hostility for twenty minutes before she says, "I am not going to ask if you're okay."

"Thank you."

"I am going to say you don't have to perform sturdiness for me."

I hold the yard bag while she clips a long cane and thinks.

"I don't feel sturdy," I say.

"Good."

"Good?"

"Sturdy is a scam in June."

"You and Jude should start a line of greeting cards."

"We'd make almost no money."

"True."

She drops another branch into the bag.

"He was nervous in June too, you know," she says.

"Micah?"

"Every year. Not about the lake. About storms." She keeps clipping. "He loved weather until it got close. Then he'd start checking the radar every ten minutes and pretending it was interest, not fear."

I didn't know that.

Of course I didn't. There are still rooms in the dead I never got to enter.

"He hid that from me," I say.

"He hid it from himself."

The heat sits over the yard like a hand.

I look at the roses, the fence, the patch of dirt that is not just dirt.

"I'm tired of June behaving like a personality," I say.

Mom snips one last stem and hands me the shears.

"Then don't give it one."

Simple. Annoying. Correct.

Later, after she goes inside for lemonade, I stay by the fence another minute and let the heat press its full weight down without answering it.

June is coming.

It is also weather.