Film Society. Gilaine E. Mitchell

a boy, before he became the man I met.

      He stood up and leaned on his shovel. He was taller than I would have guessed.

      The rain’s getting pretty heavy. I can give you a lift.”

      “I’ll be fine,” I said.

      “It’s no trouble for me. I get paid no matter when I’m doing out here.”

      I liked the fact he wasn’t giving up but I wondered if it had anything to do with me, personally. Maybe he was this nice to everyone he met up with.

      “I’ll be fine,” I repeated. “I do this all the time. And I have my umbrella.” I wasn’t even halfway through my sacred walk. I wasn’t about to abandon it on the chance there might be more to his politeness than a genetic predisposition to gentlemanly behaviour something he might have inherited from his father, and his father before him.

      I continued on down the road, feeling his eyes on my backside. I walked with a great deal of concentration. I suddenly felt tipsy and clumsy, as if I’d had too many drinks and might lose my balance and trip over my own feet. Or walk, absent-mindedly, off to one side of the road — on an angle that would reveal my self-conscious, school-girlish concern over what he thought of my ass.

      With all the grace of an insecure, ganglylegged teenager, I eventually walked out of his sight. I went to the end of the road, until my feet were soaked and my jeans were drenched, soaking wet and heavy, yet I felt light and serene in my puddly path — in the prolonged gaze Zeke had given me. In the chance he’d still be there when I turned around and headed back. In the very fact I could ask myself, What do I want to happen next?

      It had already been decided, on his first offer for a lift.

      No — before that.

      Before I ever set eyes on him. When I walked out my front door that morning, or some other morning. When I stepped outside and began putting distance between what had been and what was to come, and what I chose not to live without.

      It was only a question of would he still be there, or not? And how fast could I make it happen? I didn’t want to make it complicated. I barely wanted to talk. I only wanted to walk up to him and start.

      It wasn’t like Johnny Marks who came upon my life with some kind of fateful impact written all over his face. I wasn’t going to fall hard, and be forever changed by my experience. My head was still present, still walking with me, still demanding equal time with my libido, maybe more.

      It wasn’t like Hal, either, where everything was tied up in married love, measured in quantity and endurance not quality, or interest — just how often, as long as it was often enough, normal enough for married couples.

      It had more to do with a guy who laid me down in the grass by the roadside — another road, another time — a guy who told me I was getting too excited, that I didn’t have to move so much. Who said my urge to pee was part of it, part of losing my virginity, that he’d forgotten what a drag it was having a chick for the first time. Did I know I would bleed later? Did I know it gets better each time? But it didn’t. Not with him. Not while I continued to lay under his body, motionless, holding back urges I finally knew had nothing to do with peeing.

      I realized how fast I was walking and slowed my pace, left it up to the gods who had orchestrated the whole thing in the first place the rain, the road, the man with the shovel with the moist mouth. Planted in my path. Temptation waiting in the knoll before the turn where the rest of my life was waiting less than half a mile away.

      That night I’d be cooking spaghetti with tomato sauce, fighting with my kids to eat more, they never seemed to eat enough. I’d be playing the god of rain myself, holding the shower head above them in the bath while they pretended to be sailors at sea during a sudden storm. I’d be reading one more story, just one more story, about moons and bunnies and cats that wore funny hats. And then I’d be in the spare room, off the living room, sanding a washstand, sanding until two in the morning, at least until two in the morning, to get it done.

      I quickened my pace. I decided — yes — only the gods could make it rain. But only I could move my legs fast enough to get there. To get to him before he left. Before he drove off. Before all his work, his freshly laid sand and gravel, washed away in a rain that threatened to never stop.