Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash
James liked Kushner well enough despite the orthodoxies that ruled the man’s life. His travels to Israel; his taking Friday evening to worship; his lounging around on Sunday morning when James was taking communion. Past sundown one Saturday evening, a blank spot in both their schedules, he found himself seated at the man’s breakfast table staring at cinnamon buns and a pot of black coffee. “I can’t have breakfast with you,” Kush said, “so this will have to do. Don’t worry, it’s decaf, but it tastes like the real thing.”
He had gathered intelligence that suggested James’s wife was about to leave him. The man she was leaving town with had talked, and Kush felt compelled as James’s good friend to let him know. “I speak to you not as the man who loves you, but as a concerned fellow being.”
James loved Kush, too, sort of. More a friendship borne of the need to mingle with a man in physical fashion—a man who could be discreet. But Saturday evening? That was pushing things. Luckily, Sue was visiting her friend Patrice; Zach was seeing a movie with friends; and Teddy was out who knew where, but probably the person he was running with was a Sutphin, a family that had seeded the town with men drawn to drink, gambling, and fornication, the last of which James could appreciate as long as it didn’t beget more Sutphins (though usually it did).
“I’m telling you, she’s leaving soon. I have it on very good authority.”
James considered it; Sue’s leaving him was indeed a possibility. They had barely talked of late, and when was the last time he had lain with her? The more he saw Kush—a handsome man a few years older, a proprietor, a miser, and a scold—the less he worked to please his wife.
“Does she even know about me?” Kush asked, and James wondered what he could say to the man that would begin to explain the complications having to do with the arrangements he and Sue had made, the conversations before and after their wedding, the bargaining, the accord.
“This isn’t the life I pictured,” Kush said. His dream had been to have a younger man live with him, a ward, someone he could adopt who would inherit his growing fortune. “Instead, I have a man who shows up when he shows up, if you know what I mean.” James knew what he meant, but it was all that he could give.
“So, what are we to do?”
“I like things the way they are.”
“Sneaking about? Skulking through dark woods? Cheating on your wife? You like that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Why did you settle down?”
“The usual reasons. Normalcy, respectability, children.”
“You’re as queer as I am.”
“I can pass.”
“I can, too. I do. Some women think me the most eligible man in town.”
“Someday you’ll have to introduce me to these women,” James said, and Kush said we run in different crowds.
“I need to go home,” James said.
“Sure,” Kush said. “Get about your skulking.”
He wrapped up the buns and gave them to James and sent him out the back door. James followed the path through the woods up the hill to the school. The buns he carried carefully. The night was damp, the sky black pitch, his shoes mashing sodden leaves. He skirted the back of the middle school and walked out the access road to the street that led to his house a few blocks away. The house was empty. He sat at the dining table and unwrapped the buns. Found a glass of milk. Ate them one at a time, large ones, very glazed and surprisingly delicious.
Sue walked in the back door in nice heels and a tight skirt, fashionable. She smiled and joined him at the table. Two buns were left. He watched her eat them, the glaze lining her lips, her tongue finding it and drawing it inside, her eyes looking at him.
“Where are the boys?” she asked, and he told her.
She took him by the hand and they did what they hadn’t done in quite some time, and when James finished it was with such force that he wondered why he ever needed more than this. They lay in bed holding hands.
“How was Patrice?” he asked.
“Same as always. And Mr. Kushner?”
“In a strange mood. Full of news.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
She was gone the next week.
Michael W. Cox is the author of a collection of short stories (Against the Hidden River) and a novel (The Best Way to Get Even), both published by Mammoth Press. His stories have appeared in ACM, Columbia, Passages North, Salt Hill, and West Branch, and his flash fictions in Atticus Review, Fiction Southeast, and Weave. He serves as editor of creative prose for Pennsylvania English and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.