Chapter One

Chapter One

Over, over, done and over. Finished. Jon Kepilkowski scratched his scalp with his fingernails. He'd shampooed, rinsed, and repeated, scrubbed under his arms and between his toes, soaped every surface, brushed under his nails, squirted into his ears. The water gushing from the showerhead was cooling. Reluctantly, he twisted the tap shut and worked himself over roughly with a towel.
From the bedroom window he watched his wife as she knelt in the dirt, her face obscured by her hat, her hands busy beneath a clump of pink flowers he couldn't name. He'd known her for twenty years, longer even if you counted the first two years of high school when it wasn't so much that he'd been afraid to say "Hello" to her, but more that she'd been so far out of his league that it hadn't occurred to him that opening his mouth and emitting speech in her direction was even an option. He'd not, he recalled, even uttered "Excuse me" the time he'd accidentally bumped her with his lunch tray, the contact between the orange plastic and the green wool of her sweater so intimate, so electric it had instantly closed his throat and jump-started his heart. He'd pretended at the time, he confessed years later, though she had no memory of the incident, that he'd not even noticed the collision had occurred. When she turned with a slight, involuntary gasp to see who'd jabbed her in the ribs, he'd turned in the same direction, as if obliviously searching the line behind him for a friend.
This morning she'd have been up for hours already, taking advantage of the early coolness. He wished he could see her expression under the brim of the hat. As always in these past few months, whe