When Buddy meets Jenny Lynn, she has a hole in the side of her ankle about as big around as a nickel, a shallow well of gore at the end of the knobby bone. She doesn’t seem to mind it too much; she is laughing a lot and when Buddy thinks of her now, he thinks of her laughing. She tells him that her leg got stuck under a car, just now. Buddy asks to see it and she lifts her pant leg and pulls down her bloody sock to show him. The bleeding has stopped and the sock is starting to get stiff. It peels away from the skin, letting the fresh wound finally breathe. 

“Holy shit,” he says. 

She laughs. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” 

The ankle is starting to swell, there’s purple from the bruising and black from the asphalt, or maybe it’s from the tire. He can’t tell, but now he’s picturing her flesh and bone being ground into the road and this makes him feel sort of sick inside. It looks pretty bad. 

“What the fuck,” he says. “How is it not broken?”

She laughs. “She ran me over.” She points behind her, into the house. “I don’t know.”

“Jesus.” Now Buddy is laughing too. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jenny Lynn says. “You wanna get stoned?”

They are sitting on the front porch, on a ratty couch that no one admits to bringing here. It’s May and there’s a June bug banging against one of the screen windows and there’s a broken pint glass on the windowsill and cigarette butts on the wooden floor. There are piles of incense ash where the floor meets the wall and stacks of little yellow sticks on the sill, left from when the Nag Champa burned away. Buddy takes a new stick and lights it with a paper match and blows out the match and drops it. Watching it fall through the slats of the floor, he wonders if there’s anything flammable beneath them. 

“You wanna get stoned?” she asks again. 

He looks to her on the other side of the couch and raises his eyebrows, forehead crinkling, lids heavy and red in the whites of his eyes like webs of paprika. He blinks.  

She pulls out a clean little glass pipe and sets it on the sill next to the broken pint and she takes out a handblown jar with a cork lid and a bunch of stinky buds inside and tosses it onto Buddy’s lap. It lands just barely on one of his testicles and he flinches, wincing in pain as Jenny Lynn watches this happen in slow motion, her face distorting in horror. 

“Oh Lord!” She says this and reaches over to him and puts her hand on his shoulder. 

He makes a face and he laughs and brushes it off, says it’s fine—neither one of them wanting the other to feel bad or wrong or embarrassed. 

She takes the jar back and packs a bowl and gives it to him to light. While he smokes, she takes out a prescription bottle and shakes it, the green-coated pills rattling against the orange plastic, a sweeter sound he never heard. She sets the bottle, so gently, she balances it on his leg, just above where the blue jean is worn white at his knee. 

“Let’s get fucked up,” she says. 

They become fast friends and stay that way for a year, though Buddy knows by now that she wants more. This scares the shit out of him because he is twenty years old and still a virgin, and it’s all very confusing. The way he sees it fluctuates. Sometimes it’s because he’s shy. Sometimes it’s because women are terrifying to him, sex is terrifying to him. He still thinks of the girl in grade school, who ruffled his hair with her hand, the plastic bracelets dangling off her wrist. Riding his bike home afterward, feeling weird. Sitting next to a girl at the movies in middle school, feeling weird. On the couch with a girl in high school, feeling weird. 

Other times it’s some misplaced romantic pride, like he’s waiting for “The One.” 

What does that even mean? he wonders. Fairy tales from his youth. 

Horrified by the whole deal, he just wants to get it over with. So they finally have sex.

It’s late July and it’s hot and it’s sticky and Buddy will close all the windows in his room so the neighbors can’t hear and they will sweat together with David Bowie playing in the background. He’s high on OxyContin, and he won’t remember how it went.

They’ll keep having sex, and it will mostly be fine. Neither one of them will ever call the other their boyfriend, or their girlfriend. They are just “Buddy.” They are just “Jenny Lynn.” 

Some weeks later, Buddy loses a condom inside of her. He’s high and gone soft and he can’t feel anything and he doesn’t realize it’s missing until he gets up to go to the bathroom. Standing weak-kneed over the toilet he goes to take the thing off and it’s already off. He looks around. He goes back into the living room and looks around. He’s on his hands and knees crawling around the floor while Jenny Lynn smokes a cigarette, one hand holding it toward the open window, the other running lightly through her pubic hair. 

Buddy starts feeling under the couch cushions. 

She asks him what he’s doing.

Buddy looks at her. He can’t think of how to say it. 

She asks him if he lost a pill.

He looks at her, panic rising within him. 

“Do you feel weird?”

She smiles, sweetly. “What do you mean?”

“Like, inside?”

“Do I feel weird inside?”

“Like in your guts.”

“You’re crazy,” she says, and stubs out her cigarette. 

He puts his hands on her shoulders, looks into her eyes. “I think I lost it inside you.”

“You came inside me?”

“No, baby, the condom came off, it must be inside of you.”

He can tell that he’s scaring her and this opens something new in him, something unexpected. What would be his own fear melts at her feet and he feels only calm, and strength, and the need to protect her and reassure her and in this moment, he knows that he loves her. 

“What do I do?!” She meets his eyes. “Get it out, baby!”

“Okay,” he says.

He puts his hand behind her neck and feels fine hairs against his palm. He kisses her forehead and then he puts two fingers inside of her and tries to find the condom but he can’t. The fear is back in him now and never in his life did he see himself in a situation like this. Never did he see himself in love. He leans over and kisses her on the mouth and kisses her on the cheekbone and kisses her on the eyebrow. He reaches deep inside of her, his lips resting now against the folds of her ear and he says, “There it is baby, I got it.”

Within the year, they get pregnant. Jenny Lynn finds out at the doctor’s office, when she’s there for undiagnosed pain issues. She’s just hoping they’ll give her some pills, but the doctor makes her take a urine analysis. “You’re five weeks pregnant,” the doctor says. 

“Damn that’s crazy,” Jenny Lynn says. “Can you give me anything for the pain?” 

She’s nervous about a baby, she never thought of the realities of pregnancy. She’s excited though, she’s thinking they can do it, she’s excited to tell Buddy about it. She can clean up, she thinks. She waits for him in the kitchen of their now-shared apartment. 

He wants an abortion. “I grew up on government cheese and crappy white bread,” he says. “I’m not raising a kid like that.” He’s angry about it, and remembering things from his childhood. Getting teased for hand-me-down sneakers. Stomach grumbling in classes and everyone looking at him. Dollar bills stuffed in his locker vents with lewd notes on them. 

Jenny Lynn just stares at him. 

“We’re bums,” he tells her. “We’re poor people.” He’s getting worked up now and Jenny Lynn steps back. She’s not crying. She’s mad too. She sees her father in Buddy for the first time, and it breaks her heart. “We don’t know how to do anything, Jenny. We can’t care for anyone.”

Two weeks later she has a miscarriage. 

It’s just before Halloween and a thin layer of snow covers the ground.

It will melt away by morning. 

Four years later she has gone to school and finished a nursing degree. She gets a job as an RN in a senior living facility. Buddy is working as a bartender in a hotel until one night he falls down a cement stairwell and breaks his leg. He’d been stealing bottles of liquor from the supply closet and hiding them in a room of the hotel that was under repair, sneaking around and drinking them between room service calls. One of the hotel guests finds him at the bottom of the stairwell, sucking on lemon slices he carries in his pocket and writhing in pain. 

They’ve been living apart for the last year, but after this, Jenny Lynn moves in with him again. To help him recover. Together they blow through his prescription Dilaudid in a week and she starts stealing pills from the old folks’ home. 

She’s caught and fired; she loses her nursing license. 

She takes the city bus to Applebee’s and meets a guy in the parking lot and buys some heroin. She gets out of his car and finds a big pine tree and crawls underneath its wide skirt of branches. She puts her hands against the tree trunk, sap sticks to her palms. She lowers herself to the bed of brown pine needles and turns and leans against the trunk. She fixes up a shot. Two hours later someone calls the cops about a dead body outside Applebee’s. When they get there they find Jenny Lynn, her feet sticking out from beneath the edges of the tree. 

She wakes up and tries to hide the syringe that’s still clutched in her hand, the shoelace she was using to tie off, the little aluminum cooker. The cops are pissed because she doesn’t have any heroin left, no actual drugs. But there’s enough paraphernalia to arrest her on possession charges. Later they claim there was still junk in the syringe and give her first-time felony possession. She spends a week in jail. She is released after pleading guilty and agreeing to residential AODA treatment and probation.

The night before she goes to rehab, they listen to Mariah Carey’s “Daydream” on Buddy’s little cassette player and when the B side ends they flip it over and listen to it again and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it again. Both of them have core memories of this album from their childhood. Both of them know that they’re making a new memory, now, in real time. They know that they’re trying to hold on to something. 

She calls him from the treatment center and tells him that everything’s going well and that she loves him. She writes him letters; she keeps them light. She doesn’t ask how he is doing, instead she says, “I hope you are doing well.” She never says she misses him. She feels a weight lifted from her shoulders. But she doesn’t know how to talk about it, what it means, what it says about the two of them. She goes to meetings and she feels something positive in her life, not for the first time, but it’s been a while. It’s right on time. She has faith again. She connects with women in the house and she gets their phone numbers when they leave. She makes friends. She’s not sure if being totally sober is possible, but it sounds nice. Buddy calls and she can hear the dope in his voice. She can see him, through the phone; his eyes half closed, the spit on his lips. She can hear him suck his cheeks. Click his tongue. It’s disgusting. He doesn’t even realize it. 

She’s embarrassed for him. Most days he’s sad—dark and morbid and she wonders if they shouldn’t talk anymore. Her counselor agrees. His name is Ted and he’s balding, usually red in the face, with a kind smile. Jenny Lynn thinks he’s stoned all the time. But she also thinks that it’s none of her business, and never asks about his own sobriety. Ted tells her that it’s too hard, when one person gets clean and the other doesn’t. He tells her that relationships are the leading cause of relapse. He tells her that you can’t have any reservations. Ted’s office is filled with pictures of single lions, looking off into sunsets, looking content, at last, maybe, finally. 

One day Buddy calls and he asks her if she remembers the baby. “What if we coulda done it, Jenny? What if we coulda made it work? It’s my fault you lost it.” He’s drunk. 

She cries, sitting in the creaky wooden chair outside the women’s rooms, in front of the old wooden desk where the phone waits. Names and numbers and dates scrawled into the desk, some scratched raw into the wood. 

Her roommate takes the phone from her, the long, curled cord reaching over Jenny Lynn’s shoulder as she sets her face on the desk.

“She can’t talk to you right now,” the roommate says. 

When she gets out of rehab, Jenny Lynn moves in with her grandmother. The same grandmother that she lived with after losing her mom to cancer. After her dad traded his tools for an old shell camper and left Wisconsin, to live in Montana, without her. At four years old, this might be her first memory: she stands in front of her father’s legs, smelling the engine oil in his jeans, smelling the engine oil under his fingernails and the tobacco-stained yellow fingers that lay on her shoulders as together they wait for Grandma Maggie to accept her. Her father is crying, and squeezing her shoulders. “Take her, Maggie,” he says. “Take her from me. I can’t keep up.” Jenny Lynn is shivering, though bundled in a snow suit. She stands on her grandmother’s porch like a little stuffed toy. 

“Goddamn it, Joe,” her grandmother says. The same grandmother that took her to see Disney’s Pocahontas in the movie theater when she was six years old. The same grandmother that took her to McDonald’s whenever she got A marks on her report cards. That gave her an old thin wedding ring, the diamond chip almost invisible, and told her someday she’d know. That told her—when Jenny Lynn was awake all night, another sleepless night, another anxiety attack—to breathe. To think of the good things. To believe in the Lord and to believe in herself and that if she really waited, and had faith, she’d find the things she was looking for. She stares up at the glow stars on her ceiling, she looks over at her grandmother. “But I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” she says. 

She stalls for a couple of days after getting out, before seeing Buddy again. She picks him up and within five minutes, he asks her to split some dope with him. “I don’t want to,” she says. 

He doesn’t understand what she means. 

“I’m sick of this bullshit.” 

Buddy picks at his fingernails. “Are you mad at me?”

“Drugs, Buddy, I’m sick of doing drugs.”

He looks out the passenger seat window, where he sits in his first girlfriend’s grandmother’s minivan. She’s driving it without a license. They’re parked in front of his own grandfather’s house. He doesn’t understand what she means. Why doesn’t she want to get high?

A few months later, Buddy checks himself into rehab. The same one she went to. She’s not clean anymore, but she won’t admit it to him. He would never say he’s doing it for her, he’s not. But seeing her when she got out was the closest thing to hope he’d had in years. Something changed. Something was possible. After a week he’s allowed to use the phone and he calls Jenny Lynn to tell her how well it’s going. He tells her that he’s ready and that he wants to get married and buy a house and get a dog and make a bunch of babies. He tells her that he’ll do anything. 

She is eleven weeks pregnant. She says nothing. 

When Buddy gets out, the baby is gone. She says nothing. She can’t.   

He stays clean, he gets a job, he gets a mountain bike that’s too small and rides it around town making amends. He stays clean; Jenny Lynn does not. 

She violates the terms of her parole; she ends up back in jail.

She ends up back in rehab. 

She meets a guy in treatment who’s tall and skinny and wears expensive shoes. He’s got tattoos all over his arms that look like they’ve been there since high school. Buddy is embarrassed by this guy and he knows something’s going on but he just sits there quietly when he goes to visit Jenny Lynn in rehab and she introduces them. She tells him that the guy wrote a novel. She tells him that he lost his father. She tells him that they’re just friends. She kisses Buddy on the cheek and thanks him for coming to visit. 

“I’ve got to go to group now, Buddy,” she says. 

He says that’s good and he says that he’ll see her at the same time next week and before he leaves, he tries to talk to this new guy. Buddy asks him if he wants to stay clean.

“Yeah,” the guy says. “I guess.” 

Jenny Lynn leaves rehab early. She and the guy she met get a little apartment together, the bottom floor of a house down east of the train tracks, about three blocks from the park. Buddy goes to see her and she shows him around, shows him the kitchen with the little window over the sink, shows him the little salt and pepper shakers. A chicken and an egg. He fixates on the coffee pot. He imagines them getting up in the morning, waking up together, talking about what they need from the grocery store or when they have to go to work or . . . he imagines them getting drunk together, getting high. He pictures them honking blow off the little yellow plates that she’s showing him now. They have fuzzy ducklings printed on them, all in a row, following their mother to a pond. She shows him the living room and the couch and they have sex on it and then they lie there together. Buddy looks over and out the window and sees the guy standing on the front porch. He can see the guy’s jean jacket through the window, just his torso, just standing there. Then the guy is gone. Buddy gets dressed quickly and when he leaves, the guy is getting out of his car in the street, walking toward the house, acting like he just got there. 

Later that night Buddy starts getting text messages from a number he doesn’t know. They say that he has a small penis. They say that he’s a junkie and a loser. They say that Jenny Lynn claims Buddy raped her. He gets scared and blocks the number. He blocks Jenny Lynn’s number too. He will occasionally hear from friends that the couple moved down to Whitewater. He hears that they’re fucked up all the time. 

He hears that Jenny Lynn has overdosed in the back of someone’s car. 

He hears that she jumped out of a window. 

He hears all sorts of things. 

A year later his phone rings and Jenny Lynn’s number pops up. He stares at the phone as it rings and then he picks it up, unsure of how she got through. They talk for a minute and it’s fine and then another minute and it’s fine and then Buddy starts yelling. He freaks out, screaming into the phone. When he hangs up, he hates himself, and has no idea what he was yelling about. 

He decides to go to college. He’ll get a bachelor’s degree, even though everyone has one these days and he’s not really sure what it will do for him, but he’s sure it will do something. He thinks about going for psychology, or anything that might help him to be a counselor. He thinks maybe he’d make a good counselor. For other drug addicts, an AODA counselor. But he doesn’t want to work for the state; he doesn’t want to talk to cops all the time, be nice to them. He’s not sure how any of this works but a friend tells him that that’s not a problem. That you just start somewhere. That you figure it out as you go and all of a sudden, it’s over, and you’ve found your place in the world.

Fake it till you make it, like they say in the Program. 

He thinks of how much his own counselors helped him. Ted, and Ken, and Steve from the outpatient program. He thinks of where he would be without them. 

He runs into Jenny Lynn’s best friend at the grocery store, the one that ran over her ankle with a car. He sees her pushing her cart toward him and he sees two little kids in the cart and his heart falls to the floor of the store and rests there on the waxed linoleum and he runs it over with his shopping cart. A wheel on the cart starts squeaking. They stop and talk, and she tells Buddy that Jenny Lynn is doing great, that she really is doing great. She’s trying to get her nursing license back and she’s sober or supposedly. Yes, she’s still with the guy but she’s sick of him and he’s drunk all the time and he pisses the bed, or so the friend says. 

When Buddy drives home he thinks he should be more pleased about all that than he is. 

He gets a voice message one day and it’s from Jenny Lynn from a different number. She just wants to say hello. A couple weeks later she texts back and asks him if he would consider getting a cup of coffee with her. He says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She says that she understands. But her heart breaks again, maybe for the last time. She knows by now that he is the love of her life, and that she’s lost him. She’s heard nothing for two years but good news about him, how great he’s doing, how happy he is. How he’s a totally different person. But she knows better, he’s not different, he’s who he always was, who she saw so clearly, all that time ago, when they met on the front porch. She wants him to be happy, like he was back then. 

Some time goes by and Buddy thinks about it. He thinks that maybe he’s just being stubborn, and that there’s no good reason not to see an old friend. He starts texting with Jenny Lynn and they try to decide where to meet. They pick a neutral city that has no connection for either one of them. A sort of no-man’s-land. Buddy tells her that he’s got a bum leg again, and they joke about all that time ago, when he was a no-good drunk and she was a junkie and they did their best to take care of each other. It comes back to him, truly and sincerely, how much they cared for one another. How sweet they could be to one another. How they helped each other. He remembers all the times that he couldn’t score and how sick he was and she would always show up with a little something, she would always help him get well. She always came through for him. On the phone, she asks him how he hurt his leg and he tells her about the shitty apartment he lives in now and how everything is always broken and how hard it is to get a maintenance guy over. He tells her the place is pretty crummy but he likes it all right. He tells her that things are pretty good these days, alone. He tells her about the landlord’s buddy who looks like Hoggle from Labyrinth and that he’s the closest thing to a repair man the landlord will send but that he’s a nice guy too. Buddy likes the guy. But he came over to replace a faucet, finally, and didn’t tighten the fixtures enough, and water sprayed everywhere. Buddy ran about, grabbing towels and moving artwork and yelling into the basement to turn the goddamn water back off. He slipped on the linoleum kitchen floor and all 200 pounds of him went down at once with his leg beneath him and he swears he heard something snap. 

She laughs with him, as he tells her this.

When Jenny Lynn and Buddy finally meet again, he is thirty-three years old and she is thirty-one. He’s been clean and sober for three years, five months, and seventeen days—if you want to get specific. She says that she’s been sober for seven months and he doesn’t ask any more questions about that. He didn’t ask in the first place. He tells himself it’s none of his business really. He has ruined her life enough; he’s realized that through the years. She’d have been better without him, less of a mess. The whole problem in the past was worrying about what she was doing, trying to control her—disguised as protecting her, worrying about her. He wonders about the guy that supposedly wrote a novel. Buddy wonders if she ever saw it. He doesn’t ask about that either. About him. 

He just wants to be here with her now. It’s mid-October and it’s crisp outside and the air is full of memories. He’s thinking about their first baby again, the things he said. The snow on the ground and how it melted so fast. On her drive there, Jenny Lynn thinks about this too and she thinks about their second, and how she’ll never tell him. She can’t.

Buddy’s been walking without crutches for a few days now and he knows that he’s pushing it. Everything seems to be fine until he parks his little red truck in Fox Lake, across the street from the coffee shop, and he gets out and he starts walking across the road without thinking about how fast the traffic is moving. He doesn’t realize until he’s in the middle of it all that he’s going to have to run to make it across. He hasn’t tried to run since tearing the ligament in his leg, and when he does, something pops again. Like shooting a rubber band from your thumb, he feels it let go. He hops and hobbles across the road, wincing in pain, swearing. 

Inside the coffee shop, Buddy finds a booth facing the door. He waits for Jenny Lynn patiently, worrying about his leg only. When she comes in, he sees her but doesn’t get up until she is standing at the end of the table and when he does, she can tell that he’s in pain. He hugs her and he’s surprised that it feels normal. He’s been worried about the hug. About whether their bellies would press together. How long they would hold it. What if he got a hard-on, or what if it just felt wrong? What if her hair brushes his face? Would she still smell faintly of patchouli? Lavender? He’s grateful right then, for the pain in his leg, distracting him from this. But it all happens fast and normal. She is very nervous. He wants to comfort her. He says he is fine.  

Buddy’s birthday was last week and Jenny Lynn has brought with her a homemade card and a BIC pen from the nursing home she is working at again, with probational restrictions. She almost has her license back. She wants to be a traveling nurse, if she ever really gets it back. 

“I remember your birthday every year, Buddy,” she says. He nods before she can finish her sentence. “Every year,” he says back to her. “I remember yours too.” He doesn’t think she’ll believe him, that that’s true, but it is and always has been.

They stay there together for an hour before he has to get up to use the bathroom. She asks if he wants help and he says no, but as he walks down the hall, putting his hand against the wall every other step, it’s clear that he’s seriously injured again. That the leg is not healed. That he has made it worse. He takes a piss, leaning lopsided against the wall of the stall. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared. He comes back and she is at the table, smiling at him, quite still. She’s calm now. She’s so happy, just to see him. She smiles at him as he limps back to the table. 

“Buddy,” she says. “I’ve got to tell you something. I fucked up back there Buddy . . .”

“Not so, Jenny Lynn.”

“Yes Buddy, I made a mistake. I wasn’t honest. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“No,” he says. “No, it wasn’t like that. I’m sorry too, Jenny.” 

They get up to leave, and Jenny Lynn heads to the bathroom. Buddy walks to the front door, weaving between tables, putting his hands on them for support. Outside he stands in the sharp wind, early hints of snow blowing through the road, dancing like dandruff against his hands and his face. He knows he can’t make it across the street, back to his truck, not alone, not in traffic. He doesn’t want her to help him. He doesn’t want to need her for anything. But she comes outside now and she stands there squinting into the street. She clears her throat. He looks at her and says “okay” and she smiles and puts her arm around him. He leans into her and she feels strong, she smells good, like she always has—warm.