Short Swoop, Long Line

70 ate’s two sons, engulfed in their hoodies, were waiting in line at the pizza counter behind Alex. It was startling to see them in person. Alex had never met them, only glanced at pictures of them around Kate’s house when he slept over on nights when the kids were with their dad. In the pictures, they were smiling, their arms around their mother, sporting polo shirts and respectable haircuts. Dad was not in the pictures. Now the sixteen-­ year-­ old wore all black. The younger one, thir­ teen maybe, was in camouflage. They weren’t smiling anymore. They wore flat-­ brimmed baseball caps over shaggy skater curls and fiction Short Swoop, Long Line Andrew Martin K Short Swoop, Long Line | 71 grim masks of teenage boredom. Alex ordered his slices and a local pale ale and sat down in a booth near the window. He opened Tender Is the Night, which was going quite slowly, and tried not to look over at the kids, who, of course, sat down at the table next to his. “Yo, can I get that Parmesan?” the older one said, suddenly looming over him. Jason, that was his name. Alex passed it to him. “Thanks,” he said. Then, under his breath, he added, “Faggot.” Alex tried to make his face look stern, like a disappointed adult. Jason and the little one—Matthew?—covered their mouths and mimed silent laughter. Alex was a twenty-­ four-­ year-­ old bookstore manager, which made him twenty-­ two years younger than Kate, the kids’ mother, who, she’d made clear, was not his girlfriend. He was too old to pick a fight with her children, but still young enough to feel the sting to his pride. The fact that he could say “I’m having sex with your mom,” the ultimate adolescent trump card, gave him some peace. The fact that he could also say “I’ve been wearing your mom’s panties all week,” and “I recently spent the night under your mom’s bed at her request,” was maybe more ambiguously trium­ phant for their age group. He read and listened to the boys discuss an episode of South Park in which the citizens of South Park are plagued by a sound that makes them uncontrollably flatulent. When the kids got up to leave, Alex looked up from his book. “You know, guys,” he said. “It’s not cool to commit hate crimes against random strangers.” “Stop checking out my dick, dude,” Jason said. Matthew giggled and looked at Alex expectantly. “I know your mother,” Alex said. “Cool, bro,” Jason said. He inexplicably switched to a terrible British accent. “You probably shouldn’t tell her you were examin­ ing our willies, mate.” “Oy, mate!” Matthew added, in an even less accurate accent. “Oy! You’re fatter than Batman!” They threw their plates in the trash and walked out of the restaurant. 72 | Andrew Martin alex and kate had started sleeping together three months earlier, after meeting at a scantly attended honky-­ tonk concert at the VFW Hall on Main Street. Kate was the executive director of a women’s health nonprofit in town, and Alex heard her “community con­ nection” PSA on the local NPR station twice a day. He told her, numerous times, that she was “too hot for radio”; she had a freshly bleached, very short haircut and tall boots. She was in the process of divorcing her husband due to a “whole truckload of bullshit,” and she’d talked to Alex at length about that, and about her recent obsession with Scandinavian crime fiction, and Gillian Welch, until the bar closed. Then she’d surprised him by inviting herself back to his messy apartment out by the Walmart. Once there, she ordered him to his knees. It was a strenuous, educational night, significantly more demanding than his previous casual encounters. He drove her back to her car in the morning. “Is that how things usually go with you?” he said. “Boy, you have no idea.” Alex had assumed this was a one-­ shot deal, something to be brought up in a drunken bout of sexual trivia someday. But instead they started spending...