I start to hear bits and pieces when I stay over and Mitch thinks I'm sleeping. Our neighbor, Dennis, and my Mitch sit out on the porch smoking cigarettes until four in the morning. But the plans don't seem real to me because Mitch has doubts, you know, he’s thinking about money, losing money while he’s gone, and the fact that I'm supposed to be there full-time come June. And the trip, what do you know, it’d be set for June. Angie, Dennis’s girlfriend, says she knew it was coming. Dennis goes on a bike trip every year, and this year will be no exception. Mitch isn’t quite sold, but Angie and I begin to worry about what will happen when they leave, how we must wait for them to come back.

Weeks go by and Angie and I are cooking for the boys one night. They seem nervous, and after we eat our meatless chili the boys sit us down and tell us they’re going bicycling for a month out in the northwest. Once the words leave their lips they get excited and celebrate with a smoke and I'm so annoyed I take a hit and Angie cries but no one sees but me. I take her in the spare bathroom, the one that will belong to me in June, which now has no toilet because they’re working on it, and I tell her it’s not going to happen, this trip, the bicycles, there’s no way. Mitch can barely run down the block without a coughing fit, and Dennis started smoking because Mitch does. There’s just no way, I tell her. She still cries though and I ask her to help me serve some ice cream because we better be supportive. We serve the boys vanilla ice cream in blue bowls and Angie’s scoop melts and drips until it’s a puddle, just like her.  

The boys continue to meet after dinner each night and they talk plans; training, equipment, route, cost, etc. They seem to have their shit together and it’s more serious than anything Mitch has ever been involved in. Once in grad school he tried to unionize all the grad students. We even drove up to Tampa in my mom’s car to go to this convention for the Florida Graduate School Teachers’ Union and got all this information and pamphlets and listened to people talk about healthcare benefits and salaries. Mitch got sick from some old M&Ms and got mad at me for not taking good enough notes when he was gone because he went to throw up.  

It was the first time we stayed in a hotel room together and every promise he made about the trip was not kept. He said we’d go swimming at the beach but instead we left early the next day because he wanted to get home and start researching more opportunities to unionize down south. He told me the room was free but that wasn’t real so I had to fork over the money since he didn't have a credit card. “You can’t have bad credit if you don't have a credit card,” he always said. I told him it didn't work like that, but he only believed what his sponsor Ruben told him. He prayed to that man like a God, and I often wondered about that verse in Leviticus where they told you not to worship false idols, or was it Exodus, or both? They were always warning against that sort of thing all over the bible. But anyway, even as Mitch drove down 95 back to Boca, back to his shit hole apartment that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on for some reason, back to his cigarettes and black coffee dripping into the damn pot all day long, he didn't look half as happy then and sound merely as excited as he was about this bike trip. This bike trip was going to change his life. It would be the spiritual awakening he never had.  

The boys started showing us movies, regularly, about bicycling; people who had bicycled across cities, states, countries, the world. Most of them had to cut their trips short because they got sick, like really sick, and not just overuse injuries, but acute mountain sickness or rare spider bites from camping or foodborne illnesses and stomach catastrophes. The boys swore they’d quit smoking too, as part of their training, and that the clean, mountain air would make it easier to not smoke. “We’re not gonna want to pollute the beautiful air out there!” Mitch promised, a promise I knew he didn't intend to keep. 

Angie and I decided to make June about us, to read and write and get what we came here for. What else are we supposed to do for a month while our boys go out and find themselves? I tell Angie we can use my parents’ clubhouse on the beach and we can learn to cook more things and we can finally get some writing done and we can probably get jobs and save cash. Angie applies for a serving job and gets it right off the bat. I apply to be a manager at a clothing store at the mall and after a few weeks they call me and say I have the job as long as I intend to stay longer than summer. We start work mid-May, in order to get used to a new schedule, in order to get used to the boys not being around.  

They each ask us for a totem, something they can put on their bikes that’ll remind them of us. I give Mitch a Donald Duck sticker that I had from one of our trips to Disney World, and Angie gives Dennis a sunflower and Dennis gets irritated because it’s not so easy to stick on the bike but he gets duct tape and slaps it on to make due. “If they want to remember us that means they’ll probably miss us,” Angie says. She’s so damn hopeful it could make your heart explode.  

When I move in, it’s such a small thing, it’s like it never even happened. All my stuff goes up into the spare closet in the “office” while Mitch simultaneously packs up for his own trip. The only thing I really remember is that there was no food in the house on moving day. All I had with me was a bag of Cheetos Puffs that I ate on the couch when we were all done. I was reluctant to share, the last thing that’d be truly mine. But I did anyway. 

I wear a green dress when the boys leave. Angie is at work at the diner on the early shift, and I see the boys off, waving a dishtowel from the upstairs balcony. The boys head out in a car that’ll take them to the airport, and from there they’ll take a flight, and when they land they’ll build their bikes at baggage claim and begin their ride. At work, I busy myself with removing sensors from the legs of jeans that make them stick together, turning whoever tries to put them on into a mermaid, a one-legged freak. Mimi, the other manager, blonde and blue-eyed and newly pregnant, tells me I can have the day off if I want. She’s a Christian and sympathizes heavily with the whole ordeal. “A man should never leave his woman like that,” she said a few weeks earlier. Her boyfriend was from New Jersey and was trying very hard to stay sober so he could be a dad. I was supposed to meet him once but he didn't show up because he had a broken toe. Mimi lets me go on break without clocking out and I try to call Mitch. He doesn’t answer and I figure he must be on his flight.  

I spend the rest of the day shipping out orders; printing slips and finding merchandise for customers who are too lazy to come in and do it themselves, packing it up in blue and white packages, and waiting for the mailman to come. When he arrives, he slides the packages into a big burlap sack that looks like it’s from the Wild West. He waves his hand and I watch them fall into the dark, those packages, going to Chicago, to New York, Kentucky, Nebraska, Idaho.

Angie and Dennis do not speak. She tries calling but he never answers and never calls her back. She gets so thin I can see her ribs when we go to the beach together. The one time we go to my parent’s clubhouse it rains after only a few minutes and when we come home she doesn’t want to be alone, so I offer her a popsicle and she says no but stays while I eat mine, the red goo dripping awkwardly down onto my bathing suit. I think we are pretty close to hell at this point. 

We spend time together but our minds are out there—with our boys. In school, things had been so natural. The flirtatious environment of a graduate school poetry seminar was easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But living our lives was a different story. We have all this free time we don't really want. We thought it was all we wanted. But now all we want is the smell of smoke on a t-shirt, dirty socks on the floor. By some miracle of God Mitch actually calls me every night before I go to sleep or he least sends a message of his love if he can’t get the chance to be alone to talk. He tells me how hard it was to climb Steven’s Pass; how he wishes he was home with me in our place, together. The distance is making him love me more in a way he wasn’t able to when I was next to him. He used to get so angry with me sometimes; he would throw things across the room, not at me, but so that I knew his force, his power over me. On the phone now, I feign calm and support, and it works, it makes me appear strong. Perhaps that’s all he ever wanted, a strong woman by his side no matter what. 

He tells me about his travels when he calls, the things he ate throughout the day, the number of cigarettes he smoked and how it’s diminishing. He tells me he got me a gift, something really special, something he’s really proud of. The only thing I can guess is an engagement ring. Maybe he’s finally ready to commit, fully, to me, so when he gets back I won’t just be someone who happens to live there, but his fiancé, his soon to be wife. I know him mostly from the fiction he wrote in school, the work he doesn't do anymore because he works part-time in an office selling ad space. He wrote beautiful science fiction about creatures that were not human, but become human by doing human things, like saving a life, falling in love. His characters, if they ever killed someone, would turn into dust. I read his thesis project in less than a day. I was so wrapped up in all that, but as a couple, we didn't talk much. We existed together because I didn't want to be alone. I was scared of loneliness, how a girl might age and never marry.

I'm sure he went to a store and saw a ring, maybe something untraditional, something not meant to be an engagement ring, but a ring that fit his style, our style, and he would give it to me when he came back. He might be so excited about it. He might not be able to wait. 

And then one day Angie gets the idea to go out for dinner. I pretend to forget to take off a blouse I had borrowed from the store and we go to a pizza place on the Ave. We’re only halfway through the bike trip, two more weeks to go. It feels like it’s been weeks, months. We’re not doing well. Even though Mitch reaches out, I feel slighted, like I’ll never forgive him for this.  

“I didn't want to tell you this,” Angie says, looking up from her slice, “but there’s a storm out in Oregon. Where the boys are now, from Dennis’s plans, at least.”

Our server refills my Cherry Coke. I imagine lightning striking bikes.  

“Have you heard from them today?” Angie continues.

And now that I think about it, no, I usually don't hear from Mitch until much later. I excuse myself to the bathroom and try his cell. I don't want to do this in front of Angie. I'm afraid it’d be too much for her to handle. He doesn’t answer.

I come back to the table and it’s unspoken but decided that we will take the rest of our pizzas to go.  

We walk to the parking lot and find my car, a blue Mustang, and before I can unlock it, someone pins me against the door. My pizza box goes flying into the night and a hand covers my mouth. Nothing from college self-defense comes back to me, but my instinct is to buck my foot backwards into his groin. He falls to the ground in pain. I think to run back to the restaurant, call the cops, but I get in the car and Angie gets in the passenger side. We drive off.

I expected Angie to have let out a scream. She stares ahead while I drive.

“I'm okay,” I say. “He was probably on crack, it happens out here.” I had never been mugged before, pinned against a vehicle, handled in that kind of way. I feel my stomach churn. But I must keep driving home.

“You know,” Angie says, “my plan wasn’t to go to grad school and become a waitress.”

“I know,” I say, and realize she must be in shock. “You’re going to be a real writer. I am too. We just have to get through this part.”

My lip is bleeding. I check it in the mirror and it hurts more after I see it happening.

I imagine the boys, everything lost after the storm that they weathered in tents built out of branches and palm fronds. I imagine Mitch with a bandana around his neck, feeling like a pioneer, his spiritual awakening reinforced by the storm, the light rain that follows the next day, the next few days after. The boys walk into town and buy a beer, even though Mitch has six years clean, and they drink to good health, to the future. They forget about us, Angie and me, so easily. We are so small and so far away. We are the past.

They are no longer here to protect us. Maybe they never were protecting us, but we felt safe somehow, safer than we do now. 

Mitch sends me pictures of Montana. He says he might lose service on the last leg of the journey, but that he’ll call me from the airport before his flight leaves for Florida, to come back to home to me.

I spend the last few days practicing being surprised when he pulls out the ring, when he stops on the steps, gets down on a knee, and asks me the most important question of my life. The day of his return I buy a long cotton dress from the store, but end up wearing shorts and a t-shirt when the time actually comes. It gets late fast and I bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies, his favorite. As I pull the tray from the oven, I hear the car pull up outside.

Mitch comes up the stairs. His hair has grown. His beard is thick. He looks weathered, tan, exhausted. We kiss and he carries me to the room, places me on the bed that’s been so big for myself all this time without him in it at night. He opens his backpack and takes out a plastic bag, grabs from inside a t-shirt with dancing Idaho potatoes on it. It’s too small for me, a child’s fit, and he hands it to me, more excited than I’ve ever seen him. I have trouble looking him in the eye, so I look behind him at the wall, the beige wall I stared at for the last month. I notice the texture of its craters, how it reminds me of the moon, a lunar landing, the exploration of planets and stars. It somehow seems more beautiful in the dark, like it’s got something to say.