He was supposed to walk her home, but Juliet leaves the party early, passing alone under the heavy trees that line the sidewalks. In college, Mike had demanded kisses. He had kissed her in coat closets on stairway landings. Once at a dance, he had pulled her behind a ballroom curtain so quickly no one had seen, and he had put his hand into her dress in the muffled closeness of the space. Juliet had never had to ask.
Her parents are surprised to see her but say nothing, and when they've gone to bed, Juliet sits at the kitchen table with her beer, her oatmeal cookie, and writes a letter as dry as she possibly can. She writes of baseball and gardening and the first heat wave of the season. She folds the paper, addresses the envelope, attaches a stamp, and drinks the beer while examining the neat, white package she has made. After she had backed away from Hank, he had reached for her, but if he had really wanted her, he would have grabbed. He would have made it easy.
Her hands are unsteady as she pours herself a second beer. The first time she's had a second since the war. She drinks this one and a third. She wonders what her parents will think when they see what's been taken from the refrigerator, but doesn't care in the way she normally would.
She pulls out a new sheet of paper and writes again to Mike. She writes, "Come home, Mike. Come home. Come home." She writes it over and over, and every sentence in between the words that seem to flow from her hand of their own volition.
She tells him how she misses him. She tells him she has often imagined him inside the plane, loving the thought of the clean cockpit, the controls that he understands so well. Juliet explains that every inch of Mike's skin is the most precious to her in the world. She tells him that her only use for God is the bargaining she can do with him, 10 years of her life for Mike to come back whole. She tells Mike she lies awake thinking of the way she could have kept him with her before he left. She thinks, why didn't poke out one eye while he slept? Why didn't I take an ax to an ankle? She tells him what he doesn't want to hear. That she did want a baby. That she wants to have something of him when he's dead.
She walks the letter to the mailbox as soon as she writes it and drops it in. She guesses she will be sorry, but this is the only thing that she can do.
The next morning, in church between her mother and father, and before which she tries to make herself feel as God, Juliet is sorry. She realizes what a mistake she has made. She should not have drunk the beer. She should not have sent the letter, and Hank, she's lost control.
Before Mike left, he spent a week with Juliet at her parent's, sleeping in the other bed in her girlhood room. Once to be alone, they walked the sidewalks then the air cooled after dinner, through Juliet's neighborhood and out of it, crossing Western Avenue and making their way along a deserted main street to the high school. They broke into the football locker room where Mike could still find his way around the maze of lockers and showers, even in the dark, and they made a bed of coarse white towels. They had found them baled with twine which Mike cut through with his car key.
In the dim evening, light coming through the slotted windows, Juliet could see a light bulb covered by a small cage, and when she stood, she felt the reassuring damp settling into her underpants. She laughed aloud, "I can't believe we're doing it here."
On the walk home, Mike told her joking stories of the torture he had both inflicted and endured in the locker room. The toilet bowl drownings, stolen clothes, the merciless taunting, the towels twisted into whips.
