Seventeen

The bottle of Tanqueray is almost empty even though we’d gotten it that morning, even though it’s just my wife and me now and neither of us are drinkers, or not in the real sense. It doesn’t help that it’s almost summer and already the heat is shimmering beneath the trees. The cicadas, the seventeen-year brood, are supposed to be everywhere. We thought we’d sit on the deck and listen for them—their song is supposedly tremendous—but they never emerged for us. The only sound is the rasp of our air conditioning unit. Then it, too, stops.

My wife is looking through a pair of binoculars for the large barn cat that wanders the fields behind our house. He’s white and silent and disappears in the tall grass. I used to joke with our daughter that he was a ghost. She was the one who named him Boo.

I don’t see him, my wife says and passes me the binoculars. I look through them, but the gin has plunged everything underwater. The fields, the trees—everything warps and ripples and is out of focus, even after I adjust the lenses. There’s a smudge in the grass. I work the focus dial, am able to sharpen the image a notch. Dark shapes hop about the smudge. Vultures.

We keep our cat’s ashes in the kitchen. He always slept with our daughter, like he was one of her stuffed animals she never outgrew. She would’ve turned seventeen this year. Now he’s on the dry bar in a cherry wood box that looks like it’d hold cigars. It’s not much of a shrine. We don’t do well with shrines.

Bottles of vodka and rum are beside the box, sometimes wine. My wife likes reds, merlots mostly. She sometimes drinks too much, it’s true, but it’s not a problem. We’re not mean drunks. Sometimes we’ll have sex. Sometimes we’ll just cry. Sometimes we’ll throw glasses, or fists, though never at each other. My hand still has stitches from where it cracked the bathroom mirror. But we love one another. Forgive one another.

I lower the binoculars. I see the vultures clearer without them. Without the cicadas, the evenings are still and stagnant. Sometimes we’ll hear gunshots from across the fields, but it’s the air brakes of trucks along the nearby highway that always make us flinch, the chop and growl of their engines. The vultures don’t care. They spread their wings languidly. It’s only when they take flight that we both see it, the bob of white cutting in and out of dead grasses. The birds alight to the nearest trees and watch as the ghost cat slips along the scrubby border separating our property from the fields. Boo’s still here, I say, and my wife cries a little before draining her glass and tossing it over the deck. I do the same. Our glasses don’t break but bounce on the soft, unmown grass. We’ll collect them in the morning. We always do.