Her face was enough of a certain way to stop her from being beautiful. Her eyes didn’t seem to blink enough. She and her mother wore cotton dresses and planted flowers around their house’s foundation. Earl drove his truck down their road—he would see her and imagine different bare parts of her.
Earl lived alone and had a young baldness that seemed to cover his whole rounded body. His sheets had developed nubs in the fabric that felt like dirt. He laid there at night and thought of Norma in the one-piece swimsuit she wore under the dress.
It was nearing July and one afternoon Earl walked over to tell Norma how nice the fireworks looked from the hill behind his house.
“Yeah,” Norma said.
“Well,” he said, “some of the lower-to-the-ground ones get blocked by the trees.”
“Oh,” she said.
“And there’s bugs.”
Norma was looking at the ground but still standing in front of him like they should be talking.
“Be sure to piss and things before we go up there,” Earl said, “or else you’ll be pissing in the trees and like I said there’s bugs.”
She came when it was getting dusky and the air was turning dry. Earl watched his truck kick up dust from the side-view mirror as he drove up the hill. Norma stared out the window at the trees and the dust. Earl had to open a gate near a stand of hemlock—they drove past the gate up a rutted road to a clearing.
They sat in the grass and waited for night. Swarms of gnats floated by them and they were quiet until things got darker. The few first rockets flew straight up before they blew out in blue and red circles.
“I think we get along,” he said and watched her thighs as she moved one leg over the other.
“You know what I heard about why men and women don’t usually get along?” Earl said. “I heard that back in the caveman days the man and woman would almost starve over the winter.”
Loud bangs were hitting their chests and backs before settling into the spaces behind them.
“All the man could think about was getting her baby off her and bashing it against the cave wall and eating it, but she wouldn’t let him do it,” he said. “She held that baby right up against her.”
Earl noticed the smoothness of Norma’s face and her hair, which had separated into thin curls above her eyes.
“But I think we get along fine,” he said.
The wind blew the branches back and forth at the edge of the trees. The woods were thick and black between them and the road. There was a red explosion followed by a white one and they both burned slowly as they bled toward the ground. She was quiet and let some weight off her hands and let more of her back lower onto the grass.