Williams

The house really didn’t look that good.

For months I’d given the benefit of the doubt, the way that an unfinished structure takes on excuses when the people building it are in love. They built this house too close to Bill Williams mountain. His girl was tall and when she became pregnant, she didn’t bat an eye. She held joists up to drywall so he could hammer, her stomach round in the cold.

This was in the dusk of winter, when the dry air would go from one world of cold to the next with the drop of the sun. They had a collie who came to visit me at night. Her black, coarse hair was a secret…