Sweet Cheeks

In the end, all she had was, well, the whatnots: doodads as odd and silly and, to use her daddy’s phrase, downright unnecessary as tits on a teacup, whatchamacallits useless and excessive enough to offend a soul as merry and rich as Old King Cole. To her, it was “stuff,” no more sensible to have than was a bikini at the North damn Pole. But afterwards — after he’d moved to Dallas, and July had turned into November, and there was scarcely an A, B or C about him she did not dream of — she found herself unable to junk any of it: which, as she told the plenty in Las Cruces who listened, was the problem, wasn’t it?

She’d met him, the lawyer, at the Southside Johnny concert at the Pan Am Center at NMSU, and later, when they knew each other by first name and she could see he wasn’t just a spiffed-up cowboy with spit for brains, he took her to EI Patio, a bar in Old Mesilla, and, what with his talk about, quote, wrongful employer discharge and antitrust, unquote (plus an entire chorus of “It’s Not Unusual” he could hum the Tom Jones of), he succeeded in more or less sweeping her right off her too-damn-big feet.

At first he didn’t spend the night. He’d call her at the bank, Frank Papen’s ten-story eyesore on Main Street across from the Loretto Shopping Center, and say how about the greyhound races in Juárez. Or dinner at the Coronado Country Club in El Paso. Or let’s go up to Picacho Hills and play…