Free Still Life with Plums by Marie Manilla Page B

Stephanie.
    But tonight Jeff pretends they’re driving back through time. He sucks in his gut as if that’ll lighten the twenty-three pounds he’s gained since the marriage. If he doesn’t look at her, he can envision the svelte, pre-baby woman who rode beside him all those years ago. Happy, jittery, elated about her first trip to the Gulf. She had just moved to Houston four months before. Made the long trip from West Virginia all by herself with a baseball bat on the car seat beside her for protection. He remembers turning onto the Texas City dike at twilight, passing Latino fisherman icing down fish, packing up rods and reels. Others just settling into lawn chairs, breaking out po’ boy sandwiches and bottles of Corona, metal coolers beside them waiting for their nighttime catch. Jeff parked at the end of the dike and he and Betty got out and sat on the car’s hood.
Amazing
, Betty had said, scanning the oil refineries just across the water, an Erector Set city of gridwork outlined by millions of lights, flare stacks shooting flames.
It’s like Christmas
, she had said. Jeff pointed out cooling towers, transformers, catalytic cracking units—cat crackers, he called them, and distillation columns, thelargest structures of all, some over two-hundred feet high.
How do you know all their names?
Betty asked.
I worked here one summer
, he said, neglecting to mention that he got fired his first week for spending six hours meticulously painting a railing that his boss said should have taken thirty minutes. Jeff said that though you couldn’t see them, there were probably men out there climbing stairways around columns, or clanking up catwalks in steel-toed boots, troubleshooting, making sure everything was smoothly running.
Climbing in the dark?
Betty asked, eyes straining to make out tiny silhouettes against the lights.
They must be brave
, she said. Jeff remembers the look of utter awe on her face. Admiration.
It’s nothing
, he said.
I did it a million times
.
    “It got cold,” Jeff says now, remembering how the wind picked up. How waves crested into white peaks, how gusts buffeted the freshly waxed car and whipped Betty’s then-long hair across her face and his, sending them into the back seat where Betty shivered until he got his beach blanket from the trunk and wrapped it tightly around them.
    “What?”
    “The first time we came here. It got cold.”
    “Oh,” Betty says. “I don’t remember.”
    “How can you not remember? It was the first time we—you know.” He recalls laying her back against the gray upholstery, neatly folding his jacket into a pillow for her head. How it should have been clunky and awkward and cramped, but it wasn’t. At all.
A good fit
, Betty had said when it was over and they lay there entwined.
We’re a good fit
. He twirled the little silver ring around her index finger until it twisted off in his hand. He held it before her.
See this?
She nodded.
I’m going to climb to the top of that distillation column and put it on top. Tomorrow, one of the workers will find it and say to his buddies: Look at this. Some brave fool must sure be in love
. Betty kissed his earlobe as the refinery lights flickered in her eyes.
    Tonight Betty says, “This is stupid. The movers are coming tomorrow and I haven’t even packed up the kitchen.”
    Betty is moving back to West Virginia. To White Sulphur Springs to be near her parents and the Greenbrier Resort where she waitressed as a teen. Jeff once asked her if she knew about the resort’s secret which had recently been exposed: the super-classified bunker built beneath it for the president and high-ranking officials in case of nuclear attack.
No
, she had said. But she couldn’t wait to take the tour, to go through the fat metal door and see the operating room and rows of bunk beds and the incinerator meant to dispose of contaminated bodies. She thinks she dated an FBI agent disguised as a maintenance worker.
His first name was an initial
,