Free Fireworks Over Toccoa by Jeffrey Stepakoff Page A

sincere interest. And she never spoke back to anyone this way. Still, for some reason, she wanted to be as honest with him as she possibly could be.
    She reconnected with his eyes. “And then, I begin my life. We’ll start a family. He’ll build his career.”
    “Sounds like a plan.”
    “Yes. I’m part of something. I have a house, a husband, a community. My life is…planned.” Lily meant for this to sound effortless, obvious, just as it did when she spoke to people at church or Keener’s Market. But somehow as she was talking to him, it didn’t come out that way. She felt him looking not just into her eyes but also beyond them, as though he could see into her. “And yours?”
    “My plan? My plan is my fireworks.”
    “And then—?”
    “Then?”
    “I mean, how long are you going to be on the road?”
    “I don’t know. Guess I don’t have much of a plan, least not beyond what’s in my truck.”
    They shared a smile, the sad, whimsical smile of two strangers who shared a moment of truth the way only strangers can. Then they continued eating the risotto and drinking the Bordeaux, each enjoying the experience, however transitory, of being close to another person after so long a time spent alone.
     
    After lingering over the remaining wine, Lily cleared the table while Jake drew more water from the stream. Together they washed the tin plates and forks in a metal bucket of soapy water and then rinsed them clean.
    Jake scooped several fistfuls of oily dark-roasted coffee beans from a large burlap sack, dropped them in an old portable coffee mill, and carefully hand-ground them to a fine powder. He produced an aluminum moka espresso pot, black Bakelite handled, filled the lower chamber with water, packed the middle filter with the ground coffee and inserted it into the lower chamber, and screwed the upper vessel tightly onto the lower chamber base. Then he placed the moka pot on the lit camp stove. Having never seen a device like this before, so simple but so precise, Lily watched in silent fascination. After a few minutes, as steam and boiling water rose forcefully from the lower chamber through the coffee and collected in the top vessel, the moka pot began to gurgle. Listening exactingly to the sound, Jake removed the device from the heat at a particular moment. Then he poured ample servings of the rich espresso into two clean Duralex glasses.
    He unfolded two field chairs and set a couple of the candles in front of them. He opened the door to the cab of the truck and tuned the radio to WHAS, a Clear Channel station from Louisville whose big band programming could be heard throughout the eastern part of the country at night.
    Lily and Jake sat together peacefully, a little talked out, and sipped their coffee as Helen Forrest sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” It was strangely moving, ethereal, the haunting ballad wafting out into the moonlit field.
    Jake took out his pocket journal, its brown cover supple and felted as a club chair, and a small molar-marked pencil that he kept stuck in the pages.
    “I have an idea about something I want to flesh out a little. Do you mind?”
    “Not at all.”
    After days in the trenches with nothing to do but think and wait, Jake had gotten in the habit of always having something with him in which to write. In Italy, he had picked up several of these small moleskin journals, which bent and molded very comfortably in a rear pocket.
    Lily assumed he was writing a poem or a story, his diary perhaps. She didn’t ask. This seemed a natural part of his rhythm, something he often did. If he wanted to share it, he would. She just leaned back in her chair. There was something deeply comforting about him writing next to her. For one thing, it gave her permission to take in the night and the music and swim in her own thoughts. She’d never had coffee this good before, didn’t even know it could be like this. Thin reddish creamlike foam floating on an oily black syrup. And