Some women have daddy complexes. Wedding pictures are taken; son-in-law stands head to head with father-in-law; professions, habits, religious affiliations are matched subconsciously, or not.
We go to a bar, my husband and I. He is my height, five foot seven inches, three inches shy of my father, and weighs eighty pounds less than the man who taught me how to hunt.
They like to hunt together. Sometimes we drive down to Kentucky on Saturday nights and wait for the hunt. My father always knocks before he comes into the room he built, the room where we sleep. I imagine he’s afraid of seeing me naked, bedsheets thrown aside during the night. But I’m not. I never am. I wear an old tee shirt of my husband’s; the name of his first band ironed above my left breast. My husband jerks at the knock - the kids don’t knock on our bedroom door at home - then says, “I’m up.”
Why doesn’t he ever say that to me when I slip over him in the morning?
At the bar, my husband is asked to sing. He looks at me and winks. His voice is what lured me. Never mind that he was small. Never mind that his thighs were the size of my biceps. He could sing. So he does.
He sings one song after another. I think I’m forgotten. He’s stopped looking at me. He’s singing to the entire crowd; the men who wait until their cigarette ashes threaten to dirty the bar before tapping their smokes against tin ashtrays, the women who dance on the floor - pecking like chickens in a pen.
A man sits down next to me. My husband points and smiles through the lyrics. The man nods to my husband.
“Do you remember me?” he asks.
“Not at all,” I say.
He orders a whiskey sour and I laugh. A sour. Not straight. All sugared up.
“What do you do now?” he asks.
“I sit at home.”
“I sit at home sometimes, too.”
My father never sits at home. He always has something to do. He helped my brother build a cabin at his lake last year. He owns two autobody shops. He likes to hunt and fish.
My husband goes outside during the band break. He’s part of the band now even though we showed up on the sly.
“It’s better to talk now,” the man says. “Jared.” He touches my hand. “You’re Crystal. Crystal Gayle.”
He smiles this big grin that puffs his cheeks and makes me look away. Even though years ago I grew tired of the tugs on my long hair, of my namesake, while my head is turned to the side, I laugh too.
The next weekend we go camping. My husband and Jared have rekindled their old friendship. They’ve spoken on the phone for the past three nights, planned, called other friends, and my husband, for the first time in years, found a babysitter all on his own.
“Have Crys look,” he says.
Some guy I don’t know passes me a porno mag.
“Are they real or fake?” my husband asks. “Crys knows,” he says. “She can spot them a mile away.”
“I don’t want to look at this,” I say, tossing the magazine into the bonfire.
“What the fuck?” The owner of the magazine stands up on the other side of the fire. He has on plastic flip flops from Walmart and is holding a can of Busch light.
“Grow up,” I say, before walking down to the lake.
“Maybe she’s seen too much,” I hear my husband say. “Here’s five bucks. Sorry about the magazine.”
No one comes down to me for a very long time. The sun has faded into the kind of orange that reminds me of the sherbert Push-Pops my dad used to buy at the local grocery when I was a kid.
“I’d tell you they were childish but you’d think I was trying to make small talk,” Jared says, sitting on the sandstone rock below me.
“Did you ever do this when you were a kid?” he asks. He takes a pocketknife from his pocket and scrapes against the rock, collecting bits of sand in the palm of his hand. He holds them out to me for inspection and I’m afraid to touch his hand.
“Yes. When I was bored. Are you bored?”
“Only slightly,” he says. “It’s wearing off.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Ditch the mag or storm off?” I ask.
“Ditch the mag.”
“Women are women are women,” I say.
Jared gets off the rock and sits next to me. He stretches out his legs, that like mine, are thick; mine from dancing - I don’t ask about his.
“It’s time to eat,” he says.
“Is that why you came down here?” I ask.
“Yes.”
He sits across the fire. I sit beside my husband.
“Try this,” my husband says, balancing a bite of coleslaw and Ramen noodles on his fork.
“Didn’t you just cut your Brautwurst with that fork?”
“Just eat it. You’ll like it.”
“No thank you.”
The only thing I have to eat is what I brought - pasta salad. I try not to look at Jared but notice, through the blue light of the fire, the curly noodles and dark bits of veggies that fill his plate.
Someone brought two inflatable boats. They are tied off to a stake in the dirt on the bank of the deep.
I know how to row a boat. The lake behind the house where I grew up had water moccasins, cattails, and dragonflies that skimmed across the algae. My dad taught me how to row. We used to fish together until my parents divorced and I read a PETA magazine which told me about the nerves in the mouths of fish.
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