Girlfriend

The salesman had taken to the young girl despite his better judgment. She was endearingly compliant and yearned for his attention. As for the salesman, he liked to look at her because when he did, she stared back with the eyes of a reverent angel. It was late summer when she came to the store, came to tell him she was pregnant.

The salesman peppered her with questions and voiced his anger more passionately than he’d intended. And though she did not cry, the young girl’s intense eyes bobbled and welled up with loathing. It was in that moment he first registered a fear that he had disappointed her. He was shocked it saddened him so.

That night, after the girl had long since left the store, the salesman closed out his cash drawer in silence. Walking to the back exit, he sat for a moment on a stack of old packing cartons. Cradling his face in his hands, he considered the baby.

Seemed years since he met the girl on a warm Wednesday. They had talked of sports for more than an hour. Her lover at that time was a basketball fanatic, for that reason she knew almost all there was to know about Michigan State’s Flintstones and point guards, and the pro leagues of tomorrow. “Short equals speed,” she’d said again and again.

The salesman remembered how she laughed. Her throat began in an unexpected chortle and ended in a series of hops- all the while, her body remained perfectly still. And as they stood beside the sparkling fountain in the center of the park, her dog’s leash slipped out of her hand. The mutt was off like a shot, headed for a cluster of ducks on the bank of the creek about a hundred feet away.

“No!” the girl called out.

Together, she and the salesman darted across the clearing through the blackening sunlight. Somehow, they managed to pull the dog from its precarious position atop a smattering of wet stones.

"Those ducks are too fast for you,” the salesman chastised the dog, even as the young girl scooped him up in her arms. He petted the poor mutt and laughed at its dissatisfied expression.

In the storeroom now, all he can think is how I wish that day had never happened. Simply, if he had walked an opposite way through the park, if the dog had only taken off sooner, if he’d had the sense to not chase after it…

“I don’t want to tell your wife,” the young girl had said to him earlier that day. “This doesn’t have to be a problem. I just wanted you to know.”

He asked if she cried when she found out about the baby.

Touching him, the girl traced figure eights on his arm as she had done so many times before. “I did… I did. But then I started to think this might be the push I’ve been waiting for.” A delicate smile. “No one will ever know,” she continued. “I’ve thought about it, and I’m quite sure it’s the right thing to do.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You’ve already done it.”

On his carton at the back of the store, the tears came. If he'd only
known when he met her, he might have foregone the talk, the laugh, the dog. If he'd only chased the phantom air in the opposite direction of her.

Images of her broken body flashed in front of him now, comforting him. The salesman tried to block out the many sensations he’d drowned in at her hand. He held himself and yearned the day- that it might quickly come- when he would forget her.