Full Season

In the far corner of the cell-phone lot at Portland airport, under the only tree, Jody sat in the Subaru with a nursing cover over her shoulders, pumping milk for a husband whose plane was due in under an hour and who did not know there was any milk at all. She had backed in so that all the windshield showed her was a chain-link fence and a strip of dry grass.

The cover was navy with small white anchors on it, and she had bought it at the pharmacy in Tillamook in June because it was the only one they had, and she had been embarrassed by the anchors at the register and had stopped being embarrassed about them by July. Under it her chambray shirt was open to the waist and her bra was unhooked on the left side, and she had the flange of the hand pump tucked against her skin under her other breast, warming.

Velma had told her that the first week. Warm the plastic first, against yourself or in your hands, and your body will take it as something friendly. It had sounded like nonsense in June. Now Jody did it without thinking, the way she rinsed her hands before she went into the cave.

The left side was the fuller one. It always was by early afternoon. She had pumped at nine in the kitchen at home before she left, and again at half past eleven in a gas station lot in Forest Grove with a delivery truck idling beside her, and since then she had driven the rest of the way with the heaviness coming back under the seatbelt, slow and plain, the way the tide came over the flats. It was tight high up, near her arm. Her nipple had gone sensitive against the inside of her shirt somewhere around Hillsboro.

She took the flange out from under her right breast and set it in place on the left and pressed it to her, and the plastic was warm now, nearly her own temperature. She rubbed her breast with her free hand first, from the outside in, the slow circles Velma had shown her on a sheet of paper with a drawing of a breast that looked like a weather map. Then she started on the handle.

It was a small, plain sound in the closed car. Squeeze and release. Squeeze and release. The air conditioning ran on low and the cover held her own heat in against her, and she sat back and looked at the fence and waited for it.

It came on its own time. It always did. First a prickle deep in, under the skin, and then a pins-and-needles warmth that spread out from behind the nipple, and then the first thin spray against the plastic, and the bottle under the flange began to take it, a little at a time and then faster. She let her shoulders down. The relief was in her whole chest, not just the one side.

In June there had been nothing. Weeks of nothing, the handle going in the dark kitchen at two in the morning and the foghorn on Wick Point sounding across the bay and not one drop in the bottle. Then a few drops, on the first of July, that she had looked at under the light over the stove for a long time. Now there was this. It was not a lot. A woman with a baby would have laughed at it. But the bottle was filling and it was hers, and she had made it, and sitting there in the heat she felt the plain pride of it, the same pride she felt when a Fogline wheel came up right under her hands.

The spiral notebook was open on her lap under the cover. It was the second one. The first was at home in the basket on the counter. She had a pen clipped to the wire. When the left side slowed she wrote the time and the side and the minutes in her small square writing, and then she switched, and warmed the flange again for a moment against her stomach, and started on the right.

Her phone was face down on the passenger seat. His flight from Seattle was due at two-forty. It was ten to two. She had worked it out at the kitchen table the night before, the drive and the stop in Forest Grove and this, so that she would be finished and buttoned and have the pump parts packed and her face washed with a water bottle and a paper towel before he so much as had his bag.

The phone buzzed against the seat.

She looked at it. She kept the handle going. Then she turned it over with one finger.

Down early. Wheels on ground. Coming out now.

"Oh, no," she said out loud, to the fence. "No, no, no."

She did not stop at once. She could not. The right side was still letting down, and if she stopped now she would be heavy and leaking on that side all the way home. She gave it a few more pulls, fast, and then she made herself stop and lifted the flange away, and a thin line of milk ran down the underside of her breast and into the band of her bra, cool almost at once against her skin. She swore. She pressed the cotton of her shirt against it with the side of her hand.

Then she moved.

She capped the bottle and wrote the amount with the pen she had in her teeth, badly, the numbers sloping off the line. She closed the notebook. She pulled the pump apart into its pieces, the flange and the valve and the little membrane and the handle, and wrapped them in the dish towel she kept for it, and got out of the car with the cover still around her neck like a bib and her shirt half open under it.

The back of the Subaru was hot as an oven. She unzipped the cooler bag and put the bottle in against the ice pack and the wrapped pump parts in the side pocket, and zipped it, and pushed it to the very back behind his duffel from June that she had never unpacked from the car and the box of food for the cottage. Then she lifted the cargo floor where the spare tire lived and laid the notebook flat on top of the tire, and set the floor back down over it, and stood there for a second with her hand flat on the carpet.

A man two cars down was eating a sandwich in his truck with the window open. He was not looking at her. Nobody was.

She got back in and did her bra up and buttoned her shirt to the top. The chambray was soft from washing and it pulled across her breasts the way all her shirts did now, every button working, and on the right side there was a dark patch the size of her palm where she had leaked into it, just below the pocket. She pulled the cover off over her head and balled it up and shoved it under the seat.

The sweater was on the back seat. It was his, the cream fisherman's sweater his mother had knitted the winter before they married, cabled down the front, with a darned place at one elbow that Jody had darned herself. She had slept in it most of the summer. It was eighty-four degrees in the parking lot. She pulled it on anyway and drew it down over her hips, and it covered the patch and the shape of her and smelled of him and of her and of the house, and she checked herself in the rearview mirror. Her face was flushed. A strand of dark hair had come out of the braid and stuck to her neck. She looked like a woman who had been crying or running.

She turned the key and drove out of the lot.

He was at the curb before she was. She saw him from a long way off because he was bigger than everyone around him. He stood at the end of the arrivals curb with his seabag on his shoulder and his canvas jacket over his arm, very still in all that movement, the way he stood on a deck, and he was browner than when he left, and his hair had gone lighter at the front, almost white where the sun had been on it. He had a beard. A full one, close and sandy and darker at the jaw.

She pulled in crooked and got out with the engine still running, and a man in an orange vest told her she could not leave the car there, and she said she knew.

Matt put down the seabag. He did not say anything. He took two steps and got his arms around her and lifted her clean off the sidewalk, all of her, the way he had done the first time he came home from Alaska thirteen years ago and every time since, and her feet came off the ground and her face went into his neck.

He smelled of the plane and of salt underneath it, salt and diesel and soap from some boat shower, and his neck was warm and his beard was rough against her cheek, a whole summer of it. She held on to him. Then he tightened his arms, and her breasts were pressed flat against his chest through the sweater, and the right one was still tender from where she had stopped too soon, and she felt the warning prickle start under the skin.

She turned her shoulder into him and angled her chest away, so that it was her side and her arm against him and not her front. She laughed to cover it.

"Put me down. You'll do your back in."

"My back's fine." He set her down slowly. He kept his hands on her waist, under the sweater's hem, on the shirt, his thumbs at her hipbones. His eyes went over her face. "You're wearing my sweater."

"It was there."

"It's eighty degrees."

"It's the coast in my head," she said. "I've been cold since June."

He looked at her for a moment longer and she thought he would ask, and then the man in the orange vest came over and said, "Folks," and Matt let go of her and picked up the seabag and put it in the back of the car himself, on top of the cooler bag, on top of everything, and shut the hatch.

They took the highway west out of the city, and then Highway 6 at Banks, and the road began to climb into the Coast Range.

Matt drove. He always drove when he came home. He said it was so he could feel solid ground under something, and she had never argued, because the first day he was home she liked to sit and look at him. He had his window down a few inches. He drove with his right wrist over the top of the wheel and his left elbow on the door, and his forearms were dark gold and the hair on them was bleached nearly white.

"How was it," she said.

"Good. Long." He thought about it. "Good fish in July. Then nothing for ten days. Then good again."

"How was the skipper?"

"Same."

She nodded and looked out of the window. They were in the trees now, the second-growth fir that had grown back over the old burn, steep and dark green on both sides, and the Wilson River ran beside the road in its rocks, low and clear at the end of summer. The air through his window was cooler already. She could smell the river.

He told her a little more. A deckhand from Wrangell who could not stop talking. A humpback that had come up beside the skiff so close it soaked them. The skipper's wife flying up in August with a box of peaches. He told it in short pieces, with long quiet between, and she listened and asked the right small questions and said the right small things, and all the time she was aware of her own body under the sweater, the right side tight and warm where she had not finished, and the slow return of fullness in the left, too soon, faster than in June.

Somewhere past the summit he put his hand on her thigh.

It was what he always did. His hand was big and heavy and warm through her jeans, the palm flat on the top of her leg and his fingers curved to the inside, and he left it there and drove one-handed. It was nothing. She had felt that hand on her leg on this road twenty or thirty times. But she had not been touched by anyone in three months, and her body did not know it was nothing. The heat of his hand went straight up through her, and the prickle came back sharp under both breasts at once.

She crossed her arms over her chest and pressed down hard with her forearms, and held them there.

She felt the let-down start anyway. A tingling rush behind the nipples, and then the warm wet seeping into her bra on both sides, and she sat very still in the passenger seat with her arms locked across herself and her face turned to the window and looked at the river.

"You okay?" he said.

"Fine. A little cold."

He reached over and rolled up his window. He did not take his hand off her leg. After a while he said, "You're quiet."

"I got up early."

"You didn't have to come all the way in for me. I could've got the shuttle."

"I wanted to come."

He squeezed her thigh once and let it go back to the wheel. She saw him decide it. She saw it in his face in profile, the small settling of his mouth: she was tired, she had driven two hours to get him and two more to go, and that was all it was. He would let her be. He had always been good at letting her be.

She uncrossed her arms slowly. Under the cream wool her shirt was wet against her on both sides now, cooling. She could feel the shape of it.

In the cup holder between them the green thermos rode upright, rattling a little on the curves. It had a dent near the base from the time he dropped it on the dock at Petersburg the second summer, and the paint was worn through to the steel where his hand always went. She had filled it with coffee for him the morning he left in June, at four, in the dark kitchen, the way she had filled it every June for fourteen years, and every June before this one he had carried it down to the truck. This June he had forgotten it on the counter. She had found it there when she came back from the airport that June morning, still full and still warm, and she had stood in the kitchen and drunk his coffee out of the cap.

It had been empty since. She had put it in the cup holder this morning without knowing why.

He tapped the lid of it with one finger. "You brought it."

"I always bring it."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book