The Name Tattooed On Her Arm

The shirt in the heat

Here is the thing you have to understand about that week. It was hot. Not regular Indiana hot, the kind you complain about and forget. It was the kind of heat that sits on the town like a wet blanket, ninety-six degrees at nine in the morning, the corn curling, the old men at the co-op talking about it like it had a personal grudge against them. Everybody in Harmon was down to the least clothing they could decently wear.

Patty dropped Marlene off Sunday afternoon while I was hosing down the porch just to feel cooler. And my wife stepped out of that maroon Buick in a long-sleeve shirt.

It was a Branson souvenir shirt, navy blue, with a guitar and some hills printed on the front, and the sleeves came all the way down to her wrists. She had it tugged low, the cuffs bunched in her fingers.

“Aren’t you burning up in that?” I said, meaning nothing by it, walking over to take her bag.

She smiled, but it was a smile that did not sit right, a smile that arrived a half second late. “A little,” she said. “But it was such a good trip, I’m not ready to take the shirt off yet.” She pulled the cuffs down further over her hands as she said it.

I laughed. It seemed like the kind of soft, silly thing a woman says about a trip that meant something to her. I did not think about it again. I carried her bag inside and we sat on the porch with iced tea and she told me about Branson and the catfish and the show, and if her sleeves stayed down over her wrists in ninety-six degrees, well, I was not the kind of man who made a study of his wife’s sleeves.