By the time he caught on, I had driven past his house seven hundred forty six times, pulled into his driveway sixty, and checked his mail twice. Both times it was only bills and advertisements from Home Hardware addressed to ‘Valued Customer,’ although from the look of his house, he couldn’t possible have been that valuable. I put the mail back, kissing the bills lightly where his address had been printed by a cold computer, and drove away before his neighbor saw, the one with the red-faced boys who swung from tree branches, their limbs stretched by the effort, monkeylike. I was never caught.
 
The day he finally stopped me, flagged me down as I drove past for the fifth time that day—in the summer it got really bad—he was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt proclaiming him FATHER OF THE YEAR in large, blocky letters of uneven magic marker. His legs glistened slack and off-white, the color of my father’s legs, and just as hairless, and he wore loafers without socks, stained green from lawn care. His head was burnt, radiating heat probably, like the tip of a match that’s just been blown out, and the monkish fringe of hair that circled it was blown back, laying crazed in unnatural poses. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man that would do his own lawn work, although I had seen the riding mower in his garage—red and shining, like his bald head now, and looking quite unused—but here he was, raking grass into the street, a Mississippi of sweat columning from his neck to the too-high waist of his red shorts. He wiped his forehead—or what would have been his forehead, what used to be his forehead—with the back of one burnt arm (why not his legs? He must have worn pants all the time at the—office? The factory? His children were too clean for a factory job) and waved, listlessly, gesturing to his driveway with a tilt of his chin.
 
I am on my way to In-and-Out Burger, I practiced, as I always did when I passed, in preparation for whatever questions he might launch at me if he had a chance, to Kiddie City. I sat in the car for a few seconds at the edge of the driveway, hands on the steering wheel, and he approached the car like a cop. He rested his hand on the car door, fingers half in, half out of the open window. His nails were short and clean but not too clean, and I imagined, just for a second, feeling them with my tongue, painting their ridges with saliva and toothpaste-freshened breath. Instead I just looked at them, and then at him. He didn’t smile.

 "Hey," he said after a few minutes. The letters on his shirt were beginning to run in the humid weather, and I imagined them making their mark on his chest, backwards and smeary, father of the year, like an emblem of shame.
 
"Yes?" I feigned boredom, confusion—the two together make a powerful tonic. The creases in his forehead were brown, as if they caught and held the sun’s rays longer than the rest of his face. "Do you need something?"
 
"Your front headlight is out."

 I squinted at him. "It’s daylight."

 "It’s broken out. Shattered. You should get it looked at." He motioned for me to get out of the car, and we squatted together in front of my car, its plastic bumper smile broken by the three letters and four numbers advertising Ohio as the heart of it all. "See? Did you hit something?"

 "Not as far as I know." My knee crept over to his and bumped it; the skin there was soft and moveable, sliding around his patella like the white pimpled skin of an uncooked chicken breast. "It was fine yesterday."

 "Must have been a hooligan with a baseball bat."

 Did he just say hooligan?

 "Must have been."

 "Listen." We stood up, brushing our hands on our shorts. "Do you live around here?"

 "What?" Now I feigned discomfort, or thought I feigned it—had he noticed me? "Why do you ask?"

 He shook his head and frowned. "No reason. Your car just looks familiar. I wondered if you taught at my children’s school or something." He stared at the car and I could feel the heat from his x-ray vision boring into the side panel, melting the license plate. "It seems like I see this car every day."
 
"No, I work in insurance. At Credit General. Insurance."

 "Uh huh."

 "Well, thanks. For pointing that out to me." We shook hands and he clung to mine, just the tips of the fingers, squeezing them until my nipples hurt. "I’ll see you around, I guess."

 "I know where you can go to get that fixed," he said. "Why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll see if I can’t get you in to see him? My friend. He’s a mechanic."

 "Why don’t I just call myself?" I said, getting into my car.

 "Wait," he said, so I waited. He surveyed his lawn briefly, his eyes seeming to settle on the lone black trash bag at the end of the drive. Its red drawstring handles battled each other as a brief wind pulsed through, yanking free one of the few tufts of hair his yard work had left unruffled. The yaw of a pizza box protruded from the side of the bag where an animal had ripped it open—raccoons, maybe, secret night predators that pissed in his garden and fought like dinosaurs against his cat. He drummed his fingers on the door slowly, glancing first into the sky, then at the garage, which hung open like a lax fly, and then drummed harder, rhythmically—a high school drum line cadence, maybe; it was something you could march to. "I can get you a discount."

 "Really?" It was a good really; my rehearsal had paid off. It was the really that said you lost me before, but now, my friend, now I am right back with you. It was a really designed to give hope. I dug around in my purse, fishing out a notebook with a kitten on the front. The paper was soft and old, and held the indentation of my name and number like a bed that has held a corpse. I copied over it and handed him one hastily torn sheet. "Here, then."
 
"Ardith," he said, looking at it. "Interesting name."
 
"It’s an old woman’s name." I revved the engine.
 
His name, he told me, was John Cake. And I was right about him. He was a lonely guy.
 

An essay I wrote in freshman comp that landed me in bed with my professor:

There's something about a lonely guy that drives me crazy.

 I have no idea why. They’re ugly, mostly, or homely at least, and their arms are too long, dangling just a centimeter too close to the ground. And their faces are crooked, as if when God was molding them he got lazy with the symmetry. But they’re nice, for the most part, and clean, the factory seconds of the male population. Most of them don’t even know they’re lonely. But I do.

 Some lonely guys of note: Boo Radley. Howard Cunningham, from Happy Days. Maybe Ralph Malph, too. And Richard Nixon, yes. Sure, he had Pat, he had Kissenger and Checkers and the whole clan, but in his heart he was a lonely guy, walking the beach at San Clemente, socks pulled up too high, not lonesome, but lonely.

 They’re a slippery breed, though, the lonely guys. They look like regular guys, some even look like men, but they leave clues, secret handshakes that even they don’t know about. Lonely guys obsess about the price of gas. Any guy whose favorite Beatle is George is lonely. Anyone whose pants hit the middle of their shins when they sit down is lonely. If they whistle while they exercise. If their favorite movie is Shane, or Jeremiah Johnson, Mountain Man. If they walk on the balls of their feet.

 A lonely guy is between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-two—before thirty-seven, they still see themselves as marketable, after forty-two, they’ve accepted their new station and embraced it, drinking wine by themselves after work, reading woodworking magazines on the toilet at five a.m. But in that five year period they are still transitioning, not expecting anything but grateful for everything, for glances at the supermarket or a cold hand on their upper arm. It’s the period when they are the most lonely, and it wafts from them to me like pheromones.

Most lonely guys are divorced, though some have never been married—it’s good to check; guys who are unmarried by age forty are usually damaged goods, or have damaged goods. The divorced guys keep their rings in a white department store ring box in their underwear drawers, or on their dresser, like they’re waiting to wear it for a special occasion. And there are pictures of the children—children on the swings, in the park, at Christmas. Children without mothers, in these pictures, with blonde hair and freckles that they didn’t get from their father, but got from no one, because in the mind of the lonely guy, there is no one but them.

 Lonely guys are not to be confused with lonely men. Lonely men look the same, dress and act the same, mostly, but they are less inside-out, more closed, the Hemingways of their children’s soccer fields. The wives of lonely men are usually dead, their ovaries gumballs of cancer, and their children are sad. Lonely men read war novels and keep one of their wife’s nightgowns in their closet on a padded hanger. Lonely men are bad news.

 But lonely guys, man. I can’t get enough.

 I got an A on the paper.

My freshman comp professor was a tall man with suede patches on the elbows of his corduroy jackets. He wore loafers without socks and talked a lot about the Puritans in bed. His ancestors had been Puritans, he told me. I imagined them in Provincetown, wearing tall hats with buckles on them, calling each other Brother and Goody, burning each other at the stake. Then I imagined him in a tall hat with a buckle, and laughed.

One day he told me who in the department had slept with whom, and who had gone outside department lines, which was a faux pas on par with marrying a cousin. I was all right, he told me, because I wanted to be an English major. It was almost the same.

"Why didn’t you ever go for any of the women in the department?" I asked him. We were posed classically, like the cover of a romance novel—me with the sheets up to my armpits, him covered only to the waist. The room was too well-lit for my taste, and I could see my latest essay, "Why I Am Proud To Be An American," on the top of a pile of paper on his dresser. It was an A, and he hadn’t even read it yet. I’m that good.

"You know. Those women." He made a face like a child tasting mayonnaise for the first time.
"They’re all so old, and fat. So unattractive."

"But I’m fat," I said, lowering my eyes until he could barely see them through the lashes. "I’m fat and unattractive."

Here is what he was supposed to say:

No, you’re not. You’re a beauty, you’ve always been a beauty. Everything about you is perfect.

But instead he said "But you’re twenty-two."

So I left him. He wasn’t lonely enough.
 

I didn’t meet anyone for dinner the night I met John Cake, except my television and a TV dinner tray depicting the Last Supper, only with cartoon dogs. Jesus wore a studded collar. My mother had bought it for me at a garage sale when I was five and I had carried it with me from home to college to apartment, its edges rusted and crumbling, the seared edges of an important document or a map of the Ponderosa. The phone rang six times, six rings apiece. John Cake was on the line.

 Each time he hung up—the third and fourth time his sigh gusted through my house before the answering machine cut him off—I took a bite of my microwave pizza and smiled. The pizza served four. It was gone by the fifth call.

 I used to be thin, very thin, scarily, almost, and my clothes hung wrong, the way chimps looked on TV when their owners would dress them up. That was the way it had to be for everyone in my house, even the dog, a whippet with a twisted stomach named Auntie Grizelda. But when I went away to college I gained.

 John Cake, what do you want from me?

 The seventh time he called I picked up the phone and did the shower routine—if you practice enough, you can actually sound wet. It’s method acting. "Yes?" If I had really been in the shower, what would I be feeling? Rivulets of water skating down my flesh, into warm dark crevices and overhangs. It came through in my voice.

 "Sorry. Were you in the shower?"

 "Yeah. Who is this?"

 "John Cake? Remember? We met today? Busted headlight?"

 "Mm. Yeah."

 "Well, listen. I called my friend. He can get you in at two tomorrow. How does that sound?"

 "Good. I can get the afternoon off, I guess." To convey sudden frustration, a groaning realization—how to do that? Easy. I slapped my open palm against the countertop and hunched my shoulders, my neck dipping like a turtle about to fight. The motions are still important, even when you’re on the phone. "But I can’t. I don’t have anyone to drive me back."

 "Well." He cleared his throat, and in the background I heard two kids yelling, girls, maybe, or below-average boys. "Well. I could do it. I’m free."

 "Oh, no. No. That would be too much of an imposition."

 "No, really. It would be fine. I’ve got the week off. The kids are at school—it would be fine."

 "Okay? I’ll meet you at your house, then? At one thirty?"

 "Good. See you then." He continued to talk and I hung up.
 

 I used to like regular guys. A long time ago, before I developed the skills to snare them—the makeup, the hairstyle, the skillful art of décolletage. In high school I would pine for them, spray my pillows with discount store knockoffs of their musks—high school guys always made the tragic mistake of wearing musk—and comb my hair before bed, so if I met them in my dreams I would already be coifed.

 One boy in particular, Eddie. He was my man. Short brown hair combed forward and then curled, so he looked like the sort of extra they would have playing the piano in the Gangland hangout of a thirties mob film. He was prone to fedoras and buck shoes, and he was the love of my life.

 Unfortunately, he was also prone to Dana, and Dana was prone to fistfights in the girls’ locker room. So I was prone to loneliness and dateless prom nights and the fat frog eyes of a theatrical weeper. But we had our moments together, Eddie and I, sitting next to each other in eighth period marching band. He was first trombone and I was third, and he was impressed with how long my arms were.
"Easier to reach seventh position," I explained.

"Not the best position," he agreed.

"I can think of better." Or did I really say that? Did I really say "yeah," and nod my head and turn purple while Dana watched from her reedy woodwind swamp across the room? Or did I just say nothing, only buzz my lips and empty my spit valve onto the gray concrete floor while he watched? Did he notice how smoothly my spit escaped the corked end of the slide, not viscous but a gentle waterfall diving into the clean Canadian spring I had already accumulated? Dana’s reed was dirty. I had seen it.

My junior year Eddie was a senior and Dana was at the vocational school learning horticulture. Her mother had had a stroke behind the counter at McDonald’s, falling face first into the spitting grease altar of the deep fat fryer, leaving her scarred and lipless. Dana thought that arranging flowers would be less stressful than studying government and English, Eddie explained to me one day as we marched drills in front of the sophomore gym class. Someone kicked a soccer ball into one of the tubas and it wedged. We stopped marching.

"You still see her a lot, though, right?" I asked. I feign sympathy as well as I do disinterest.

"Every day, almost. It’s taken some of the romance out, though."

"Because you can’t bring her flowers," I agreed.

"That and her mom." He shuddered. "It’s just sort of gross."

Someone dug his fingers into the corroded recesses of the tuba and attempted to pry loose the ball, caught like a piece of gristle in an old man’s throat. The director stomped his foot and fingered his whistle, his lips pursing around an imaginary cigarette. We were practicing for the Homecoming show. Dana wouldn’t be marching. Dana wouldn’t be going.

"What about Homecoming?" I asked, my head tilted to the side. I hoped my insincerity would dribble from one ear before it reached my mouth.

"She doesn’t want to go, I guess. I don’t know."

My hands began to burn, and they felt huge, like the foam novelty fingers they sold in the stadium. I’m number one, I thought, so loudly that Eddie turned his head toward me. I opened and closed my mouth, just once, simulating a yawn, and frowned. How unfortunate, I said. But you have to go. Dana would want you to go. And I’m not going, I said. And he said, "I think she wants me to take her sister."

"Beth? She’s only twelve," I said, my hands deflating.

"Not Beth. Tracy." He rolls a piece of grass between his thumb and finger. "The fat one."

"Oh." The whistle blew and the soccer ball was kicked back to the whooping sophomore crowd, dancing from one foot to the other like kindergartners. We lined back up and began marching again,. and I only moved the slide to Chicago’s "I’m a Man." My lips weren’t in it.

"You’re going, though, huh?" Eddie asked me as we returned to the sideline.

What was this? An invitation? To meet him under the away team’s basketball hoop, which would catch the overhead lights of the gym and sparkle around us like so many strung diamonds, where we would dance to a song only couples in love can dance to, while Dana’s fat sister hung on the wall, God’s big fat ugly booger?

"Yes," I said. "Yes, yes. I am going. Yes."

He said he would see me there. So I was going to Homecoming. Alone.

That night I put on my green skirt with its matching velvet top and chewed a hole in my lower lip as my father snapped roll after roll of film. Me in front of the fireplace, in front of the grandfather clock, in the garden. He thought I was meeting my date at the restaurant. I planned on driving to the park and setting fire to this dress and then killing myself in the river.

But instead I arrived and sat by myself, watching Eddie and Tracy work their way around the gym like figurines in a cuckoo clock. Once he swung by my table, lugging Tracy past in her blue velveteen potato sack, and he winked. Winked! This was my sign, my self-destructing message! Now, we dance the night away, Eddie would say with a French accent, taking me in his arms. Eddie always spoke in a French accent in these sequences. Now that ze pig girl is gone, we are free to express our forbidden love for one another, our secret desires. Kees me, my darling. Kees me! So I got up and asked to cut in.

Eddie eyed me, tilted too forward on my Payless high heels, face made up like an underenthusiastic clown, and tugged his collar. "Who wants punch?" he asks. "I want punch." Neither of us saw him again that night.

But I did see Mr. Dingman, who stood in the center of the dance floor with a whistle, ready to corral affectionate couples at a moment’s notice. He was a biology teacher, freshly divorced, equipped with a runner’s ass and three—perhaps four—chest hairs, which he displayed like prize azaleas by opening the throat of his white polo shirt. Not a bad looking man, not a good looking one—his hair looked plastic, Ken hair, and one eye was slightly more to the right than it should have been. Not like Eddie, whose face reminded me of one of those exercises in symmetry in which the other fourth graders invariably created tempera-bright butterflies and I made an ugly but always perfectly aligned brown mess.

Wiping tears from my eyes, Tracy pawing me from behind as if I were a Christmas-dressed Snickers bar, I nearly collided with Mr. Dingman, who stopped me with one hand.

"Ardith," he said, catching my arm. "What’s up? What’s wrong?"

"Nothing. The usual. Homecoming stuff. Someone has to cry at Homecoming, don’t they?"

"It seems that way," he said. "But don’t go yet. It might get better."

"How could this possibly get better?" I asked, leaving a snail trail of snot through the verdant fields of my shirtsleeve. "Eddie hates me, Tracy hates me, Dana, she’s going to hate me. She’s going to kill me."

"No, she won’t."

"Oh yeah?" I laughed my first faked laugh then, the first of many—the Worldly, Ironic Laugh, the I may only be sixteen, but I have seen it all laugh. "Why’s that?"

He put his arm around my waist, and I felt two of his fingers, cold, slide underneath my green velveteen top. "You can tell her you’re with me," he said.

I didn’t go home that night.
 

John Cake waited on his porch, scanning the roads for my car with its black eye.

"Are you ready?" I asked him.

He nodded eagerly, looking too much like a sophomore on her way to prom with a senior on the football team. "You follow me," he told me. "It’s a little out of town."

I follow him thirty five miles to Lorain, where we stop at Bobby’s Brakes and Tires. There was no mention of broken headlights on the sign, but it did specify that the garage was owned by a born-again Christian, here to service our cars and our souls. It was there, in small print, under the word tires. I don’t lie.

Bobby told me two days and took my key as if it were made of feces, so badly did my soul reek to him. His tattoo told me he was keen on Jesus, and I realized John Cake did not know this man at all.

What he knew was the plumbing supply business, he told me. He knew how many toilets there were in every school building in northeast Ohio. Name a school district, he told me. Any school district. And I bet I’ll be right within ten. And he knew the karaoke scene—had I ever seen him at Players, at the Wagon Wheel? He does a mean Neil Diamond, he told me. "Crunchy Granola Suite" is his favorite, because it grabs you right here—he poked me in the chest three times with the tips of his fingers—right there. I told him I wasn’t born when that song came out, and he ignored me. He knows community theater, he told me. He’s been in shows. Just in the chorus. But his name was right there in the program. He told me all this in the waiting room while Bobby contemplated the ethical ramifications of repairing a car that was already on the Beltway to Hell.

"What do we do now?" I asked when the deed was done.

What a stupid question. We go to dinner.

And he talks about his children.

Annie is ten and on a t-ball team (the Patriots.) She looks like her mother, but Kevin looks like him, only with more hair (laugh, laugh.) Kevin, fifteen, plays football and bags groceries at Hawkins Family Market, hopes one day to work in the deli, because he likes the slicers. At home, he practices with an electric carving knife. He can carve a turkey like a sculptor; he sees where the slices are supposed to go, like it’s already marked for him. He is a genius.

"Are you going to finish that?" he asked me, gesturing toward my appetizer with his chin. I rarely ate more than appetizers in restaurants like this, the walls spattered with local memorabilia, because my father once told me while daintily slicing his white puff of fish that I was too damn fat. At home, in front of my television, I ate candy and cheese crackers and rested my hands comfortably on my belly, feigning pregnancy, my first son. Armstrong, he would be named. He would play tennis and run track, or maybe throw shot, if he were big enough.

 "No."

 "Not hungry?"

 Everything he said was a question. "No. I’m fine."

 "You want to go somewhere else?"

 "No. I’m fine."

"Because we can."

"Can we go back to your place?"

"What for?"

What a stupid question.
 

The music in the bathroom swelled, and I could see a lone feather blowing in the thin breeze atop Walton’s Mountain. Ma and Pa Walton would be at the bedside of their new and mysterious friend, a wounded Indian named Bear With One Eye. He’s hurt, bad. "Do not cry for me, Waltons," Bear With One Eye would say. "I go to a better place." Then his head would droop to one side, eyes still open, and Ma would clutch Pa like a handbag. An eagle would screech across the sky, and John Boy would say something poignant about death. Then, commercial.

A toilet flushed and Brenda Caffey told me the white man was keeping her down. I was a white woman, which was totally different, because the white man was keeping me down, too. He kept everyone down but other white men and dogs. It amazed her that white men treated dogs of all colors the same, not just white dogs. She didn’t understand it.

"You know there’s someone outside for you," she told me after I didn’t answer. What can you say about the white man’s passion for dogs?

"Who?"

"Some delivery man. He got flowers."

Flowers from John Cake.

And the card read two months, sixty days
       you’ve made me smile a million ways
     I’d travel by camel 1,000 miles
    To see one of your fantastic smiles

I threw the card away and arranged the flowers on my desk prominently between my Daytimer and Ronoco Pro-Rate Wheel, where everyone could see them. I told John Cake not to get me anything for what he called our anniversary—two months is still one big date, no commitment.

It’s typical lonely guy behavior, though—they’re like those gummy men they used to sell in quarter vending machines, the ones you would throw at the wall and watch climb down, the ones that stained flat paint and wallpaper and made my mother angry. He’s a cling-on, a too-sweet doughnut. The other day he took me to the Wagon Wheel and sang "Forever In Blue Jeans" for me as drunk patrons doused him with beer, soaking his shoes and ruining his #1 Dad t-shirt, another Magic Marker relic from Annie’s childhood. Now, he told me, Annie got him ties. He hugged me when he finished singing, and the smell of marker and beer made me nauseous.

"This is my girl," he told the drunken throng. "This is my Ardith. She’s my baby."

"Maybe you should get her back in the womb for a little longer," a man yelled. He had his hair in a ponytail, a welder’s cap sitting high on his forehead. "She don’t look quite done."

"Don’t mind them," John Cake whispered to me. "You’re perfect."

Yesterday we played croquet with his children, and I won. I don’t believe in letting people win just because they’re younger. You do that once, they think they’ll win forever. And just be disappointed when they don’t. Annie kicked the wickets out of the ground with one pink tennis shoe, girl power sewn on the side in powder blue. It wasn’t fair, she said. Kevin went inside and carved radishes into roses, which he left on the table for John Cake and me.

"These children," he said. "What would I do without them?"

That’s what I wanted to know.
 

John Cake, we need to talk, I said.

He grinned, his fist around a pocketful of posies from his front yard. He held them out like
Frankenstein’s monster, and I told him to have a seat.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love John Cake. Although I didn’t. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy with his company. Although—I wasn’t. It was this otherness, this something that I hadn’t been able to locate. I thought I had been drawn to him, filings to his magnetized poles. But now I felt more like I had become stuck to him inadvertently. I was the fur around the warm gooey center of a hairball. Every day he presented me with this trophy, this World’s Greatest Lover trophy he had made himself out of an old bowling trophy, just pasting my name over the 300 Club inscription that still showed through the paper. At the end of the day he would take the trophy back, saying who knows, tomorrow it might be someone different. But then lo and behold, the sun rises and I am the world’s greatest lover again. At first I accepted the award gracefully. I was shocked and stunned. I thanked God and my mother. But now, now it’s just creepy.

"Where do you think we should go for dinner tonight?" he asked me. "Or should we eat in? The kids are at their mother’s. I can make soup."

"I don’t want soup," I told him. "I want to talk."

"What about?" As if I wanted to talk about the weather. What about?

"Us," I said.

Oh, he said. Oh, oh, oh.

"Us and the kids," I said.

"They make me uncomfortable," I said.

This was a lie, a test, a trial, an episode, staged. If anything, I made them uncomfortable, a twenty-five-year-old woman showing up at breakfast in their father’s Piece-a Cake Plumbing work shirt, eating their precisely sliced ham and radishes, beating them at their own sports, and at board games, charades, anything I could force them to play. They treated me with curiosity and indifference, a pungent combo that I would later work into my repertoire. And I treated them how I thought they should be treated.

So here it came, or here it was supposed to come: John Cake was supposed to begin calmly and slowly, his fist tightening around the posies until their stems snapped, leaving them flaccid and disappointed in themselves. These children were his life, he was supposed to say. They were his joy and his happiness and his reason for staying alive. Didn’t I understand that? How could I expect a man—because that’s what I am, Ardith, I’m a man—to simply toss aside his children, simply abandon them like cats in the woods, for some little hussy like me? How dare I even give voice to such an insane idea? How dare I even hint at it. You are a bad person, Ardith Enlow, he would tell me. And I want you out of my house.

But instead he said "Really? Well. We can get their mother out here tomorrow, then. Right? Not a problem. Taken care of. Solved."

I got up, got myself a glass of water, drank it in front of him. Silent. Then I rinsed my cup and left. It was never going to work.

He was too lonely.