When I woke up this morning, I could smell Kevin. Rain dripped slowly across the face of the window, and the coffee pot in the kitchen was going. It’s a fancy one, it’s got a timer and everything. Usually, I wake before Kevin. I get up, strip completely naked for the first and last time of the day—this is a usual day that we’re talking about—and I shower in the nude for fifteen minutes, scrubbing everything I got with soap and washing it all off again. I get out, towel down, dress, and go to the kitchen. The scent of the brewing coffee could drive a man insane; it’s a good thing I’m a lady or I might kill everyone in the complex from fevered masculine bloodlust on account of the smell of that damn hot coffee. I try to just have the one cup, because, Lord, if I have two or more cups of that damn Joe I might kill everyone in the complex from Joe fever. I drink the one cup—this is a usual day—and I think of Kevin. I wonder where he slept the night before, who he was with, what he did for dinner, how he felt waking today and if he woke thinking of me the way I usually woke thinking of him. I put on three coats and two hats. I take two big deep breaths and I go outside. I know Kevin wants to speak to me. There’s nothing I want more in the world than for him to appear suddenly, rapturously before me at moments like this, beside me throughout the dull business of my mornings. Would that it were the USUAL. But it is not to be. Shivering, pulling my outermost coat closer to my second most outermost coat, I cross the highway to the 7/11. I buy cigarettes for Kevin even though I know when I give them to him he will not light a one. On a usual day, I say something to the brown boy behind the counter, something nice like, “The puddles in the parking lot are very pretty today,” because I know no one ever says nice things to a boy like that. The only people who come into the 7/11 are dour folk, droopy eyes and disfigured spirits, all. I wave a thrice-mittened hand at him in farewell and leave, dinging the electronic bell noise as I push out the door. It is then that I see Kevin, across the street. Fully across. From stem to stern, soup to nuts, head on one end and the rest of him fully across the other. I can’t weep; I’m a lady damn it, and a lady doesn’t weep on the highway. It will take the black metal dustpan to get all of him back together and out of the road, but it is almost time for the rush hour. I guess it isn’t a usual day. On a usual day, a squirrel would be off picking up giant nuts, and taking them back to his secret wooded hole, hoarding a store for the winter like a squirrel ought to. Damn the road and its cars. Kevin was my squirrel.

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