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When Doris Day comes on the oldies station, Jessica sometimes goes into a secret room in her mind, and Karl usually finds a way to absent himself from her consciousness, Doris Day singing the music of her former life and her husband who died two years before Karl knew Jessica existed. Today, “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps,” comes on while she’s gardening, and she sings with it.
Perhaps, she is dancing with that other man in her mind.
Perhaps, they are making love.
Perhaps, they are talking about the babies they raised together, adults now who miss their father achingly, and who wouldn’t.
It could be that she’s simply singing because she loves to sing. Her voice is off-key and gorgeous in the way that only pain and hope and love can make a voice.
Her love for Karl, whom she has not married, whom she will not marry, whom she likes to spend long weekends with, who has not met her children and probably never will is a good thing and a real thing, but it is not the same thing.
Today, rather than sneaking off to leave her alone with the man she carries with her, he watches her pulling weeds and singing perhaps to the man she lost, to the true love of her life.
Karl thinks about the woman who is the true love of his life and wonders what she would think of Jessica if she were still alive. He can see them talking out there in the field behind the house. They would walk and talk about little things. Karl strains to hear their voices, what they’re saying, but they are beyond him.
John Brantingham
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear, Kitkitdizzi, and Days of Recent Divorce. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, NY.
