Our love appeared when the sculpture did — suddenly, downtown, right outside the Hub.

For years I’d been a regular at the Hub, Tampa’s best bar for its unpretentious atmosphere, titanium-strong drinks, all-around incredible staff. But when Maria and I went there on our third date in 2012, the smoky air hummed with magic. We talked and laughed, leaned close as silhouettes shifted around us and Galaga flickered and swooped with neon 1982. She was small, curly dark hair cut short, nice full figure, a smile wider than her face. A Cure fan, she had a crush on Ghost World-era Steve Buscemi (helpful); she thought traveling carnivals and mainstream politicians were a fascinating kind of creepy. She wanted dogs but was allergic, argued the third Indiana Jones movie should’ve been a riff on North by Northwest. She worked for a nonprofit that tracked manatees and she gave presentations to schoolchildren about estuaries and sea grasses and low-wake zones.

I wouldn’t know about these things if they smacked me in the face. But I was fixated on her beauty and locked on her words as we bumbled out into the blazing orange night, abuzz with the energy of each oth—

I popped forehead-first into metal, a stinging flash on my skull. Clutching my brow, I staggered backwards as she tried to keep laughter from escaping.

“Who put this here?!” I winced.

It was a reaching, rust-colored flame, flecks of undulation. Dirt rising up in human form, in humble exaltation. A tree overjoyed, like us, to be at the Hub?

She circled the sculpture, kneeling to inspect the legend. She stood, looked at me with a shyly growing smile.

“It’s beautiful,” she shrugged. “It’s Gaia.”

“It didn’t have to jump out like that!”

As I watched her eyes, bright with wonder, I saw the future.

“Gaia belongs to this moment,” I declared. “It’s ours.”

She walked back to me, pulled my hand gently away from my forehead.

Beckoning me down, she kissed the injured spot over my eye.

We never returned to the Hub. Other things took precedence, at any rate. In two months I’d moved from my apartment into her home in Seffner, a 40-year-old neighborhood, an occasional angling oak in this weathered and overcast corner of suburbia. Here’s her old green pickup, here’s my blue Taurus. Lawns carpet-bland and tended just to code. A one-story world.

Down the street lives Maria’s younger sister Veronica, a frazzled beauty who’d plunged into pills. Like summer weather, storms would flare up and Veronica’s son Lance would stay with us. One Thursday, rain heaving down in diagonal beams, we found the boy crouched at our front door, soaked and sobbing. He was 6. Maria knelt and swaddled him as her eyes welled. Inside she helped him lift his T-shirt off. In stuttering sniffles, he had his arms up. Like Gaia.

Eighteen months later, Maria was gone.

Veronica bought a Glock 32 .357 pistol two months ago, on the day her husband went to prison for selling pills. This particular Glock offers optimum carry comfort.

When Veronica wants help with groceries, I go.

Her house is off-white brick with a collar of shrubs so neglected they’re probably fake. I bristle past the crape myrtles along the driveway, fanning sticks in February, and slip through the garage side door with my key. Boxes are stacked like some triumph of Tetris. Give her this: she keeps the place clean. Inside it’s dark as always, shadows conspiring in the washroom and kitchen. Shifting TV logic and blue shafts of late afternoon tickle the living room’s vinyl furniture. Embedded in a bookshelf of tell-alls and biographies, the TVs infected with news feeds, weather, stocks scrolling. The camera helicopters over the crater where the plane went down.

Winding through a dim hallway, I press open Lance’s door. In a space cluttered with the post-detonation shrapnel of clothes and soda cans and whatever junk, the 8- year-old reclines on his bed, face blinking in the action onscreen. His massive flat monitor is a futurescape of glowing readouts and pipe. Screeches and drones, rumbles and shrieks. He roams corridors with a shoulder-slung cannon, sweeping and scanning, when a purplish figure jumps out. The boy jostles with his controller, riddling the attacker with fireworks of heavy munitions.

He glances over at me with passive acknowledgment.

“Who y’killin?” I ask and he shrugs, tractor-beamed back on the game. His bedroom window’s open a crack.

“Mutants,” he says finally.

The action continues, percussive explosions and screams. A Martian gunship, hit by a rocket, spins in a flaming arc before bursting apart.

I’m watching his huge gun huddle behind beams, peeking out to fire off rounds. He flashes me a quick aside.

“I’ll go see it. That sculpture.”

I’m trying not to seem surprised. “Yeah?”

That sculpture. He’ll go see the sculpture.

I’m gonna help the kid. We’ll build empathy.

Veronica’s force, the momentum of her mania, spills into the hallway behind me.

“Can’t find my goddamn Price Buddy card!” she folds her arms with a vengeance.

I appraise her with concern and a little fear. “Where’d you have it last?”

“The store?”

Lance’s game shouts “Get down!”

“He’s not your buddy, Veronica.”

She pivots toward the entry and I follow — she’s in a tank top, jeans, flip-flops — through the half-lit reaches. She hits a wall switch and the kitchen’s fluorescent. Over the sink she opens a cabinet to grab her prescription. Filling a glass in the sink with a splatter of water, she downs her pills. Turns around, butt against the sink with a sour smirk.

“Course they don’t have it. I called.”

She’s slimmer than my wife but has her face; the cheeks, nice nose and dark arching eyebrows belong to Maria every bit as much. Freaks me out a little. Veronica’s eyes are a little different — strikingly blue like her sister’s but with a cynical glisten, probing for evidence of guilt.

She strolls into the living room to turn off the TV and a shadowy space falls still.

There, by the microwave. Beside her faux-leather purse.

The gun.

Like another home appliance. Segmented and severe, the pre-natal nephew of a skyscraper’s girder. Angled on the counter with the slightest smug malevolence. As if it’s looking at me. Like it’s a pit bull. Slapping back into the kitchen, she follows the drift of my gaze to its target.

“At the store, Veronica?”

“Oh come on,” she moans, planting the gun inside her purse. “Sometimes I’m like over bein’ attacked for doin’ what I’m entitled to do, okay? I’m not gonna be stuck that one time shit happens. One time’s all it takes. You know. One moment y’deal with forever.” She’s digging into her purse for cigarettes. “No thank you.”

She scrapes fire from her lighter and eases back with her smoke, breathing out. The plume spreads, rolling under the ceiling, dusty and ghost-like in the corporate light. She’s not finished.

“I’m just sayin’ — be vigilant, right? I imagine somebody comin’ in the doors. Too warm for that coat. Goddammit, I see it. Whippin’ out a shotgun. Can you promise it won’t happen?” She frowns. “Are you gonna stop him?”

The moment hangs there, smothering.

“Anyway,” she exhales, “I don’t understand how you can’t—”

“Be armed?”

“Think about it! Y’got gangbangers, ISIS, whatever fuckin’ pirates get on the tanker ships?” She offers a shrug, scratching behind her right ear. “People who wanna eradicate religion worry me. Shit, Ebola?” Cigarette flaring.

“Sinkholes?” I suggest.

She hangs a tragic face. “One word: thugs. In our midst.”

“This neighborhood?”

“Shit yes. Thugs — practically with two G’s. Hear about over on McKinnon?”

“No, what?”

“Cul-de-sac over off Carver?”

“What?”

“My god, the break-in?”

“Shit.”

“Can’t even pull their pants up — think they respect anything?”

“We need a bazooka.”

“They show up around here?” She huffs a satisfied chuckle. “Watch out.”

The thing is, she means it.

“It’s all hangin’ by a goddamn thread,” she goes on. “Who’s comin’ for us when shit hits the fan? The ones who don’t have what I got, that’s who. I’m protecting my shit, y’know?” She glances back toward the noise of Lance’s game. “Protecting him.”

“A gun wasn’t gonna—” I swallow. The words crawl out non-confrontationally. She’s not even religious. “Save Maria.”

She dabs her cigarette in the sink, looking toward some vague spot on the ceiling. “Lance!” she hollers. “We’re leavin’, baby!”

Her son stays home when she shops; he turns his game up deafening.

At least she’s got her gun.

We head out to her old taupe Corolla. Someday she’s gonna shoot somebody.

Veronica has her pills; I have mine.

I’m 32, bad posture since the accident. Too skinny, maybe. My job as a manager at Sears is ancient history. I drink all day, live on the settlement and disability. Stupidly imagine I can write. Veronica scoffs at this; the only art she needs is rich people arguing on reality TV.

Veronica saved my life.

She’s also a raging racist — just like Vic, her husband.

What’ll save the kid? Help Lance not be like his parents?

In certain light I’m back at my wedding, beatific faces and ancient relatives, aunts
and uncles and cousins. Dad’s here in his dementia; mom’s dead a while now. I’m dizzy, euphoric, drinking and floating. Monumental conversations last mere seconds. Vic, a muscular mustache of slick-haired charm, is cutting pill deals in the parking lot.

Dancing on cobblestones, Maria and I trade lopsided grins at the silliness of the ceremony. In the spectral sweep of the disco ball she rolls her eyes — who picked Ricky Martin?! — wearing holes in her stockings, looking bashful and gorgeous with an upsweep of hair. We clasp hands, best friends bewildered by the universe. How’d I ever find her? Her dress is silk frosting, one strap off its shoulder. We steal away to make out. 

That’s 16 months ago. Forever lasted five months, three weeks and a day. Until the accident, when headlights blared out of nighttime nowhere on Parsons Avenue. Crushing impact, my car a shattered coffin of glass, suspended mid-air as we tumble and smash upright. 

She’s alive for 23 minutes while I slept, sliced-up bloody. I slept.

What did she think about for 23 minutes?

Witnesses pleading Hang on! Pacing tearfully. Gonna be alright!

When I’m home from the hospital, Veronica’s there, clutching me in our devastation. The kitchen’s halo at 4 a.m., lit like a dentist’s crypt. I trembled with fever- dream convulsions and sobbed. Vic hugged us and cried too; we had pills and alcohol. Endless pills, hers, the ones he sold, my new ones. Lance back there somewhere…

Asleep? Please?

I sorta remember rainy dinnertime.

Blitzed out of our brains, we laughed. For whatever reason. Something stupid in vanishing ink. Dam-burst snickering at long last. Convulsions of giggles, catching our breath. New chuckles and quakes, cradling my stomach.
A moment that saved me. They saved me.

Maria was dead. But finally we could laugh. God, how we laughed.

I won’t lie. There’s an action-thriller in my head where I lean out the wind-blast window that night with a gun and pop three shots into the drunk driver’s car. It flips, a hailstorm of shards missing us by inches. The image cuts out with a flicker and spark.

Through doors that part with a whisper, Veronica and I wander into the grocery store. It’s a kaleidoscope of pyramid-stacked displays, household goods, rows and rows of bright-lit brands. A temple of plastic, fruits included. Soft hits filter down at agreeable volume. We’re in a maze all too easy to escape with money or stamps. Cartoon characters live beside happy families in colorful packaging; compare us to competitors. The place is anti-nature in every way. How did Maria ever navigate this world?

I carry the basket; Veronica draws inward and fixes a rigid gaze when we pass people different enough from her.

I clear my throat. “I’m takin’ Lance to that sculpture.”

She’s about to drop Fruit Roll-Ups in the basket but reconsiders, stands there thinking, places the package back on the shelf and grabs the generic version.

“I dunno,” her voice drops. “Just you two?”

“Yeah?”

“Driving? You hate even thinking about driving!”

“Bullshit,” I mutter. She’s absolutely right, of course. “I love driving. I just need luxury in a high-performance package.”

She’s balking — she’s actually trying to limit my friendship with Lance. Why? Because it reminds her that Maria was a better mother?

We wind into the dairy section as “Say You, Say Me” hits its rock stretch. The freezer hints a puff of mist as she extracts ice cream.

“Vic said I’m like Lance’s father figure!” I protest.

“How fucked up was he?”

I’m getting angrier by the second.

She’s scanning labels like she cares about nutrition when all that matters is price. She won’t look at me, can’t see me, a beacon of apathy who looks like a strung-out actress. I’m ready to sling the groceries across the stupid store.

It’s building, my fury, and the checkout line unfolds like I dread, Veronica arguing about her Price Buddy card with the cashier, a pretty black girl, Tameka, maybe a teenager, confronted by this entitled, 28-year-old white woman with the glare of a desperately cutthroat consumer.

I try to catch Tameka’s eyes, maybe offer some eyebrow-twitch of empathy. As the exchange escalates — Veronica’s certain her Price Buddy card is in the store’s system and loaded with savings — I wander toward the customer service counter. Finally, her groceries bulging in plastic bags, Veronica swipes her receipt.

In the pothole-strewn parking lot, late-afternoon sun spears nicotine clouds. She pulls out her pills in the car, taps a couple into her palm and downs them with Diet Coke. She turns the key and punches through radio stations until Bon Jovi turns up.

“Maria would want Lance to see the sculpture,” I blurt as we pull into the street. “It meant something to her. It’s called Gaia for crissakes! Can’t I just be the kid’s uncle still? Can’t we just let him see something other th—”

“Than what?” She jabs the radio off. Suddenly we’re barreling into a fight without
brakes. “Seriously — what? I don’t care about any tree-hugging shit.”

“Maybe Lance will!”

“Don’t fuck with me,” she snaps.

“Veronica!” I’m trembling with anger. “I stood there and watched you with that cashier! I mean sure, we’re probably all subconsciously racist in some way, right, I get it, I hate it, but—”

She raises a quivering hand, shut up, stop the conversation. She bites her lower lip as the engine revs and right away I’m horrified, anticipating impact, clutching the door handle with bone-tight knuckles.

“Veronica—”

We’re coming up to the house. She slows quickly, lurches right and we squeal to a stop. Her eyes are ablaze as she glares at me.

“Do not say I’m…”

Suddenly her eyes turn curiously sideways. We both hear it, something muffled and noisy outside. Opening our doors to the sound of screaming, skin pounding a surface.

We trade fearful looks. And like that, Veronica’s running around the front of her car while jostling into her purse, she’s out of her flip-flops and I’m chasing her. I glimpse it, she’s reaching for the gun, it’s in her grasp as we round the side of the house and I fall forward — no! — tumbling into her legs as she turns in terror and falls— 

A shattering snap, echo clapping off stucco and brick.

I’m atop Veronica as we freeze, locked into each other’s panicked eyes. The pistol lies just out of reach.

“It’s me—!” a voice cries.

Thirty feet away, a small white woman, fiftyish, squats petrified against Veronica’s house with her hands up. The neighbor.

“Heard screamin’!” the woman gasps. “Guns’n…!”

And seeing the shock of Veronica and me, immersed in each other, she springs up, makes a break for her screeching porch door.

Veronica’s gaze, so stricken and wide.

We’re close enough to kiss.

And I see my wife’s face again. But suddenly it’s an indictment.

Was Maria secretly like her sister? Would our long life together have revealed this if death hadn’t intervened?

I cough, climbing clumsily to my feet.

Maybe it’s how I had to see her. The only way to wrench myself free of grief. I’m standing over Veronica’s disbelief, the gunshot almost still audible, gradually replaced in our chiming ears by the blare of artillery coming through Lance’s window.

The boy’s game roars on.

The next couple weeks are quiet. Veronica’s embarrassed. I don’t want her to be.
I pick Lance up at his house without fanfare, don’t see his mother. We talk little on the Selmon, boy mostly buried in his phone, games and conversations, a universe of things I can’t replace. It’s a sunny cumulus Saturday.

We’ve found the start of the story — time together. A plan moving forward from here.

Downtown, beneath the sparkle of an apartment tower, we park at Franklin and Polk. Rounding the corner, my heart swells.

I have to catch my breath.

Maybe it’s because the kid’s here at the sculpture that I have to see her, imagine Maria here too. Maybe because I’m here.

“Called Gaia,” I say. “By Ofra Friedman. Your aunt loved it.”

The boy’s glancing around, taking in the urban canyon.

“Maria said something you should know that night,” I lie. “Heaven’s an endless forest. We’re all trees when we die. Our roots entangled with everybody else’s. Where do we end and the next person begins?”

We stand there, beholding Gaia.

I wanna think it’s like he can see her too, smiling, shaking her head at this ridiculous world. At this idiot who banged his head and had the dumb misfortune or luck to keep living. Who loved her while we had the chance.

“We better find new ways to be nice to each other,” I say. “Y’think?”

Lance stares at the sculpture, skeptical tilt in his face. A shrug.

“Yeah.”

This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2015.