She stood watching the dust bunnies come,  watched them bare their bucky teeth as they swept from beneath the archaic refrigerator, caught up in the draft her ordinary housedress had created, whirling about in an exuberant vortex.  
    She stood watching out the window after the bunnies had scurried to other nesting grounds, where they would nurture their young at a tangled teat, and was surprised to see the red Ford pickup of one Joe Cuppy pull into her husband’s customary spot. 
    She touched her wheat-colored hair, smoothed the faded skirt, licked her teeth clean because she’d been eating lettuce for lunch, and went to the door. 
    Upon opening it, Kanton, Oklahoma entered in all its obliterated beauty, followed shortly by a boy in his late teens, the grocer’s son, one Joe Cuppy. 
    He was nice-looking, that Joe, brown hair all tangled from the dusty wind, hazel eyes staring out from beneath lashes more suited to a girl.  And he was popular, that Joe, had lots of friends- girlfriends, too. But he was faithful to Jenny, the same girl he’d been sweet on since sophomore year. 
    “Hullo, Mrs. Teagan,” he called as he entered the kitchen, passing the worn, wooden table as though his appearance were an ordinary ritual in her daily routine, like tending the dead house plants or ironing Milo’s trousers.
    “Joe?”  she said, reminding him somewhat of a child. “What’re you doin’ here? Where’s Milo?” 
    Joe smiled, and she saw why he had so many friends.  “Asked me to bring these out seein’ how he’s busy fixin’ the truck.” 
    She stood, uncertain because Milo did things like this from time to time and it never ended well for her, then took one step back to allow him passage and motioned to set the bag down.  “Please, Joe-“she began, and he smiled at her in such a way it made her ears heat up.  “Call me Claire.”
    “Uh,” he hadn’t been expecting that from a forty year old woman. Hadn’t known they still had feeling between their legs.   “Okay…” 
    She smoothed her skirt again, asked him to shut the door, and began unpacking. 
    “I can do that, Mrs. Teagan.”  A sharp look from her and he reconsidered.  “I mean Claire.”
    “Now isn’t that nicer than callin’ me by Milo’s name?”
    Joe Cuppy shrugged, thinking that maybe women were supposed to like stuff like that.  He suspected Jenny would be more than happy to be called a Cuppy.  
    “I appreciate you drivin’ all the way out here,” Claire said while turning her back to him, giving him ample opportunity to view her tush, which she still considered to be quite remarkable.  “I hurt my wrist and can’t carry worth a darn.”  
    “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, wanting to climb back into the red Ford and forget about doing favors for his father’s cantankerous customer- the one who never forgot a slight, no matter how. 
    “Sure beats walkin’, though,” she dropped the line in a casual way, like she used to in high school when she wanted the boys to think she was easy. 
    “Walkin’?” Joe Cuppy repeated.   “It’s two miles to town.”
    “Sure is,” she reached into the bag, retrieved some milk, a carton of eggs, and Joe watched her, wondering if he did this to every woman he unpacked groceries for, piecing together what he thought they were by what came out of their sacks.
    Claire smiled, reached inside, and felt her fingers brush against what she’d been hoping was there. Pulling it out, she offered it to her young guest.  “Got plenty of apples. Want one?”
 “I don’t eat apples, Mrs. Teagan.”   
    “They keep the doctor away.” 
    “Uh,” he savored the word because there was nothing behind it, let it flow from his tongue like the kisses he’d planted down Jenny’s neck the night before.  “I should probably just be goin’.” 
    He couldn’t be caught here with this lady, not with his hand in her bag of produce and Milo Teagan two miles away, sniffing the air like a rutting buck, because Joe Cuppy had noticed the tush.  Quite remarkable.
    “No need to be rude, “she set the apple down, turned and opened the fridge, deposited the milk, then shut it again with a smooth motion of her hips.   “You’re half my age.” 
    “Well,” he said while running a hand over his neck, scratching the curls at the nape where sweat was beginning to gather.  “I just thought-“
    She laughed.   “Do you think I’m pretty, Joe?”
    His hand stopped, dropped to his side.  “Sure ya are, Mrs. Teagan, sure-“
    “Come on…” she turned,  let a finger slide down the length of the counter, wistful in its wanderings.  “Milo used to say I was. But now I’m beginnin’ to wonder…”
    “Sure ya are,” Joe repeated, unable to think of a reason to lie.  “Sure, Mrs-“
    “I told ya to call me Claire.” 
    He took a step back, answered, “All right, Claire. All right…”
    She smiled, reached up to touch the sleeve of his shirt, more a gesture of affection than seduction, and asked, “Know who you remind me of?”
    He shrugged again. Words gone, inching ever closer to the door and the blistering Oklahoma heat just beyond it.
    “Your mama,” she licked her lips. “Darn, but you look just like her.” 
    His heart did a chin-up and came to rest in his temples, where it throbbed with a heated hand. 
    She noticed the look on his face, didn’t need to elaborate just yet.  “Yes, sir- she was a looker, too.  No wonder your Pa snatched her up when he did, green on the vine.“
    “Wait a minute,” he stepped forward, away from the door and the heat and toward Milo Teagan’s wife.  “You knew my mother?”
    “We were real good friends, me and her.“
    He stood. Opened his mouth. Shut it again.
    “Somethin’ the matter?”
    He decided to answer. Let the darn thing that had hold of his tongue out of the bag. “No one knew my mother.”
    Claire smiled again. “Everyone knew her, Joe.  Remembering, now that’s another kettle of fish.”
    “Can you,” he faltered, unable to understand why this strange woman living on the edge of town had suddenly become more important than his sterling reputation at Table Rock High School.   “Can you tell me about her?” He paused, took a seat in the old rocker just this side of the kitchen counter.  “Please.”
    Claire shook her head, letting him savor the uncertainty.  “You’d best be goin’, now- your pa must be wondering where you are.”
    “He don’t wonder about me. “
    “If you was my boy I’d keep you under lock and key.  Your pa-“
“Fuck my pa!” 
    “Joe!”
    “Well,  goddamn it,”  he stood again, circled the rocker, stopped, then sank back into it.  Looking up, he said, “Prove it.”
    “What?”
    “Prove you knew my ma. “
    Without another word, Claire Teagan went to the lopsided baker’s rack that leaned against the north wall, and opened a drawer.  Inside was a picture, and she carried it to Joe Cuppy, who reached out and took hold.  It showed his Ma- young, in a summer dress, with Milo’s wife, their fingers interlaced.
    He traced the surface with a pensive finger.  “Can you tell me-”  No words. Again.
    She waited, knowing they would come when he was ready.
    “Why no one talks about her?”
    She smiled in a nice way, came to the front of the rocker, went to her knees before it. 
    “Wanna know how I got my name?”
    He didn’t answer her question.  Couldn’t just yet, but found his anger in the next instant. “Your what?” he stopped, unbelieving.  “Your name?”
    Her smile was still nice as she leaned one elbow on the rocker, moving it with the involuntary motion of her breath, telling him how she was born in North Carolina, on a clear night with a full moon, about how her Pa looked out the window and thought it was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. How he named her after his wife’s favorite song.
    Joe Cuppy sat and stared, and rocked without meaning to. 
    “The Claire de Lune.”
    “Oh.”
    “It means ‘moonlight’.”
    “Really?”
    She smiled up. A child again.
    “Listen,”  the heartbeat was still there in his forehead.  “I don’t have time for stories, so if you’re not gonna tell me about my mother-“
    “Ren wasn’t from here, either.  That’s why folks were so mean to us.”
    “Why,” he leaned forward, stopped her motion with a hand to the shoulder.   “Why would folks be mean to you?”
    “The ‘Claire de Lune’ was my border song.”
    “Border-” He saw there was no sense in making sense, and irritation quickly replaced pity.  “What in the hell are you talkin’ ‘bout?”
    “They keep people movin’. The whatnots that settled this town heard ‘em, and the ones that kept goin’, past here an’ on to the ocean.”
    He thought about it, let his mind wander to a time when he’d wanted to ride out and leave the store. His friends.  Jenny, even. 
    “When I was a girl I wondered what was on the other side of the hills behind our house,“ she paused, put one finger to her bottom lip, hooked it inside, and Joe thought she could see him making for the sea as well.  “If I’d known Kanton was out here I’d of left well enough alone!”
    Joe Cuppy laughed despite himself, and thought of Jenny as a grocer’s wife.
    “It ain’t so bad here.”
    Claire Teagan got to her feet and went to the window, stirring dust bunnies again with her passing.  “Your Ma heard ‘em, too.”
    He stood, came beside her, and put a hand to her right hip, wanting her to give him what he wanted simply because she could. 
    “What was Ma’s song?”
    She stiffened against him, leaned back, her remarkable tush flush with his groin.  “I don’t know.  She never told me, but-“ she turned her head and wanted to please him for no other reason than he’d been Ren’s.  “I think it drove her crazy.” 
    He drew back.
    “She blew a hole in your pa’s roof with his shotgun. Said someone was up there watchin’ her.”
    Joe stepped away, twisted her in his arms so he could see her eyes, and knew she wasn’t lying.
    “Pa never said anything about that.”
    “What did your pa say?”
    “That she was real sweet and nice, and died in her sleep because bad hearts ran in the family.”
    His words did not surprise her, and still she giggled.  “Bad hearts?  That’s a nice way of saying took down the clothesline and hung herself in the pantry.”
    “What?”  The blood was rushing again,  this time against gravity and into Joe Cuppy’s eyes, where they filled with a strange compassion,  a fear for the mother he’d come to believe was no more than a woman who’d lived only to bear him. 
    “Your pa didn’t tell you?” she seemed incredulous, almost taunting, and any thoughts he’d harbored before about giving her what she wanted evaporated with the last  mantle of morning mist.
    “Why would he tell me?” Joe was pacing now, between the rocker and television set, passing in front of the soap opera Claire watched without the sound.   “I get stuff outta that pantry all the time.”  He stopped again, thought on it, and said, “He couldn’t find her ring.”
    “He what?”
    “Pa,” Joe turned on his heel, fixed her with an intense stare, one she suspected made Jenny’s knees weak, and said,” he couldn’t find her weddin’ ring after she died.”
Milo’s wife stared, and said nothing.
    “My aunt told me that. Made me promise to keep quiet.”
    “I didn’t know,” she continued to stare, her blue eyes going soft, growing large.  “I don’t get out much, and when I do, no one talks to me.”
    Joe Cuppy swiveled, put his weight on his left foot, then drew a disgruntled hand down over his face,  cursing softly and muttering in a voice Claire had to strain to hear.  “Can’t say I blame ‘em.”
    Milo’s wife took a step forward, hurt registering in her face even after all the practice she’d had at hiding it.  “You think I’m crazy, too?”
    He blew his breath out, “anyone who throws her life away to marry a bastard like Milo Teagan can’t be square.” He paused, reconsidered, and tried to make right. “No offense-“
    “None taken.”  But she didn’t mean it, just said the words because they kept her above water.   “And for the record, Milo promised me a buckskin gelding.”
    “A what?”
    She screwed up her nose, gave him a sheepish look. “A gelding… to race barrels with.”  He looked on, confused, and she finished with, “in the rodeo.”
    She remembered Ren when she’d first seen her, outside of Tulsa, riding the circuit on a trick pony,  her fringed skirt flying high.  Claire had wanted the same. All of it.
But her son waited, and so she got on with it, asked him if he’d ever thought about life outside their small town. 
    “Nope!”  His voice was rough, and he knew it, but all he could see was his Ma- her face so like his own, swinging from the rafters by a clothesline tied with her own hand.  “There’s no sense in it. Pa wants me to run the store when I get older.”
    She smiled as though something had touched her, sighed, hooked a finger in her mouth again.  “You’ve never wondered about college?”
    “Nope.”
    “There’s no harm in dreamin’.”
    “Look where dreamin’ got my ma.  Look where it got you!”
    She shook her head, smoothed the troublesome skirt, but wouldn’t look at him. “I used to sit in this red rocker and wonder what life was gonna be like when it finally got interestin’.  I realized soon enough that the most interestin’ people in the world do the same thing, only difference is they’re in different colored chairs.”
    “Aw!” Joe Cuppy exclaimed right before storming into the kitchen, making for the door.  “I just came out here to deliver some damn groceries, and if I didn’t know better I’d say you made everything up so I’d sit and listen to your stupid ‘Claire de Lune’ story.”  He paused at the door.  “Well, if that’s the line, I ain’t biting! I’m going right back to the store an’ talk to Pa!”
    Claire moved then, quickly, and with the grace of the dancer she’d been before meeting Milo. She moved between Joe and the door, put her hands to his shoulders, and he hadn’t any idea how she came to be where she was. 
“When did you first know you loved Jenny?”
He shoved a finger in her face, right between the eyes, and said with the low grumble of a bear protecting its own, “leave her outta this.”
“Can’t.  I’m afraid she’ll hear the songs an’ leave you.  One way or another-“
“Shut up!” her words made his stomach turn, thinking of the girl he wanted to marry swinging from the end of something she’d tied herself.      “Jenny’s sweet and nice and has her head screwed on straight.  She doesn’t mind living here, wants lots of babies.“
“Your ma said the same thing.  Just what your pa wanted to hear.”
“My ma was bat shit crazy, I’m guessin’, to be friends with someone like you.”
Milo’s wife stepped aside, put her hand on the door and slowly pushed it open.  Oklahoma waited just outside- the bright sun, flat fields and dusty byways- all she’d ever known since turning twenty and following a man west who would never love her.  A man who’d never bought her that buckskin gelding, and never known how she envied the grocer his son. But more than that, his wife.
  “I think you’d better go. Milo-”
He let the air escape his lungs, the huff of a working bellows.  “You go right ahead and tell that son of a bitch everythin’.  Don’t leave nothin’ out.  An’ when he comes looking for trouble, he’s gonna get it.”
    She told him trouble was all Milo was ever looking for. 
    Joe Cuppy shoved past her,  stomped down the steps, stopped at the bottom and looked back at her standing in the doorway, a Carolina girl named after the moonlight who had the misfortune to marry the meanest man alive,  and summoned a brief semblance of pity.
    “Why do you stay with him when he beats you?” 
    She looked down, put a hand to her mouth, then dropped it along with the pretense.
When she didn’t answer, he looked down as well, kicked at his tires with the tip of a white tennis shoe. “I know that’s the real reason your wrist is no good for carryin’ worth a darn.”
    Milo’s wife looked to the wrist, healing nicely, and remembered the moment Milo had grabbed hold of it and thrown her to the floor.  A man, he’d said, had asked about her in town.
      “I guess some troubles are too heavy to let go.” 
    He smiled for the first time since she’d offered him the apple.  “I don’t think that’s what you heard when you listened to your border songs.”
    She returned his smile, touched her hair again, wondered if he still found her pretty after the words that had passed between them. 
    Joe Cuppy turned, caught sight of Milo Teagan’s truck kicking up a storm at the end of the lane, and pulled open the door of his pickup.   Once inside, he stuck his head out the window and said, “they’re halfway between brown and hazel, and look like sunlight shinin’ through a glass of whiskey.”
    Claire Teagan didn’t know what to say, just stood in her doorway, wondering what had gotten into the grocer’s son, hoping he’d be gone before her husband had a chance to ruin it. 
    “The color of Jenny’s eyes,” he answered for her.  “I saw them in my sleep and knew I loved her.”
    She paused, thinking how lucky Jenny was to have found Joe before someone else found her. 
    “That’s nice,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear, watching as he pulled out, passing Milo at the wide place in the lane.
    Claire stood while her husband got out and moved up the steps, a deliberate man who knew his place in the world, wiping his hands on the handkerchief he kept in the back pocket of his bibs.  
    “That boy just get here?”
    Milo’s wife followed him inside, shut the door, and answered with a nod.
    “You embarrass me enough without throwin’ yourself at a kid his age.”
    She didn’t reply. Went to the counter and began to prepare lunch.
    “Milo,” she called to him before she’d really begun, and he emerged from the bedroom. 
    She paused, felt the edge of the knife she’d been using to cut the apple Joe wouldn’t eat, and wondered what it would feel like to get out.  Really out.
    “What color are my eyes?”
    Milo paused, looked away, then laughed so loud the neighbors they didn’t have would have heard.  “Darlin’, the last goddamn thing I’ve got on my mind is the color of your eyes.”
    She stood for a moment, thought of the hills behind her Carolina home,  the way the mist rolled off the rounded tops like chimney smoke,  and Joe,  halfway to town and the girl he loved because her eyes were the color of whiskey.
    “Claire?” her husband asked. 
    She moved again, knife in hand, and pulled open the drawer on the baker’s rack, the one that housed the picture, and reached beneath it.  Her fingers closed on the ring, Ren’s ring, the one Joe’s pa had married her with, the one she’d given to Claire the day she died, and slid it over the knuckle of her finger.
    “Claire?” Milo repeated.
    She walked to the doorway and opened it, stopping for a moment to look over her shoulder at the man who’d shared her bed for the last twenty years, and knew the only thing she could be grateful for was that they had no children.
    “They’re blue,” she said, stepping outside. Blue as the band of sky just above the wavering horizon, and shut the door behind her.