One Day the Wind Changed by Tracy Daugherty

as the coils of my cooker.
    One night I dreamed of tossing her over the railing, only to run down and catch her in my arms, the boyfriend just a mulch-pile at this point, a wet mess to be raked away someday. The woman cooed “Baby baby!” as I carried her back upstairs.
    On Friday nights, when I’d finished studying, I’d head over to Finches, a beer and burger joint on Mockingbird Lane near the university football stadium. The smell of fresh bread from a bakery up the street made me feel full whether I ordered dinner or not. A friend of mine managed Finches. His name was Gary. He had a ginger beard, a sly smile, and a limp. He’d shovel fries until two. Then he’d close the place, send the help home. He’d sit with me by the bar’s stone hearth reading aloud chapters from a novel he’d hacked at for years. It wasn’t very good but I enjoyed the ritual. He’d grab us a couple of lagers—ignoring the sticky plates in the kitchen—and remind me where we’d left off in the story. His stubborn pluck and glee, his devotion to his awful characters, warmed me more than the fire.
    On a typical Friday night, a student poets’ club gathered at a corner table, got snockered, bold, and loud, and yelled at the late-shift girls streaming in from the Dr Pepper bottling plant across the street. The girls shed their shoes, rubbed their pinched red feet, and told the poets to shove it. This just stirred them up. “Hey baby, let’s couplet!” one of the geniuses would shout. They tipped poorly, left a salty, burbling mess on the table, and mocked Gary’s gait. The Dr Pepper divas were every bit as smarmy, setting their shoes on tabletops, griping about their feet.
    Gary could have told them all a thing or two (though he never did): a jungle in southern Laos, a land mine sunk in mud; it was pure dumb luck the thing malfunctioned just as Gary stepped on it.
    â€œ This is what you should write about,” I told him whenever he talked about the army. Instead, his novel concerned a black girl in a Houston ghetto: a subject he knew nothing about, but the material was “sociologically significant,” he insisted. I’d know the importance of this, he said, if I ever got out of the library and took a look around.
    So we’d sit after closing, two literary types flummoxed by the world: he by what he’d seen, me by all I’d missed. “10, 2 & 4” flashed the Dr Pepper sign in front of the plant. What did these numbers mean? I imagined them as the key to a combination safe. Inside, Linda Ronstadt. Judy Collins. Or my neighbor in her nightie. Never Suzi. Never the treasure I expected. Already, my imagination had accepted Suzi as a creature apart.
    One Friday evening, the yelling started early in the courtyard. “I’m coming up there, bitch!” “I’ll call the cops!” the woman said.
    I switched off my hot plate and looked out the window. She wore only a white dress shirt, a man’s. It barely covered her butt. The backs of her knees seemed to glow. Rain lashed the tree. The boyfriend staggered and weaved. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my stomach hurt. The discomfort convinced me that no matter what the future held, I would never feel nostalgic about my college days. I wouldn’t miss the rain. The tree. Or the lonely boy I’d been.
    But oh baby baby, the backs of her knees.
    I was surprised to see Billy that night at Finches. He didn’t see me, or pretended not to. He had his arms around a woman I didn’t know. Tall, loud: Suzi’s opposite.
    Thin crowd. Late spring. Some seniors—those headed for the service or their fathers’ corporate boardrooms—had graduated early; others stayed home prepping for exams. Gary always worried about summer. Without students around, Finches didn’t do enough business to justify staying open, and he felt unsafe with so few people in the bar.
    Tonight, a