“Percy.” A pause. “I married her because I’d gotten her pregnant, and that was the right thing to do. And then after she lost it, I couldn’t exactly—“ Another pause. “I stayed out of guilt. That’s the honest answer.”
The bag from Dina’s is still in my hand.
The dogwoods outside are still doing their embarrassing thing.
Fox’s voice continues, patient and certain, explaining to his friend like I’m a decision he made under duress and has been managing ever since.
I stand in the hallway of the building that bears his family’s name, in the life I built around a man, and I know—fully, finally,with the specific clarity that only comes when there is nothing left to misunderstand—that I have been alone this whole time.
I just didn’t know it.
Stupid!
2
LOVES HER NOT
FOX
Igot the name Fox because I got lost.
I was seven years old, and the Bennett men were doing what the Bennett men did every third weekend of October—loading into two trucks before dawn and driving out past Franklin to a vast forest my grandfather bought in 1961.
The hunting lodge in the forest was in the style of an English country estate—rough stone, heavy beams, enormous fireplaces, and a long room where fifteen men could eat, drink, and tell lies—along with a spotless shed behind it outfitted with steel hooks, drains, and everything required to process the carcass of a deer or two.
My father, my uncle Reeves, David—who was twelve and already insufferable about it—and me: small, distracted, more interested in the way the light moved through the tree line than in anything that required a firearm.
I wandered off.
That part I remember clearly—not getting lost, but the moment before getting lost.
I saw something move in the undergrowth and followed it the way seven-year-olds follow things—without calculation, without telling anyone, without the basic self-preservation instinct that parents hope children have by that age.
I walked for what felt like a long time.
The sounds of the men receded.
The woods thickened.
I wasn’t afraid, which I think alarmed my father more than anything else, when they found me three hours later.
Who they found me with was a family of red foxes.
I had, apparently, sat down in a clearing and stayed still long enough that a vixen and her two kits came close enough to investigate.
Cross-legged in the leaves, not moving, I watched them the way I would anything that interested me—completely, quietly, and with my whole attention. They watched me in the same way.
The search party crashed through the undergrowth, at which point the foxes disappeared, though not before everyone saw them.
My father grabbed my arm hard enough to leave marks and scolded me from here until the cows came home.
Uncle Reeves, who was and remains an alcoholic with an arsenal of weapons—talk about a bad combination—laughed until he had to lean on a tree.
“Found him with foxes,” Uncle Reeves told everyone at Thanksgiving that year. “Just sitting there like he belonged to them.”
The name stuck.
Bennett men acquire their names like they do their land—someone decides, and then it simply is.
