The Promise of Jesse Woods by Chris Fabry

play. She wore loose terry-cloth shorts that crept up when she sat on the couch. She’d extended her bare feet and stretched them like a cat, touching my leg.
    Gwen was not a homely girl. In fact, she was quite pretty. She had been on the plump side in junior high, like I had been in my early teens—all that studying and little interest in sports had given her a full figure. Now she smiled and again I saw the difference money and orthodontia can make.
    “Do you ever think of our school days? All the fun we had?”
    I could think of them, but Gwen’s days had been pool parties and majorettes and pizza after football games.Compared with Jesse, hers was an easy life with an intact family and a paved road with college at the end.
    “Are you finished with school?” I said, changing the subject.
    “I finish grad school in December.”
    “Something in the medical field, I suppose?”
    “Anesthesiology,” she said.
    “Bless you,” I said.
    She laughed. “Oh, I miss that quick wit of yours. You were always so funny.” She touched my shoulder. “One of these days I’m going to get up to Chicago and see you in a play.”
    I looked behind me at the meat counter, but there was no one there. “I haven’t exactly broken into the big time. In fact, I’m mostly counseling young kids—”
    “You were always such a success. Do you have a girlfriend up there?”
    I winced but tried to hide it. “Still looking, I guess.”
    Someone pushed a cart past us and we moved closer to the stewed tomatoes.
    “‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it . . . ?’ Do you remember that from Our Town ?”
    I nodded.
    “‘Every, every minute?’”
    I pulled the dialogue from memory. ‘No. Saints and poets maybe . . . they do some.’” I said the line as a good-bye.
    Gwen smiled sadly. “It’s a shame about us. We would have been good together. Maybe we still can be.”
    I thought of some quick-witted joke about being married to an anesthesiologist, that you never had to worry about insomnia, but I held back. It was my quick wit that she loved.
    “It was good seeing you again, Gwen.”
    She followed her mother toward checkout and I glanced behind me at the bloody meat counter. Gwen’s life had been high heels and dance shoes and I couldn’t help comparing her to Jesse’s rough feet. Gwen waved from the front of the aisle and I turned to the back of the store.
    The meat counter was empty but I noticed a fresh chicken on a wooden slab with a cleaver next to it. Dexter Crowley, a boy two years ahead of me in school, pushed a load of laundry detergent toward a far aisle and stopped.
    “Matt Plumley,” he said, sticking out a rough hand.
    Dexter had the frame of a football player but not much coordination. He was all arms and gangling legs and a blank stare that felt like menace to opposing teams but was more Dexter trying to remember who he was supposed to block.
    I shook his hand and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m back for a few days. Is Jesse working today?”
    His mouth was open as he glanced at the counter. “Yeah, she was there a minute ago. She works all this week except for Saturday. Did you know she’s getting married?”
    “I heard.”
    “First time I heard it, I thought they was funnin’ me. But she showed me the ring and said it was true. And Earl, he comes in here—why, there’s Verle now.”
    Verle Turley was cut from the same cloth as his brother, and if there had been a sound track for his approach, it would have been a cross between the banjo from Deliverance and the strings in Jaws . He walked up to Dexter with a John Deere hat pulled low.
    “Verle, you remember Matt Plumley, don’t you? He was in those plays at school.” He turned back to me. “You know, the one I remember was when you played that guy who sees the ghosts at Christmas. Remember that?”
    I nodded as Verle gave me a slack-jawed stare. He crossed his arms and planted his