Sea Change

“Everybody my age has had sex,” she said.

“Probably not all of them with a stranger forty years older, in front of a video camera,” Jesse said.

“Turn you on?” she said.

She looked at him with her eyes wide open. Jesse looked back. Big, blue, innocent and stupid, he thought.

“You were maybe the twenty-fifth person I looked at,”

Jesse said. “I was a long way past turning on.”

“So, you gonna arrest me, or what?”

“I don’t quite know what to do with you, Katie. Let’s try talking about things, just sort of pleasantly. I won’t be a 1 6 5

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tough guy, and you won’t be a sexpot, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.”

She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he had said.

“You married?”

“Divorced,” Jesse said.

“Got a girlfriend?”

Jesse smiled. “Actually, I’m living with my ex-wife,” he said.

“That’s weird.”

Jesse continued to smile.

“Yes,” he said. “It certainly is.”

“If you’re divorced, how come you live together.”

“It has to do with love,” Jesse said.

“You love her?”

“I think we love each other,” Jesse said.

“So how come you got divorced?”

“Long answer,” Jesse said. “The short version is, we had problems we couldn’t solve.”

“And now you can?”

“Maybe.”

“You gonna get married again?”

“I don’t know.”

“They got divorced five years ago,” Katie said.

“Your parents,” Jesse said.

“Yes,” Katie said. “I don’t care.”

Jesse nodded.

“And I don’t want you giving me a lot of crap about broken homes and that shit,” Katie said.

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“Okay,” Jesse said.

“I always been kind of wild,” she said.

“Must worry the hell out of your mother,” Jesse said.

“She’s scared out of her gourd I’ll get pregnant, like she did.”

“Which was why she married your father?”

“Yeah, and had me.”

“Your father worry about you?” Jesse said.

“He’s in Louisville, Kentucky,” she said.

“So you don’t see him so often.”

“For sure,” she made it one word. “He got married again.

Got a kid.”

“And,” Jesse said, “I gather your mother dates.”

“She’s boy crazy,” Katie said. “Like me.”

“Or occasionally,” Jesse said, “man crazy.”

“You mean Harrison? Yeah. I really showed him something. He said he couldn’t believe how great I was. He’s got this huge yacht and tons of money. My mother’s probably jealous. She’s always pigging these losers.”