What He Knows

by Weston Cutter

There’s something I’ve been avoiding talking to you about, son, about
avoiding and talking and your mother, son, how she kept me hidden from her but, understand, I don’t mean that she didn’t see me, because she did, she did, but it’s how—its like those mornings, wintertime, it’s so cold
and you

wake up and pull on anything, just something for cover, you’re not sure
if it stinks or has stains but its the nearest thing and it’ll do for warmth, then you wake up more and put more clothes on, shoes and a hat, and that’s the day, you’re ready, out into it you go, into doghair and kidsmells, cars

passing and that dry smell of snow falling like…like I don’t even know. The sweat of it all’s what I’m getting at. And say you cut through the McDonald’s parking lot and you smell like fries even though before that you smelled like autumn? Here I am avoiding still, still talking. Your mom had a garden

when we met and she’d wake up, Sundays, get lousy with greenery and dirt before she’d even had her coffee and hours later she’d stand amazed before the mirror, dirt across her forehead, earth on her shirt. There was one awake and another, I guess, and at the end of a Sunday is when we met, for whatever

that’s worth here and now, son, and what I’m telling you is to find a woman with a garden she’ll get dirty in before she has her coffee, a woman who’ll wear a dirt-streaked shirt out to dinner without even knowing it. I helped with the garden when we were falling in love but before we knew it and she

laughed the first time I tried to change shirts afterward, laughed like it was something I’d just discovered, or—oh I don’t even know. I only know one way is what I’m trying to tell you and the way I know’s got gardens and dirt, shirts you don’t even realize you been wearing this whole time.

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