Sundown In Jupiter

I stop the truck in front of Jeri’s house and wait while she walks out and gets in. She smiles a little as she comes out the front door of her pa’s little house, but she looks down at her feet for most of the walk to the truck, so I know something is wrong, or maybe just not right. A breeze out of the west, off the reservation, out of the past, blows Jeri’s long red hair across her cleft chin and cupid’s bow lips, and I remember why I love her.

Jeri opens the door of my old rusty pickup and climbs in. She smells like peaches, and she looks like a long, sweet nap on a Sunday afternoon, and I smile as she leans toward me and we kiss. Jeri’s ma waves from the front gallery.

We don’t say a word as I pull away from her dooryard, just happy to be together for the moment. I glance sideways at Jeri to see what she’s wearing, and she’s looking out the window, watching dirt and sagebrush pass by fast. It’s a white cotton dress with little pink flowers all over it, and I want to kiss every one of them. She’s wearing the turquoise bracelet I got at a pawn shop on the rez and gave her just to be giving her something. Sometimes I love her so much I want to cry. Sometimes I cry.

“Where to?” I ask. Jeri laughs a little. It’s an old joke. There’s only one place to go on a weeknight in Jupiter, Wyoming. So I head up 13 toward the Dairy Queen, where I will have a chili cheese dog and a strawberry shake, and Jeri will have a bacon cheeseburger, an order of onion rings, and a 32-ounce Coke. I’ll finish my dinner while she’s still working on her burger, and I’ll drink the last few sips of her big Coke so she won’t waste it.

“Something wrong?” We never talk much, don’t have to anymore, but Jeri is quieter than usual.

“Nope, nothing.”

“How’s your pa?”

“Sleepin’.”

Jeri’s dad is dying of something, but he won’t go to Cheyenne to the doctor, and Doc Murphy just keeps him painless with morphine. Jeri thinks it’s cancer, and it probably is, so there isn’t much point in going to Cheyenne anyway.

We met in high school. Jeri was a cheerleader, and I fell in love with her at the homecoming bonfire sophomore year. I dropped out of school to work on my pa’s ranch, and Jeri just went on chasing her dreams of graduating and going to college in Cheyenne.

We saw Tori Amos on TV, and when I remarked that Jeri looked a lot like her, she went home, looked in the mirror, and decided she wanted to be called Tori. She was a little annoyed when I said, “whatever,” and I still call her Jeri. Her pa still calls her Jeri when he knows who she is. Jeri’s mom just rolled her eyes at first, but started calling her Tori to humor her.

I’m worried about something Jeri doesn’t know about. It’s something she doesn’t need to know about, because it only happened once, and it’ll never happen again, because halfway through, I realized Jeri was the only girl I was ever going to love, and I had to stop. But I have to tell her, because you can’t let something like that hang between you, or it might get infected and kill you. I just don’t have the words, and I feel so sorry, and I wish it had never happened. I’d die to take it back. I feel like I want to cry, and my dinner sits on my stomach like an anvil.

After dinner, we get back in the car, and Jeri puts a Tori Amos tape in the player. I don’t know which one it’s going to be, but it doesn’t matter because I like most of them. Sometimes I listen to them in bed at night with my eyes closed and imagine Jeri lying next to me, singing quietly with Tori Amos’s voice. It’s funny, but I think those songs make me love Jeri more than I already do.

I pull the truck in behind the grain elevator so we can sit together and watch the sunset across the high desert, just as Tori Amos launches into “Girl.” I pull Jeri close to me, and she leans in, and I tell her how much I love her as best as I can. She tells me the same thing. We don’t need to say any more because it’s just us there, and we don’t need anything else. The sun slips down until it’s just a sliver, and the sky above it is pink and purple and orange and blue and so beautiful it hurts to look at it. I ask Jeri if she wants to go somewhere, and she says, “This is fine,” and she’s right because there is nowhere to go anyway. Jupiter is nowhere.

“We could drive in to Cheyenne for a movie.”

“They’ve only got one, and we’ve seen it three times.” Jeri smiles when she says it, but it’s true. Cheyenne is just a little past nowhere, and a hundred miles from Jupiter.

Jeri takes my hand in hers when Tori Amos starts in on “Silent All These Years,” and I notice she’s crying a little. It makes me so sad to see those tears roll down her cheeks that I just want to die. It feels like someone is squeezing my heart tight, and I don’t understand how love can feel like this. It’s like pain, but pain you can’t do without. I can’t do without it, can’t do without Jeri. She doesn’t make a sound when she cries, just tears, and I feel helpless.

I whisper, “What’s wrong?” but I’m afraid I already know what’s wrong, and I wonder how she found out.

And Tori Amos answers for Jeri when she sings “So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts/What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts/Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon/How’s that thought for you?” and Jeri rests my hand on her belly for punctuation. I pull her close and kiss her tears because I don’t care if she’s pregnant or even if it’s mine, because all I need to know is that I love her. But I’m scared. I’m scared of so many things, but mostly I’m afraid that Jeri might stop loving me, because I’ll never stop loving her.

I guess we’re both in trouble now.

© 2025 Brian G Parker