The Book of Joe

suspiciously at the packages, her forehead lined with deep creases of consternation.
    “What is all of this?” I say.
    “He buys things,” she whispers to me as if revealing a dark family secret. “Day and night. He just orders things off that godforsaken computer.”
    “What for?”
    “How should I know?” she snaps, her voice edged with hysteria. “Every day I get packages. And when they come, he doesn’t want to open them. Tells me to just put them in here.”
    I stare in puzzlement at the jumble of cartons. There are easily forty or fifty of them, scattered in haphazard piles around the room. “Have you asked him about it?” I say.
    “Of course I asked him,” she practically hisses. “He has no answer. I don’t think he even remembers what he ordered.”
    “I think this might be a symptom,” I say. “Some form of dementia from the illness.”
    She gives me a frazzled look. “What am I supposed to do with all of this stuff ?” She looks back at the boxes, haunted by them. “What in god’s name am I supposed to do?”
    When I leave a few moments later, she’s still standing there like that, staring desolately at the roomful of unopened packages.

Nineteen
    Bush Falls was named for a pair of medium-sized waterfalls that fed the Bush River in the woods just off Porter’s Boulevard. There was a well-known urban legend surrounding these twin waterfalls, concerning a couple of high school kids who parked on the bluff overlooking the falls to make out. As things heated up, the girl, in a fit of passion, dared her date to prove his love by jumping over the falls, offering up her virginity as the prize. Naturally, he immediately threw himself into the swirling, frigid waters and was carried over the falls. Here the versions vary, with some claiming he accomplished this feat in the nude, and others saying he was fully dressed. Some accounts have him breaking his arm on one of the large stones that protrude from the pool of water beneath the falls, and others have him emerging unscathed. These details, and others, have been argued through the generations with all the ardor of a Talmudic debate, but there is universal agreement as to the story’s conclusion. He returned triumphantly to the car, drenched and shivering, where he found his girlfriend lying gloriously naked in the backseat, ready to fulfill her side of the bargain and warm him with the sweet, wet heat of her surrendered virginity.
    Not surprisingly, the woods immediately surrounding those waterfalls remained the most popular make-out spot in town. If you were a girl who didn’t intend to put out, you avoided the falls, because agreeing to go was an unspoken covenant that you would be forthcoming with your favors. If you were a guy who didn’t plan on getting some action, chances were pretty good that you didn’t actually exist.
    Every once in a while, one of the more daring boys, in a hormonal frenzy, would brave the falls again, usually having secured a similar promise from his date. The occasional fatality served only to heighten the excitement, and the rule that evolved over time was that if you happened to be there with a date when someone went over the falls, you had a moral and historical obligation if not to actually have sex then at least to step up your usual routine significantly.
    This ritual and its contemporary bylaws were surprisingly well respected by teens of both sexes, enforced by an unspoken collective conscience, a social contract between teenagers more binding than any rules imposed on them by the authorities. Like playing spin the bottle in the fifth grade, it somehow lent an air of validation and provided a forum for communication in the otherwise awkward business of incrementally increasing the output in budding sexual relationships. Sex in the back of a car might be regretted later as something tawdry and a poor setting for the surrender of innocence. This was something the girls worried about much more than the boys, who would have been happy to have sex bent over in a stinking dumpster. But if it happened at the falls, you were a part of a sacred tradition, the next generation in a revered and enchanted history. There was a sense of destiny to it, as if the place was part of some romantic heritage, a sexual legacy for the teenagers of Bush Falls.
    Carly and I lost our virginity there in the backseat of my dad’s Pontiac on a cold January night, with the snow falling like a curtain over the fogged-up car