NORBERT KEENE OWNER & MANAGER 17 page

Dear George—

If you still want to take me to dinner tonight, it will have to be five-ish, because I’ll have early mornings all this week and next, getting ready for the Fall Book Sale. Perhaps we could come back to my place for dessert.

I have poundcake, if you’d like a slice.

Sadie

“What are you laughing about, Amberson?” Danny Laverty asked. He was correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. “Tell me, I could use a giggle.”

“Nah,” I said. “Private joke. You wouldn’t get it.”

But we got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that fall.

We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on. There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely mean folks. They knew Sadie’s situation, at least in a general way, and understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn’t come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind of talk. I never stayed beyond ten o’clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn’t have done so in any case, because someone would have known. In small towns, they always do.

I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper. Sometimes we went to Al’s Diner and ate Prongburgers or catfish fillets; sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Saturday-night dances at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a glass of wine before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie’s one and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle—Negroes had won the right to sit at the Woolworth’s lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston—but schoolteachers didn’t drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.

When we made love in Sadie’s bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a state she had taken to calling in flagrante delicious), she got into those threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of The Watchtower. “Jehovah’s Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went away.”

Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper—Love in the Afternoon. “Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night.” She said this a little wistfully. “When regular people do it.”

“You’ll get a chance to find out,” I said. “Hang in there, baby.”

She smiled and kissed the corner of my mouth. “You turn some cool phrases, George.”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m very original.”

She pushed her plate aside. “I’m ready for dessert. How about you?”

Not long after the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling at Sadie’s place—this must have been early November, because I’d finished casting my version of Twelve Angry Men—I was out raking my lawn when someone said, “Hello, George, how’s it going?”

I turned around and saw Deke Simmons, now a widower for the second time. He had stayed in Mexico longer than anyone had thought he would, and just when folks began to believe he was going to remain there, he had come back. This was the first time I’d seen him. He was very brown, but far too thin. His clothes bagged on him, and his hair—iron-gray on the day of the wedding reception—was now almost all white and thinning on top.

I dropped my rake and hurried over to him. I meant to shake his hand, but hugged him instead. It startled him—in 1961, Real Men Don’t Hug—but then he laughed.

I held him at arm’s length. “You look great!”

“Nice try, George. But I feel better than I did. Meems dying . . .
I knew it was going to happen, but it still knocked me for a loop. Head could never get through to heart on that one, I reckon.”

“Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”

“I’d like that.”

We talked about his time in Mexico. We talked about school. We talked about the undefeated football team and the upcoming fall play. Then he put down his cup and said, “Ellen Dockerty asked me to pass on a word or two about you and Sadie Clayton.”

Uh-oh. And I’d thought we were doing so well.

“She goes by Dunhill now. It’s her maiden name.”

“I know all about her situation. Knew when we hired her. She’s a fine girl and you’re a fine man, George. Based on what Ellie tells me, the two of you are handling a difficult situation with a fair amount of grace.”

I relaxed a little.

“Ellie said she was pretty sure neither of you knew about Candlewood Bungalows just outside of Kileen. She didn’t feel right about telling you, so she asked if I would.”

“Candlewood Bungalows?”

“I used to take Meems there on a lot of Saturday nights.” He was fiddling at his coffee cup with hands that now looked too big for his body. “It’s run by a couple of retired schoolteachers from Arkansas or Alabama. One of those A-states, anyway. Retired men schoolteachers. If you know what I mean.”

“I think I’m following, yes.”

“They’re nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the relationships of some of their guests.” He looked up from his coffee cup. He was blushing a little, but also smiling. “This isn’t a hot-sheet joint, if that’s what you’re thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So they don’t have to be in such a hurry. And so they won’t feel cheap.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood. Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age.” He smiled ruefully. “Or almost. We’d go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know. They really do that. They howl at the moon.”

He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man’s slowness and mopped his cheeks with it.

I offered my hand and Deke took hold.

“She liked you, although she never could figure out what to make of you. She said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies from the thirties. ‘He’s bright and shiny, but not all here,’ she said.”

“I’m no ghost,” I said. “I promise you.”

He smiled. “No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was after you’d been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there . . .” He shook his head, still smiling. “And your degree is from a mill in Oklahoma.”

Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn’t speak at all.

“And what’s that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags, spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn’t that long ago, either. You’re a damn fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And that’s a lot to me.”

“Does Ellen know I faked my other references?” Because Ellen Dockerty was acting principal, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be hers permanently. There were no other candidates.

“Nope, and she’s not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn’t need to.” He stood up. “But there’s one person who does need to know the truth about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, and that’s a certain lady librarian. If you’re serious about her, that is. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.

I only wished it did.

Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been wonderful. “But I’m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning even more. Do you hear the wind?”

I did. It hooted around the eaves.

“Doesn’t that sound make you feel cozy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to say something now. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

“Tell me.”

“I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it’s just the sex, I’ve heard that’s a mistake people make, but I don’t think so.”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?” She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.

“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”

“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.

On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. “But turn out the light, would you?”

I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.

“But it always did hurt,” she said. “You know?”

John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored him. Claire Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.

“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,” Sadie said. “He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to the lav and wash just as soon as he could.”

“Also color-coordinated clothes,” I said. “On his body and in the closet, and woe to the person who moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to check that the stove burners were off and the doors were locked?”

She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked companionably; the wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. “How do you know that?”

“It’s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard—” I stopped. Howard Hughes has a bad case of it, I’d started to say, but maybe that wasn’t true yet. Even if it was, people probably didn’t know. “An old friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you, Sadie?”

“Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that’s all. But people hurt people in other ways, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine. During was as close as she could come to the word intercourse. I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. ‘What goes on behind the bedroom door is none of my business,’ she said. I stopped, because I didn’t really want to talk about it. I was so ashamed.”

Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her he needed to “get it out.” They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.

“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he said?”

“No.”

“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some sleep.’”

She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long, sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.

Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.

“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”

He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.

“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”

The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’”

“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”

“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone . . . because it was funny.”

I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.

“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”

“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”

In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “Clayton didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”

“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell anyone.” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either. She understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. She’s the one he should have married.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Mama probably would have loved that old broom.”

“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”

“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”

“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”

She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”

I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”

She looked. And then she touched.

I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane—but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs—it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.

Thud, clump, thud.

From overhead.

“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.

Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.

Clud, thump, clud.

Plaster-dust sifting down.

“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”

Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.

She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we’re here!”

“Wake up, George! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.

“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’”

“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.

“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”

That was not good. “Like what?”

“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was that about? Do you remember?”

“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.

We stared at each other.

The knock came again.

It’s the Jimla. This thought was very clear, very certain.

Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir—Bud Yorrity?”

One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.

I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. “What is it, Mr. Yorrity?”

“I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent.”

I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.

“What lady?”

“Ellen Dockerty.”

I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and read the message.

Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “What is it?”

“There’s been an accident,” I said. “Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie says she’s okay otherwise.”

“Vince?”

I thought of the way everyone said Vince drove—as if there were no tomorrow. Now there wasn’t. Not for him. “He’s dead, Sadie.”

Her mouth dropped open. “He can’t be! He’s only eighteen years old!”

“I know.”

The sheet fell free of her relaxing arms and puddled around her feet. She put her hands over her face.

My revised version of Twelve Angry Men was canceled. What took its place was Death of a Student, a play in three acts: the viewing at the funeral parlor, the service at Grace Methodist Church, the graveside service at West Hill Cemetery. This mournful show was attended by the whole town, or near enough to make no difference.

The parents and Vince’s stunned kid sister starred at the viewing, sitting in folding chairs beside the coffin. When I approached them with Sadie at my side, Mrs. Knowles rose and put her arms around me. I was almost overwhelmed by the odors of White Shoulders perfume and Yodora antiperspirant.

“You changed his life,” she whispered in my ear. “He told me so. For the first time he made his grades, because he wanted to act.”

“Mrs. Knowles, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind and I hugged her tighter, as if hugging could make it go away: Maybe it’s the butterfly effect. Maybe Vince is dead because I came to Jodie.

The coffin was flanked by photomontages of Vince’s too-brief life. On an easel in front of it, all by itself, was a picture of him in his Of Mice and Men costume and that battered old felt hat from props. His ratty, intelligent face peered out from beneath. Vince really hadn’t been much of an actor, but that photo caught him wearing an absolutely perfect wiseass smile. Sadie began to sob, and I knew why. Life turns on a dime. Sometimes toward us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?

And Jodie was good—good for me. In Derry I was an outsider, but Jodie was home. Here’s home: the smell of the sage and the way the hills flush orange with Indian blanket in the summer. The faint taste of tobacco on Sadie’s tongue and the squeak of the oiled wood floorboards in my homeroom. Ellie Dockerty caring enough to send us a message in the middle of the night, perhaps so we could get back to town undiscovered, probably just so we’d know. The nearly suffocating mixture of perfume and deodorant as Mrs. Knowles hugged me. Mike putting his arm—the one not buried in a cast—around me at the cemetery, then pressing his face against my shoulder until he could get himself under control again. The ugly red slash on Bobbi Jill’s face is home, too, and thinking that unless she had plastic surgery (which her family could not afford), it would leave a scar that would remind her for the rest of her life of how she had seen a boy from just down the road dead at the side of the road, his head mostly torn off his shoulders. Home is the black armband that Sadie wore, that I wore, that the whole faculty wore for a week after. And Al Stevens posting Vince’s photo in the window of his diner. And Jimmy LaDue’s tears as he stood up in front of the whole school and dedicated the undefeated season to Vince Knowles.

Other things, too. People saying howdy on the street, people giving me a wave from their cars, Al Stevens taking Sadie and me to the table at the back that he had started calling “our table,” playing cribbage on Friday afternoons in the teachers’ room with Danny Laverty for a penny a point, arguing with elderly Miss Mayer about who gave the better newscast, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite. My street, my shotgun house, getting used to using a typewriter again. Having a best girl and getting S&H Green Stamps with my groceries and real butter on my movie popcorn.

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

The Year of Our Lord 1961 was winding down. On a drizzly day about two weeks before Christmas, I came into my house after school, once more bundled into my rawhide ranch coat, and heard the phone ringing.

“This is Ivy Templeton,” a woman said. “You prob’ly don’t even remember me, do you?”

“I remember you very well, Miz Templeton.”

“I dunno why I even bothered to call, that goddam ten bucks is long since spent. Just somethin about you stuck in my head. Rosette, too. She calls you ‘the man who cotched my ball.’”

“You’re moving out, Miz Templeton?”

“That’s one hunderd percent goddam right. My mama’s comin up from Mozelle tomorrow in the truck.”

“Don’t you have a car? Or did it break down?”

“Car’s runnin okay for a junker, but Harry ain’t goan be ridin in it. Or drivin it ever again. He was workin one of those goddam Manpower jobs last month. Fell in a ditch and a gravel truck run over him while it was backin up. Broke his spine.”

I closed my eyes and saw the smashed remains of Vince’s truck being hauled down Main Street behind the wrecker from Gogie’s Sunoco. Blood all over the inside of the cracked windshield. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miz Templeton.”

“He goan live but he ain’t never goan walk again. He goan sit in a wheelchair and pee in a bag, that’s what he goan do. But first he’s goan ride down Mozelle in the back of my mama’s truck. We’ll steal the mattress out’n the bedroom for him to lay on. Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it?”

She started to cry.

“I’m runnin out on two months’ back rent, but that don’t confront me none. You know what does confront me, Mr. Puddentane, Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You the Same? I got thirty-five goddam dollars and that’s the end of it. Goddam asshole Harry, if he could’ve kep his feet I wouldn’t be in this fix. I thought I was in one before, but now looka this!”

There was a long, watery snork in my ear.

“You know what? The mailman been givin me the glad eye, and I think for twenty dollars I’d roll him a fuck on the goddam livin room floor. If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us while we ’us goin at it. Can’t very well take him in the bedroom, can I? That’s where my brokeback husband is.” She rasped out a laugh. “Tell you what, why don’t you come on over in your fancy convertible? Take me to a motel sommers. Spend a little extra, get one with a settin-room. Rosette can watch TV and I’ll roll you a fuck. You looked like you ’us doing okay.”

I said nothing. I’d just had an idea that was as bright as a flashbulb.

If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us goin at it.

There was a man I was supposed to be watching for. Besides Oswald himself, that was. A man whose name also happened to be George, and who was going to become Oswald’s only friend.

Don’t trust him, Al had written in his notes.

“You there, Mr. Puddentane? No? If not, fuck you and goodb—”

“Don’t hang up, Miz Templeton. Suppose I were to pay your back rent and throw in a hundred bucks on top of that?” It was far more than I needed to pay for what I wanted, but I had it and she needed it.

“Mister, right now I’d do you with my father watchin for two hundred bucks.”

“You don’t have to do me at all, Miz Templeton. All you have to do is meet me in that parking lot at the end of the street. And bring me something.”

It was dark by the time I got to the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward warehouse, and the rain had started to thicken a little, the way it does when it’s trying to be sleet. That doesn’t happen often in the hill country south of Dallas, but sometimes isn’t never. I hoped I could make it back to Jodie without sliding off the road.

Ivy was sitting behind the wheel of a sad old sedan with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window. She got into my Ford and immediately leaned toward the heater vent, which was going full blast. She was wearing two flannel shirts instead of a coat, and shivering.

“Feels good. That Chev’s colder’n a witch’s tit. Heater’s bust. You bring the money, Mr. Puddentane?”

I gave her an envelope. She opened it and riffled through some of the twenties that had been sitting on the top shelf of my closet ever since I’d collected on my World Series bet at Faith Financial over a year before. She lifted her substantial bottom off the seat, shoved the envelope into the back pocket of her jeans, then fumbled in the breast pocket of the shirt closer to her body. She brought out a key and slapped it into my hand.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 499