When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right now. She was having an adventure.
She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband. She admitted that she didn’t think they could ever get back together, and said it was her fault.
“I can’t believe that.”
She sighed. “It’s true, Mack. I’m just not the woman he married anymore.”
Well, he told her, people change, and before he could think he was telling her everything he could tell her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think you’d get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but you never did.
And she reached out one hand—it was cold enough that he turned up the car’s heating—and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.
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Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn’t care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.
He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.
“Well,” confided Laura, “I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I’m just relying on the kindness of strangers.”
“Aren’t you scared?” he asked. “I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve.”
She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, “I met you, didn’t I?” and he couldn’t find anything to say.
When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchildren in the rain.
“How far can I take you?” he asked, when they made it back into the car.
“I’ll go as far as you’re going, Mack,” she told him, shyly.
He was glad he hadn’t used the Big Mack line. This woman wasn’t a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.
This was love.
“Look,” he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. “How about I find a motel for you tonight? I’ll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up.”
“That sounds wonderful,” said Laura. “What are you delivering?”
“That stick,” he told her, and chuckled. “The one on the backseat.”
“Okay,” she said, humoring him. “Then don’t tell me, Mister Mysterious.”
He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning.
They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine.
“Hey. Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a hug?” asked Laura with a smile.
“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.
“Mack . . . I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours?” she asked. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. “Sure I do.”
So she showed him.
Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf.
Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.