He offered her a Marlboro and she took it. She hadn’t smoked since college, but it was an excuse to touch his hand as he lit her cigarette. Her arm warmed from the contact. His eyes were almost indigo blue.
Patrick threw a crumpled $20 onto the counter as they left. Outside, Joyce stood against the cab of his panel truck, letting the cool damp of the metal seep through to her back. Patrick leaned over her, propped on a hand he placed beside her cheek. Five foot ten, she guessed. His breath smelled of tobacco.
“Why did you drop out of school?” Joyce asked.
“That’s a story.” Softly, almost whispering, he told about how he’d gone, one Saturday morning, to fix a window in his math teacher’s room. She was waiting for him, a woman in her first year on the job. Young, black hair, brown eyes. “A tall girl. Tall as me. Pretty.” They thought they were alone in the building, but they got caught in the cloakroom and he never went back.
Joyce stared at his mouth. He leaned down and kissed her gently.
“Can I see you again?”
Joyce nodded.
“Meet me for lunch here, tomorrow?”
She nodded again and he took her phone number.
He walked her to her car and kissed her hand. Joyce realized that she wouldn’t be telling Kathleen about her morning at Halibut Point, after all.
KATHLEEN PUT ON her seat belt and sat, distracted, her fingers on the unturned key. Buddy came over to the driver’s side. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.” She started the car and pulled out of the driveway. Kathleen drove down the block slowly and waited for the traffic to break. Why are there so many cars today? Why are they all going so fast? Why won’t anyone let me in? She gripped the wheel.
Finally there was a gap in the traffic and she eased out into the road. A trucker blasted his horn and set her heart racing. Riding the brake, Kathleen edged into the rotary, merged right toward the bridge, and realized she was panting. Climbing over the river, she noticed a long line of passing cars. She looked down at the speedometer. I’m not really going twenty miles an hour, am I? As another car passed, she turned to see the driver mouthing curses at her.
She fixed her eyes on the bumper of the car ahead of her and tried to keep up. Oh, my God, she thought. Oh, my God.
Once she got off the bridge, Kathleen pulled over to the side of the road, crawled over to the passenger’s seat, opened the door, and vomited onto the sandy shoulder.
What on earth had she eaten last night? Or was this some form of radiation sickness?
She counted to one hundred and felt her pulse slow down a bit. It wasn’t food poisoning or radiation sickness, she thought. It was all in her head. And if she didn’t pull herself together, they would drag her to a psychiatrist.
She found a breath mint, brushed her hair, and started the car again, forcing her right foot down until the speedometer registered forty-five, which was as fast as she could bear to go. “I can do this,” she said, glancing at her panicked eyes in the rearview mirror. “I have to do this.”
Kathleen arrived at the office ten minutes late, but no one commented or seemed to notice her agitation. I must be a better actress than I thought. Or maybe they just weren’t interested.
Actually, the whole office was a bit out of kilter. Dr. Singh was at a conference in Boston. His replacement, a heavyset woman with a Russian accent, came in to check on the settings and barely looked at Kathleen. Rachel had called in sick and Terry was on vacation. The substitutes called her “honey” and took too long getting her positioned.
On her back, arm raised, breast bare, she tried not to think about driving home. She closed her eyes against the red laser line, but it remained on the backs of her eyelids, vibrating and fading, a crimson tightrope.
After her treatment, Kathleen drank a cup of tepid tea in the too bright hospital cafeteria and then walked around the small gift shop for as long as she could. At least there won’t be much traffic now, she thought. She could drive like a little old lady and they could all pass her. I can do it, she told herself. I’ve done it a million times.
She had done it with children screaming in the backseat. She had done it with brushfires smoking in the woods on both sides of the road. She’d driven this stretch of road after the unveiling of Danny’s headstone, Buddy sobbing beside her.
I can do it, she thought. But as she approached the bridge, she started to shake. “What is this?” she wailed, and pulled off the road again.
“Okay, okay,” she said in the tone she used with the kindergartners. “You don’t have to take the bridge. You can go around.”
But that would add so many more miles to the trip. Which was worse? She stared at her knuckles and realized her hands ached from grasping the steering wheel so tightly. All she wanted was to be home.
“Let’s go home,” she said to herself firmly in the rearview mirror. She turned off the highway and took the longer route, forcing herself to breathe slowly: in two-three-four, out two-three-four.
That evening, she asked Buddy if he would mind driving her tomorrow. “It would be nice to have the company.”
“Only if you let me take you to breakfast after.”
With Buddy at the wheel the next morning Kathleen wasn’t quite as terrified, but the trip over the bridge still made her pulse speed up and her hands clammy. She kept her eyes on the guardrail and counted. Buddy didn’t notice.