Page 81 - WTp Vol. VII #9

“Are you sure you’re alright?”
“I love you, baby.” She hung up without saying more, hanging the receiver on the hook and pull- ing away into an empty space at the edge of the parking lot. She pressed the rest of her quarters into the coin holder in the console under the stereo. Then she reached for the paper bags on the passenger seat and pulled out the pint bottle of Jack Daniels, twisting off the cap and pressing the glass mouth to her lips without even thinking about it. Tip, sip, burn. She sucked air through her teeth as a chaser, the whiskey burning her
“She didn’t have to consult any phone
book, because the number was her own, half a conti- nent away, and her finger hit the buttons by itself."
throat as it went down. It was only a sip, after all. Bobby’s place was less than a half-hour out of town, and she could drive the road blind-folded even after all these years. That was just one of the many ways in which driving cleared the mind.
~
County Road 66, three lefts and three rights. Corn fields flickered by, interspersed with stands of cottonwood and elm. Nothing looked any dif- ferent. She’d started dating Bobby Bogue in the first month of her freshman year at Webster U., and it lasted until the summer after graduation, when everything changed. During those four years, she’d traveled this road a thousand times, pressed up against Bobby’s shoulder on the front seat of his pickup or squeezed into the back-
seat of some other car filled with her whooping
friends, roaring over the gravel fast enough for the tires to pop tiny rocks off into the darkness like b.b.’s. It was one of those nights, in a carload of drunks, that Bobby had first proposed to her. She’d laughed, with the wind through the window filling her mouth and rippling her hair across
his face, pressed against her neck where he kept whispering. Her only answer that night was that laugh, like he’d just told a great joke. Days later, when she had to give him a reason why not, she said that her parents didn’t want her to get mar- ried until she’d gotten her career started. That was very far from the truth and Bobby knew it, but you couldn’t argue with a girl who was turn- ing down a marriage proposal. He resorted to flowers, bottles of wine, fancy dinners at the Ital- ian restaurant in downtown Bellefountaine. He even made a cedar headboard for her double bed, but she never came around for him. When she gave it back to him, she heard later, he chopped the headboard into kindling and had himself
a bonfire behind his folks’ barn. What else he burned there, she didn’t know.
Margie wouldn’t tell him her reasons, because she didn’t know them herself. It was just a feeling, that she needed to wait. Then she met Jennifer Bashline at a graduation party, and everything changed. After Jennifer came Eliza, then Lucy,
and finally Jazmine. What she’d been waiting for. Bobby never knew where he went wrong. “So what did all these girls have that Bobby didn’t?”
It was Hank Finn’s voice. Her father was only in her head, but she imagined him in the bucket seat beside her, speaking without looking at her, staring out the window with his chin in his hand. He was in his hospital smock because, she sup- posed, she would always think of him as sick. The road rumbled underneath, dull thunder. She let
a couple fields of knee-high corn go by, mulling the question. Could it be reduced to one word? “Patience,” she said, to see how it sounded. And it sounded right. “She has patience.”
Her father snorted. That was the side of him that
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