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170 Jack Fritscher

deliberately into squares. “But you know Cassie. She always says
the opposite of what she means. You have to read her in a mirror.”
Ada never believed in telling anyone everything. She decided not to
lighten up with a joke about Cassie’s chameleons.
“What’d she say?” Cameron rose and crossed to the bottle tucked
away in the bookcase.
“She said she’s leaving San Francisco. She said she stopped over
to say good-bye. She said she’d never call us again. Not even collect.
She said she was a chameleon. Her hints were as broad as her hips.
I think she wants to live with us too. Fuck her!”
“Cut it, Ada,” Cameron said. He was flashing on the night Cassie
had called them long distance, desperate and sick on junk. “That
poor kid,” he had said. He had spent the night in the Greyhound
Bus Depot waiting for her to get back from Santa Cruz.
Ada had been furious. “You can’t really expect me to go down to
that filthy bus station practically on our honeymoon to meet your
whore,” Ada had said. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“I don’t know,” he had said. “I suspect I’ll find out. Sooner or
later.”

*

Even through that long night waiting for Cassiopeia, Cameron
hadn’t blamed Ada. Strangers in the station had surrounded him,
deathly alive at 3:30 AM. They had breathed on him. Everyone
smoked. Their blue exhalations had yellowed the air, thickening
the pallid fluorescent light.
He hadn’t blamed Ada and he hadn’t blamed Cassie.
The longer he had waited that night the more he had needed the
men’s room. He had stalled leaving his seat in the crowded terminal,
mainly because an old woman, a white choir robe folded over her
arm, had stood sentinel, waiting, like God’s Righteousness at the
end of the full row of seats. She had tried to stare Cameron into
relinquishing his chair. But he had sat, steadfast, bladder hurting,
because her face, over the folded choir robe, because her face, over
the righteous folds of her melting flesh, was so mean.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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