hard as a brick.
“Grady?” she said, in a careless voice, as though she were trying only to attract my attention to an interesting item in the newspaper. “Are you still with us?”
“Hello,” I said. “I think so.”
“What happened, big guy?” Her eyes darted from one corner of my face to another, and she licked her lips, and I saw that despite her tone of unconcern I had given her a fright. “Not another one of these dizzy-spell things?”
“Kind of. I don’t know.” Your dog is dead. “I think I’ll be all right.”
“Do you think I ought to run you over to the E.R.?”
“Not necessary,” I said. “Is the thing over?”
“Not yet. I saw you walk out, and I—I thought—” She wrung her hands a little, as if they were cold. “Grady—”
Before she could say whatever difficult thing she intended to say to me, I sat up and kissed her. Her lips were cracked and slick with lipstick. Our teeth touched. The play of her fingers along the back of my neck was cold as rain. After a moment we parted, and I looked at her face, freckled and pale and alive with the look of disappointment that often haunts the difficult faces of redheaded women. Presently we kissed again, and I shivered as her fingertips ran like raindrops down my neck. I slipped my hands down into the back of her dress.
“Grady—” She let go of me, and drew back, and shook herself. She took a deep breath. I could feel her physically readopting some resolve she had made, some promise not to let me kiss away her doubts. “I know tonight is a terrible night to try to deal with the kind of things we need to deal with, here, sweetie, but I—”
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something hard.”
“Stand up,” she said, in her most Chancelloresque voice, reacting immediately to the note of fear that had crept into my voice. “I’m too old for all this rolling around on the floor.” She rose a little unsteadily on her heels, tugged down the hem of her black dress, and held out a hand to me. I let her pull me to my feet. Her wedding ring was like a cold spark against my palm.
Sara let go of my hand and looked over her shoulder, down the corridor. There was no one coming. She turned back to me, trying to make her face expressionless, as though I were the college comptroller come to deliver some bad financial news. “What is it? No, wait a minute.” She pulled a pack of Merit cigarettes from the purse she sometimes carried on formal occasions. It was a flashy silver beaded thing no bigger than twenty cigarettes and a lipstick, a gift from her father to her mother fifty years before, and utterly unsuited to either woman’s character. Sara’s regular handbag was a sort of leather toolbox, with a brass padlock, filled with spreadsheets and textbooks and a crowded key ring as spiked and heavy as a mace. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. Just before she lit her cigarette I thought I caught a faint whiff of burning bud in the air. Those kids standing out in the lobby, I thought. It smelled awfully good. “Sara—”
“You love Emily,” she said, looking down at the steady flame of the match. “I know that. You need to stay with her.”
“I don’t think I really have any choice there,” I said. “Emily left me.”
“She’ll come back.” She allowed the flame to burn all the way down to the skin of her fingers. “Ow. That’s why I’m going to—not have this baby.”
“Not have it,” I said, watching her maintain her cool administrator’s gaze, waiting to feel the sense of relief I knew I ought to be feeling.
“I can’t. There’s no way.” She passed her fingers through her hair and there was the momentary flash of her ring, as if her russet hair itself were flashing. “Don’t you think there’s just no way?”
“I don’t see any way,” I said. I reached out to give her hand a squeeze. “I know how hard it is—for you to—lose this chance.”
“No, you don’t.” She jerked her hand away. “And fuck you for saying you do. And fuck you, too, for saying …”
“What, my girl?” I said, when she did not continue. “Fuck me too for saying what?”
“For saying that there’s just no way I could have this baby.” She glanced away from me, then back. “Because there is, Grady. Or there could be.” From out in the lobby came a loud squeal of hinges and a burst of human murmuring. “He must be finished,” she said, looking at her watch. She blew a cloud of smoke to hide her face, and reached up to brush away the tear that hung from an eyelash of her left eye. “We should go.” She sniffled, once. “Don’t forget your jacket.”
Sara knelt down to retrieve my old corduroy blazer, which she had stripped from my body and folded into a pillow for my head. As she peeled it away from the carpet, something tumbled out of one of the pockets and clattered to the floor, where it lay shining like the hood ornament of a madman’s Rambler.
“Whose gun is that?” said Sara.
“It isn’t real,” I said, stooping to get to it before she did. I was tempted to stuff it into my pocket, but I didn’t want her to think that it was anything important enough to hide. I held it in the palm of my hand for a moment, giving her a good look at it. “It’s a souvenir of Baltimore.”
She reached for it, and I tried to close my hand around it, but I was too slow.
“Pretty.” She ran the tip of her index finger across the mother-of-pearl handle. She palmed the little pistol and slipped her finger through the trigger guard. She lifted the muzzle up to her nose. “Hmm,” she said, sniffing. “It really smells like gunpowder.”
“Caps,” I said, reaching to take it away from her.
Then she pointed it at my chest. I didn’t know how many bullets it held, but there was no reason to think there might not be one more.
“Pow,” said Sara.
“You got me,” I said, and then I fell on her and caught her up in a bouncer’s embrace.
“I love you, Grady,” she said, after a moment.
“I love you, too, my monkey,” I said, as with a twist of her thin wrist I disarmed her.
“Oh!” said a voice behind us. “I’m sorry. I was just—”
It was Miss Sloviak, standing at the head of the corridor, balanced atop her heels, hand on her hip. Her face was red, but her cheeks were streaked with mascara, and I could see that it was not the flush of embarrassment.
“It’s all right,” said Sara. “What’s the matter, dear?”
“It’s your friend, Terry Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, looking at me harshly. She took a deep breath and passed her fingertips through her black curls, several times, quickly, in a way that somehow struck me as very masculine. “I’d like for you to take me home, if you don’t mind.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said, starting toward her. “I’ll meet you all later, Sara, over at the Hat.”
“I’ll
