“But you don’t know all that much about me, and what stories I might tell.”
“Do you really believe that at this point?”
Claire was expecting the sky to lighten, but instead more stars had emerged. She heard the cars and trucks in the distance, their rushing past offering that heard sense of the wind. The sounds of the insects were syncopated by the twang of a frog.
“I like this place,” Claire said faintly.
“It’s a good place for you to finish your story. Better than the highway, you know? I mean, think of all those kids in that school over there, gathered during the winter months to hear their teachers read books to them. It’s a place where stories are told. And when you’re done, if you want me to, I’ll tell you the rest of the story about your father. And then we can head down the road, and before you drop me off in Chicago, we can talk about other things.”
“Okay, Genevieve.”
Claire closed her eyes, held a deep breath, and then released it.
“I wouldn’t say, the night after we took the walk to the bakery, or the days that followed it, and there weren’t that many, that things changed completely. But they were different. We still drank at night. We still ended the drinking with one of us pulling the other into the bedroom. And Seth still talked to me while we were making love, but he had pulled back some from the violence of the fantasy I told you about. When he’d come in from work, and I’d be standing in the kitchen, making some sort of simple meal for us, he’d come up behind me, breathe in the scent from my neck, and tell me he loved me. He’d keep his face buried in my hair until I said it back to him, as if he needed to hear it. Most times, I didn’t mind telling him that I did love him, though I knew I didn’t mean it anymore.
“For a while, I wondered if he could tell, and was looking for reassurance, but one afternoon, when I’d come back from the sandwich shop, and I was vacuuming the floor—I guess I liked our little domestic arrangement, the sense that I was taking care of a home—I didn’t hear him come in, and when I didn’t, he pulled the vacuum cord from the outlet, and he gave me sort of a half smile and sat down on the stool near the door where we usually threw our coats. But by then it was late March, and spring had come early, and I’d bundled up our coats in a plastic bag, and stored them in the back of our one closet. I remember thinking that was a hopeful thing, because it meant that come October or November, I’d be taking them out again.
“I was waiting for Seth to say something, but he just sat on the stool, with the end of the vacuum cord in his hand, rolling it over in his fingers so the plug looked like the moving head of a small animal. Finally, I said, ‘What? You got something against a clean floor?’ and tried a smile, but he shook his head. Then he said, ‘I lost my job.’ I knew that soon April rent would be due, and my check might cover it, but how we’d eat next month I didn’t know, and those were the first thoughts that crossed my mind. I asked him what happened, and he told me, ‘I’m really sorry, Claire. They laid me off three weeks ago. I should’ve told you. I didn’t tell you because I was trying to find work. I figured if I had a new job, what would it matter if pay was minimum wage, anyway, but no one seems to be hiring.’ He was still rolling the cord between his fingers, only now he was looking at the plug itself instead of me.”
Claire thought she had never in her life lain looking at the sky as the stars faded into dawn, and she was still waiting. “Do the cars on the highway sound like wind to you?” she asked.
“Yeah. They always have, when there’re a lot of them. But I like it best when I hear a lone car traveling late at night on the freeway. I think of the person in there as someone going on a long, long trip, like you’ve been, or someone who has just said good-bye, or someone going home after a long time away.”
Claire wondered if Genevieve was thinking all three were true of her, but she didn’t ask.