“We were supposed to do this tomorrow, remember? Late afternoon? Coffee and a chat?” A smile creased his face. “I would have had the other car if plans had stayed the same. But you needed to change the day. It was kind of last-minute, and we’re really doing this for you.…”
He let the words trail off so she’d remember that she’d suggested the meeting and not the other way around. She nodded a final time because it made sense and because she didn’t want to look like the kind of person who cared about something as meaningless as a car, not when she was too broke to buy her own. “My mother’s coming in from Tennessee in the morning.” She glanced back at the apartment building, new lines at the corners of her mouth. “It was unexpected.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s my mom.”
“You told me. I know.” A little frustration was in his voice, a little impatience. He smiled to take out the sting, though the last thing he wanted was to be reminded of the girl’s hillbilly roots in some hillbilly town. “It’s my nephew’s car,” he said. “He’s in college.”
“That explains it, then.”
She meant the smell and the dirt; but she was laughing now, so he laughed, too. “Kids,” he said.
“Yeah, right.”
He made a mock bow and said something about chariots. She laughed, but he was no longer paying attention.
She was already in the car.
“I enjoy a Sunday.” She sat straight as he slid behind the wheel. “The stillness and the quiet. No expectations.” She smoothed the skirt and showed the eyes. “Don’t you love a Sunday?”
“Of course,” he said, but couldn’t care less. “Did you tell your mother we were meeting?”
“Not a chance,” the girl said. “There’d be a million questions. She’d say I was needy or irresponsible, that I should have called her instead.”
“Perhaps you underestimate her.”
“Not my mother, no.”
He nodded as if he understood her isolation. The mother was overbearing, the father distant or dead. He turned the key and liked the way she sat—back straight, both hands folded neatly in her lap. “The people who love us tend to see what they want to see, and not what we really are. Your mother should look more closely. I think she’d be pleasantly surprised.”
The comment made her happy.
He pulled away from the curb and talked enough to keep her that way. “What about your friends?” he asked. “The people you work with? Do they know?”
“Only that I’m meeting someone today, and that it’s personal.” She smiled and showed the warm, rich eyes that had drawn him in the first place. “They’re very curious.”
“I’m sure they are,” he said; and she smiled a second time.
It took a dozen minutes for her to ask the first meaningful question. “Wait a minute. I thought we were having coffee.”
“I’m taking you somewhere else first.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a surprise.’
She craned her neck as the city sank behind them. Fields and woods ran off in either direction. The empty road seemed to take new meaning as her fingers touched her throat, her cheek. “My friends will expect me back.”
“I thought you didn’t tell them.”
“Did I say that?”
He gave her a look, but didn’t respond. The sky outside was purple, the sun an orange push through the trees. They were far past the edge of town, an abandoned church settling quietly on a distant hill, its steeple broken as if by the weight of the darkening sky. “I love a ruined church,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t you see it?”
He pointed, and she stared at the ancient stone, the twisted cross. “I don’t understand.”
She was worried; trying to convince herself everything was normal. He watched blackbirds settle on the ruins. A few minutes later, she asked him to take her home.
“I’m not feeling well.”
“We’re almost there.”
She was scared now—he could tell—frightened of his words and the church and the strange, flat whistle that hissed between his lips.
“You have very expressive eyes,” he said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You’ll be fine.”
He turned the car onto a gravel road, the world defined by trees and dusk and the heat of her skin. When they passed an open gate in a rusted fence, the girl began to cry. It was quiet, at first, then less so.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
She cried harder, but didn’t move. The car rolled out of the trees and into a clearing choked with weeds and old equipment and bits of rusted metal. An empty silo rose, round and streaked, its pinnacle stained pink by the falling sun. At its base a small door gaped, the space beyond it black and still. She stared up at the silo and, when she looked back down, saw handcuffs in his hand.
“Put these on.”
He dropped the cuffs in her lap, and a warm, wet stain spread beneath them. He watched her stare desperately through the windows, looking for people or sunlight or reasons to hope.
“Pretend it’s not real,” he said.