“Look, honey, you and me just need a little face time. We need to put our two heads together and be reasonable here, figure out what’s best for everyone.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
In fact I did not know what I meant: he was terrifying me. I shook my head. I wasn’t in charge of myself, just flustered and stuck. It was exactly what I’d been afraid of since the day he started pursuing us. He’d never laid a finger on me in anger, Ned had never been violent physically. He’d only been false and cold.
Despite this nonviolent history he chilled me to the bone.
“I know you want to come home,” he said.
The arrogance of it flummoxed me—as though he was speaking to a third party, a cameraman, maybe, who was watching and evaluating our performances and knew nothing whatsoever about us.
“I don’t want to at all,” I rushed. “I don’t have a home with you and I don’t want a home with you. You know what I want, don’t you, Ned? I just want a divorce.”
“Oh now. Listen. You’re getting yourself all in a bunch, aren’t you? Relax! We’ll go down the street and get a bite. John here tells me y’all have a diner in this town that serves Mexican Coke. All the way up here in the pine-tree state. Go figure. You like that Mexican Co-cola, don’t you? Cane sugar, not corn syrup? We need to bring that old-style Coke back to the U. S. of A. I’ll put a bill in Congress, on down the road when I get there.”
He’d ramped up his Southern accent several notches, the Southern manners of speech he’d partly suppressed in his first flush of adulthood. Maybe he’d raised the good ol’ boy quotient for electability—Alaska has a certain kinship with the South, a redneck commonality without the heat or black people. Southern accents may be a bankable asset, I thought. Ned had always considered Alaska a frontier, the main reason he’d asked me to move there in the first place—not that he cared about the wild and scenic aspects, not that he was attracted to the state’s unpopulated beauty. It was the mythology of fortune-seeking that he liked, the small but abundant niches in various markets in the state that called to him.
Because while it was true that Alaska had glaciers and polar bears, albeit melting and starving/drowning, it was a frontier in other ways too—a colony still in development, into which, therefore, generous moneys pour from oil companies and Washington. Ned had been right, I guessed, to see his future in a place where men loved both their guns and their government and corporate handouts. He liked the cojones of Alaskans, was what he always said, the way they swaggered like lone cowboys and professed to hate all vestiges of government but at the same time clung fiercely to the coattails of that government—both to their own small government and its big, rich uncle in D.C.
Anyway he’d rediscovered his Southernness. And he was on a first-name basis with Beefy John.
“How’d you know I was here?” I asked.
All of it hung at the margins, all was fuzzy irrelevance except for Lena—where was she, who had her right at this moment? I struggled to think of anything else, stalling until I saw clearly what I should do. I expected a decision to come: presently I would render a decision, a decision would descend and land on me.
I waited for it.
“I make friends easy, honey,” Ned said smoothly. “You know me.”
“ ’Fraid I got to close up, folks,” interrupted Beefy John, emerging from the back office, grinning broadly. The pink skin on his nose and cheeks shone under the fluorescents. “Don’t keep Saturday hours, normally.”
That was how I came to scrape my keys toward me on the counter and follow Ned out into the parking lot. Trudging through the slush I considered the fact that Beefy John had opened the shop on Saturday and then Ned had been there. Conspiracy, I thought, conspiracy, I’d been stalked, I’d been tracked, I hadn’t been paranoid at all.
Could Don help me?
I got into my car and of course couldn’t stop Ned from following in his own—a rented SUV driven by someone else, some kind of bodyguard or other employee—in a dutiful procession to the diner a block down, a procession that made me feel like a condemned person. The diner served beer and wine, at least . . . and what could Ned do to me there, in broad daylight? I didn’t care how early it seemed to be; it was a zero hour for me, the time of reckoning. I had to stay clearheaded for Lena, but also I desperately needed to calm down.
I ordered a beer.