“I don’t know a whole lot of husbands who’ll let their wives drive.”
“Right now, my husband’s in no position to have an opinion of what I do,” Kate said.
“Well, it’s a nice car, anyway,” Ella said.
“Where am I going?” Kate asked.
“Head back out to Franklin,” Ella said. “Then take a right. Just keep driving west until we get to Bessemer City.”
They were on the open road outside Gastonia within a few minutes, the lights of the city behind them. The Essex cruised along, its headlights shining on the wet road. Another automobile appeared in the distance, and Ella saw that it was the back of Chesley’s truck. Kate veered around it without slowing, without showing any sign that she’d noticed it. As she flew past Chesley’s truck and then Sophia’s, Ella turned her face away from the window so that she wouldn’t be seen.
“My husband always had an opinion about what I was doing,” Ella said.
“What makes you say that?” Kate asked.
“Because of what you said earlier,” Ella said. “You said your husband didn’t have no opinion about you right now.”
“Oh,” Kate said. She laughed. “I don’t think that’s true. I’m sure he has opinions about me. I just don’t care to hear them.”
Ella looked around the inside of the car. It was the nicest automobile she’d ever seen. She fingered the leather seats, closed her hand around the metal crank that would lower the window if she were to turn it.
“What kind of work does your husband do?”
“He runs a family business,” Kate said. “Nothing interesting.”
“In town?”
“No,” Kate said. “Not in Gastonia, but close by over in McAdamville. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” Ella said. “Is it nice there?”
Kate grew quiet, and Ella wondered if she’d done something wrong by asking the question.
“It should be nice,” Kate finally said. “But, no, I don’t find it that way. Others do. My husband does.”
“Husbands,” Ella said.
Kate smiled.
“It sounds like you understand,” Kate said.
“I do,” Ella said, “but my husband’s gone, so I don’t have to understand him as much as I used to.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said.
“Oh, he’s not dead,” Ella said. “He’s just gone. I don’t know where to. He’s better off wherever he is. So am I.”
“How long were you married?”
“Since I turned sixteen,” Ella said. “My mother and father both passed away real close together. I got married because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It must have been awful to lose your parents so young,” Kate said.
“It was,” Ella said. “My older brother ran off as soon as he was old enough.”
“Where to?”
“Detroit,” Ella said. “I’ve never seen him since. I was little when he left, probably ten or twelve. I think he went up there to build cars.” She wrapped her knuckles on her window. “He could’ve built this one here.” She looked over at Kate. “Wouldn’t that be something? Me just sitting here riding along in a fine automobile that my brother Wesley built, not having any idea that he’s the one that built it. It’s a nice thing to think, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “It is nice.”
“After my daddy died, the lumber camp doled out my widow’s pay. I had nowhere to go. All I could think to do was find one of them old letters that Wesley had wrote us from up north, and then go down to the train station and buy a ticket to wherever he was.”
“Is that what you did?”
Ella thought about not saying another word about herself, about not telling Kate, this stranger she’d never met before, any more of her story. But something about the silence of the car and the feel of the night made her want to keep talking.
“It’s what I would’ve done,” Ella said. “It’s what I would’ve done if John Wiggins hadn’t been sitting on a bench in that train station waiting for a girl just like me.
“He was good-looking too, dressed in a fine suit of clothes, probably the only thing he owned at the time. He asked me where I was heading, and when I didn’t have my answer ready I figure he probably knew I was the one he’d been waiting for.
“We spent our first night in a boardinghouse right there in Bryson City. That night I laid in bed in a strange room beside a strange man and listened to the train whistle out there in the mountains. And each time I heard it whistle I wondered if that was the train that was supposed to be taking me to Detroit. But instead, here I was laid up in bed with a fine-talking stranger, our bellies full of steak and champagne. A whole lot of my money already gone. It was just about the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life.”
She’d said too much, revealed too many things about herself, about who she’d been. Ella could almost feel Kate tossing around images of her in her mind: the sight of her in bed with John, the feeling of champagne slipping past her lips, the echo of the train whistle in the night. She wanted to open her mouth and suck the words back into it, but instead she kept talking, kept throwing words after the ones she’d already said as if they could reconstruct instead of underpin the idea Kate already had of her.
“I’d never done anything like that before, you know, spent the night with a man, and I said to him, I said, ‘You reckon we better get married now?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. We don’t got time for that kind of thing.’ Well, I couldn’t figure out what time had to do with it, but looking back on it now, I know he said that because he was planning to cut out just as soon as we ran dry of my widow’s pay. And then a few weeks later I told him I thought I was pregnant, which I was. And I asked about us getting married then, and he said, ‘Well, I reckon we ought to now,’ and that’s about as romantic as he ever got. ‘I reckon we ought to.’”
“How long ago did he leave?”
“About two years ago,” Ella said. “Right after I got pregnant with my youngest. I reckon it took John Wiggins that many years to do what he’d wanted to do the first morning he woke up beside me.” Ella looked over at Kate. Her face grew hot. She’d said too much again. She turned toward Kate, nearly felt herself throw the onus of speaking into Kate’s lap. “Where’d you meet your husband?”
“In Chapel Hill, at the university,” Kate said.
“You went to college?” Ella asked.
“No,” Kate said. “I wish I’d gone. I begged my daughter to go to college because I didn’t, and I grew up wishing I had. But, no, my older brother went to college in Chapel Hill. My husband was his roommate until my brother passed away. He died young. He was eighteen.”
“I’m sorry,” Ella said.
“Thank you,” Kate said. “It was a long time ago.”
“It don’t get no easier to lose somebody you love,” Ella said. “No matter how long it’s been.”
“That’s true,” Kate said.
Silence hung between them for a few minutes after that. The quiet nearly blotted out the sound of the air as they cut through it and the noise of the car’s tires on the wet road.