THREE DAYS later Rain was prepping for the dinner shift when she glanced up from her work to see Loyal sitting in his truck in the parking lot. She hadn’t seen him since he’d come to the house before the bad weather to apologize for the argument they’d had at his apartment. That in itself was strange. In the past he had called her daily, and though things had been hard, it was odd that he hadn’t reached out. Perhaps she had hoped things would end gently that way and a part of her had pushed it to the back of her mind. Perhaps too she didn’t like to admit that some of what he said was true about how she had begun to allow herself to feel about Stratton. But that was her own concern, and she didn’t like him showing up here like this while she was working. Surprise then turned to something else, and she found her hands moving more quickly and brusquely over their tasks. When she was finished with everything, had wiped the counter down and still he hadn’t come in, she told the cook she was taking a quick break and stepped outside to see him.
He was sitting with the driver’s window down smoking a cigarette. He didn’t look at her when she approached.
“Pretty cold to sit out here with the window cracked, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“You coming in or you just going to sit out here?”
“I’m just waiting on you.”
“Well, you’re going to be waiting a while. I’ve got about another three hours before I get off.”
“That’s fine,” he said, flipped the butt past her. It went in a brief and smoldering arc. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“All right. As long as you understand that.”
He nodded, lit another cigarette, and let the smoke crawl from his mouth.
She went back behind the counter and waited on a couple with kids. As she stood there while they ordered, she could see Loyal sitting and staring. He remained like that through the course of the night, his only change coming when he would reach the end of a cigarette and light another.
When her shift ended she took her coat from the back, punched out, and left without telling anyone goodbye. The night had gotten even colder. The pavement was slick from ice and she had to be careful as she crossed to open the passenger’s side of the truck and slide in.
“Well, I hope it was worth the wait,” she told him, turned the heater vents so that she could get some of the air.
“Mind if we drive while we talk?”
“Not as long as you bring me back here when we’re done. I’ve still got my own car to drive home.”
He put the truck in reverse and eased from the lot, turned on the highway headed toward town. The streetlights came over them in paced intervals, the periodic glow like drops of measured time.
“You’re acting strange, Loyal.”
“I guess I have a right to.”
“Why don’t you tell me what this is about, then?”
“I figured you might want to tell me. Give me some way to make sense of what’s happening.”
“What the hell are you talking about? If this is more of your bullshit about Stratton, then you can turn us around right now. I’m not going through that again with you.”
“It’s not about Stratton. Not directly, anyway. Why don’t you tell me why I would stay away? What would pull everything out from me like it was never real in the first place?”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Loyal.”
His fist struck the dashboard so hard that she jumped.
“Cut the bullshit! Tell me then you don’t have a husband that’s out there looking for you. Tell me that I imagined that shit.”
“Oh, God.”
“God doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with it. I come home from seeing you and this sonofabitch gets the drop on me while I’m going into my own place, shoves a pistol in my back and tells me to go in so we can talk or he’ll put a couple of bullets in my fucking spine. Me, I think I’m being robbed, but as soon as he gets me up there he has me sit down and he starts telling me this wild ass story about you and him and how you were on the road together, husband and wife, making do however you could manage, to include selling your ass and whatever else. I thought it was crazy. I thought it had to be, but he had an awful lot of details, an awful lot of conviction.”
“What did he say he wanted?”
“Oh, that’s good. I’m glad to see you’re at least not trying to pretend it’s not true.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s a nice mouth for one of the few friends you got. Why don’t you sit there and listen to me, because I’ve got something you will probably want to hear. After this sonofabitch got finished telling me his story, he told me that if I came back around you he would make sure I never did it more than once. But I followed him after he left, saw him get in his piece of shit car and tear ass out of town. It made me curious, after all, where this sonofabitch laid his head. Thought you might like to know too.”
They sped through town and up past the ConAgra plant with its military-looking gatehouse and lurid lights, then shot the long dark corridor of the riverside road. When the headlights hit the clumps of frozen snow they cast back holes of white in the peaceably dark woods. The moon was up and it showed the massive mountain country ahead, stamped against the sky.
Loyal doused the headlights and slowed, though he remained on the road.
“See that down there,” he said, pointed to a meager pattern of fire beyond some undergrowth. “He’s got his camp set up down there. Parks that old black police cruiser in there and stays all night for the last three nights. I’ve been coming out here to make sure.”
A quarter of a mile down the road he turned around in the end of a dirt driveway and steered back toward town. This time his lights were on and he did not slow as he passed the camp.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Loyal.”
“That’s fine. I didn’t expect you would know what to say. It’s all busted to hell, isn’t it?”
She was unsure if it was a question in search of an answer. He continued to talk, though she only heard pieces of what he said. Mostly versions of what he had said before. His love for her and the desire to make everything right between them, regardless of the price. Even as she sat there and listened it was like recalling a memory.
He parked on the street bordering his apartment, shut the engine off.
“Why’d you bring me back here, Loyal?”
He wouldn’t look at her when he spoke.
“Because this is where we make the decision, Rain.”
“What decision?”
“I’ve got six hundred dollars up there in the apartment. I’ve got a couple of suitcases too. You can have one of them and we can get the hell out of town tonight. No more questions asked. Just get away from whatever has followed you.”
He had leaned his head against the driver’s window. She could see the split reflection of him there. She could see his handsome face cut in two.
“I can’t do that.”
She tried to touch his hand but he drew away.
“Don’t do that,” he told her. “It’s fine. I knew it would be this way.”
And while there was something in his voice that troubled her, some distinct change in how he spoke, she did nothing to stop him as he cranked the engine and drove her back to the restaurant.
She said goodnight and got in the Bronco. He spun out of the lot, tires barking, before she could get the engine to run. She sat over the wheel for a long time like it held some final solution she couldn’t grasp.
Once she made it home Stratton had already gone up to bed. She let herself in and quietly shut the door. She called his name once. Not Stratton’s but the other, the man who still claimed her, who had come back for her. She let the sound roll out of her, as if it were a sadness she’d kept inside for too long. She should have feared him, she realized. And she did. But it wasn’t only fear. The answering silence affirmed that she was alone. Of course, that was what she should have hoped.
She sat up in bed trying to read one of the books she’d checked from the school library and kept over the break. It was one her English teacher had recommended, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Much of it was heavy and the sentences read like something turned out by a piece of machinery, but there was a distinct power in the story there, the doomed ambitions in both love and character for both Jude and Sue Bridehead. She liked too the way the surrounding countryside held them, as if the earth contained them, rendered their losses more meaningful because of the common ground they shared.
She put the book aside and thought about what Loyal had said. His choice of words. Selling your ass. The sound of it was like something vile stuck to the roof of her brain. He didn’t know what it had been like, didn’t understand the human involvement, but he’d decided he understood everything from the vantage point of his disdain. It made her resent him in a way that was far beyond any shame or hurt she had felt as a result of the act itself. Yes, there was that burden, that sadness in the body from having traded away a part of herself, but that remained hers to suffer. She would not let him make that part of his possession. He had no claim on the sharp edges that formed who she had become.
The moon showed through the trees, lay a pale floating lake across the floor of the room. She imagined the surface of it enclosing her. She pulled the blanket to her chin and made herself tight within its glow. She preferred, not a man, but the night to capture her.