Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Read on for an extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grownups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America
The marriage wasn’t going well and I decided to leave my husband. I went to the bank to get cash for the trip. This was on a Wednesday, a rainy afternoon in March. The streets were nearly empty and the bank had just a few customers, none of them familiar to me.
Time was when I knew everybody in Clarion, but then they opened the lipstick factory and strangers started moving in. I was glad. I have lived in this town all my life, thirty-five years, forever. I liked having new people around. I liked standing in that bank feeling anonymous, with some business-suited stranger ahead of me in line and someone behind me wearing a slithery-sounding, city-type nylon jacket. I didn’t know the teller either. Though she might have been one of the Benedict girls, just grown up a little. She had that Benedict voice that turned off and on in the middle of words. “How would you like that, sir?” she asked the man ahead of me.
“Fives and ones,” he said.
She counted out the fives, then reached into some inconvenient place and came up with a couple of stacks of ones in brown paper bellybands. Just at that moment, the nylon jacket started up behind me. Somebody pushed me, somebody stumbled. There was this sudden flurry all around. A nylon sleeve swooped over my shoulder. A hand fastened on the stacks of bills. I was extremely irritated. Now look, I wanted to say, don’t be so grabby; I was here before you were. But then the teller gave a squawk and the man ahead of me spun in my direction, unbuttoning his suit coat. One of those plumpish men, puffy-faced as if continually, just barely, holding in his anger. He fumbled at his chest and pulled out something stubby. He pointed it at the nylon jacket. Which was black—the sleeve, at any rate. The sleeve darted back (the hand clutching money) and circled my neck. For a moment I was almost flattered. I curved to make way for the object pressing into my ribs. I smelled the foggy smell of new dollars.
“Anybody move and I’ll kill her,” said the nylon jacket.
It was me he meant.
We backed out, with his sneakers squeaking on the marble floor. Like a camera zooming away I saw first a few people and then more and more, all their faces very still and turned on me. My view grew even wider, took in the whole gloomy, paneled interior of the Maryland Safety Savings Bank. We lurched backward out the door.
“Run,” he told me.
He gripped my sleeve and we ran together, down slick wet sidewalks. We passed a man with a dog, one of the Elliott children, a woman pushing a stroller. You’d think they would look up, but they didn’t. I considered stopping very suddenly, asking someone strong for help. (The woman with the stroller is who I’d have chosen.) But how could I visit this affliction on them? I was in quarantine, Typhoid Mary. I didn’t stop.
In fact for a while there I imagined I might outdistance him, but his hold on me was very tight and he stayed beside me. His feet slapped the pavement steadily, unhurried. While I myself was gasping for air, my handbag thumping against my hipbone, loafers squelching water, and by the third block it seemed that some sharp-edged mainspring had snapped loose inside my chest. I slowed down.
“Keep going,” he said.
“I can’t.”
We were in front of Forman’s Grocery, comfortable Forman’s Grocery with its tissue-wrapped pears. I stopped and turned to him. It was a shock. I had been building this picture of him in my mind, somebody evil-faced, but he was just ordinary, calm-looking, with a tousle of oily black hair and black-rimmed, pale gray eyes. His eyes were level with mine; he was short, for a man. No taller than I was. And much younger. I took heart.
“Well,” I said, panting, “this is where I get off, I guess.”
Something clicked on his gun.
We ran on.
Down Edmonds Street, past old Mr. Linthicum, who’d been placed on his stoop as always, rain or shine, by his daughter-in-law. But Mr. Linthicum only smiled, and had long ago stopped talking anyway, so there was no hope there. Down Trapp Street, past my aunt’s brown duplex with the wooden eyelet lace dripping from all the eaves. Only she would be inside now, watching “Days of Our Lives.” A sharp left down an alley I hadn’t known existed, then left again, dodging under somebody’s stilt-legged porch, where once, I believe, I played as a child, with a girl called Sis or Sissy, but I hadn’t thought of her in years. Then across the gravel road by the lumberyard—does it have a name?—and up another alley. In the alleys it was raining, though elsewhere the rain had stopped. We were traveling a corridor of private weather. I had lost all feeling and seemed to be running motionless, the way you do in dreams.
Then, “Here,” he said.
We were facing the rear of a low, dingy building, buckling clapboard in a sea of weeds and potato chip cartons. Not a place I liked the looks of. “Head around front,” he told me.
“But—”
“Do like I say.”
I tripped over a mustard jar big enough to pickle a baby in.
Then think how I felt when we reached the front and I saw that it was Libby’s Grill—only Libby’s. Which was also the local pinball joint and bus depot. It’s true that I wasn’t exactly known there (I couldn’t afford to eat out, didn’t play pinball, never traveled), but at least it was public, and there was a good chance someone inside might recognize me. I walked in the door as straight as possible. I looked all around the room. But there was just a stranger drinking coffee at the counter, and the waitress was nobody I’d seen before.
“When’s the bus leave?” the bank robber asked her.
“What bus?”
“Next one.”
She looked at a wristwatch that was safety-pinned to her bosom. “Five minutes back,” she said. “He’s late as ever.”
“Well, me and her want two tickets to the end of the line.”
“Round trip?”
“One way.”
She went over to a drawer, pulled out two ribbons of tickets, and started whacking at them with a set of rubber stamps that stood beside the percolator. Now, surely people didn’t come in every day asking for tickets to the end of the line, wherever it was, on the next bus going out. And surely she didn’t often see a woman draggly-haired, out of breath, about to collapse from running too hard, accompanied by a stranger all in black. (For even his jeans were black, I saw now, even his sneakers—everything but his startling, white, out-of-place shirt.) Wouldn’t you think she would give us at least a glance? But no, she kept her eyes down, her chin tucked into her other chins, even when accepting the money he laid on the pads of her palm. Before we were halfway out the door, I believe, she had forgotten we existed.
And then the bus had to wheeze up the moment we arrived at the curb, not giving me two seconds to look around for someone familiar. Though I was calmer now. It didn’t seem so likely he would shoot me with people around—even these numb, dumb people lining the bus, half of them asleep with their mouths open, old lady talking to herself, soldier with a transistor radio pressed to the side of his head. Dolly Parton was singing “My Life Is Like Unto a Bargain Store.” The vanity case on the old lady’s lap was meowing. I decided there was hope. I sank into a seat and felt suddenly light-hearted, as if I were expecting something. As if I were going on a trip, really. Then the bank robber sat down beside me. “You keep on behaving and you’re going to be fine,” he whispered. (He was a little out of breath himself, I saw.) He reached over, palm down. His hand was square and dark. What did he want? I shrank away, but he just took hold of my purse. “I’ll be needing that,” he said.
I disentangled the strap from my shoulder and gave it to him. He held it loosely, between his knees. I looked away. Outside my window was Libby’s Grill, the bus driver joking with the waitress on the stoop, a child mailing a letter. What about my children, would they wonder where I was?
“I have to get off,” I told the bank robber.
He blinked.
‘I’ve got children, I didn’t make arrangements yet for after school. I have to get off.”
“What you expect me to do?” he said. “Look, lady, if it was up to me we’d be twenty miles apart by now. You think I planned this? How was I to know some clown would pull a gun?” He swung his eyes around, checking out the sleeping faces. “Nowadays just anybody’s got them, people without a lick of sense. I could be clean free and you safe home with your kids by now if it wasn’t for him. Guy like that ought to be locked up.”
“But we’re out. You’ve escaped,” I told him.
I felt embarrassed; it seemed tactless to discuss the situation so openly. But he didn’t take offense.
“Wait and see,” was all he said.
“Wait for what?”
“See if they can say who I was. If they can’t I won’t need you. I’ll let you go. Right?”
He gave me a sudden smile he didn’t mean—short, even teeth, surprisingly white. Stubby black lashes veiling whatever look was in his eyes. I didn’t smile back.
The driver climbed on, a man so heavy that we felt the tilt when he landed. He pulled the door shut and ground the motor. Libby’s Grill slipped away like something underwater. The child at the mailbox vanished. Then the laundromat, the hardware, the vacant lot, and finally the pharmacy with its mechanical lady lounging in the window, raising her arm to rub Coppertone on it and dropping it and raising it again, eternally laughing her faded laugh inside her dusty glass box.
I was born right here in Clarion; I grew up in that big brown turreted house next to Percy’s Texaco. My mother was a fat lady who used to teach first grade. Her maiden name was Lacey Debney.
Notice that I mention her fatness first. You couldn’t overlook fatness like my mother’s. It defined her, it radiated out from her, it filled any room she walked into. She was a mushroom-shaped woman with wispy blond hair you could see through, a pink face, and no neck; just a jaw sloping wider and wider till it turned into shoulders. All year round she wore sleeveless flowered shifts—a mistake. Her feet were the smallest I have ever seen on a grownup, and she owned a gigantic collection of tiny, elegant shoes.
When she was in her mid-thirties—still a maiden lady teaching school, living in her dead father’s house beside the Texaco station—a traveling photographer named Murray Ames came to take her students’ pictures. A stooped, bald, meek-looking man with a mustache like a soft black mouse. What did he see in her? Did he like her little feet, her fancy shoes? At any rate, they married. He moved into her dead father’s house and turned the library into a portrait studio—an L-shaped room with an outside entrance and a bay window facing the street. You can still see his huge old complicated camera there on its stand beside the fireplace. Also his painted backdrop—blue, blue sky and one broken-off Ionic column—which so many schoolchildren used to stand in front of so long ago.
She had to quit teaching; he didn’t want a wife who worked. (He was given to fits of cold, black moodiness that scared her to death, that made her flutter all around him wondering what she’d done wrong.) She sat home and ate chocolate caramels and made things—pincushions, Kleenex-box covers, Modess-pad lady-dolls to stand on bureau tops. This went on for years. Every year she got fatter and fatter, and had more trouble moving around. She tilted at each step, holding herself carefully like a very full jug of water. She grew listless, developed indigestion, felt short of breath, and started going through the Change. She was certain she had a tumor but would not see a doctor; only took Carter’s Little Liver Pills, her remedy for everything.
One night she woke up with abdominal spasms and became convinced that the tumor (which she seemed to picture as a sort of overripe grapefruit) had split open and was trying to pass. All around her the bed was hot and wet. She woke her husband, who stumbled into his trousers and drove her to the hospital. Half an hour later, she gave birth to a six-pound baby girl.
I know all this because my mother told me, a thousand times. I was her only audience. In some way, she’d grown separate from the rest of the town—had no friends whatsoever. She lived her life alone behind her gauzy curtains. Yet I believe that once my mother’s family was very social, and filled that house with dances and dinner parties. (My grandfather was involved in politics somehow, something to do with the governor.) There are pictures of my mother in a pink tulle evening gown, looking like a giant hollyhock, playing hostess in the period after my grandmother’s death. In all the pictures she is smiling, and has her hands linked across her stomach as if hugging herself for joy.
But my grandfather was the only man who ever totally approved of her (he called her his biscuit, he loved her dimples, he was glad she wasn’t all skin and bones, he said) and once he had died, her social life began to thin out. Pretty soon only her father’s oldest, kindest friends asked her places, only to dull family dinners where there was no need to pair people; and then they died, too, and her one lone brother was married to a woman who didn’t like her; and the other teachers were so young and vivacious, they filled her with despair. Also, she got the feeling sometimes that the children at school were laughing at her. While they were her pupils they just loved her, oh, they loved to be rocked by her when they fell off the jungle gym and to smell the velvet rose fastened to her bosom, with its drop of L’Heure Bleu she put on a single petal every morning. But a year or two later, when they had passed on to other grades—well, several times she had noticed things. Little snickers, traded glances, rude limericks she wouldn’t lower herself to repeat.
Then after she was married there was a brief flurry of invitations, as if she had suddenly been declared alive after a long misunderstanding. But … what was the trouble, exactly? She couldn’t say. Couldn’t put her finger on it. Her husband just never had learned to fit in, maybe that was it. He wasn’t outgoing enough. He acted so glum, wouldn’t raise his eyes when spoken to and hardly spoke at all himself. Hung about as if he didn’t own his body—shoulders sagging, middle caved in; he looked like an empty suit of clothes. No wonder their life had shrunk and dwindled so!
Yes, I wanted to say, but what about Alberta, the lady next door? Her husband was no good whatsoever, and still she had more friends than I could count.
I entered school, a whole new world. I hadn’t had any idea that people could be so light-hearted. I stood on the edge of the playground watching how the girls would gather in clumps, how they giggled over nothing at all and told colorful stories of family life: visits to circuses, fights with brothers. They didn’t like me. They said I smelled. I knew they were right because now when I walked into my house I could smell the smell too: stale, dark, ancient air, in which nothing had moved for a very long time. I began to see how strange my mother was. I noticed that her dresses were like enormous flowered undershirts. I wondered why she didn’t go out more; then once, from a distance, I watched her slow progress toward the corner grocery and I wished she wouldn’t go out at all.
I wondered why my father had so few customers, most of them soldiers or other transients, and why he had to talk to them in that mumbling, hangdog way that tore at my heart. I worried that he and my mother didn’t love each other and would separate, fly apart, forgetting me in the flurry. Why couldn’t they be like Ardle Leigh’s parents? The Leighs held hands every place they went, but my parents never touched at all. I seldom saw them look at each other. They seemed to be staring inward, like people cheated or disappointed somehow. And though they slept in the same great wooden bed, the middle of it stayed perfectly neat—a median strip unrumpled, undisturbed. Or sometimes they quarreled (irritable lashings-out, no issue you could name, exactly) and my father spent the night in his studio. Then I felt dislocated and sick to my stomach. I loved my father more than I loved my mother. My father believed I was really their true daughter. My mother didn’t.
My mother believed there’d been a mix-up at the hospital. It was all such a shock, that whole business, she said; she’d been a little dazed. An unexpected birth is like—why, an earthquake! a tornado! Other natural disasters. Your mind hasn’t quite prepared a frame for it yet. “Besides,” she would say, plucking at the front of her dress, “they gave me some kind of laughing gas, I think. Then everything was a dream. My vision was affected and when they showed me the baby I assumed it was a roll of absorbent cotton. Mostly they kept her in the nursery. On the day I went home they handed me this bundle: a stark-naked child in a washed-out blanket. Why! I thought. This is not mine! But I was still so surprised, you see, and besides didn’t want to make trouble. I took what they gave me.”
Then she would study my face, with her forehead all ridged and sorrowful. I knew what she was wondering: what stranger’s looks had I inherited? I was thin and drab, with straight brown hair. Nobody else in the family had brown hair. There were peculiarities about me that no one could explain: my extremely high arches, which refused to be crammed into many styles of shoes; my yellowish skin; and my height. I was always tall for my age. Now where did that come from? Not from my father. Not from my mother’s side—my five-foot mother and her squat brother Gerard and her portly, baby-faced father beaming out of the photo frames, and certainly not from my Great-Aunt Charlotte, for whom I was named, whose pictures show her feet dangling comically when she is seated in an armchair. Something had gone wrong somewhere.
“But of course I love you anyway,” my mother said.
I knew she did. Love is not what we are talking about, here.
Unfortunately I was born in 1941, when Camp Aaron was filling up with soldiers and Clarion County Hospital suddenly had more patients—mainly soldiers’ wives, giving birth—than at any other time before or since. All the hospital’s records for that period are skimpy, inaccurate, or just plain lost. I know, because my mother checked. She had nothing to go on. Somewhere out in the world her little blond daughter was growing up with a false name, a false identity, a set of false, larcenous parents. But my mother just had to live with that, she said. Her hands fluttered out, abandoning hope.
To her the world was large and foreign. I knew that it was small. Sooner or later her true daughter would be found. Then what?
My father, if asked directly, said that I was the true daughter. He didn’t go on and on about it; he just said, “Of course.” Once he took me into a guest room and showed me my baby clothes, packed away in a brassbound trunk. (I don’t know what he thought that proved.) He had had to buy those clothes himself, he said, while my mother was lying in the hospital. He had bought those clothes for me. He jabbed a finger at my chest, then scratched his head a moment as if trying to recall something and went off to the studio. I worried that he was building toward one of his moods. I barely glanced at the baby clothes (yellowed, wrinkled, packed together so long and so tightly you would have to peel them away like cigar leaves) before I left too and went to find him. I worked alongside him all afternoon, rinsing heavy glass negatives under running water, but he didn’t say anything more to me.
Meals were strained and silent: only the clinking of silverware. My parents didn’t speak, or if they did, it was in a hopeless, bitter way. “Bitter as acorns,” my father said, and he set the coffeecup down so sharply that it splashed across the mended tablecloth. Then my mother lowered her face to her hands, and my father jerked his chair back and went to wind the clock. I mashed my peas with my spoon. There was no point in eating. Anything you ate in that house would sit on your stomach forever, like a stone.
These were my two main worries when I was a child: one was that I was not their true daughter, and would be sent away. The other was that I was their true daughter and would never, ever manage to escape to the outside world.
I was glad the robber had let me have the window seat. Even if it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart, at least I got to see the last of Clarion skating by. Followed by a string of housing developments, and then wide open fields where I could just sit back and let my eyes get lost. It was years since I had been anywhere.
Meanwhile there was this nylon jacket slicking around to one side of me, continually changing position. He was restless, I could tell. I mean restless in a permanent way, by nature. At all stop signs and traffic lights he resettled himself. When a woman rose to get off by a mailbox in the middle of nowhere I heard his fingers drumming, drumming, all the time the bus was stopped. Once we had to slow down behind a tractor and he actually groaned out loud. Then shifted his feet, scrunched his shoulders around, scratched his knee. With his left hand, of course. His right hand was out of sight—arm folded across his stomach, gun jammed between my third and fourth ribs. He was taking no chances.
What did he think I would do? Jump out that little, sooty window? Ask the old lady in front of me for help? Scream? Well, scream, maybe; that might work. (If they didn’t just think I was a lunatic and pretend not to hear.) But I am not the kind to scream, I never have been. As a child I nearly drowned once, sinking in a panic beneath the lifeguard’s eyes with my lips clamped tightly together. I would rather die than make any sort of disturbance.
We rode alongside a freight train a ways. I counted the cars. If you’re stuck you’re stuck, I figure; might as well relax. I wondered why the B & O Railroad had changed its name to the Chessie System. Chessie could be a new kind of sandwich spread, or a lady gym instructor.
From time to time it occurred to me that I could possibly be killed in a while.
The soldier’s radio was playing a golden oldie, “Little Things Mean a Lot.” I could close my eyes and be dancing at the Sophomore Prom again if I wanted. Which I didn’t. The song broke off in the middle of a high note and a man said, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.”
The bank robber didn’t move a muscle, but he grew a surface of awareness that I could feel.
“Clarion police report that the Maryland Safety Savings Bank was robbed at around two thirty this afternoon. A white man in his early twenties, apparently working alone, escaped with two hundred dollars in one-dollar bills and a female hostage as yet unidentified. Fortunately, the bank’s automatic cameras were activated and police have every hope of—”
The soldier turned a dial on his radio. The announcer lost interest and wandered away. Olivia Newton-John drifted in.
“Shoot,” said the robber.
I jumped.
“What’s a two-bit place like that want with cameras?”
I risked a glance at him. There was a little muscle flickering near the corner of his mouth. “But listen—” I said. The pistol nudged me, like a thumb. “Listen,” I whispered. “You’re gone now! You’re out of there.”
“Sure. With my face all over a roll of film.”
“What does that matter?”
“They’ll identify me,” he said.
Identify? Did that mean he was a known criminal? Or paranoid, maybe—some maniac from Lovill State Hospital. Either way, it didn’t look good.
“It don’t look good,” he told me.
His voice was thin and gravelly—the voice of a man who doesn’t care what he sounds like. I wasn’t encouraged by it. I shut my mind and turned back to the window, where peaceful farms were rolling by.
“What are you staring at?” he asked.
“Cows,” I said.
“They’re going to meet me at the next town, wait and see. What’s the next town?”
“Now listen,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the radio? They know you have a hostage, that’s all they know yet. They’re looking for a man who’s traveling with a hostage. All you’ve got to do is let me go. Doesn’t that make sense? Next place we stop at, let me off. You stay on the bus. I won’t say a word, I promise. What do I care if they catch you or not?”
He didn’t seem to have heard. He gazed straight ahead of him with that muscle still working. “One thing I cannot abide is being locked up,” he said finally.
“Right.”
“Can’t take it.”
“Right.”
“You’re staying with me till I see that bank film.”
“What?”
“Half the time them things’re all blurry anyhow,” he said. “Why panic? We’ll wait and see. If the film’s no good, if they lose my tracks, why, then I let you go.”
“Well—how will you know the film is no good?”
“They show it on the tube,” he said. “Evening news, I bet you anything.”
“But where will you get to watch it?”
“Baltimore, where’d you think.”
He let his head fall back against the seat. I returned to looking at farms. I thought I had never seen anything so heartless as the calm, indifferent way those cows were grazing.
We must have been on the most local kind of bus it is possible to get, because we stopped at towns I’d never heard of before and a lot of other places besides. Crossroads, trailer parks, lean-tos covered with election posters. By the time we reached Baltimore it was twilight. I could look out the window and see my own reflection gazing back at me, more interesting-looking than in real life. Beyond was the outline of the bank robber, constantly shifting and fidgeting.
At the terminal, our headlights colored a wallful of black men in crocheted caps and satin coats, lounging around chewing toothpicks. “Balmer!” the driver said, and the passengers rose and collected their things. All but me and the bank robber; he held me down. He made me wait till the others were past. Now it was my turn to get fidgety. I have a little trouble with closed-in spaces. If a bus isn’t running its motor it is definitely a closed-in space. “I need to get off,” I told him.
“You’ll get off when I say so.”
“But I can’t stand it here.”
His eyes flicked over at me.
“Do you want me to have hysterics?”
I wouldn’t really have had hysterics, but he didn’t know that. He stood up and motioned me into the aisle with a gleam of his pistol. We followed the soldier, whose radio was playing “Washington Square.” For some reason I always get “Washington Square” mixed up with “Midnight in Moscow” and it wasn’t till I was all the way off the bus, standing in a daze on the concrete and teetering from the long ride, that I decided it was “Washington Square.”
“Will you move it?” the robber said.
Couples were meeting and kissing in the gray light between buses. We dodged them and headed toward the street. There were a lot of people milling around there, mostly men, mostly no-account. It was the hour for getting off work but that wasn’t what they were doing here, surely—standing about in packs, loitering in front of cocktail lounges and peep shows and “Girls! Nitely!” There was a strong smell of French fries. Everybody looked dangerous. But I had this robber and his warm heavy gun, and anyway, what was left to lose? He was the one with the purse. I slid through the crowds as easily as a fish, unhampered, guided by that nudge in the small of my back.
“Stop,” he said.
We had come to a dingy little place with a neon sign sizzling in the window: BENJAMIN’S. A red wooden door so thickly painted I could have scratched my name on it with a fingernail. He pulled it open and we went inside. A TV set turned the air blue and dusty; rows of bottles topped with silver globes glittered before a mirror. We felt our way to the bar and sat down. I unbuttoned my raincoat. A man in an apron turned his cheek to us, while his eyes stayed fixed on the television.
“What’ll you have?” the robber asked me.
At our house, nobody drinks; but I didn’t want to seem unfriendly. “Pabst Blue Ribbon,” I said at random.
“One Pabst, one Jack Daniel’s neat,” said the robber.
The bartender poured Jack Daniel’s blindly, while watching a commercial for potato chips. But he had to turn away to hunt a glass for my beer. Then the news began and he gave up, passed me a stark tall can unopened and held out his palm for whatever money the robber put into it.
Various politicians were traveling around the countryside. We saw them getting off airplanes, setting right in to shake hand after hand like people hauling rope. We saw a man who’d been acquitted by a jury. He believed in the American system of justice, he said. There was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.
“Hit me again,” the robber told the bartender, holding out his glass. I opened and took a sip of my beer. The good thing about sitting at a counter was that I didn’t have to look at him. We could each pretend the other wasn’t there.
My eyes were used to the dark by now and I could see that this place was hardly better than a barn—barren, dirty, cold. It would have been cold even in July; no sunlight ever reached it, surely. I wondered what the restrooms were like. I needed to go to one but I wasn’t certain of the procedure.
They had never covered this problem on those cops-and-robbers shows.
In the local news, there was a school board meeting. A policeman’s funeral. A drug arrest. A five-car accident in Pearl Bay. A bank robbery in Clarion.
The announcer’s face gave way to film of a different quality, blurred and shadowy. On this film a small group of people stumbled in line, like dominoes. The foremost person, a squat man in a business suit, tore something from his chest. An arm loomed out. Another man backed jerkily away, half hidden by a tall, thin woman in a light-colored raincoat. The man and woman disappeared. Several faces swam forward, and someone put a white scarf or handkerchief to his or her eyes. I was fascinated. I’d never before been able to observe a room after I had left it.
The announcer returned, a little blank of face as if he’d been caught unawares. “So,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Well, that was … and remember you saw it here first, folks, a genuine bank robbery in progress. Police have identified the suspect as Jake Simms, Jr., a recent escapee from the Clarion County Jail, but so far no one has stepped forward to name his hostage. However, roadblocks have been set up and Clarion’s police chief Andrews feels confident that the suspect is still in the area.”
“Come on,” said Jake Simms.
We slid off our stools and left. In the doorway I glanced back at the bartender, but his eyes were still on the screen.
“I knew it would work out like this,” the robber told me.
“But you’re past all the roadblocks.”
“They’re looking for me by name.”
We threaded our way through even larger crowds than before, none of them apparently going anywhere at all. As far as I could tell, the gun wasn’t jammed in my back any more. Was I free? I stood still.
“Keep moving,” he told me.
“I want to find the bus station.”
“What for?”
“I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not.”
We stood square in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the flow of pedestrians. He needed a shave, I saw. It made me uneasy to be at eye level with him; I distrust compactly built men. I reached out a hand, careful to make no sudden moves. “Could I have my purse, please?” I said.
“Look,” he told me. “It ain’t me keeping you, it’s them. If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways, and believe me, lady, there ain’t nothing I’d like better. But now they have my name, see, and will track me down, and I need you for protection till I get to safety. Understand?”
We went to another bar, as dark as the first but with some customers in it. This time we sat at a little wooden table in the corner. “Now let me think. Just let me think,” he told me, although I hadn’t said a word. Then he gave his order to the waitress: “One Jack Daniel’s neat, one Pabst. Couple bags of pretzels.” I decided not to drink the Pabst because of the restroom problem, I folded my arms on the table and craned my neck to see the TV—this one in color, a man reeling off the weather. Meanwhile, Jake Simms set my purse on the table between us. “What you got in here?” he asked me.
“Pardon?”
“Any weapons?”
“Any—no!”
He undid the catch and opened it. He pulled out my billfold, frayed and curling. Inside was a pathetic bit of paper money. Small change and bobbypins. A library card. He glanced at it. “Charlotte Emory,” he said. He studied a photo of me holding Selinda, back when she was a baby. Then he looked into my face. I knew what he was thinking: lately I had let myself go. However, he didn’t comment on it.