We were having a whole conversation without moving our mouths.

Chapter Six

Rollie fell asleep as the sun went down, the way a man sleeps when he's been driving since before dawn and plans to drive again at full dark. He went all at once, between one breath and the next, his arm still around me.

I lay there for a while. Through the leather curtain, the light changed from amber to purple to the particular gray-blue of a Southern evening. Outside, Jacksonville finished its Friday night — voices from the Howard Johnson's lot, a car radio, someone laughing at something across the asphalt.

After a while I sat up carefully and let him sleep.

There was storage built into the wall of the bunk — a long low compartment with a latch — and I opened it without much expectation. A wool blanket, dark green. A flashlight. A paper bag with what turned out to be beef jerky and a sleeve of saltine crackers. And books.

Seven or eight of them, paperbacks, their spines cracked from reading and their covers doing what paperback covers did in 1958: making promises in primary colors. A woman in a torn dress. A man with an improbable jaw. Red letters above them: Kidnapped Bride. Stolen Fiancee. Hidden Lust for a Stranger. Captive Wife. Woman on the Run. Fugitive Lover. Runaway Girlfriend.

I held Kidnapped Bride at arm's length and looked at the cover for a moment.

Guy Wendell had read sales reports, trade publications and Louis L'Amour. Guy Wendell would have looked at this cover and put it down immediately.

I opened it to page one.

* * *

Twenty pages in, I surfaced briefly, the way you surface from a dream when a car goes past outside and then you go right back under. The woman in the book was being carried somewhere against her will, or in the vicinity of against her will, her feelings on the subject considerably more complicated than the word against could account for. The man doing the carrying had blue eyes.

I noted this and turned the page.

The writing was not Hemingway. It knew things Hemingway did not know, and didn't apologize for knowing them, and I found I had no objection to that.

Rollie breathed slow and steady beside me. The light through the curtain was full dark now.

I finished Kidnapped Bride and picked up Stolen Fiancee, which had a different woman in a different torn dress being carried by a man who might have been the same man with a different haircut. I read thirty pages of that.

Then I put it down and lay on my back in the bunk and looked at the ceiling of the sleeper cab and did not examine too carefully the reason my heart was going the way it was going.

Guy Wendell, I thought.

It felt like a name I'd known once. The shape of a person I'd heard about from someone reliable.

Outside, a truck pulled into the lot — the long downshift, the hiss of air brakes, the idle settling into its rhythm. The road was still out there, waiting. Charlotte was seven hundred miles north, and Rollie would sleep another hour or two and then we'd be moving again, Georgia in the dark, the Carolinas by morning.

I reached for Woman on the Run and then stopped and put my hand on Rollie's chest instead, felt it rise and fall.

Gwen Telford, I thought. Twenty-three years old. From Springfield, more or less. In a truck, going north.

That was enough to know for now. The rest of it could wait for the road.

I opened Woman on the Run and read until Rollie stirred.

Chapter Seven

The Charlotte freight depot smelled like motor oil and sawdust and the particular exhaustion of things that have traveled a long way to get somewhere unremarkable. Rollie backed Gypsy into the dock with the patient precision of a man who has done this ten thousand times, and I sat in the passenger seat watching his hands on the wheel and thought: I could watch him do this all day.

I could not have told you four days ago that I would ever think a sentence like that.

The dock foreman, a heavyset man in a canvas jacket with PIEDMONT FREIGHT stenciled on the back, waved Rollie down, and they talked through the window for a few minutes. I heard the words Chicago and deadhead and call you back, and then Rollie climbed down and came around to my side.

"Dispatch is finding me something," he said. "Could be an hour. You want breakfast?"

I wanted breakfast.

* * *

The diner across from the depot was called Marvella's, which seemed optimistic for a place with grease-fogged windows and a parking lot full of semis. Inside, it was warm and loud and smelled like bacon, which covered a number of sins. Rollie found a booth in the back and stood beside it until I slid in first, then he slid in next to me. A waitress appeared with coffee before I'd finished unwinding my scarf.

The coffee was better than the Silver Springs Motel diner. I was developing opinions about truck stop coffee; this was at least grade three, maybe grade two.

We ordered. Rollie got eggs and sausage and a stack of pancakes that arrived looking like serious intentions. I got the same thing because I was hungry in a way that still surprised me — Guy Wendell had eaten like a man who regarded food as fuel; Gwen Telford, it turned out, regarded it as one of the better arguments for being alive.

I was working through the pancakes when the man appeared at the end of the table.

He was maybe thirty, broad through the shoulders, with a good-natured face and the kind of confidence that comes from being found handsome often enough to expect it. He was looking at me the way men had been looking at me since the Waffle Barn, which I was getting better at receiving without doing something foolish with my face.

"Rollie Blankenship," he said. "You are the last man I expected to see in Charlotte."

"Jonah." Rollie looked up from his pancakes with the particular neutral expression I was coming to understand meant he was paying close attention. "Delivering to Piedmont."

"I work there now." Jonah's eyes moved to me with the transparent casualness of a man pretending the move was incidental. "You going to introduce me to your—" He left a pause where a word should have been.

"This is Gwen," Rollie said.

Jonah smiled. It was a good smile, practiced but not entirely dishonest. "Gwen." He said it like he was deciding whether he liked the taste of it. "You mind if I—" He gestured at the booth.

I looked at Rollie. Rollie looked at his pancakes.

Jonah slid into the booth across from Rollie but he hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

The thing I understood, watching him, was that I had a choice. Guy Wendell would have registered Jonah as background noise, a man talking to another man across a table. But I was sitting in a diner in Charlotte, North Carolina, wearing a denim skirt Rollie had picked out and boots that clicked on linoleum and a shirt tied under my boobs, and Jonah Fellman was looking at me with transparent appreciation, and somewhere in the new architecture of my nervous system a small pilot light had gone on.

Not for Jonah. I want to be clear about that. For the situation.

Jonah was funny, as it turned out. He'd worked for Piedmont three years, had opinions about the depot foreman's management style, knew Rollie from a run through Memphis two years back and brought it up with the ease of men who have a history of not quite being friends but respecting each other's competence. He talked to Rollie and looked at me. He talked to me and glanced at Rollie. He was reading the room the way a man reads a room when he suspects there's a room to read.

"So where you from, Gwen?" he asked.

"Springfield," I said. "Originally. Kansas City most recently."

"Kansas City." He nodded like this confirmed something. "You working, or—"

"Traveling," I said.

He smiled. "With Rollie."

"With Rollie," I agreed.

Jonah looked at Rollie. Rollie ate a piece of sausage.

And here is where I did the thing I should not have done, which was: I let Jonah catch my eye for just a half-second longer than necessary, and I did not quite smile, and I looked back at my coffee.

It was nothing. It was absolutely nothing. It was the smallest possible motion, the social equivalent of a pebble dropped in still water.

I felt Rollie go still beside me the way a room goes still before a change in weather.

Jonah felt it too. He was a man who had navigated enough of these situations to understand, immediately, that he had just seen a line he hadn't known was there. He leaned back slightly. Recalibrated.

"Well," he said, with the particular cheerfulness of a man making a graceful exit, "I got to get back before Herschel loses his mind. Rollie." He stood. "Gwen — real pleasure."

He was gone before Rollie looked up from his plate.

Rollie looked up from his plate.

I applied myself to my coffee.

"Gwen," he said.

"Mm," I said.

"What was that."

It was not a question. I understood it was not a question.

"Nothing," I said. "He was just—"

"I know what he was just." Rollie set his fork down with the quiet deliberateness of a man setting something down so he doesn't do something else with his hands. "And I know what you just."

I looked at him. He looked at me. The diner went on around us, indifferent.

The thing I could see, if I looked carefully, was that he wasn't angry. Or not only angry. Or something I didn’t quite have a word for. Hot? He was heated, hot. There was something else in the faded blue eyes — something that had registered the situation and found it, on some level that he wasn't going to acknowledge over pancakes in Marvella's, not entirely unwelcome.

He knew I'd done it on purpose. He knew I knew he knew. We were having a whole conversation without moving our mouths.

"Finish your coffee," he said, and picked his fork back up.

* * *

The payphone was on the wall outside the depot office, and Rollie made the call while I stood in the watery January sun and watched a man on a forklift argue with a pallet of something that didn't want to be moved. The conversation was short. I heard Rollie say Winston-Salem and yeah and what time and then he hung up and came back with the particular set to his shoulders of a man who has work to do and is satisfied about it.

"Cigarettes," he said. "Long trailer out of Winston-Salem, bound for Chicago. We deadhead there, pick up at seven tomorrow morning."

Chicago.

The word landed in my sternum and sat there.

I knew, in a general sense, that trucks went to Chicago. Chicago was where things went. It was the center of a certain kind of American gravity, the place the roads bent toward. I had simply not, until this moment, thought about what Chicago meant in terms of coordinates — in terms of how far Rockford, Illinois was from the city limits, in terms of Walt Niederhauser's office on State Street, in terms of an apartment on Elm with my clothes in the closet and eleven years of a life stacked neatly in drawers.

Ninety minutes. Chicago to Rockford. On a good road, less.

Rollie was watching me.

"Chicago," I said.

"You got people there?"

The question was careful. Not casual — Rollie didn't do casual when he meant something — but measured, the way you hand someone something fragile.

"Not anymore," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded, the way he nodded when he'd heard what he needed to hear and wasn't going to ask for more than that. I had come to love that nod. I wriggled a bit in appreciation of that knowledge and I saw Rollie’s eyes widen in appreciation of my wriggle.

He glanced at the sun. "We’ve got time before we head out," he said. "Nice place for dinner, not a diner. You can wear the good boots."

I followed him back to the truck, both of us pleased about something we hadn’t named.

* * *

The heels were ivory with a low block heel, nothing dramatic, but on the asphalt of the parking lot they were dramatic enough. I took Rollie's arm without being asked and he didn't say anything about it, just slowed his stride to match mine while I figured out what my feet were supposed to do. Click-cclack, click-clack. By the time we reached the door I almost had the rhythm and the sway just right..

The steakhouse was the kind of place that had menus with tassels and a bar that looked like it had been there since 1965 and intended to stay put. The hostess led us to a booth in a corner, leather seats, a candle in a little glass globe, and I slid in across from Rollie and spread the cloth napkin in my lap like I'd been doing it all my life. The waiter arrived, middle-aged, unhurried, and looked at me first. What can I get you to drink, ma'am?

Ma'am.

I ordered sweet tea and didn't let myself make a face about it.

Rollie got the ribeye. I got the petite sirloin, medium, because that was what I said when he asked how I liked it and it turned out to be true. We didn't talk a lot. Rollie was a man who ate like eating was its own conversation, and I found I didn't mind the quiet. I had the candle to look at. I had the heels under the table, crossed at the ankle the way I'd seen women do. I had the slow understanding that no one in this room was looking at me sideways, not the hostess, not the waiter, not the couple two booths over. Whatever I was, I was passing through the world as a woman having dinner with her man, and the world had no objections.

Rollie paid cash and left a good tip.

I walked back to the truck full of good sirloin and the clatter of the heels followed me, sounding natural now. Rollie picked me up and put me in the cab and I slid over to my side while he climbed in behind me. Just like in the diner booth earlier. I smiled at him as he adjusted things and made a note in his logbook, then we were on the road again. I took off the heels and put them away and snuggled up close to Rollie. If he need to shift, he could move me.

"You sleepy?" he asked. "It’s about ninety minutes to Winston. I’ve got to log my ten hours when we get there — we’ll still be ready by seven."

“You’re the boss,” I said with a giggle. “I just work here.”

He smiled at me as he got the truck into gear. “Work?” he said. “Is that the word for it?”

“Well, it has four letters,” I said.

* * *

He waited until we were on the highway before he said anything. I'd been watching North Carolina through the passenger window — red clay and pine trees and a sky that couldn't decide what color it wanted to be — and I was thinking about Chicago and not thinking about Walt and doing those two things simultaneously with the practiced skill of a woman who had been doing it since Charlotte.

"You want to tell me what that was back there," Rollie said.

I was sitting sideways in the seat, knees under me, in a pose that would have left Guy Wendell wracked with pain for days. Not right up against Rollie in case he needed to shift but easily within arm reach. My new favorite place to be.

I showed the tipoff my tongue, like I was thinking of what to say. "I told you, it was—"

"Gwen."

Something in his voice changed register. Not louder. Lower.

I stopped. A thrill traveled down my spine toward a place between my knees.

"You pushed my buttons," he said. "On purpose. With Jonah Fellman, who I have known for two years and who is not a bad man but who would have gotten the wrong idea if I'd let it go another thirty seconds."

I considered arguing. I considered explaining. I considered pointing out, accurately, that nothing had actually happened. I showed the tip of my tongue again.

"Yes," I said.

Rollie drove.

"Why," he said.

This was the harder question. The honest answer was: because I could. Because I had discovered in the last four days that I had a capacity to make men look at me that I had never had before and I wanted to test its range. Because I wanted to see what would happen when Rollie noticed, and I wanted what happened to be exactly what happened, and I was self-aware enough to know all of this and still have done it anyway.

"I wanted to see," I said.

"See what."

"What you'd do."

Another mile of pine trees.

"And?" he said.

"And—" I looked at my hands in my lap. "I liked what you did."

Rollie was quiet for long enough that I started to wonder if I'd miscalculated something. Then his hand left the gearshift and came down on my knee, not gently, and stayed there.

"When we stop for fuel," he said, "you're going to climb in the back."

The heat went through me so fast it was almost useful information.

"And?" I said, because apparently I had learned nothing.

"And I'm going to make a point," he said, "about what happens when you poke at things to see if they bite."

I looked out the window at the pines.

"Okay," I said. And that little shivering thrill made another journey to an inner place.

* * *

The point he made was not, precisely, unpleasant.

This is all I am going to say about that, except: there was a moment, somewhere in the middle of it, when I understood with complete clarity why those seven paperbacks were in the storage compartment. Rollie Blankenship had curated that collection the way a man curates evidence of a preference he hasn't had occasion to act on in some time. The women in those books found something clarifying in exactly this kind of correction. I had read that and understood it intellectually.

The intellectual understanding turned out to be insufficient preparation.

We came back out of the sleeper and Rollie got the truck back on the highway and I sat in the passenger seat with a warmth in my face that had nothing to do with the heater but matched the warmth in another part of my anatomy.

Winston-Salem came up ahead of us in the dark, a scatter of lights above the treeline, and Rollie followed the signs until he found what he was looking for.

He found a legal place to park the bobtail, not in the restaurant parking lot. We didn’t have a trailer attached, so you could actually see something out the little back window in the sleeping berth. I crawled in first, got naked, then Rollie crawled in, taking up almost all the remaining space. He handed me one of the books. Captive Bride.

“Read to me, till one of us falls asleep. I got the ‘larm set for 5 a.m.”

It was tight, holding the book above my face while I read until the words swam, until the woman on the page and the woman reading were the same kind of lost, and somewhere in the dark middle of a sentence I was asleep with the book on my chest and Rollie's breathing slow and even beside me. When I surfaced again the sleeper was pearl-gray and my mouth tasted like sleep and the clock on the dash said five-forty. I lay still for another minute, listening to the truck lot coming alive outside, then reached over and put my hand on Rollie's shoulder.

“Five o'clock,” I said. “Your pickup.” The alarm in the cab rang at the same time. I’d expected it, but it still startled me. How had I woken up just before it rang?

We stopped at a Truckadero on the way out of town to use bathrooms, collect Danish and coffee, and were back on the road in less than fifteen. I had a blanket pulled over me.

After a few miles Rollie reached behind the seat without looking and came up with Captive Bride, which I had gotten halfway through the night before.

He handed it to me open to a page near the middle.

I read the page. I read it again.

"Read it out loud," he said.

My voice, when it came out, was even warmer than usual. The bourbon had gone to something nearer whiskey.

I read two pages. Then I read two more. Rollie drove with his hand on my knee and his jaw set in the particular way it got when he was concentrating on something that wasn't the road, and the heater hummed, and outside the window North Carolina went about its business completely unaware of what was happening in the cab of a Kenworth.

I stopped at the end of a chapter.

"Keep going," Rollie said.

"We have to pick up a trailer," I said.

He made a sound that was not quite a word.

"In Winston-Salem," I said. "Seven AM. You told the man seven AM."

Rollie drove for another mile.

"Bookmark it," he said.

I found a matchbook in the ashtray and put it between the pages and closed the cover. Rollie's hand moved from my knee and went back to the gearshift, and I sat in the passenger seat with the closed book in my lap and thought about the part I just read where Burton spanked Ellie Sue for flirting with the best man. And she’d liked it.

I might not have believed that sequence a few days ago, but now I knew different. Could it happen? I knew that it could.

* * *

We stopped for fuel outside of Lexington and I sat in the cab while Rollie dealt with the pump, and the payphone on the wall of the service station looked at me and I looked back at it.

Walt Niederhauser's number was MOhawk 4-2280. I had dialed it so many times that the sequence lived in my fingers the way songs live in your fingers, without having to go through your brain at all. I could have dialed it in the dark.

I thought about what I would say.

Hello Walt, this is — no.

Walt, I need to tell you about Guy Wendell — no.

The Army Corps meeting, Walt, the reason nobody showed up — no.

The bourbon voice would come out of the receiver and Walt Niederhauser, who was not a stupid man, would hear a woman he'd never spoken to telling him things that only Guy Wendell could know, and he would listen, and then he would ask questions I couldn't answer in any way that would leave the situation better than I found it. He'd call the police. He'd call the motel. He'd find the Buick in the lot with the keys still above the visor and the rental agreement in the glove box and no Guy Wendell anywhere.

And then what. Then what for Walt, who was worried before he was angry and would be both now. Then what for the Army Corps, who had a contract to sign. Then what for the woman in the truck whose name was Gwen Telford from Springfield, Illinois, who had a Florida ID card that said she was twenty-three and had never heard of any earthmover salesman from Rockford.

The payphone looked at me.

I looked at my hands.

I thought about Marcos. He was six. He had a way of running toward you with his arms already out, committed to the hug from ten feet away, all-in before he arrived. I thought about Elena, who was eight and precise about things, who at Christmas had explained to me at length and with evidence why Santa Claus was logistically impossible, and then said she still wanted to leave cookies out just in case. I thought about the way Laneka had looked at me the morning she left, standing in the doorway with two suitcases and the specific expression of a woman who has made a decision she should have made two years earlier. I thought about an island I had never seen, palms and a particular blue I was imagining, a surf I couldn't hear.

Marcos would be running toward someone else now. Arms out from ten feet. All-in.

I sat with that for a while. The service station hummed and a truck pulled in behind us and somewhere in the distance a train said something long and flat about the distance between places.

Guy Wendell showing up on Ilhaina — even if such a thing were possible, even if Laneka could be made to understand something that couldn't be understood, even if the children could be told something that wouldn't damage them in ways I couldn't predict — Guy Wendell wasn't there anymore. And Gwen Telford was a stranger with a Florida ID and a bourbon voice who had no claim on anyone.

To go back would be to ask two children to lose their father twice.

Let Guy be dead. Let him be a man who walked into the Everglades in his good suit and didn't come back. It happened. Men disappeared. The Buick in the motel lot would be found; the rental company would sort it out; Walt would eventually stop calling and file the paperwork and hire someone else. Marcos would grow up. Elena would keep leaving cookies just in case.

I would be, for the rest of whatever I was now, a woman who had loved two children she could not go back to. That was the thing the spring had taken that it couldn't give back. I put it somewhere careful and closed the door.

The truck door opened and Rollie climbed in, smelling like diesel and cold air.

"Ready?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

He looked at me for a moment the way he sometimes looked at me, reading something in my face that he hadn't been told. He didn't ask. He just put his hand on the back of my head for a moment, warm and steady, and then started the truck.

* * *

The trailer in Winston-Salem was fifty-three feet of Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls and Camels, stacked in brown cardboard cases to the ceiling and smelling, even through the walls, like a decision you'd regret in thirty years. The yard manager had us backed in and loaded and the paperwork signed by half past six, and Rollie walked the truck and trailer while I stood in the cold Carolina morning with my hands in my jacket pockets and watched the sky go from black to gray to a thin winter pink over the warehouses.

Rollie came back around from checking the rear lights and stopped next to me.

"Chicago by tomorrow night," he said. "Day after at the latest."

Chicago. Two days.

"Is there a decent place to stay in Chicago?" I asked. "While you unload."

He looked at me sideways. The question had a second question inside it and we both knew it.

"There's a place I know on the North Side," he said. "Takes truckers. Clean."

"North Side," I said.

"That work for you?"

A careful question, from a careful man.

I thought about the North Side of Chicago, which was not Rockford, which was not State Street, which was not MOhawk 4-2280. The North Side of Chicago was somewhere Gwen Telford had never been.

"That works for me," I said.

Rollie nodded. He walked around to the driver's side. I walked around to mine, and the boots clicked on the blacktop, and I pulled myself up into the cab with the ease of someone who had been doing it her whole life — which was four days, which was all the life I had — and Gypsy smelled like diesel and distance and the particular warmth of a thing I was already calling home.

Rollie looked over at me.

"You got the book?" he said.

I held it up.

He smiled, the real one, the one that went all the way to the faded blue eyes.

Then he put her in gear, and we went north.

Chapter Eight

The delivery took most of the morning — a warehouse on the South Side with a loading dock that smelled like cigarettes even before you opened the door, men with clipboards and opinions about count. I waited in the cab while Rollie dealt with it and watched Chicago arrive outside the windshield, which was not the same as being in it. The city didn't care about the truck. The truck didn't care about the city. I was somewhere in between. Waiting in the cab sometimes was my job now, and I liked it.

By noon, Rollie had the paperwork signed, and Gypsy unloaded, and we were bobtain again, and back on the North Side, at a place he knew on Halsted that took truckers and kept clean sheets and didn't ask questions. The room had a window that looked at a brick wall and a radiator that knocked like it had a encyclopedias to sell. I liked it.

He laid four fifties on the dresser.

"Sears is six blocks," he said. "Spend it."

I looked at the money. "All of it?"

"Every dollar." He picked up his cap from the bedpost. "I've got to go see a man about a load back south. You'll be all right?"

I had been all right in a Florida spring, in a gas station bathroom, in a diner in Charlotte with Jonah Fellman looking at me. I thought I could manage six blocks.

"I'll be all right," I said.

* * *

The Sears on State Street was familiar in the way of all Sears stores — the same smell, the same particular light, the same sense that anything you needed could be found here if you were willing to look for it. I had bought my first skirt in a Sears. It felt right to come back.

I spent the first fifteen minutes just walking the women's floor, which was something Guy Wendell would not have done. He would have found what he came for and left. Gwen Telford browsed. She ran her hand along a rack of blouses and stopped when something stopped her. She held things up against herself in the mirror and put them back and picked them up again. She was learning what she liked, which turned out to be different from what she thought she'd like, which turned out to be bright and fitted and not sorry about itself.

Rollie liked me visible. I had figured out what that meant in practice — color, fit, the particular kind of confidence that says I know what I look like and I have decided it must be your problem, ‘cause it sure ain’t mine. I found a blouse in a deep coral that did things for my coloring that made me stand in front of the mirror longer than was strictly necessary.

I was reaching for a second one in green when I heard them.

Two women, late thirties or early forties, sensible haircuts, the particular look of women who have worked in the same office long enough to finish each other's sentences. They came around the end of the rack and stopped at the clearance section three feet away, and I heard the one with the dark bob say, "—still can't believe it, he was just there, you know, he was just at the Rockford meeting in November—"

I went still.

"Walt's taking it hard," the other one said. "You know how Walt is."

"They found his rental car at the motel. His suit was in the room. His briefcase." A pause, the sound of a hanger sliding on a rack. "Nobody just leaves their briefcase."

"Unless they're not planning to come back," the dark bob said, quietly.

I was holding the green blouse and seeing nothing in front of me.

Guy Wendell, who had not been planning to come back. Whose briefcase was in a motel room in Silver Springs, Florida. Whose suit. Whose rental car with the keys above the visor because he always did that and no one had ever told him it was a bad idea.

Walt was taking it hard.

I thought about Walt. His handshake, which was firm in the way of men who had decided a long time ago that a good handshake was worth having. The jar of lemon drops on his desk for anyone who came in. Eleven years of Monday morning meetings and the particular way he said Guy when he meant I need you to handle something difficult.

I felt something move up through my chest toward my throat and I breathed through it, slowly, the way you breathe through something you are not going to do in the Sears on State Street in front of strangers.

Guy Wendell was dead. Walt would grieve and then hire someone else. The briefcase would go to a storage facility and eventually to a landfill. The Buick would be returned to the rental agency and cleaned and rented to someone else. The apartment on Elm in Rockford — the lease was up in March.

Let Guy be dead. I had thought that before. Now I understood it differently. Not as a decision but as a fact. He was already gone. I was just the last one to know.

"—did you see, by the way—" the dark bob said, and her voice changed register, lightened, the way voices do when they're done with the hard thing and ready for something easier. "Coming through accessories, that woman with the denim skirt."

I reached for a pair of slacks without looking at them.

"Oh my God," the other one said. "The skirt."

"The skirt. And that top—" A brief, delighted pause. "Honey."

"Some men like that, I guess."

"Some men do." And I could hear the smile in it, not cruel exactly, but comfortable in the way of women who have decided what they are and are satisfied with the contrast. "She looked like she was trying to fall out of it."

I stood very still for a moment.

Then I put the green blouse over my arm with the coral one, and thought about the top I was wearing, which tied under my boobs because Rollie had picked it out in Charlotte and I had put it on this morning without hesitating. It was a man’s shirt tied under my boobs because Rollie liked the way I looked and liked to see other men looking at his woman.

The thing was — I was aware there was a version of this moment where I felt ashamed or small or caught out — but the thing was, I didn’t feel that way at all.

I was not trying to fall out of my top. I knew exactly where I was. I had Rollie's two hundred dollars in my purse and I was buying bright things for myself in a Chicago Sears, and those women had looked at me and seen a tart and a truck driver's girl, and they were not wrong exactly, they just didn't know that I had chosen this. That my man liked me visible and I had decided I liked being seen. That I had stood in the mirror twenty minutes ago and looked at myself and not looked away.

The giggle came up without warning. I put my hand over my mouth.

One of them glanced over at the sound. I smiled at her pleasantly, the smile of a woman who has just thought of something privately funny. She looked back at the clearance rack.

I took my blouses and my slacks to the counter and nearly every dollar.

* * *

The walk back was six blocks of Chicago winter, which was a different animal from Florida cold — purposeful, with a manifesto. I had a bag in each hand and the heels clicked on the sidewalk and I thought about Walt's lemon drops and Marcos running with his arms already out and the briefcase in the motel room, and I let myself feel the weight of it all the way up Halsted, because it was there and it was real and it was mine to carry.

Halfway back to the hotel, I had it somewhere manageable.

In the middle of the last block, I saw the liquor store I’d passed on the way to Sears two hours ago. I had a little money left, and Rollie had said I was to spend it all, so I went inside.

I picked out a half-pint of good bourbon and put it on the counter. Neither Rollie nor I did much drinking, but sometimes it is good to have something to mark a celebration. The clerk looked at me but I waved him away for the moment, I wasn’t done.

I saw the six spinners of paperback books near the back. I went directly to the one farthest from the lights of the front of the store. There near the floor, they had the kind of books I was looking for. The titles said it all: The Wrong Stranger, The Bride Wore Red, Road to Lust. Master of Her Dreams. They would do.

The clerk looked bored when he added up the total, and I put in two nickel Hershey bars to spend every last cent. But he winked at me when he took my money.

Rollie was back before me, sitting on the edge of the bed with his boots off and a road atlas open across his knees. He looked up when I came in.

"Spend it all?" he said.

I set the bags down and showed him the empty billfold.

He smiled. The real one, all the way to the faded blue eyes.

"Good girl," he said, and went back to the atlas.

I hung the coral blouse next to the green one in the narrow closet and thought: yes.

That's all. That's exactly right. I’m Rollie’s girl and it’s good to be me.