it,” she sighed before heading off in the direction of the cries, the blond toddler budding out of her side.
On their slow meander back to the car in late golden sunlight, through a park now mostly empty, Zach said, “She couldn’t have been much older than you.”
“Who?”
“The girl with the three kids.”
“A year younger, actually. Cloey Ingram—Cloey Danforth now.”
“You know her?”
“Know of her—this town’s not near big enough to hide a sixteen-year-old’s pregnancy, not if it goes to term.”
“So she married the father?”
“Yes—Arlan Danforth the Third, son of one of Greensboro’s oldest families.”
“That must’ve been quite a scandal.”
“For a few weeks, then everybody moved on to more current gossip.”
“And Cloey was left to raise the kid.”
“Like Sarah,” Becca said without looking up. She rarely spoke about her sister’s situation.
“After the storm comes the real challenge.”
“Enjoy life while you still have it.”
“Yeah, but what if enjoying life produces those obligations?”
Becca released his hand and said, “Race you to the car!” She started running toward the parking lot in the shadowed distance.
Zach yelled from where he stood, “What’s the winner get?”
“Anything she wants,” Becca shouted over her shoulder.
“And the loser?”
“Meeeee,” she said, the long e slowly fading into the afternoon stillness.
Zach broke into a sprint, almost but not quite catching his prize before she lunged to touch the car.
Later, much later, after Zach had picked up his wife and taken her to her new apartment and spent as long as it took to hear about her trip and family and wait for her to calm from another crying spell, after he’d returned to his own dark and cold apartment (he’d turned off the heat to save money, not thinking of how cold it would be once the sun had set) and taken a long hot shower in a futile attempt to wash away the chill and the loneliness, and put the sweatshirt from this afternoon back on because it still carried a faint scent of Becca, and climbed into bed and turned the light off and was almost asleep—he heard a faint tapping on the door.
At first he thought it was someone knocking at an adjacent apartment. But the tapping continued and he realized it came from his door. He rose and pulled on sweatpants over his nakedness beneath the sweatshirt and walked around through the dining nook and living room without turning on a light. There was no peephole and he wasn’t about to draw back the curtains from the living room window so he just opened the door.
Becca stood on the breezeway in her canvas field coat, her hands limp at her sides and a sheepish look on her face. But her eyes, barely visible in the dim glow of the streetlight off to the right, showed the crouched intensity of desperation, so far removed from their easy confidence this afternoon.
Without a word, Zach offered his hand and led her through the living room and dining nook and into his dark bedroom. There he slowly undressed her as she stood between the bed and his desk. She shivered as he removed her last sock. He pulled his sweatshirt off and slipped it on her raised arms and gently over her head and smoothed it to her thighs.
As she lay on her back in the inky blackness on his Spartan mattress of two sleeping bags unfurled on the carpet, Becca finally found relief from the weight of her life in the far lighter press of his body atop hers.
The End
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