Part III

After leaving the house, we backtracked to the interstate and were a few miles down the road before Beth spoke. When she did, I could tell from her tone that she was annoyed.

“Well, that was quite an interlude,” she said.

I agreed that it was and started to say something about our host, but she smacked the dashboard with one hand and said in a too-loud voice, “And what about that Jamie? Something special, am I right?”

I nodded, pausing to see if she was going to keep talking or give me time to frame a response. She turned and looked at me. I could smell her hair, the honeyed scent of the shampoo she uses. “Yeah, Jamie is pretty interesting, that’s for sure.”

“Interesting! She seemed a little slow to me. Didn’t you pick up on that?”

“Well, yeah. But I think that’s because she is slow. I mean, there’s clearly something –there’s some kind of backstory there.”

“Mr. Greene didn’t mention anything like that.”

I glanced at her. She had the look on her face that she got when waitstaff at a restaurant dawdled. I shrugged. “He didn’t really have a chance to say much about anything…you know. Personal.”

Beth huffed out a sigh. “He had enough of a chance to hit you up for some free manual labor, didn’t he?”

I drove another three-tenths of a mile before I replied. “I don’t think he ‘hit me up’ so much as I volunteered.”

Another sigh. “Yeah, I noticed. Like we’re not busy enough. So now you’re committing to driving an hour all the way over here on your day off and helping him like an indentured servant.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said. “I’m glad to help him out, and it’s not like you haven’t volunteered me to help out with all kinds of things, things I’ve done for people who are not elderly and not saddled with some of the things –”

That’s when my wife punched me on the cheekbone. Hard.

An exit was just up ahead, and I took it. At the end of the ramp was an abandoned gas station/deli next to a dubious-looking motel. I yanked the wheel over to the right and stopped under the overhang, then killed the engine. “That’s the last time you’re going to hit me, Beth,” I said.

“And that’s the last time you’re going to speak to me like that,” she replied. Just then, her cellphone buzzed. She fished it out of her purse and looked at the screen. “Great.” Another sigh. She answered the call, and I started the car and made a big circle out of the parking lot, headed back to the interstate. We’d be home in twenty minutes. I had time to do some thinking while she talked to her sister. The white lines in the road raced at me like tracer rounds. Beth was giggling at something her sister was saying.

To be continued…

~ S.K. Orr