The Last Refuge (6 page)

Amanda was sitting at a table in the corner, almost hidden behind the deli case. I must have felt her looking at me, because our eyes met the moment I saw her.

“Hey. How’re you doing?”

“Okay,” she said, looking at my coffee. “Taking out or staying?”

I sat down at the table. She looked like somebody had tightened her all up. Her face was drawn back and her hands were clasped together in a white grip. Only her posture seemed at ease as she leaned in closer to speak.

“I feel so bad about the way I’m behaving. I really wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

“For what? How’re you supposed to behave?”

“I don’t know. That’s not really what I mean.”

“We’re just having a cup of coffee. That was the deal, I think.”

She dropped one shoulder as she leaned in a little closer. I could smell her hair.

“I don’t usually do anything on my own without telling Roy what I’m doing. I mean, I don’t have to ask permission. I just usually tell him if I’m doing something with somebody. But I thought I might catch you here. I see you come in and out of here all the time. It’d be like … coincidence.”

She looked up at me and smiled a tight little smile.

I wanted to get her off whatever subject we were on, even if I didn’t know exactly what that subject was.

“I guess Joe Sullivan tracked down Regina’s nephew, Jimmy Maddox. You know Joe Sullivan? He’s a Town cop.”

“I don’t know him. Roy probably does.”

“He’s a local.”

“Then Roy must.”

“You guys must have met here, as kids, huh?”

“Oh, yes. Roy’s always been here.”

It was her turn to whisk me off the subject. She pointed out at the street.

“I ran over here when I saw you pull in. That big car must be quite the collectible.”

I snorted, the closest thing I had to a laugh.

“Collects problems. It’s a big dumb thing.”

“But you drive it. It must be more fun than your regular car.”

“No, that’s my regular car.”

“My.”

“It belonged to my father. Who was also poorly designed and out of place on Main Street.”

The look on her face told me she regretted picking this tack, as innocent as it looked at first. I tried to recoup for her.

“Is your father still around?” I asked her.

“No. He died when I was little. I never knew him.”

Man, I’ve got a real skill with casual conversation. An instinct for scratching at nerves, picking off scabs.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. People die. Our parents die. Even my mother, who never had a sick day in her life.”

I pursed my lips and tried to look understanding, afraid I was going to stick my foot in it again. She helped me out.

“Roy and I went over there when we hadn’t heard from her and couldn’t reach her. She’d been ironing her little doll outfits. She made her own dolls. She was very talented. It was horrible.”

She looked me in the eye when she said that and took a sip of her coffee. It wasn’t as if she was trying to test my reaction. She just looked at me. Her hands rotated the coffee cup, occasionally stopping it to draw imaginary lines down the sides with her fingernails. They were strong, thin fingers, with perfect long nails.

“Sorry. We shouldn’t talk about all these sad things. It’s just, you know, she was in pretty good health, and to just have that happen. And when you told me about Regina, something made me think about my mother. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“So what was it, a heart attack?” I asked, sensitive to the last.

She shook her head, her face down again.

“That’s what they thought. I don’t know. Roy looked after all that. I couldn’t really deal with it.”

“Roy must be a good looker-after.”

“Too good,” she said, then regretted it. She smiled brightly and switched gears.

“What are you doing in town today? I know it’s not bank day.”

“Just chores.”

“I can see everything from my window. I saw you go into the hardware store. I thought you’d come in here next. You usually do after you stop at the bank. I think it’s funny. I ambushed you.”

“I’m glad.”

She looked pleased. “I wanted to honor our bargain.”

“You did.”

She snuck a look out the picture window as she sipped her coffee.

“Something’s buggy,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I used to work on big complex systems for a living. Too complex for anyone to ever really understand. Even us engineers. So a lot of the time you just ran on instinct. I don’t know. Sometimes things just felt buggy.”

I drank a little more coffee and tried to keep my mouth shut, but it was hard with this woman. I wanted to talk to her.

“Maybe you just think too much,” she said.

“No, I do everything I possibly can to avoid thinking about anything at all.”

“You said it’s a feeling. So maybe you feel too much.”

“I’ve already had a lifetime of feeling. My allotment’s used up.”

Amanda sat back in her chair, looking into the paper coffee cup she was now crumpling with two hands.

“I understand. I shouldn’t be bothering you.”

“You’re not bothering me. I’m bothering myself. You’re just being nice. I’m not worth it. Not at all.”

She dug a thumbnail into the side of the cup.

“I understand. Really. I do. More than you think.”

Then she got up and left. I watched her delicately navigate the crowded little coffee shop. Nice going, Sam, I told myself. Fucking brilliant.

She got hung up in the chaotic line in front of the pastry counter. I saw an opening form along the window and took it, so by the time she reached the door I was already there, without having to climb over tables or trample baby carriages.

I caught her by the elbow. She swiveled her head around and stared at me.

“You don’t know this because I’ve been coming into the bank every month to do my stuff in person, because that’s a habit of mine. And somehow you got stuck with me. So it gave you the idea that I’m a normal sociable person, which I’m not. You’re actually about the only person I’ve said anything to for almost four years. You and Regina.”

“And here I am boring you about my mother.”

“I’m sure she’d have been pleased to know she had a daughter who thought about her,” I said, scrambling for something to say. “I bet the two of you had a lot in common.”

Some people were trying to squeeze past us to get out the door. Amanda held her ground.

“My mother was a very brave woman,” she said, “not like me.”

As the morning aged, the light out on Main Street had hardened up. But Amanda’s skin still looked like it’d been airbrushed on and her auburn hair sparkled with tiny little fireworks. It caught me by surprise and distracted me from coming up with something else to say, so she slipped away and walked back to the bank without looking back. A familiar sight. A beautiful woman in full retreat.

I was overconfident when I set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. Sleep clogged my veins and packed gauze in my eyes. The cigarettes had left their usual rat’s ass taste in my mouth. My stomach was skittery, unsure how to play the day.

When I left my wife, she predicted I’d last five years on my own. One to go.

That was around the same time the psychiatrist threw me out of his office. He said there was nothing he could do for me. Actually, he said he didn’t
want
to do anything for me, which I guess in retrospect was a breach of ethics. Not that I cared. I hated the self-important little prig. All he wanted was to get me off vodka and on to antidepressants. This was supposed to prepare me for psychoanalysis, so I could dig out deep-rooted causes.

The therapy was part of a deal I had to make with
the Stamford district attorney. She hoped it would cover her decision not to prosecute me for a series of things, including gutting my wife’s house. Me and a pair of hard cases from the gym had packed all our furniture and household goods in a big semi, tore out the woodwork, ripped up the floors and stripped the walls. We filled up a few dumpsters, then trucked the semi down to one of those mountainous landfills in the Jersey Meadowlands where we buried all my wife’s treasured belongings under a hundred tons of Manhattan garbage.

We left the studs and rough plumbing and all the equipment in the basement. Plus a note on the plywood substrate floor, in what used to be the kitchen, telling her I’d cover full replacement costs.

I’d already given up my share of the house and three-quarters of my money. I still had a little left to live on, after I paid off whatever my wife’s insurance wouldn’t cover. I’m not proud of it, I just did it. I still don’t know exactly why, but it can’t be for any good reason.

I did, however, like that DA. My wife and her lawyers had a hard time getting her to muster the appropriate prosecutorial outrage. It helped that she’d been putting in twelve-hour days and weekends during the two weeks my wife had been out on the slopes. We talked about overwork and lost time and sacrifice. Her husband had spent most of their married life finding himself. She’d supported him while he earned a pair of master’s degrees and a Ph.D. He’d complain she was too stressed out. That she’d forgotten how to have fun. I just smirked at her and she looked down at her tired hands and said, “Right.”

So I copped the shrink deal and spent three months sparring with this little jerk who couldn’t look at a urinal without analyzing the psychosexual impulses underlying the urge to take a piss.

I never understood any of it. It bothered me that people considered lightheartedness and optimism the norm. I wondered how anyone could be more than half awake and not be at least a little bummed by the desperate hopelessness of human existence.

Mornings like this were especially hard. I was so tired and sick to my stomach. It didn’t help that I’d risen to this a million times before. The pain was cinched up tight around my heart.

After making up a pot of coffee, I put on a T-shirt and shorts and went out for a run. I usually saved this kind of thing for the gym, but I was afraid the big black dog was going to chomp down hard if I didn’t get my cardiovascular fired up.

A study someone did in the eighties concluded the better grip you had on reality, the more likely you were to be depressed, and vice versa. Science has confirmed that ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

My jogging route took me along sandy unpaved roads threaded through the tall oaks and scrub pines tucked up to the bay shore. Every fifty to a hundred feet was a driveway to a house built on the coast. Other houses were stuck in the woods or perched on pressure-treated pilings above swampy bogs that were grandfathered out of the Wetlands Act.

Twenty minutes into the run I started to feel better. Too distracted by the effort of running to bother with anxiety. By that time I was passing the gate to WB
Manufacturing, the abandoned plant built on the peninsula immediately to the east of Oak Point. There was a new cyclone fence and gate securing the entrance, but otherwise it looked like it had forever— all concrete, red brick and rust.

When my father was building his house most of our neighbors worked at the plant. Even then, jobs at WB were considered tenuous at best. Manufacturing never really took hold out here, which helped save the East End for all the potato farmers and tennis courts. My father put in a little time there himself, but I think they fired him. If it was like any of his other jobs he’d gotten into a scrape with somebody, or spouted off about something too loudly, or too often. That was why he could only really work for himself. Today you’d say he was a little light on the interpersonal skills.

That’s probably what killed him. They never caught the guys who did it, assuming they even tried. Probably a pair of punks stopping off for a quick drink. He’d probably provoked them. The wrong look, the wrong word, a gesture, a snort—that’s all you needed to do. Took about five minutes. They left him in the can, already dead as you can get before the door slammed shut on their way out.

I felt better when I got back from the run. Good enough to take a shower, shave, get dressed and take off in the Grand Prix. Good enough to give it another day.