Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“Oh, just an old guy.”

“It’s not you or anything? I mean, did you get the card under another name?”

“It’s not me. Only at the motel and like that.”

“Can’t you get in trouble using his card?”

“Later,” he said. The waitress was bringing their food. She sat in silence until the woman had set down the plates and cups of coffee and moved away. Then she said, “Can’t you—”

“Get in trouble? Not hardly.”

“But this Mr. Ferris, I mean the real Mr. Ferris—”

“Will the real Mr. Ferris please stand up?” He laughed shortly, easily. “Well, now, that’s the point, see. The real Mr. Ferris ain’t all that likely to stand up, because he was an old fellow, see, and he had an accident.”

“Oh.”

“What it amounts to, the real Mr. Ferris is dead. So there were his cards just going to waste, not doing him any good at all, and I thought, well, that I might have a use for them. See?”

“I guess so. It’s not legal, is it?”

“Using his cards? Not exactly.”

“Oh.”

“That bother you?”

“Just that I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Now that’s something for you not to worry about, girl. I’m not the sort to get into trouble.”

She smiled back at him, then turned her attention to the food. She had ordered the special country breakfast, eggs and country sausage and home fries and grits, plus a big glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. It was a big breakfast and she had the appetite to do it justice. She was not usually this hungry in the morning. She wondered if the lovemaking had had something to do with it. It seemed possible. Or perhaps her hunger was more attributable to the fact that she was eating breakfast hours later than she usually did. Or to the fact that she was sitting at a table with a person she loved and not two people she hated.

Did it bother her about the credit cards? She guessed that it didn’t. A man had died and Jimmie John had had the luck to make off with his wallet. Well, that wasn’t going to hurt anyone, as far as she could tell. The credit card company would just get stuck for whatever he bought with the cards, seeing as Mr. Ferris wasn’t alive to pay his bills. She knew that those companies were huge corporations, and a few dollars spread over everything they had wouldn’t amount to much.

Anyway, it wasn’t her place to be bothered or not to be bothered. He was the one using the cards, and he was the kind of person who knew what he was doing. And he cared about her, he really did. The way he’d reacted when he thought she thought he didn’t care about her! All the warmth going out of his eyes, all the cold steel coming into his voice. He cared about her, and not just for a couple of hours, not just for a night. He really wanted her.

“Back in a minute,” he said. She watched him walk to the rest rooms in back, then turned her attention to the food on her plate.

He had ordered only toast and coffee and had barely touched his toast. She raised this point when he returned.

“No appetite,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not much at eating on an empty stomach.”

“That’s why you get sick first thing in the morning. You don’t eat enough.”

“Oh, I get by.”

“It’s being alone so much and traveling all the time. You don’t eat the right foods. And eating in diners all the time, it’s not the same.”

“I guess I don’t pay much mind to what I eat.”

“I wish—”

“What?”

“That we were someplace where I could cook for you. Don’t laugh, but I’m a good cook. I don’t know how to cook that many things but when I make something for myself it always tastes better than my mother’s cooking. And if I had cookbooks I could make just about anything you might want. It’s just a question of following the directions.”

“If that’s all it is, you’d be surprised the number of people who can’t follow directions. Some of the places I’ve been. It’s the grease I can’t take.”

“You shouldn’t eat greasy food. It’s bad for you, and especially when you’ve got a sensitive stomach.”

“I don’t know as there’s anything wrong with my stomach, exactly.”

“Just that it’s sensitive.”

He smiled. “Well, one of these days you’ll cook me a meal or two,” he said, “and get my sensitive old stomach back in proper shape.”

“You’re just joking but I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

In the car she said, “I wonder what my parents are thinking right now. Be home at three thirty, blah blah blah, and then I didn’t come home at all.”

“I was thinking about that.”

“They probably think I’m at Carolyn’s house. And trying to get the phone number.”

“Who’s Carolyn?”

“Carolyn Fischer. She lives at Newgate Avenue near the viaduct and her father works at the B & C. The granary. And she has a little brother named Billie and her mother used to teach school before she got married. And some other things about her I don’t remember. I made up a whole lot of things about Carolyn Fischer. I even made up Carolyn Fischer. There is no Carolyn Fischer.”

Giggling, she told him how she had invented Carolyn as a way to avoid coming home from school. “And then she’ll say, ‘How come you always study at Carolyn’s and never bring Carolyn over here? Are you ashamed of where you live?’ And all the time I’m wanting to say, ‘Yes, I’m ashamed of where I live, and ashamed of you and ashamed of my father and ashamed of Granny,’ but instead I always keep a straight face and—”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “So they’ll probably try to call this Carolyn, and they won’t be able to, and then what? You see what I’m getting at?”

“No.”

“Next thing is they’ll call the police and report you missing.”

“They wouldn’t do that.”

“Sure they will.”

“They always say I’m going to run off like Judy. Well, that’s what I’m doing, aren’t I? So it shouldn’t be any big deal of a surprise to them.”

But he was shaking his head. “They won’t know you ran off, Betty. They’ll think maybe you were in an accident, or I don’t know what, and they’ll call the police. Then they file a missing persons’ report on you and your description goes out and everything. That means if you’re just having a cup of coffee somewhere and some smartass cop recognizes you from your description, we’re all in a lot of trouble.”

“How would we be in trouble?”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen in July. Why?”

“Fifteen years old. Jesus Christ.”

“How old did you think I was?”

“I don’t guess I thought much about it. But even if you were seventeen they could make you go back.”

“They couldn’t do that!”

“The hell they couldn’t.”

“I’d just run away again.”

“And they’d just bring you back again. Even put you in a home if they felt like it. Like a prison. And while they were at it they would lock me up for running off with you.”

She looked at him, eyes wide. “I never thought of that.”

“I should of thought of it myself before now. Let me think a minute. All right. What we’ve got to do is hope they didn’t call the cops already. They probably wouldn’t, not the first night. They might check the hospitals to make sure you weren’t in an accident but they wouldn’t likely go further than that. So what we do is find a telephone and you’re going to have to call them.”

“I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t—”

“Just listen to me. Is there a time they’ll both be home? A time when everybody will be home?”

“Around dinner time, probably. They’re usually both home every night.”