David Wiltse - Bone Deep

"Would you rather take two cars?" he asked, simultaneously holding open the passenger door of his car for her. "If you'd feel more comfortable that way." Denise was amazed at his consideration. It seemed that everything he did was right and she knew that he was as uncomfortable about the awkwardness of this first meeting as she was. She felt uneasy around men who were too smooth, too sure of themselves. His diffidence was charming. She didn't know what to say so she simply slid into the front seat of his car.

Luv did nothing that night but talk to her. They discussed their children and their lives for close to two hours, sipping coffee and lingering, reluctant to leave each other.

Finally Luv glanced at his watch and said, "I didn't realize it was so late. I told the baby-sitter I'd be back in an hour and a half. I've got to get back to the kids." Denise guiltily realized that she hadn't given a moment's thought to her own teenaged daughter waiting at home for her.

After the first hour he had taken her hand in his and said, "I have a confession to make. I didn't tell you this right away because I know how it's going to sound and I had to be sure you'd understand. It's…

It's weird."

She looked at him expectantly. It was hard to imagine anything about him that wasn't good.

"I told you my wife is gone but that isn't really true," he said. "We're divorced, but she still lives with me and the kids. She's emotionally unstable, it's a chemical imbalance, the doctors say, and she's on medication, but-the thing is, she can't live on her own. She's not really crazy, I mean I don't think she'd ever hurt anybody-do you understand at all what I'm saying?"

Denise nodded but in fact she understood none of it. His explanation whirred past her ears.

"If we turned her out of the house-well-this is hard for me to say, this is the mother of my kids-but hell, she'd be a bag lady inside of a month. She can't function without the medicine, she won't take the medicine unless someone is there to supervise, she can't afford to hire anyone-and the kids love her. I want them to love her, she's their mother." He sighed heavily. "I just don't know what else to do. It would be like killing her, in a way, if I told her to go away. She wouldn't understand it either. She gets confused, she doesn't really understand what has happened to her, she thinks-She just doesn't live in reality." He put his face in his hands. "It's so exhausting," he said.

Denise touched the back of his hand with her finger.

"It drains me," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "She's a weight, a millstone-but what else can I do?"

He removed his hands from his face, looked Denise in the eye, pleading for compassion. "What else can I do?" he asked again.

"Nothing," she said, thinking he was the best man she had ever known.

"You must help her."

When they had finished in the diner at last, he drove her directly to her car and waited beside her as she unlocked it.

"This was wonderful," Luv said. "It felt really good talking to you."

He had gotten past his shyness in the diner and now he looked at her all the while as he talked to her, smiling directly into her eyes.

"Yes," said Denise, feeling her own shyness returning now that he stood next to her without the restaurant's table between them. There seemed to be such a power to his physical presence now. "I felt the same way."

She wondered if he might try to kiss her and she decided she would let him if he did, but after a brief pause in which he seemed to be struggling with himself, he offered his hand instead.

"Good night," he said. He spoke the words as if they were a caress in themselves. His flesh was warm and soft and Denise felt that she should have removed her own hand sooner, but she did not want to. He broke away at last and returned to his car. When she was behind the wheel and her engine was on, he waved and drove away. Denise watched him go with such a tumult of emotions that she did not know exactly what she felt, except that it was all good. Even the disappointment that he had not kissed her was good. It was too early to do so and she was glad that he had realized it, even if she had not. Besides, she did not need his kiss to know that he liked her. It was obvious in the way he looked at her, in the way he showed her respect. Denise knew she would see him again, even if he did not yet know it himself. She would see to it.

As she drove home, she realized that she knew him only as Lyle, she had no idea what his last name was. But then she knew very little about him really. He had not talked about his job, he had not talked about himself much at all, except to tell her how he felt about his children-and his wife. Ex-wife. She realized belatedly and with some surprise that most of the conversation had been about herself. She had spoken with uncharacteristic candor and bitterness about her ex-husband, a thing she almost never did in the presence of a man although she was quick enough to detail Larry's shortcomings with her girlfriends. She had told Lyle things that astounded her in retrospect. It had been like talking to a therapist, he had been so encouraging, so interested. The two hours had flown like five minutes-it did not bother her at all that she didn't know his last name, she told herself.

She was so absorbed in replaying the conversation in the diner that she never noticed the headlights in her mirror that followed her all the way home and pulled to the side of the road when she turned into her driveway. She did not see the man she knew as Lyle watching her go into her house.

Luv whistled softly as he noted the pattern of lights going on and off in Denise's house. Her bedroom was on the second story, her daughter's room just across a hallway. That made the use of her house unlikely. Not impossible, surely, for he liked a challenge, but not probable. Which meant another motel. Not the same one as with Inge, not so soon, but there were others, many others. There was a drop of several feet into a flower bed from her window, but since she was not married there was no need for an emergency escape route. Still, it was always good to be prepared. It was one thing to take risks, quite another to work in unnecessary ignorance. The one was exciting, the other stupid, and he was already skirting too close to danger at the moment. Inge's body was still in the trash bag in the trunk of his car.

He had to find a new burial site and he was waiting until it was a good deal later to start his search. Luv should have taken care of it earlier, he knew, but life had intervened, he had gotten busy with other responsibilities. He could not be Captain Luv all the time, much as he might be inclined to be so.

He had another hour or two to kill before it was safe to drive the back roads and search the woods, so Captain Luv went looking for a bar. He might find another victim and he could squirrel her away for future use.

They were everywhere, all of them waiting for him. "Luvvv is where you find it," he sang. "Don't be blind, it's all around you, everywhere."

Tee's wife, Marge, walked in and out of the kitchen and through the living room, carrying soiled laundry one way, clean laundry the other, back and forth over the course of the evening while the washing machine pulsed and throbbed in its cubicle off the kitchen and the clothes dryer, which was out of alignment and badly in need of shims under its base-a chore that Tee had been promising to tend to for the better part of five years-sent shock waves vibrating through the floorboards and into Tee's feet. Tee sat in his armchair, long since past noting the hyper agitations of the dryer, and contemplated his wife as she made her periodic passages. In her late forties, she still did not look old to him. Not young, either, but in that limbo of indeterminate age when the wrinkles still added character to the face and not just years, when the skin tone still responded to exercise, but with diminishing resilience, when life itself seemed to be attenuated in a sort of declining crawl that lasted a decade or two before the long free-fall of true age began.