Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

For a moment I thought I had convinced her. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m just not ready.”

I rose and she followed suit. “Well,” I said, “the offer’s going to stand.”

She put the scotch away, and instead of setting the glass in the sink the way people did with late-night dishes, she rinsed it and put it away in the cabinet. It was an action that suggested to me that drinking had become a common ritual that she was trying to hide from her sister and brother-in-law.

When we were back in bed, Genevieve dropped off to sleep almost immediately, aided undoubtedly by the whiskey. Not me. I was keyed up from our conversation. I closed my eyes, thinking surely my previous lassitude would return soon.

It didn’t. I lay awake for a long time in the narrow twin bed, breathing the Clorox scent of the sheets. The room had an old-fashioned digital clock, with white numbers that rolled over, and every ten minutes the first of the two minute placeholders rolled over with an audible click. There’d been a clock like that in the main room of the trailer I’d lived in as a child.

When 11:30 rolled over, lit from the side with an orange light, I sat up in bed and was nearly surprised to feel my feet reach the floor.

I’d lived too long in cities, gotten too used to a little light and a little noise at any hour. I hadn’t lived in a place like this since New Mexico. Beyond the sheer curtain I brushed aside with one hand was the country-dark sky I knew I’d see, richly spangled with stars despite the pale wash of light from a full moon. The last time I’d looked out a bedroom window to a sky like that, I’d never held a gun, I didn’t have any money of my own, had never had a lover to share my bed.

I lay down again, rolled over to lie on top of the pillow, wishing for Shiloh. If he were here, we could do something wicked and adult to hold this child’s feeling at bay.

In the distance I heard a train whistle. Probably a freight at this hour. This train was too far away for me to hear the three-part rhythm of its passing on the tracks, but the whistle blew again, a faint comforting sound of Minneapolis.

Genevieve agreed to go for a run with me in the morning, two easy miles. We returned to find Doug and Deborah getting ready to go out, to meet friends for a late Sunday breakfast. “There’s coffee on,” Deborah advised me, hurriedly, when Genevieve and I arrived in the kitchen, and its scent did fill the house.

In the kitchen, shortly before Deborah and Doug left, I managed to talk with both of them while Genevieve wasn’t in the kitchen.

“Listen,” I said carefully, “I was talking about something with Genevieve last night… Do you keep any guns in the house?”

“Guns?” Doug said. “No. I don’t hunt.”

“Why?” Deborah asked.

“I’m just worried about Genevieve,” I said. “You live awfully close to Royce Stewart. And sometimes I wonder if she’s always thinking straight.”

Doug gave me an incredulous look. “You can’t seriously think-”

“No,” I said. “I’m probably just being paranoid. Goes with the job sometimes.”

Genevieve drifted back into the kitchen, and I fell silent. Deborah busied herself before the refrigerator, surveying its contents.

“Honey,” she told Doug, “I thought we had more Diet Coke than this. Don’t let me forget to stop on the way home, all right?”

While her husband was warming up their car in the garage, Deborah pulled me aside.

“Come upstairs with me for a minute,” she said.

I followed her up to their bedroom and watched as Deborah pushed aside the hanging clothes in her closet and took a small black purse from a peg in the back. Although the bag looked empty to me, with its sides caved slightly in, she handled it with delicacy. Sitting on the bed, she unzipped it and reached inside. Made curious by her caution, I moved closer.

She paused with her hand in the purse and looked up at me. “I guess Doug didn’t know I had this,” she said. “So I’m sure Genevieve doesn’t, either.”

She withdrew a small handgun from the bag, a.25 with cheap, bright plating.

“When I had my first teaching job in East St. Louis,” she said, “the school was in kind of a rough neighborhood. A friend who’d lived there all his life gave this to me. It’s not registered to me… I don’t know who it’s registered to, actually.”

Deborah Lowe wore a white blouse and a black straight skirt, and her lips were limned tastefully with pale red lipstick. I marveled.

“Teacher’s got a Saturday-night special,” I said.

“I know, it’s awful. That’s why I wanted you to take it. It’s not necessarily because of Genevieve. I just want it gone, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.” She offered it to me.

Doug’s voice echoed up the stairs. “Deb! We’re burning daylight!” he yelled.

I took the little gun from her hand. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I stayed awhile with Genevieve after they had gone. I tried to interest her in department news and gossip, to the extent that I knew any. The truth was, I’d always counted on her for that sort of thing. She’d been my branch of the grapevine.

When I left, Genevieve followed me as far as the front porch. I stopped there and spoke to her. “If you ever want to talk, just give me a call. You know I’m up late.”

“I will,” she said quietly.

“You should think about coming back to work,” I added. “It might help you to be occupied. And we need you.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m trying.” But I could see in her eyes that she was in a dark place and a few rallying words from me weren’t going to help.

The first raindrops speckled my windshield only minutes after the house disappeared from my rearview mirror.

I thought I’d left in plenty of time to get back to the Cities. I should have known better. You should always expect bad luck on the road. Particularly when it rains.

The bad luck turned up twenty minutes north of Mankato. Traffic on the 169 slowed to a thick automotive sludge. Impatient, I turned down the radio, which suddenly seemed loud, and turned up the heat to keep the idling engine cool.

For twenty-five minutes, we all inched along. Finally, the cause came into view: a jackknifed truck in the road. Two highway patrol officers directed traffic around it. It didn’t look like an injury accident. Just a nuisance.

Past the obstruction, as the traffic broke up, I urged the Nova up to 87, ignoring the rain. I was going to have to really move if I wanted to catch Shiloh in time.

A little over an hour later, I turned into the long driveway outside our house. It was a quarter to one. Good, I thought, I was in time.

I made enough noise, banging the kitchen door open, that Shiloh would surely hear, wherever he was in the house. But the only answering noise was the ticking of the kitchen clock.

“Hey, Shiloh?”

Silence. Half the living room was visible from the kitchen, and unoccupied.

“Shit,” I said. I’d considered calling from the Lowes’ place to make it clear I’d be home in enough time to take him to the airport. Perhaps I should have done so.

It only took a moment to satisfy myself that he wasn’t home. But it seemed early yet. He shouldn’t have left already.

The house looked the same inside as it usually did, not really clean, not dirty, either. Shiloh had straightened up just a little. There were no dishes in the sink, and in the bedroom the bed was made, the Indian blanket pulled smooth.

I set my bag down on the bedroom floor and went out to the front of the house. In the front entryway, the hook where he hung his key ring was bare. His everyday jacket was gone as well. He’d erred on the side of caution and left without me.