Toby Olson - Tampico

“Hey,” I said, turning. “Have a nice day.”

When I slid back into the Cadillac, she was watching me intently as if I might be bringing bad news, and I realized the shape she was in and that it wasn’t very good at all and that she’d been working to control herself.

“It’s okay,” I said, lifting my hands and pushing the palms at her. “Just some cattail pickers.” Then she was talking.

She was thirty years old and had been married to him for ten years, a certain Michael Plummer, who had once been a plumber, but was already a wealthy and successful plumbing contractor when they met. Her name was Erica.

“He’s in toilets,” she said. “That’s what he says, and once he put my head down into one, just for the fun of it, and to teach me a lesson.”

He was fifty now, but she’d been a child when they’d married, really that, and she’d liked the way he’d dressed her up and had given her money and the way he’d taken her places, vacations to islands and to resorts in New Mexico, but she hadn’t been liking it for quite a while now, and when he’d found that out it had pleased him, her unhappiness, and he’d worked to increase it, getting her up in clothes like this, and jewels, and forcing her into the color combinations of her makeup. “Even photographs,” she said. “He takes pictures. Not sex. He doesn’t do that anymore. But for a measurement, the ways he likes me. Then if I don’t get it right, he hits me, pushes food into my face. And if I talk to anyone at all and he finds out about it, he has a strap and handcuffs.” She leaned toward the door, her fingers brushing her buttocks. “Do you want to see?”

“No,” I said. “Do you have any relatives?”

“There’s no one,” she said.

I asked her if she’d ever called the police, and she shuddered. Once she had, and they’d joked and laughed in the doorway, and he was still laughing when the door was closed and when he had her by the hair and was dragging her, across the carpet, right over the furniture and the sills and the fine Italian tile. And that’s when he pushed her head down in the toilet, his foot on the base of her spine, and was still laughing.

“What about Provincetown?”

“I’m glad I did,” she said. “He was fishing with his friends and I had a few drinks, and that’s what got me to the police station. Then I got scared and left, and that’s when that man gave me your number.”

“Do you have any money?” I said.

“Money?”

She lifted her leather purse from the seat between us, unzipped it, and opened the mouth. It was full of money, bricks of twenties and tens with rubber bands around them. She pushed the purse toward me.

“Take it,” she said.

I reached over, brushing her fingers as I pulled the flap closed, and she jerked her hand away, then lowered her eyes, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Christ, don’t be. It’s understandable,” I said, and then we sat there, both breathing deeply, looking at each other, and when I thought she had settled down and we could talk in some reason, I laid the whole thing out for her.

I asked her for the name of a shopping center in Taunton and a store, then wrote them down. The keys would be in the ashtray and the driver’s door would be open and she’d know the car as the one with a playing card in view on the dash. I’d rent the car under an assumed name, but she didn’t have to remember that, but only the motel name in Providence. The papers would be in the glove compartment. And she didn’t have to remember the lawyer’s name either. He’d mention mine when he called and she’d know it was him.

“It’s better this way,” I said. “That I don’t actually take you, that you leave him on your own. Then there’s no question of coercion should it come to trial. The lawyer’s a good one, you’ll see. And I’ll be in touch with him. You might have to stay there for a week or so, maybe even more, until the papers are served. I’ll watch that too.”

“And him,” she whispered. “You’d better watch him.”

“I will, indeed,” I said. “And closely. Do you have any more money?”

“Yes,” she said. “A lot. I’ve been saving it.”

“Take all of it. Every last penny.”

Tomorrow was too soon, because she had to get ready, her personal papers and whatever ones of his she could safely get her hands on, and some proper clothes and anything else she could think of, and when I suggested the next day, she laughed lightly, her face brightening briefly in the first anticipation of some possible freedom in her future. The first time in a long time, I thought.

“But it’s Thanksgiving!” she said, and I was taken aback, then back down the road I’d traveled to get there, bouquets of dried corn hanging from door knockers and pumpkins on stoops. Christ, I thought, I have no family at all, no reason for the holiday, just like her.

But she had his friends coming over, men just as crude as he was, and he insisted that she cook and bake for the lot of them and that everything be right in the holiday spirit and that she hum to herself, holiday songs, as she cleaned up after them and they watched the football games on the large-screen television and drank beer and laughed and insulted each other, arguing the fine points of plays and players as if they knew something about them.

“How about Friday, then?”

“No,” she said. “And not the weekend either. He’ll take all the days off. Probably he’ll take me out somewhere on Saturday, but all day Sunday he’ll lay around.”

She was counting the days now, excited in naming them, most probably searching for moments in them, ways she would pack and hide things, get herself ready, and in the light coming in at the window I could see the delicate bones in her face as they pushed up through expression of her new animation. There was a child in there, but a woman too under the knit and silk trappings, the bloody lipstick and lime, a free woman who, unlike a battered plaything, could be a child again, at least in the unfettered power of her imagination. Light touched her high and angular cheeks, and the skin over the edge of her skeletal jaw looked like hard ivory, and then she turned to face me.

“Okay,” I said. “Is it Monday, then?”

“Yes!” she said.

“All right!”

We sat grinning at each other, both of us vibrating a little. I’d caught it from her, the opening into a new world, and I liked the feel of it. I could imagine the travail that lay ahead for her, but in the moment that seemed secondary. Then it must have come to her imagination too, but before her smile slipped completely she lowered her head and reached for the purse.

She counted out the money on the fine leather seat between us, and I was careful not to forget anything. I told her I’d figure in the mileage later, when we worked out the final bill. I took six days in advance as retainer, and we shook hands over the cash in the open purse, grinning again. Then I opened the door and got out and walked back to my car. I heard the Cadillac’s engine rush into life as I climbed in, then saw Erica wave through the windshield as she passed in front of me. She turned down the empty road toward town, leaves rising in a russet cloud behind her, and I started my car up and drove away in the other direction, toward Fall River.

I crossed the Sagamore bridge and headed down the mid-Cape highway thinking of Thanksgiving and the monstrosity it would be for Erica, though a last holiday occasion of that kind if she were lucky. I am, I thought, nothing quite like that in my life, and soon after I’d passed Dennis I had a menu and a shopping list, everything that had rested on the table, once my mother had carried it all in. I reached the Orleans rotary and turned off and drove to the Stop and Shop, and by the time I was loading the bags into the trunk the sun was sinking and the stillness of dusk was in the trees on their little islands in the parking lot. Tomorrow, I thought, I would have been going to Boston with Gordon Strickland. It seemed an odd day to have planned that, right before the holiday, and once I’d closed the trunk and climbed into the car, I searched my wallet for the directions.