Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

A minute later there was the sound of another small explosion, and then the lights were back. Then, a moment after that, a sound system started up, the televisions behind the bar powered back on, and the place filled with a sort of Mexican ska that hadn’t been playing before. The other diners — who Mark now realized must have been moderately to very drunk — cheered. The waitress beamed. “Told you,” she said. But it wasn’t addressed to them so much as it was to the pad in her hand and the people around them.

Mark looked at Maggie. She was sitting dead still, her posture perfect, her lips pressed together so that he couldn’t see that cherished gap. Her shoulders were high and tensed. Her immediate atmosphere had gone cold.

“Maybe we need a minute?” Maggie said. “I’m not ready to order yet.” She was looking at Mark, imploring him with her big eyes. What they were saying — her big doe eyes — was, Let’s get out of here, let’s go right now, let’s leave before there’s trouble and we all wind up dead, dead, dead. But he couldn’t do it. He was tired. He needed some food and maybe a quick beer to help with the tension in his knees.

The waitress — petite, dark-skinned — was still standing there. She didn’t have the body type or facial features that, twenty years ago, Mark would have found attractive. But now, a middle-aged man, he was able to see the appeal in the roundness of such a jaw, the fullness of such a thigh.

“One Corona,” he said.

“What are you doing?” said Maggie. “I thought you were driving next.”

“I am,” he said to Maggie. To the waitress he said, “And a lime.”

The waitress wrote it down. She didn’t care about Mark and Maggie or who was driving next. For that matter, neither did she care about the jumpy electric panel in back or the encroaching storm outside. What she cared about was the tip jar and her next shot of tequila and her two or three little babies waiting for her at home. What she cared about had nothing to do with them, and for that — for her supreme, nearly palpable indifference — Mark felt his entire heart open up.

When the waitress brought a third beer, Maggie reached for it before Mark could. She took a long, slow swig.

“Ten-thirty,” the waitress said, putting a bill on the table. “Closing time.”

The rain had stopped. The window they sat next to was bulleted by the occasional sheet of wind, but other than that, it seemed perhaps the worst of this particular storm might have passed. Gerome hadn’t raised his head — not that Maggie had seen from where they were still sitting in the booth — in at least a half hour.

It wasn’t so much that Maggie minded the idea of having a drink and then getting back in the car. In fact, one of her favorite things to do in Virginia, in Mark’s home state, was drink and drive on the small back roads that zigzagged between farmland and country life. She loved the freedom of it, the thrill of an open container combined with a curving flat road late at night. But this wasn’t a quiet private lane in Virginia they were talking about. This was a full-scale road trip. This was a late-at-night, middle-of-nowhere drive across five states, and the idea of adding booze to the equation just seemed thick. It hadn’t been her idea, but there was no going back now.

She took another slow swig. Her mugger had been drunk. She’d smelled it on his breath, in his clothes. He’d been at a bar, some place that still let regulars and old-timers smoke inside. She often thought about which bar it might have been — was it a place close to where they lived? She wondered whether or not he still went there. Sometimes, lately, she wondered if he’d been too drunk to remember her the next day or if, even now, even still, he thought about her from time to time. Her hand trembled slightly. She didn’t like the idea of that man out there, existing, conjuring her up whenever he wanted.

She closed her eyes, took another drink, and tried not to think of the coed. She would finish this beer and still be fine enough to deliver them to the closest hotel, which was no longer up for debate: getting a hotel was now a must.

Funny how she’d come 180 degrees in just one day. That morning you couldn’t have paid her to consider stopping, but now, in this weather, alcohol in her blood and in Mark’s? She’d sooner chew off her own hands than try to make the Blue Ridge tonight.

They’d have to start looking immediately. They were a half hour from Jackson, an hour from Gallipolis. They’d pass probably a half-dozen hotels in that hour. Not the best places, but one of them would get the job done. No problem. She’d check them in, walk Gerome by herself just to show Mark that she could — there was a small canister of mace in a zippered pocket of her purse — then she’d shower, slip into bed, pass out. She’d put this day behind her.

In the morning she’d wake up and they’d be halfway to Virginia. The storm would be a thing of the past, and everything could just go back to normal. On Monday she’d have Gwen saddle up one of the older mares for her, and she’d make a routine of it while they were at the farm. She’d get some riding in, go for regular runs in the mornings. Maybe she’d drive into town with Robert, hit a few golf balls at the country club with him if he didn’t mind. The club had only recently let women on the course, and she wasn’t sure how Robert felt about that. But she’d suss him out, and if all was copacetic, she’d hit some balls with him. Ten years ago she’d had a decent swing, or so Mark had told her.

The important thing — once they got to Virginia — was that she leave Mark alone. And that Mark, for a little while at least, leave her alone. They needed some time. Not away from each other exactly, but to themselves. And being with his family would allow them both some breathing room. It might be a strange thing for a daughter-in-law to admit, but Maggie genuinely looked forward to these trips, to his parents. They had a way of pampering her to just the right degree. All the love she never felt from her own parents, she felt from his. She drank up their attention. Plus, it was always so nice not to have to walk Gerome on a leash. That was something she always looked forward to, seeing him romp, watching his elegant vaults over the log jump-course near the lavender fields where Gwen sometimes worked the horses. He really was a beautiful dog.

It occurred to Maggie — as she watched Mark pull his wallet from his pants pocket — that he might want to have sex when they finally got to the hotel. Nothing turned Mark on more than a night in a strange place. Maggie shuddered at the thought. Don’t get her wrong: she was still attracted to him. Of course she was! He had a beautiful head of hair. She liked to run her hand through it, grab a small fistful, then lean in close for a deep inhale. He had zero belly fat, but not in an obsessive caveman way. He was, in her honest and unbiased estimation, a visually perfect specimen of a real and total man. She’d marry him all over again for his looks alone. Probably every one of his students had crushes. Textbook scenario: If they were girls, they wanted to date him; if they were boys, they wanted to be him. But who cared about students? Mark was hers.

Lately, though — and this was a phenomenon she was still puzzling out — she’d been turned off by the idea of sex in bed. It felt too intimate, too serious. Instead, she found herself increasingly turned on when, for instance, driving to get groceries. Or finishing up her day’s notes at the clinic. Walking the dog, perhaps. Taking an elevator or brushing her teeth. She hadn’t told Mark about her recent change in appetite. Not that she could guess his reaction. Maybe he’d be equally turned on by her admission; maybe he wouldn’t. But she was worried by the possibility that he’d somehow find a way to take the change personally, which was the last thing she wanted. And so she’d kept her desires to herself, which meant recently there hadn’t been as much sex as either of them would have liked. She had considered more than once bringing it up with her former therapist, but she could never settle on an appropriate opening.