Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

Lisa frowned. “You have to leave now.”

Michael looked at her wearily and didn’t move.

“Leave now,” she said again. She put her hand on Alisa’s head and stared at him. Michael got up finally and started to walk, then stopped.

“What?” she said.

“I’m so sorry.”

Lisa double-bolted the door behind him and watched him until he left the steps at the bottom of the walkway. She watched him through pulled-shut curtains. And, yes, for a few seconds after, she watched. While they cried.

“You never can tell about people, now can you?” she says. The kids continue to cry. Sob, more like. She realizes she is shaking a bit. Odder still, the sinking feeling hasn’t left. She almost thinks she might have got it all wrong. She is so tired. What has happened? She’s prettty sure she’s getting everything wrong. She is so exhausted. She watches her children, bewildered. No mistaking it. Alex and Alisa are crying at her.

Lorene sits in an expensive restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. She looks at her hands, not really recognizing them. She puts them under the table, suddenly self-conscious. She thinks about calling Mina, seeing how it all went. Truth is, she is kind of dying to talk to Mina, misses her in a bored, sentimental way. She doesn’t mind that, either. She eats her dinner slowly and studies the staff as they work. Lorene examines silverware and feels with two fingers the paper the menu is printed on. She lifts the bread plate, a lovely simple bone china, to see if she has correctly guessed the name of the manufacturer. Of course, and this pleases her. The waitress stands by her table as Lorene engages her in conversation. After a couple of minutes of talking, the waitress nods distractedly, looks away for a second. Oh, God, Lorene thinks, it’s happening — I’m becoming one of those people who tries to have personal conversations with waiters.

Mina gets up, washes her face. She takes a shower. She dresses and eats breakfast. She gathers her things together and boards a plane for L.A. She would have dinner with David that night. Which seems, at this long-distanced point, pretty good. Something everyday and ordinary and deeply familiar.

Mina stretches in her seat on the airplane, half watches the inflight film with no headphones.

Last night Lorene had called her from New Orleans. Woke her up. Lorene said she would be going back to California in a few days. Mina said, “It’s only been a week, Lorene.”

But it seems Lorene has a great idea for a new restaurant. Something so diabolically clever that it requires an in-person meeting of Pleasure Model Enterprises. It had come to Lorene suddenly, eureka-ish, in a lightning voodoo moment sometime between her paraffin pedicure and her painful but necessary Brazilian bikini wax.