Jim Shepard - Kiss of the Wolf

“Why didn’t you go pick ’em up from the guy?” Joanie asked.

“He owes me a favor,” Bruno said.

They said good-bye to Todd. He was still sitting at the table, the roses spread out in front of him.

“Don’t wait up,” Bruno said.

“We won’t be that late,” Joanie said.

But in the car she thought about it: the concert would probably go past eleven, and they had an hour’s ride back after that.

“Everybody’ll still be there,” Bruno said. They climbed the ramp onto I-95. “You can meet the guys. There’s a treat.” She figured he meant at Goewey Buick.

After he merged into traffic, he looked over at her.

“You look very good,” he said.

She murmured a compliment back. They went by an old Coppertone ad painted on the side of a building, a little girl’s bathing suit bottom pulled down by a terrier. The terrier’s head was missing.

Bruno turned the radio on and then off. “Took a long time,” he said.

She could see what a big deal this date was for him and she was touched. “Well, you blew your opportunities,” she said.

“Ho.” He put his hand out. “Let’s back up here. Wait a second. I did not blow them. I did not blow them. What opportunities?”

She shrugged. “Oprah says women have ways of letting you know.” Why was she saying this? What was the point of teasing him?

“Where’d you hear that?” he asked.

“Oprah,” she said.

“Oprah,” he said grimly.

“Oprah knows everything.”

“Oprah knows dick. Pardon my French.”

They got off 95 at the Kings Highway exit. At the bottom of the ramp a woman was peering at the stop sign from a few feet away through a camera with a huge lens.

“This woman’s takin’ pictures of the stop sign,” Bruno said as they pulled up alongside. He looked at Joanie, and she shrugged. He rolled his window down. “Excuse me. What’s the interest here?” he asked the woman. She ignored him.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sure I can’t say.” She looked at him briefly and went back to her camera, moving around to get different angles. “Maybe you see something I don’t,” he said. “Maybe it’s me getting jaded. This is possible.” He waited for her to say something, and then he drove off.

“You like B.B. King?” he asked her.

She said she did.

At Goewey Buick three or four guys were standing and sitting around waiting for customers. She was introduced. One of them arched his eyebrows when he was shaking her hand and said, “Va-va-va-voom.”

“Somebody leave an envelope for me here?” Bruno asked. The guys said Cifulo had it. Cifulo was out. “Maybe he left it in your office,” one of them said.

They went to look. His office was partitioned with glass off the showroom floor. While he rummaged through his metal desk Joanie looked around. Someone had pinned a Goewey Buick circular to the bulletin board next to her. She read a correction printed in a box under the headline, OOPS!: “Last week’s circular incorrectly states, ‘Free leather travel case with any test drive.’ The correct copy should read, ‘Free daily calendar with any purchase of a Skylark Executive Edition.’”

The office was a mess. There was a big Mr. Coffee on the file cabinet, with a couple of mugs and torn blue packets of Equal around it. The garbage can was spattered with something and piled with little metal-handled Chinese takeout boxes. One still had the chopsticks sticking out of it. She straightened a framed poster with the title MY FIRST MILLION. It was a photograph of stacks of money. “That’s the previous guy’s,” Bruno said when he saw her looking at it. “I never took it down.”

One of the guys she’d been introduced to poked his head in while Bruno searched. “Listen,” he said. “The Korean was back. He said you promised him ten percent.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bruno said. He lifted the blotter on his desk and shook it. “Some people say one thing, some people say something else. The hell did he do with those tickets?”

“This guy said he was gonna call the Better Business Bureau. What happens, he comes in with them?”

Bruno pulled one drawer out of his desk and dumped it on the floor. Joanie jumped. “If he does, we deal with that then,” he said.

They watched him turn his office upside down.

The guy folded a piece of gum into his mouth. “Cifulo moved two Rivieras yesterday,” he said. “He tell you? He said to tell you he was gonna match your totals. He said he was gonna be making that trip with you.”

“Tell him not to buy any new luggage,” Bruno said, distracted.

“Is that it?” the guy asked. He pointed at an envelope on the floor.

Bruno picked it up, checked inside, looked at the guy, and walked out. Joanie followed.

“Hey,” the guy called after him. “You gonna leave your office like this?” Bruno waved, like he’d wished him a good trip.

In the car he said, “Morons.”

They were quiet on the way back to the highway. Bruno turned the radio on.

She formulated questions about Joey Distefano.

“So how you been?” Bruno asked.

She searched his expression, but he was watching the road. “I been all right. How good’re you gonna be?”

“I don’t know. It’d drive me crazy.”

She pulled her eyes to her lap. “What would?”

He looked at her. “What do you think? Your husband takin’ off.”

A police car went by the opposite way, its lights going.

“Lemme ask you something,” Bruno said. “He leave you fixed at all for money? It’s none of my business, I know.”

She shook her head.

He made an exasperated noise. “Joanie, you gotta get after him. The man owes you a little bit here.”

She nodded.

A Yardbirds song came on. Joanie turned it off.

“You hear from him at all? You think he’s comin’ back?”

She put her face in her hands. She was suddenly near tears.

“Hey. Whoa. Ho. Sorry. I’m sorry,” he said.

She was crying. “This whole thing is so bad,” she said.

He flipped his turn signal and threw a look over his shoulder and cut across the right lane to the exit. They bumped down the ramp and pulled over once they reached the stop sign. Someone behind them leaned on the horn and swerved by.

“Hey,” he said, and he put his hand to her hair. “I’m here.”

She leaned over to him, her head on his shoulder, and cried. “It’s all right,” he said. He cleared his throat. “It’s okay.”

She sniffed noisily and got hold of herself. She sat up and straightened her back and took a deep breath. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” he said, meaning, It was nothing.

She was looking at him. It was as if with that “Hey,” he had touched a finger to her feelings for him. He kissed her. She put a hand to his throat. She moved her lips, trying to communicate tenderness. He pulled back from the kiss, and his fingers were on her cheek.

She smiled, and thanked him for being sweet. She wiped her face.

“I’m not sweet,” he said.

“We should get going.” She ran her spread hands down her thighs like she needed to dry them. “We gonna eat?” She sniffled again and wished for a Kleenex.

He pulled across the street and up the entrance ramp. He said he figured they’d get into Hartford first, get situated. Eat ginzo on Franklin Avenue, a nice place called Carbone’s.

When she didn’t say anything, he added that the concert wasn’t until nine.

“I didn’t think that was gonna happen,” he said a little while later.

She thought maybe she could press this as an advantage. You are one cold bitch, she thought. She put a hand to her hair, as if to remind him where his hand had been. “So tell me about Joey Distefano,” she said.