Crushed

When Jason Alter was a junior at Thomas Edison High School, he fell madly in love with Catherine Keenan. It was the head-over-heels kind of love, the heart-palpitating kind of love, the can-think-of-nothing-but-her kind of love.

Catherine, a sophomore, was a service aide in the library. Jason hated sitting in the school cafeteria because of the smell, the crappy food, and the mayhem. He’d rather read in the library while sneaking bites of a sandwich he had smuggled in. But the first time he laid eyes on her, perched on a stool behind the circulation desk, he couldn’t focus on his reading, and didn’t even bother with his sandwich. He could only stare.

Thinking back, Jason felt so foolish because she probably never knew he existed. And he knew that what had happened to the sixteen-year-old half-man was so much in the past – more than half a lifetime, a numerical fact he ruminated over when he was in one of his morbid moods. But he could still not avoid cringing. It was just like the embarrassment he felt back in fourth grade, in Miss McColgan’s class, when the rear seam of his corduroys split open and his classmates screamed with laughter until the teacher made them hush.

He remembered inking “J A & C K” on the textured gray-blue cover of his looseleaf notebook: Jason Alter and Catherine Keenan 4-ever. He remembered Xeroxing the yearbook picture of the cheerleading squad, in which Catherine, who stood off to the side in her oh-so-short skirt and who was definitely smiling at him and at him only, and then unsuccessfully enlarging the image on the copier and then, equally as unsuccessfully, attempting to hand-copy it to scale onto blue-lined graph paper. He remembered how he sighed with longing as he gazed at her picture. And he remembered how Blondie’s song, “Call Me,” resonated in him, and how he couldn’t get the lyrics, Color me with kisses, baby / Color me with love … out of his mind.

There were also his love poems, which Jason had never thrown away. He had hand-written a dozen or so of them, in blue-black fountain-pen ink, on textured bond paper. He had kept them in the inside pocket of his looseleaf notebook, where he magically yearned for her to find them and read them and then return his adoration.

And then there was the risk mixed with excitation of having someone else find them, like Randi Baxter, who sat behind him in every class, for she was merciless in her mockery, especially when she discovered what “J A & C K” stood for. Randi, who sat behind him in most of his classes because they were in the same honors track, would eventually became his platonic girlfriend, not that he wanted it that way, and later, a drinking buddy. But in their eleventh grade English class, it was “Hey, Jack-EE,” followed by kissing noises, and in Spanish III, it was “How’re you doin’, Jackie-pie?” and so on. Jason tried not to be flustered.

Jason had hidden his poems in a taped and string-tied envelope in the bottom drawer of his dresser, under several pairs of rarely-used pajamas. Once, while his wife was ensconced in front of her computer, he had silently closed and locked the bedroom door, and then sat down on the bed to read each one. He shook his head and chuckled when he read them, not quite believing that it was he who had once written them. The first was five lines long: Your love is like a soft breeze / filling me with happiness / a warm breeze / casting away the fear / of never being with you. He leafed through the pack and found the painfully-constructed acrostic poem, and even remembered the study-hall period on a rainy day before Thanksgiving when he wrote it: Carry me into your heart / And I will know true bliss; / Take me into your arms … / Here I am, waiting. / Earnest I am in my love, / Right, I am, to feel this. / I will never leave you, / Never, never leave you, / Else I might soon die … and how he had meticulously inscribed the first letter of each line in his own version of Old English script.

Nevertheless, he could not stop a tear from trickling down his cheek when he read there will never be / never be / anyone else but you …

Jason attended his twenty-fifth Edison High School reunion on a frigid night in the middle of January. It was held in the Tahiti Room at the Holiday Inn out at Exit 75 of the Interstate.

Jason never liked big parties and except for Randi and a couple others, he was never close to most of his high school classmates. But his wife warned him: “You’ll regret it if you don’t go. Remember my twentieth reunion? Remember how I refused to go? Now, I wish I had.” At times, Amy could be very sentimental, even maudlin. When they listened to the oldies station on the car radio, she could get choked up at song lyrics he thought were insipid. Lately, however, she had often been distracted and indifferent, and sometimes even abrasive.

Jason thought that someone had an ironic sense of humor when he walked into the Tahiti Room, for it was decorated as a school gymnasium. A set of bleachers were on one side of the room, hiding the tropical murals covering the wall. Fake palm trees in gravel-filled planters had been pushed into a far corner. Portable basketball backboards were set up at opposite ends of the parquet dance floor. Colored tape edged the dance floor and demarcated the free-throw lanes, the half-court line and the middle circle. When he had taken Randi to his senior prom, hoping for a breakthrough with her, the school gymnasium was then decorated in the spirit of “A Romantic Evening in Tahiti.”

The hits of the eighties and the din of conversation were so loud that he wanted to turn around and walk out. “Funkytown” was followed by Diana Ross’s “Upside Down.” Jason wished that there were name tags, even the smiley-faced ones he so despised, because he had trouble recognizing many of his old classmates who had become bloated and old-looking. But when he spotted Catherine Keenan, with a drink in her hand, standing under one of the backboards, his breath was taken away. At the same time he realized that that description was such a cliché, Blondie’s lyrics, Emotions come, I don’t know why, / Cover up love’s alibi popped into his mind.

Catherine Keenan … she was a year behind. What was she doing here? he wondered. She hadn’t aged at all, unlike the other women standing near her. Like twenty-six years before, he could only gawk and stare.

“Straight up, please.” Jason rarely drank and he wanted what he thought was the best, and undiluted, at that.

“Thanks.” Jason sipped from his glass and started to circulate. After the first astringent-tasting sips, his tongue started to feel numb and the whiskey began going down more smoothly. As he meandered around the room, he nodded at some people who looked vaguely familiar. The music had been turned up a notch which made conversation almost impossible.

As he finished the glass, he began to feel light-headed. He remembered that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He almost laughed out loud when the phrase “buzz from the booze” popped into his mind. Downing the glass, he wandered back across the basketball court for a refill.

Instead of drifting around, Jason stood at the end of the bar, listening to the Pointer Sisters singing “He’s So Shy.” He felt more at ease watching his ex-classmates from afar. It was just like back at Edison when he had distanced himself from them. But his eyes kept returning to Catherine Keenan.

His thoughts: Who’s that guy next to her? He looks familiar. Oh yeah, that’s gotta be Nicky Darnell. Was in my home room. Sat in the back. Football star. Jesus … could she be married to him? Now look at him. As puffy as all the rest.

Jason watched Darnell unclip the cell phone from his belt and begin talking into it. His gestures were animated, angry, then exasperated. He snapped it shut, clipped it back and then drew Catherine aside. They stood arguing, but they worked hard to keep it under control. When they rejoined the group, Darnell said something, another man nodded and, moments later, Darnell walked out. Catherine became the seventh wheel in what had been a group of eight.

Catherine excused herself and Jason watched her stride over to the bar. “He’s So Shy” segued into Blondie’s “Call Me”: Color me your color, baby / Color me your car. / Color me your color, darling. / I know who you are. In his increasingly inebriated state, Jason thought of the song as a harbinger, an omen filled with hope and promise.

As he poured the vodka and the tomato juice mix, Jason stood there, tongue-tied, just like in the school library.

They shook hands. Oh, her touch. Jason felt woozy and speechless, but then blurted out, “Sure. Of course I know who you are. And you’re as beautiful now as you were back then.” What the hell am I saying? Damn, it’s gotta be the alcohol talking ...

“Yeah. I’m the guy who had a real serious crush on you. I couldn’t get you out of my mind.”

She smiled. “My girlfriends teased me about you. But it was so sweet. In fact, it made me feel special. But it would’ve never ever have worked out. My parents would never have allowed it.”

“You know … ’cause, I’m Catholic. Lapsed now.” She shrugged. “And, of course, you’re, uh, Jewish.”

Catherine sipped from her drink while Jason tapped his almost empty glass on the bar. Call me call me au revoir / When you’re ready we can share the wine. / Call me ...

“Right. But he had to leave. There was a bad accident over at Exit 89 and they needed him right away. He’s a volunteer fireman and he’s one of the department’s jaws of life guys. The other guy’s away on vacation so …” she shrugged, “Nicky had to go.”

“Listen, Catherine. I really want to talk to you. Can we, like, take our drinks into the lobby? It’s so loud I can barely hear myself think.”

Jason, a bit wobbly, picked up his glass and Catherine, her own, as the Blondie song ended. Oh, call me, ooh ooh ah / Call me in my life. Call me, call me any anytime. And they walked out to the lobby.

They sat next to each other on a couch. Jason could not take his eyes off her face and, especially, her lips, as she spoke. Their legs were a hair’s breadth apart and he could feel the heat. He wanted to slide closer and lean in to kiss her – to consume her – but he couldn’t summon the nerve, especially since they were talking about safe things, like Jason’s job and Amy and his boys, like Catherine and Nicky and their twins, Caitlin and Megan, one who had “special needs,” as she put it. She licked her lips as she spoke and occasionally swept back a stray hair, mannerisms that to Jason were agonizingly alluring.

In the lobby, the music was muffled, but every time the doors to the Tahiti Room swung open, they were pounded by the throbbing beat from inside. Each time they both looked up to see who had come out, even though they were doing nothing illicit. As much as Jason wanted her, as much as he wanted to take her upstairs or even out to his car, he knew that this could neither be the time nor the place. He assumed that she, like he, feared the hint of impropriety. But he also wondered If not now, when?

Just then, she pulled him out of his reverie. “Listen, Jason. I think we’d better go back in. You never know what they might be thinking.”

“Yeah, they. Just like back at Edison, when everyone was so wrapped up in their image and who they were going out with.”

Jason left his empty glass on a side table and started to lift himself up. “Oh boy. Maybe I had too much to drink.”

“Yeah. And I’ve got to drive home later. I guess I’m going to have to switch to something lighter.”

Just before they rejoined the reunion, Catherine turned to him and said, “You know. If you ever want to talk or something, give me a call. I’m in the book, under ‘Darnell.’ Most days, Nicky works nine to five or six, but he spends most evenings at the firehouse.”

Jason realized that her husband’s sudden departure created an empty seat at her table, but he didn’t want to intrude. Most of the others were from the same in-group who had sat together in the lunchroom and at football and basketball games. He didn’t much like them then and he had nothing common with them now. Except Catherine.

Despite his decision to go easy, Jason washed down another double before switching to ginger ale. In an attempt to drown out the music, he made two spit balls out of strips of a paper napkin and stuck them in his ears. He felt more isolated when he couldn’t hear what people at his table were saying – not that he really cared. The food took forever to arrive and was not worth waiting for, and he couldn’t wait to get out of there. If it weren’t for Catherine, sitting across the dance floor, and some wishful thinking about getting together with her afterwards, he would have already left.

When the night drew to a close and he figured there was no way he was going to get her alone, he decided to call it quits. He welcomed the biting cold that sliced through him as he walked through the wind-swept parking lot. It helped clear his head. As he drove home, he kept his windows open to stay awake, and carefully obeyed the speed limit.

At home, he hung up his suit, washed his face and swallowed a couple of Tylenols. He sat in his underwear on his side of their bed. His head was spinning and his stomach was churning. Amy turned over and mumbled, “Oh you’re home. Didja have a good time?”

“Yeah, it was okay. But it was so freakin’ loud.” Amy’s breathing became regular once again, so he went back to staring at the clock radio as its red numerals changed from 3:17 to 3:18 and then 3:19. His thoughts became jumbled and incoherent and when he was finally overcome by the welcome wave of exhaustion, he dropped his head to the pillow and fell into a dead sleep.

I have all the trappings. That phrase had popped into his head as he got out of bed on Monday morning and Jason was still mulling it over as he sat in dead-stopped traffic. Damn Soldiers Highway. Probably a three-lighter before I get through the Route 29 intersection. And the new shopping center – as if we really needed another Costco and a Home Depot and a Sleepy’s – wasn’t even finished. He imagined the idiots speeding along in front of him, desperately holding on to plywood sheets and mattresses that had been tied with flimsy white cord to the roofs of their cars.

All the trappings of the middle class existence. Jason still had a headache from his Saturday night binge. He hadn’t had a two-day hangover since his drinking days at State.

The middle class existence. His father, a semi-skilled laborer, had never earned much, contrary to the antisemitic stereotype. The family was forced to move when he was injured and went on disability. Jason had to share the bedroom with his brother and his parents. For privacy, his father hung a shower curtain from the ceiling. He realized, looking back, that his parents could have been intimate only when they sent his brother and him out to play or to a movie matinee or to run an errand.

Now, Jason had the oversized split-level house in a house farm with skylights over the living room, the three-car garage, the in-ground pool, a bedroom for each of his sons, the fourth bedroom turned into an office and promptly appropriated by his wife, the upscale kitchen, the second refrigerator and a freezer in the basement, the home theater system in the “media room,” and the Latino landscapers coming every week. He had all the trappings and he couldn’t escape. He couldn’t even chomp off a leg and run off howling into the night.

The traffic inched forward, two, three, then four car lengths, and then another dead stop. He pulled to the left of the lane to see the traffic light, and he saw flashing red lights further ahead. Damn.

He couldn’t get Catherine out of his mind all day Sunday as he watched the football playoffs, not that he was able to pay much attention to the games, with the hangover and all. On the “all sports, all the time” radio station that broke the isolation of his commute, Monday morning quarterbacking was the earth-shattering issue.

Jason turned down the volume, pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and inserted the bluetooth earpiece. He speed-dialed information and got the number for Darnell, Nicholas, which he saved under the listing “CK & Co.” He decided it was too early to call, and he wouldn’t even know what to say. Another time. Maybe during lunch. But when lunch had come and gone and he remembered again on his way home, he promised himself that he would definitely call the next day.

Several weeks went by, but Jason couldn’t bring himself to call. He moped around the house like a lovesick teenager, reliving his high school crush, frozen in his inaction. Meanwhile, Amy was so wrapped up in what she was doing that she was oblivious. Thoughts of Catherine bubbled into his consciousness at inopportune moments. On the spur-of-the-moment he stopped at the mall to buy the “Blondie - Greatest Hits” CD and then played it over and over in his car. Several times, he drove by Catherine’s house on his way home from work. A few times, he parked across the street, longing to catch a glimpse of her.

Another lunchtime. The job of putting together the lunch order fell upon an intern, who asked Jason, “Sir? Can I pick up anything for you?”

“Not today. I’ve got to get out of here for a while or I’ll go crazy.” Eating lunch at his desk had become a habit that Jason wanted to break. Working through lunch allowed him to leave an hour early, which had once meant beating the evening traffic.

The early February day was unseasonably mild, so Jason decided to take a walk. He picked up a ham and Swiss hero and a bottle of Diet Coke from a sandwich shop across the street. He looked up at his nondescript gray building – Christ, almighty … I’ve been here fifteen years. Where the hell did the time go? – and then walked a couple of blocks to a park next to the court building.

In warm weather, the park was usually filled, but Jason was glad to have the park to himself and the bedraggled-looking pigeons who had strutted over. Jason remembered his promise to himself to call. The spring-fever-like warmth helped to turn his thoughts to Catherine and, simultaneously, lust.

When he finished his sandwich and soda, he took out his cell phone and clicked down to CK & Co. He pressed “talk” and heard the phone ring. An answering machine picked up – “You have reached the Darnells ...” and then he heard a click and Catherine’s voice. “Hello?”

“Oh, yeah, right. I’m sorry. My mind is kinda fuzzy.” He thought her words sounded slurred.

He waited for her to continue. “She had another one of her screaming fits this morning.” A pause. “She refused to get on the bus. And … it’s happening more and more lately.”

“Yeah. She stays in her room. Watches TV. Who the heck knows? ...” Her voice trailed off.

“I’m afraid to leave her by herself. I’m afraid for her. Sometimes, I’m afraid of her. I never know what’s she’s going to do. So I mostly end up sticking around.”

“I don’t have anything to write with. But wait. It’s right here, on the Caller ID.”

“Listen, Jason … I’ve got to go. I hear Megan screaming.” There was a click, and then the soft hiss of dead air.

One week, then two, turned into a month. Jason wanted to call her, yearned to call her again, but he just couldn’t. He felt stuck. But he did run the script of their conversation over and over in his head. His increasingly aching need for her was intensified by the abject neediness that he heard between her slurred lines.

It was the beginning of yet another five-day week, and Jason was on his way home from work, once again stuck in traffic. His cell phone chimed. He flipped it open before checking the screen. “Yeah?”

“Yes … no … I don’t know” followed by several moments of soft breathing.

“How ’bout tonight? The girls are staying at their grandma’s and Nicky has a meeting down at the fire house. Yeah, a meeting, my ass … oh, sorry.”

For once, Jason wanted to slip unnoticed into the house, take a shower and grab a bite to eat. Instead, when he closed the door behind him, Amy called out,“Hey, Jas! Want something to eat?”

“Sure. Nothing special though.” Why tonight, of all nights is she being nice to me?

He stood under the hot needles for a while, but little of his tension was pulsated away. When he got back downstairs, a setting for one had been placed on the kitchen table. “Aren’t you having anything?”

“Take care of,” “look up,” “work on,” “check up on” were all code words for “I’ve got to get back on the computer.” But he was relieved; he really didn’t want to talk to his wife. He decided that he’d wait until he was ready to leave to tell her that he was going out.

Amy split the omelet in two and slid the halves onto warmed onion rolls. She said, “Here you go. Enjoy,” and hurried from the kitchen. Jason gobbled down his meal, and washed it down with a bottle of iced tea. He put his plate and glass into the dishwasher, along with the frying pan.

When he walked into the living room, Seth and Jonathan were, as usual, slouched on the sofa, watching college basketball on the new large-screen TV. Ordinarily, they’d be upstairs IM’ing and Facebooking on their own laptops, with their iPod docks’ volume turned up high and their own LCD-TV’s muted, while just possibly completing their homework assignments between phone calls and running downstairs to the refrigerator for fortification. Jason often marveled how well they supposedly multitasked, except that a recent newspaper article described multitasking as a degraded form of “continual partial attention.” HiDef TVs, iPods, iPads, iPhones and laptops – all the trappings, he thought.

Jason asked, “Who’s winning?” though from the low score superimposedon the screen, he assumed the game had just begun.

Then “Fine, Dad” and “Yeah, we’re okay.” He heard Amy’s irritation and impatience in their answers.

Without taking their eyes off the screen, the boys moved aside just enough to make room for their father.

For several minutes, he watched the game without really watching, checked his watch, and said, “Listen, guys. I’m going out for a while.”

On the way out, Jason set the alarm and locked the front door. He got into his car, started it up and lowered the windows. More than ever, he needed to feel the cold air. Whenever he was in the house with his wife or his sons for any length of time, he felt not only ignored, but stifled and unable to breathe, as if they were using up all of the oxygen.

He made the left onto Soldiers Highway and then sped up so he could feel the wind blowing through his thinning, prematurely graying hair. While he waited for the light to change at the four-gas-station corner, he lubricated his ring finger with saliva so he could slip off his wedding band. It was the first time in nineteen years of marriage that he had taken it off.

As he sped down Soldiers Highway, he almost missed the Lakeview Road turn-off and had to skid into the turn. He flicked on his brights as he continued the mile or two down to the parking lot.

It was as if time had stood still, Jason thought, as he dimmed his headlights. The single overhead light – the target of enthusiastic vandals in his time – had been replaced by a sodium vapor lamp, now protected by security screening, which cast an eerie orange glow over much of the lot. Several cars, with their windows fogged up, were parked off to one side in the darkness.

He drove to the front edge of the lot and cut off his engine. The light from the near-full moon shimmered on the lake. Maybe things really don’t change, he thought.

He sat awhile, then turned the ignition key to “on” and tuned to the oldies station. 9:29, 9:30, then 9:31 . Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love” was followed by “All the Man I Need,” by Whitney Houston. Oldies? Music from the early 90s? 9:35. “The Sign,” by Ace of Base. Who? 9:39. Then “Again,” by Janet Jackson. Exposing herself – what a stinkin’ mess that all caused.

9:44, 9:45, 9:46. When he heard tires on gravel, he watched in his rearview as a red minivan crossed the parking lot. It was her! She pulled up next to his car, turned off her headlights and then the ignition. The dome light went on as she opened her door.

He started to get out of his car, but she gestured “no” to him. Instead, she stepped down out of her van and walked around to his passenger-side door, opened it and got in.

“Sorry.” Jason started the car, raised both windows, and turned up the heat.

“Sure. Go ahead.” But he lowered her window part way and then turned off the engine.

The Lexus’s lighter had gone missing, and he hadn’t yet replaced it, so she tapped out a Marlboro Light and used her own Bic to light it.

“‘Cath.’ Damn it. That’s what Nicky calls me.” She took a long drag, held it in, and then blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and out the window.

“Everything. Everything’s falling in on itself. It’s like it’s, uh … how do you say it?”

Between inhalations and exhalations, cigarette lightings, and opening and closing her window, Catherine went on about Megan’s problems and her concomitant learning and behavioral disabilities. About the damage her condition had done to the family. About Caitlin’s acting out: her choice of friends and boyfriend, her poor grades, her cutting school and experimenting with drugs. And about her husband, she said, “He’d rather risk his stinkin’ life running into a burning building than stay at home to deal with all our problems.

“My husband, the football star. He runs into someone else’s burning house hoping to save a life. Jason, you’ve gotta realize that all those new homes are made with a lot of artificial crap that’s toxic when it burns. He also’s gotta be the first to grab the jaws of life, even when there’s a risk of having a car catch on fire. And he insists on leading the way into a burning building even though a damn roof could cave in.”

“Yeah. The first time we went to Vegas – it was our first real vacation without the girls – he did some gambling. Slots, blackjack, a little roulette … you know, the usual. ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ he kept on insisting. At first he won small and then big a few times. Ever since, he’s gotten more heavily into gambling. He doesn’t know I know, of course. ‘It’s only like ten, twenty dollars at a time,’ he’d tell me. But now it’s a lot more, a hell of a lot more. There’ve been some months we couldn’t pay the mortgage – yeah, he’d make up some kind of lame excuse – but it was me who’d have to go and ask my mother for help. Do you know how that feels? Do you have any idea?”

“I tried to talk sense to him. He wouldn’t listen, of course. But I’ve since learned that gambling’s an addiction, a disease, and that he won’t begin to fight it until he hits rock bottom. Meanwhile, I’m really afraid, you know, about his losing his job, then our losing the house, and so on and fucking so on.”

“And it’s all wrapped up together with Megan’s problems and Caitlin’s problems and my own disillusionment and his being an ex-football star and his crappy dead-end job and his whole life, which he thinks is going right down the toilet.”

“The damn fire department and the gambling – it’s risk-taking, multiplied, squared. And I really can’t blame him. If I were him, I’d probably be doing the same damn thing.”

“He either turns me off, or says ‘That’s what guys do’ or ‘It is what it is.’ And how can I possibly argue about his saving lives and serving the damn community?”

Catherine wiped away a tear. “But who am I? That’s what I want to know. Who the fuck am I? And when do I get to be me? When is it my turn? When do I get what I want? Damn it to hell! I’m so damn angry … and confused.”

Jason wanted to hold her and comfort her. Close up, in the harsh orange glow, he noticed the wrinkles under her makeup, the crows-feet at her eyes, the skin aged by smoking. But at that moment, she had that same look that she had more than twenty five years before, when he worshiped her from afar. The very same look that made him want to possess her, to devour her, to love her for all time.

As he reached over for her, and as he pulled her closer, and as he drew her face close to his, and as their lips began to meet, he was suddenly assailed by the odor that clung to her: of cheap perfume over stale smoke and aspirated alcohol.

He pulled away. He willed himself to not show his disgust, and then he said, “I can’t do this, Catherine. I just can’t do this.”

“Yes I did … I wanted to. But now I just … can’t ... I don’t know what it is.”

He could not possibly tell her the truth: that she reeked and that he was repulsed and disgusted. And it wasn’t just the smell. It was her whole essence, her entire compendium of unsolvable problems. He just didn’t want to be part of the crises and the maelstrom that enveloped her life.

“Listen, Cath. This isn’t such a good idea.” He receded back into his bucket seat. “I thought that things could be different. I thought I could love you and make love to you. You know … somehow be with you ...”

She stared into his eyes, and then gently placed two fingers on his lips. “You don’t have to say anything more.”

She got out of his car and closed the door behind her. She climbed into her minivan, started it up, lit a cigarette, and then drove away. Jason watched in the rearview mirror as she made the turn from the parking lot back out onto Lakeview Road.

He turned on the ignition, and switched on the air conditioner to full blast. And then after a while, he, too, drove away.

He raised the volume up on the radio. Eric Clapton was singing “Layla” – I tried to give you consolation / When your old man had let you down … Jason sadly shook his head and hit the FM/AM switch to tune back to the all-sports station. And when he stopped for the light at the intersection where the four gas stations were located, he suddenly remembered his wedding ring. He took it out of his sweatshirt pocket and slid it onto his finger.

It took a week of driving with his windows wide open for the residual smokiness and the smell of her to dissipate. But he still found himself driving by her home, sometimes stopping, hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of her.

Rev 9 / February 22, 2007 .. Rev 15 / January 21, 2012

Up to the beginning of the story

January 2012…Copyright © 2012, Lloyd B. Abrams

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