Trust Exercise(84)
* * *
BUT BEFORE THAT, the day she’d stood sightlessly grasping the comedy/tragedy mask in the hot parking lot—
—at last she understood she must retrace her steps, and going back in and down the main hall, she reentered the office, where it seemed everyone had gone out for their lunch but a dumpy and aged old woman who hadn’t been there before. “Just returning this,” Claire said, proffering the guest pass. The woman jerked back as if frightened.
“My God,” said the woman, whose name tag read “Velva.” “Sweet Jesus. Come closer to me.”
As if in a dream Claire stepped close and the old woman hauled herself onto her feet. She reached a leathery hand to Claire’s cheek. “Why, you must be more than twenty years old.” Her breathy wonder repulsed Claire, frozen under her touch.
“Twenty-five.”
“That’s right,” said Velva in triumph. She sank back in her chair, her gaze feasting on Claire. “What did they name you, sweetheart?”
It was such a strange question! “I’m Claire,” Claire said brusquely and dropping the pass on the desktop went out, the right way this time, to the parking lot holding her car, the door and the key and the pedals of which she attacked with more force than required, leaving the gray stones of that building so far in her wake that it was only when the building was gone, the people she’d met in it dead, Robert Lord’s name given then taken away from the fancy new building expressing his vision that she understood why that old woman had stared in that way all those years ago now.
Are we still recognized if seen by the wrong eyes?
But by then it was too late to go back and say, “Tell me her name.”