Sunburn: A Novel(45)

She’s mentioned that they could stop using condoms, but he keeps using them. She’s insulted, suspicious. “I can go on the Pill, it’s 99 percent.” He says only, “I don’t think birth control pills are good for women. I won’t tell you what to do with your body, but you should rethink all those hormones.” God, he sounds like his own mother, but the world finally caught up with her, didn’t it? A free spirit who may or may not have had a fling with Neal Cassady, Lillian Bosk would now blend in comfortably with most suburban moms. Adam grew up eating good food, admiring his mother’s painting, listening to his father play tenor sax. Work to live, don’t live to work, that was his parents’ motto.

And yet their son has somehow ended up putting in fourteen-hour days in a roadside Delaware restaurant, whose main distinction is that it’s too good for most of the people who eat there, but not good enough to get people to drive up from Salisbury or down from Wilmington. What’s he going to do, get a Michelin star in Belleville, Delaware? There was a reason he left cooking behind after that season on the yacht. PI work also has its fourteen-hour days, but it pays much better. Then there are the long fallow seasons when he travels. He should be in New Zealand or Argentina right now, watching the world edge into spring instead of fall.

He should be alone. Except he can no longer imagine being any place without Polly and this seems to be where she wants to be.

He argues in his head: There’s no money, Irving. There can’t possibly be any money. No one with money would be here, in Belleville, in this garage apartment she found a week ago.

She seems to love it.

But would someone kill to keep this life? Did she kill Cath?

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, he says to his own thoughts, then reaches for her hand.

“Did you say something?” he asks. He’s not even sure if she’s still awake.

When she replies, her voice is clear and measured, not the least bit sleepy. But also without the edge that most women use when asked to repeat themselves. She is capable of a stillness he has never found in another woman. Stillness. He thinks about hunting. Deer season will be starting soon. Do they have deer in Delaware? Is there a place for him to go and sit in a tree with his bow and arrow? Is there time? Tonight at work, doodling on a pad, he found himself sketching a stick figure being pulled underwater by an anchor. The anchor is the High-Ho. The anchor is this town, this life. But not Polly, unless—

“I asked what you were thinking about.”

“Rice,” he says.





26


Polly asks Adam to borrow his truck. Doesn’t say why, doesn’t offer to tell him where she’s going. Let him show some curiosity, she has answers ready if he wants them. But he doesn’t ask. He’s terrified to ask her anything, she realizes. He can barely ask her, How are you? or, when they’re eating breakfast, Could you pass the butter?

He thinks she straight-up murdered Cath. Fine. Yet he alibied her, agreed she had been at his door by midnight—which she was, give or take. She didn’t ask him to. Didn’t need him to. That’s his problem. She has her own problems. Which is why she needs his truck.

She’s working six days a week, but her pocketbook would be hurting if she and Adam weren’t splitting expenses on the garage apartment. Adam never seems to worry about money, though. That must be nice. Polly wonders if people who don’t worry about money can ever understand what it’s like, fretting over every dollar that leaves your hands. Even if they used to know those circumstances, they forget so quickly. It’s like being hungry. You can’t really remember it when you have enough food, you can’t will yourself to feel it. You’re hungry or you’re not. You’re poor or you’re not. Today, for example, Polly has to think about how much gas his truck has, if she can afford to fill it, or at least buy a few gallons of gas after the trip.

Adam being Adam, he gives her the truck with a full tank, kisses her, and remembers to ask, “You going to be okay, going across the bridge?”

“I’m going up to Dover.”

He doesn’t ask why. She has a lie ready if he does. She’s going to say she’s taking her driver’s exam, that she still has a birth certificate that identifies her as Polly Costello, so she should be able to do it pretty simply. A lie on so many levels, one he’ll see through—where’d she get her birth certificate if she lost everything in the fire?—and, again, one she has an answer for. Oh, you can write to the State of Maryland and request a copy. Of course, she can’t become Polly Costello again until she divorces Gregg. Even then, it’s not automatic. She’s going to have to go through the Social Security Administration to get her own name back. But Adam doesn’t know all that.

Adam, true to form, isn’t asking her any questions.

He does say, “You’re getting an awfully early start.”

It’s only six, barely light at this time of year.

“The early bird gets the worm. Place opens at eight, but I want to stop for breakfast.”

*

She’s in Baltimore by 8:15 waiting near the corner of Harford Road, hoping that Gregg won’t notice the big pickup at the curb. Gregg doesn’t notice much. He’s the kind of guy who can’t tell when a woman has an orgasm. And not because the woman’s faking it, all When Harry Met Sally style. Gregg assumes it’s happening and, if it’s not, then it’s not his problem. He thought their sex life was great. It was. For him.