Just After Sunset(11)

"Em! How are you?"

That should have been a complex question, but wasn't. "I'm fine, Dad. But I'm in the Morris Hotel. I guess I've left Henry."

"Permanently or just a kind of trial balloon?" He didn't sound surprised-he took things in stride; she loved that about him-but the sound of the revving motors first faded, then disappeared. She imagined him going into his office, closing the door, perhaps picking up the picture of her that stood on his cluttered desk.

"Can't say yet. Right now it doesn't look too good."

"What was it about?"

"Running."

"Running?"

She sighed. "Not really. You know how sometimes a thing is about something else? Or a whole bunch of something elses?"

"The baby." Her father had not called her Amy since the crib death. Now it was always just the baby.

"And the way I'm handling it. Which is not the way Henry wants me to. It occurred to me that I'd like to handle things in my own way."

"Henry's a good man," her father said, "but he has a way of seeing things. No doubt."

She waited.

"What can I do?"

She told him. He agreed. She knew he would, but not until he heard her all the way out. The hearing out was the most important part, and Rusty Jackson was good at it. He hadn't risen from one of three mechanics in the motor pool to maybe one of the four most important people at the Tallahassee campus (and she hadn't heard that from him; he'd never say something like that to her or anyone else) by not listening.

"I'll send Mariette in to clean the house," he said.

"Dad, you don't need to do that. I can clean."

"I want to," he said. "A total top-to-bottom is overdue. Damn place has been closed up for almost a year. I don't get down to Vermillion much since your mother died. Seems like I can always find some more to do up here."

Em's mother was no longer Debra to him, either. Since the funeral (ovarian cancer), she was just your mother.

Em almost said, Are you sure you don't mind this? but that was the kind of thing you said when a stranger offered to do you a favor. Or a different kind of father.

"You going there to run?" he asked. She could hear a smile in his voice. "There's plenty of beach to run on, and a good long stretch of road, too. As you well know. And you won't have to elbow people out of your way. Between now and October, Vermillion is as quiet as it ever gets."

"I'm going there to think. And-I guess-to finish mourning."

"That's all right, then," he said. "Want me to book your flight?"

"I can do that."

"Sure you can. Emmy, are you okay?"

"Yes," she said.

"You sound like you might be crying."

"A little bit," she said, and wiped her face. "It all happened very fast." Like Amy's death, she could have added. She had done it like a little lady; never a peep from the baby monitor. Leave quietly, don't slam the door, Em's own mother often said when Em was a teenager.

"Henry won't come there to the hotel and bother you, will he?"

She heard a faint, delicate hesitation before he chose bother, and smiled in spite of her tears, which had pretty well run their course, anyway. "If you're asking if he's going to come and beat me up...that's not his style."

"A man sometimes finds a different style when his wife up and leaves him-just takes off running."

"Not Henry," she said. "He's not a man to cause trouble."

"You sure you don't want to come to Tallahassee first?"

She hesitated. Part of her did, but-

"I need a little time on my own. Before anything else." And she repeated, "All this happened very fast." Although she suspected it had been building for quite some time. It might even have been in the DNA of the marriage.

"All right. Love you, Emmy."

"Love you, too, Dad. Thank you." She swallowed. "So much."

Henry didn't cause trouble. Henry didn't even ask where she was calling from. Henry said, "Maybe you're not the only one who needs a little time apart. Maybe this is for the best."

She resisted an urge-it struck her as both normal and absurd-to thank him. Silence seemed like the best option. What he said next made her glad she'd chosen it.

"Who'd you call for help? The Motor-Pool King?"

This time the urge she resisted was to ask if he'd called his mother yet. Tit for tat never solved anything.

She said-evenly, she hoped: "I'm going to Vermillion Key. My dad's place there."

"The conch shack." She could almost hear him sniff. Like Ho Hos and Twinkies, houses with only three rooms and no garage were not a part of Henry's belief system.

Em said, "I'll call you when I get there."

A long silence. She imagined him in the kitchen, head leaning against the wall, hand gripping the handset of the phone tight enough to turn his knuckles white, fighting to reject anger. Because of the six mostly good years they'd had together. She hoped he would make it. If that was indeed what was going on.

When he spoke next, he sounded calm but tired out. "Got your credit cards?"