Stay Gone Days by Steve Yarbrough

Author:Steve Yarbrough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing

EARLY MARCH OF ’91: THE BERLIN WALL for sale in tiny chunks at souvenir shops, Saddam swiftly chastened, the nation riding high, unaware that in a matter of months the economy will enter a downward spiral culminating in the defeat of a president whose approval rating at the moment is 89 percent. Caroline doesn’t see the crash coming either. Her own crash came long ago and has been maintained, to one degree or another, in the interim. She’s had better times and worse. She’s sung for her supper, her lunch, and her breakfast, though she’s only performed for the morning meal once, and that happened earlier today, after she spent the night in a luxury hotel on Newbury Street with a man she’d met in a bar. He was in Boston on business, he’d said. To prove it, he handed her a card. Bingo, whispered a little voice in her head. She’d landed on a stool beside a literary agent. She knew the name of the outfit he worked for, one of the big talent agencies that represented novelists, journalists, screenwriters, even actors and directors. She let him buy her three Manhattans while he consumed four big Glenlivets. Things went the way they sometimes do, except that last night he couldn’t finish and they had to wait until morning. He was about her age, maybe a year or two younger, sweet, well-behaved. After breakfast, when they said goodbye outside in light snow, he kissed her cheek and told her to keep him in mind when she finished that novel they’d discussed. There was, of course, no novel, except the one she’d invented at the bar. Halfway through her spiel, she realized it would not be a bad book if she could actually write it.

She tromped back to the fleabag where she’d left her stuff, picked up her duffel and asked the stale-smelling guy at the front desk if he could call a taxi. He didn’t even look at her, advising her to go outside and wave one down. Knowing that she was about to commit an act of some extravagance, she climbed into the cab and gave the driver an address. Her flight out of Logan, half the price of one from JFK, was not until nine that night. Even allowing for the need to arrive early, there were eight hours to kill and she’d decided last week how to waste them. Martin Summers, CPA and record producer, had not been hard to find. He lived in a little town named Cedar Park, a few miles from the center of Boston. She knew their home phone number but elected not to call ahead.

The driver, disinclined to converse, made sure she got the message by turning up the radio. He was listening to a sports call-in show, where guys who sounded like the hoodlums in The Friends of Eddie Coyle bitched about the Celtics’ free-throw shooting. As he drove north on I-93, the snow began to fall harder.

When the cab left

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