Apology by Jon Pineda

Author:Jon Pineda [Pineda, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781571318923
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Elle knew there was a knife. It was hidden, used as a bookmark. The Bible, with its tattered leather cover and gilded onionskin pages, rested on the floor next to the couch.

“One time I scared my mom so good,” Elle said, biting her lip.

“Scared her?”

“Yeah, I tiptoed up to the window and then banged on the glass as hard as I could. She said I almost gave her a heart attack.”

Elle laughed and shook her head.

“Isn’t that funny?” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Why would you do that to your mother?” he said.

Her laughter trailed off. She smiled.

The man beside her was becoming someone else. It was almost too easy, the way it could occur. How he could stop being the kind man she had met in the bar, whom she had driven here in her car. The man she had allowed herself to be foolish in front of and not care how she appeared to him.

Maybe he wasn’t so different from the others.

It could be Joshua, her son’s father, sitting beside her now. If that were the case, Elle knew she would already have slipped the house key into the front door. She would have gone inside, stepping along quietly so as not to surprise her mother, and she would have reached down for the Bible and opened the book and found the knife hidden there and seen, before standing back up in the artificial glow, a line from Psalms. The one about the valley of the shadow of death. Her mother’s favorite. Elle would have used that knife to cut away every memory Joshua still had of her and their son.

Seeing again the stranger beside her, she leaned into him and said, “I’m sorry.” He did not respond with words. He nodded at the quiet surrounding the car. At the image of the woman’s mother asleep on the couch. The television continued to wash her body in bluish neon.

“You’re welcome to stay the night,” Elle said. “Or should I take you home?”

“I don’t care,” he said to her.

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