Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith

Author:Michael Farris Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Crime, Fiction / Gothic, Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

26

SHE WASN’T TO THE END OF THE BLOCK BEFORE SHE WANTED IT back. God, she wanted it back. Couldn’t understand now why she had given it to him so forcibly. Without compassion. Couldn’t understand now why she had felt like she had to bring it with her at all. She stopped at the stop sign and looked over her shoulder. He was still sitting on the steps. Looking not at her but ahead. She realized now that it was much more than a ring. Much more than something she had kept buried in her underwear drawer for eleven years. Much more than something she had been careful to conceal when she moved in with a husband and careful to conceal when they moved from the smaller house to the larger house. More than white gold and a small diamond. She realized now as she sat at the stop sign and looked over her shoulder at him that the ring was much more. Something magical. Never too far away. That led through a doorway and to another life in another world with another man and as long as she had the ring there would be that possibility in her mind. That place to drift toward. Not a world that she could cross into and not a world she was certain she would cross into if given the choice but a world that was available to her to think about sometimes when she was alone.

And now she had taken that small and magical thing and delivered it to the man who was in the center of that other world and she knew that by leaving it with him this part of her life would disappear. She turned right and began to make her way toward her mother’s house. Stopping at the end of each street and telling herself to go back though she damn well knew that she couldn’t go back after she had only minutes ago declared to him that she couldn’t come back. Not even to ask him to give her back that precious thing.

She moved across town. Driving and thinking about how she felt as she saw the note lying on the floor yesterday morning. Near the front door in the same place that the mortgage and the electric bill and the Christmas cards and other evidence of their existence fell every day except Sunday. How she had known who it was from and what it said before she knelt and picked it up and how she had read it once, twice, five, eight times as she stood in the quiet of the house in the earliest light. How she had read it over and over and how she had looked out the wide, rectangular window in the front door and imagined what he looked like in the night as he walked up her sidewalk and up her front steps and across her porch and to the door and how she had imagined what he looked like as he

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