She Loves Me Not by Ron Hansen

Author:Ron Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Can I Just Sit Here for a While?

He was called a traveler, and that was another thing he loved about the job. If you wanted the hairy truth, Rick Bozack couldn’t put his finger on any one thing that made his job such a clincher. It might have been his expense account or the showroom smell of his leased Oldsmobile or the motel rooms—God, the motel rooms: twin double beds, a stainless-steel Kleenex dispenser, and a bolted-down color TV topped with cellophane-wrapped peppermints that the maid left after she cleaned. He loved the coffee thermos the waitress banged down on his table at breakfast, he loved the sweat on his ice-water glass, he loved the spill stains blotting through the turned-over check, and he loved leaving tips of twenty percent even when the girl was slow and sullen and splashed coffee on his newspaper. His sales, his work, his vocation, that was all bonus. The waiting, the handshakes, the lunches, the Close, jeepers, that was just icing.

If you asked Rick Bozack what he did for a living, he wouldn’t come out with a song and dance about selling expensive incubators and heart and kidney machines for Doctor’s Service Supply Company, Indianapolis. Not off the top of his head he wouldn’t. Instead he’d flash on a motel lobby with all the salesmen in their sharp, tailored suits, chewing sugarless gum, while the sweet thing behind the counter rammed a roller over a plastic credit card and aftershaves mixed in the air. It was goofy when he thought about it, but walking out through those fingerprinted glass doors, throwing his briefcase onto the red bucket seat, scraping the ice off the windshield, and seeing all those other guys out there in the parking lot with him, scowling, chipping away at their wipers, blowing on their fingers, sliding their heater control to defrost, Rick felt like a team player again, like he was part of a fighter squadron.

What was this Death of a Salesman crap? he’d say. What were they feeding everybody about the hard life on the road? You’d have to be zonkers not to love it.

Then Rick had a real turnaround. A college buddy said something that really clobbered him. Rick and his wife, Jane, had returned to South Bend, his home, for the Notre Dame alumni picnic, where they collided with people they hadn’t even thought of in years. They sat all night at a green picnic table with baked beans and hot dogs and beer, laughing so much that their sides hurt, having a whale of a time. They swapped pictures of their kids, and Rick drew a diagram of an invention he might go ahead and get patented, a device that would rinse out messy diapers for daddies right there in the toilet bowl. He told all comers that he was thirty-four years old and happily married, the father of two girls, and he woke up every morning with a sapsucker grin on his face. Then Mickey Hogan,

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