South of the Big Four by Don Kurtz

Author:Don Kurtz [Don Kurtz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 1995-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-nine

“She was just unhappy,” Annie told me later that same night. “Anybody could have seen that.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. It seemed like a judgment on Byron, so I found the best defense I could. “Lots of people are unhappy.”

Annie shook her head. “A pretty girl like that, with no kind of life, no wonder she run off. You don’t know. You just don’t know, Arthur. When love’s gone, it just ain’t right,”

We lay once more in a shabby bed at the Frontier, where Annie’d insisted on us going up to meet. I don’t know what kind of excuse she’d used at work, but it was enough to spring her free for a couple of hours. The phone had been ringing when I got home from the airport, telling me to meet her there at eight. She had a boy at home with an earache, and an alarm clock already set for four-thirty, but still she lingered, while I rubbed the back of her neck.

“My kids aren’t gonna live that way. I’m gonna make sure of that. They’re gonna know there’s things to do.”

I guess I should have been agreeing more enthusiastically, because Annie sprang up then, climbing to her knees beside me.

“Are you there?” she demanded. “Are you listening to what I say?” She’d thrown one leg over to straddle me, and banged her fist into my chest in frustration. “I just don’t know you sometimes. Don’t you understand that I love you? Can’t you hear me?”

“I got ears.”

“Then use them. I love you. It’s you that I love. I love you more than anything else in the world.”

Annie had pinned me down, black eyes aiming in at me over that pointed little nose like it was a rifle sight. Her fingers were wrapped into my chest hair, her own Annie-breath was in my face. It’s funny how at a time like that almost anything else in the world can catch your attention—a card with directions for Plymouth cable set in plastic above the TV set, a whine of country-western from the room next door, the dark stain of water damage on the ceiling high above. Her fingers tightened, and I met those eyes finally, beginning to fill as her hands slowly relaxed.

“It’s just that I love you,” she said, “I really, really do.”

“I believe you,” is what I said.

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