Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [1]
In fact for a while there I imagined I might outdistance him, but his hold on me was very tight and he stayed beside me. His feet slapped the pavement steadily, unhurried. While I myself was gasping for air, my handbag thumping against my hipbone, loafers squelching water, and by the third block it seemed that some sharp-edged mainspring had snapped loose inside my chest. I slowed down.
“Keep going,” he said.
“I can’t.”
We were in front of Forman’s Grocery, comfortable Forman’s Grocery with its tissue-wrapped pears. I stopped and turned to him. It was a shock. I had been building this picture of him in my mind, somebody evil-faced, but he was just ordinary, calm-looking, with a tousle of oily black hair and black-rimmed, pale gray eyes. His eyes were level with mine; he was short, for a man. No taller than I was. And much younger. I took heart.
“Well,” I said, panting, “this is where I get off, I guess.” Something clicked on his gun.
We ran on.
Down Edmonds Street, past old Mr. Linthicum, who’d been placed on his stoop as always, rain or shine, by his daughter-in-law. But Mr. Linthicum only smiled, and had long ago stopped talking anyway, so there was no hope there. Down Trapp Street, past my aunt’s brown duplex with the wooden eyelet lace dripping from all the eaves. Only she would be inside now, watching “Days of Our Lives.” A sharp left down an alley I hadn’t known existed, then left again, dodging under somebody’s stilt-legged porch, where once, I believe, I played as a child, with a girl called Sis or Sissy, but I hadn’t thought of her in years. Then across the gravel road by the lumberyard—does it have a name?—and up another alley. In the alleys it was raining, though elsewhere the rain had stopped. We were traveling a corridor of private weather. I had lost all feeling and seemed to be running motionless, the way you do in dreams.
Then, “Here,” he said.
We were facing the rear of a low, dingy building, buckling clapboard in a sea of weeds and potato chip cartons. Not a place I liked the looks of. “Head around front,” he told me.
“But—”
“Do like I say.”
I tripped over a mustard jar big enough to pickle a baby in.
Then think how I felt when we reached the front and I saw that it was Libby’s Grill—only Libby’s. Which was also the local pinball joint and bus depot. It’s true that I wasn’t exactly known there (I couldn’t afford to eat out, didn’t play pinball, never traveled), but at least it was public, and there was a good chance someone inside might recognize me. I walked in the door as straight as possible. I looked all around the room. But there was just a stranger drinking coffee at the counter, and the waitress was nobody I’d seen before.
“When’s the bus leave?” the bank robber asked her.
“What bus?”
“Next one.”
She looked at a wristwatch that was safety-pinned to her bosom. “Five minutes back,” she said. “He’s late as ever.”
“Well, me and her want two tickets to the end of the line.”
“Round trip?”
“One way.”
She went over to a drawer, pulled out two ribbons of tickets, and started whacking at them with a set of rubber stamps that stood beside the percolator. Now, surely people didn’t come in every day asking for tickets to the end of the line, wherever it was, on the next bus going out. And surely she didn’t often see a woman draggly-haired, out of breath, about to collapse from running too hard, accompanied by a stranger all in black. (For even his jeans were black, I saw now, even his sneakers—everything but his startling, white, out-of-place shirt.) Wouldn’t you think she would give us at least a glance? But no, she kept her eyes down, her chin tucked into her other chins, even when accepting the money he laid on the