Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [8]
“Look,” he told me. “It ain’t me keeping you, it’s them. If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways, and believe me, lady, there ain’t nothing I’d like better. But now they have my name, see, and will track me down, and I need you for protection till I get to safety. Understand?”
We went to another bar, as dark as the first but with some customers in it. This time we sat at a little wooden table in the corner. “Now let me think. Just let me think,” he told me, although I hadn’t said a word. Then he gave his order to the waitress: “One Jack Daniel’s neat, one Pabst. Couple bags of pretzels.” I decided not to drink the Pabst because of the restroom problem. I folded my arms on the table and craned my neck to see the TV—this one in color, a man reeling off the weather. Meanwhile, Jake Simms set my purse on the table between us. “What you got in here?” he asked me.
“Pardon?”
“Any weapons?”
“Any—no!”
He undid the catch and opened it. He pulled out my billfold, frayed and curling. Inside was a pathetic bit of paper money. Small change and bobbypins. A library card. He glanced at it. “Charlotte Emory,” he said. He studied a photo of me holding Selinda, back when she was a baby. Then he looked into my face. I knew what he was thinking: lately I had let myself go. However, he didn’t comment on it.
He pulled out a rubber-banded stack of grocery coupons, which made him snort; a pack of tissues, an unclean hairbrush, and a pair of nail scissors. He tested the point of the scissors with his thumb and then looked at me. I was still focused on the hairbrush; it had disgraced me. I didn’t connect. “No weapons, huh,” he said.
“What?”
The waitress brought our order and presented him with the bill. While he was rummaging in his pocket I sent her silent messages: Doesn’t this look odd to you, this man emptying out a lady’s purse? Don’t we make a strange couple? Shouldn’t you be mentioning this to someone? The waitress merely stood there, gazing dreamily into the marbled mirror above us and holding out her little plastic change tray.
When she had left, Jake Simms dropped the scissors under the table and gave them a kick. I heard them scuttle across the floor. Then he reached into my purse again. This time it was a paperback—my Survival Book, worn to shreds. How to get along in the desert. He frowned. Turned the purse upside down, shook it—and out clattered something shiny which he trapped immediately. “What’s this?” he said, holding it up.
Oh, Lord, my badge. Little tin badge, shield-shaped, like something official or military. “I’ll take that,” I told him.
He looked suspicious.
“Can I have it, please?”
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s just a—like a lucky piece or something. Can I have it?”
He squinted at the writing across its face. “Keep on truckin’?” he said.
“I believe it’s from a cereal box.”
“Kind of trashy, for a lucky piece.”
“Well, it’s just from a box of … something or other, what does it matter?” I asked him. “Most lucky pieces are trashy. Rabbits’ feet, two-headed pennies … I found it in a cereal box while I was eating lunch today. I think it’s some kind of popular saying. I was going to throw it out except—oh, you know how your mind works. I took it as a sign. Not seriously, of course. I just thought, what if this was trying to tell me something? Like to get on the road, not sit around any longer, take some action.”
“Now, how’d you come to that meaning?” he said.
“I thought it was a sign to leave my husband,” I said.
There was a silence.
I asked, “Could I have my badge back?”
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You were leaving your husband.”
“Well, you know …”
I held out my hand for the badge. He ignored it. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Things’ve finally started going my way.”
“What?”
“And here I was cursing my luck! Thinking I had put