Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [136]
It turned out that he didn't need to worry about it. After awhile the silence and that queer atmosphere of suspension which always seemed to possess Tashmore Lake when fall had finally come and the summer people had finally gone began to work on him, loosening him up like gently kneading hands. But now he had something besides John Shooter to think about; he had Amy to think about as well.
'Of course I'm all right,' he'd said, speaking as carefully as a drunk trying to convince people that he's sober. In truth, he was still so muzzy that he felt a little bit drunk. The shapes of words felt too big in his mouth, like chunks of soft, friable rock, and he had proceeded with great care, groping his way through the opening formalities and gambits of telephone conversation as if for the first time. 'How are you?'
'Oh, fine, I'm fine,' she said, and then trilled the quick little laugh which usually meant she was either flirting or nervous as hell, and Mort doubted that she was flirting with him - not at this point. The realization that she was nervous, too, set him a little more at ease. 'It's just that you're alone down there, and almost anything could happen and nobody would know - ' She broke off abruptly.
'I'm really not alone,' he said mildly. 'Mrs Gavin was here today and Greg Carstairs is always around.'
'Oh, I forgot about the roof repairs,' Amy said, and for a moment he marvelled at how natural they sounded, how natural and undivorced. Listening to us, Mort thought, you'd never guess there's a rogue real-estate agent in my bed ... or what used to be my bed. He waited for the anger to come back - the hurt, jealous, cheated anger - but only a ghost stirred where those lively if unpleasant feelings had been.
'Well, Greg didn't forget,' he assured her. 'He came down yesterday and crawled around on the roof for an hour and a half.'
'How bad is it?'
He told her, and they talked about the roof for the next five minutes or so, while Mort slowly woke up; they talked about that old roof as if things were just the same as they always had been, talked about it as if they would be spending next summer under the new cedar shingles just as they had spent the last nine summers under the old cedar shingles. Mort thought: Gimme a roof, gimme some shingles, and I'll talk to this bitch forever.
As he listened to himself holding up his side of the conversation, he felt a deepening sense of unreality settling in. It felt as if he were returning to the half-waking, half-sleeping zombie state in which he had answered the phone, and at last he couldn't stand it anymore. If this was some sort of contest to see who could go the longest pretending that the last six months had never happened, then he was willing to concede. More than willing.
She was asking where Greg was going to get the cedar shakes and if he would be using a crew from town when Mort broke in. 'Why did you call, Amy?'
There was a moment's silence in which he sensed her trying on responses and then rejecting them, like a woman trying on hats, and that did cause the anger to stir again. It was one of the things - one of the few things, actually - that he could honestly say he detested in her. That totally unconscious duplicity.
'I told you why,' she said at last. 'To see if you were all right.' She sounded flustered and unsure of herself again, and that usually meant she was telling the truth. When Amy lied, she always sounded as if she was telling you the world was round. 'I had one of my feelings - I know you don't believe in them, but I think you do know that I get them, and that I believe in them ... don't you, Mort?' There was none of her usual posturing or defensive anger,