Killer Move - Michael Marshall [83]
“Doesn’t mean anything. Nick doesn’t.”
“I believe you,” I said, though I was not sure. When do these things ever mean nothing? However small, they mean something. You turn to face in a different direction from your loved one, however briefly, and when you look back, everything’s changed.
I don’t mind, Cassandra had said, in the dead of night.
“Love you,” Steph mumbled. Her eyes looked blurred.
“You too. Rest. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
She sort of nodded, but she was more than half asleep again.
I looked down at her, then set off toward the door. I had my hand out to open it when she spoke again.
“Remember breakfast at McDonald’s?”
I turned back. Her eyes were open again.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Of course I do, honey. That’s us. That’s who we are.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just looked sad.
I went back outside into air that was heavy and vile and waiting for what the clouds carried above. I drove back down the Tamiami Trail, and half a mile before I reached downtown I pulled over into the lot of a Chieftain grocery store. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I smoked a cigarette leaning against the back of the car. When I was done, I got out my phone and called Tony Thompson.
“It’s Bill Moore,” I said when he answered.
“Okay,” he said.
“You know that bottle of wine I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t drink it.”
“Okay,” he said again.
“You don’t sound surprised to be hearing from me, Mr. Thompson. You don’t sound surprised at what I just told you, either.”
“I think you and I need to talk,” he said.
Halfway back to The Breakers the skies opened. It rained so hard and so violently that the wipers couldn’t make any headway against it and I had to pull over. I sat listening to the hammering on the roof of the car and looking out through the rain into a world that was the color of wet twilight.
Stephanie and I met at college in Pennsylvania. We were not an obvious fit, and it was a while before we noticed each other. She came from money, kind of: she came from a place where it had once been, at any rate. Her father had been the CEO of some big-deal corporation that got fucked by the last recession, at which point he lost everything and his pile of stock options became worthless. He did not take it well. He drank. He fucked up. He eventually came back to the land of the living, but broken right down the middle. Some people can be happy making do, living some new and smaller story. This guy could not, and Stephanie had gone from having everything money could buy to being reminded every single day of what it did not, by a man who’d become one of the living dead. Meanwhile my own dad kept selling people paint, and the store made enough for the family to get by, but never a whole lot more than that.
Eventually our paths crossed at a party in our sophomore year. It was a slow build, unusual at a time and place where people hooked up at a moment’s notice and forgot each other twice as quickly. Initially we annoyed the hell out of each other, in fact, and we were too young to realize what this likely meant. Finally, drunk to hell at another kegfest in a beat-up house mutual friends shared on the edge of town, we got it.
We watched the dawn together from the backyard, shivering under the same blanket, holding hands. We walked back into town in gray light, and when it came time to part and go back to our separate houses I let her keep the blanket. She had it for a long time. She laid it on the bed on our wedding night, in fact. Maybe she still has it, though I have no idea where it would be.
We were together after that. In our final year Steph’s dad left her mom and Stephanie—left everything, in fact. He went out one day and never came back. Yes, people really do that. Six weeks later it was her birthday. The one thing her father had kept up after he stopped making much pretense at caring about anything else was Stephanie’s birthday. Throughout her teens he’d always make something big of it, and even in the first two years at college he and her mom would