Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [107]
“Who is that?” Marilyn said to him the next morning. She’d just come in from the garage, still in her nightgown. Chip, now four years old, was fast asleep.
He took a last sip of coffee. “Susan Hayes. She’s a new lab technician.”
“What’s she doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s sitting in your car.”
“I’m giving her a ride to work.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“A ride or a car?”
“Either.”
Marilyn crossed her arms. “Is she getting one?”
“I have no idea.”
Marilyn shook her head in amazement. “Should we expect her tomorrow then?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Marilyn waited. There was only one thing to say in response, but for years now she’d been unwilling to.
“I have to go,” he said.
He got into his car. Again, Susan didn’t acknowledge him. No smile, no hello, not even a nod. Yet Sheppard found himself nodding at her impassively, as you do to someone taking the next seat on a bus or standing by an elevator. He turned his head, placing his hand behind Susan’s seat, and backed out of the garage.
“Was that your wife?” Susan said.
Startled, he had to stop at the end of the driveway to answer. “Yes.”
“She’s pretty.”
He said nothing. To answer would be to compare them, and in the strictest sense that wasn’t possible. When Susan didn’t continue, he drove on.
“She asked why I was in your car,” she said a few minutes later. “I told her you were giving me a lift to the hospital.”
Once again, Sheppard was driving so slowly that occasionally cars swerved around him.
“She told me you’d be late and that I should go on.”
When he turned left or right, his hands came together at the top of the wheel and then slid back, once he’d finished the manuever, to ten o’clock and two.
“I knew you weren’t going to be late.” She angled the side mirror toward her face and regarded herself. Satisfied, she readjusted it and sat forward. “So I said thanks and stayed right where I was.”
She was in control, Sheppard thought. Like Marilyn when they played tennis, Susan was dictating, and if he’d learned anything from that experience it was to realize that any effort on his part to wrest power from her would ruin everything. For two whole weeks she showed up in the garage. It was what he looked most forward to, opening the door and seeing her there, as much a part of the car as the wheels, as surprising as seeing a cat uncurl itself from the front seat and scamper across the grass. He would open the door and look at her. She had a long, lovely neck; arched, haughty eyebrows; a small mouth to which she applied no lipstick, the upper lip on the verge, it always seemed, of a snarl. He walked toward her slowly so he could take in as much of her as possible before he entered that zone of silence, of blindness. Her hair, auburn and curly, was still damp at the neck from her shower; her upper lip freckled near the twin peaks by the philtrum. He took his seat, put the keys in the ignition, started the car, released the brake, pulled the stick to neutral, moved the gear shift from side to side once before dropping it into reverse, this last action allowing him to regard her hands. She had long fingers, thickly veined, the metacarpals as distinctly visible as the delicate fingers that stretched taut the wings of a bat.
“I can’t drive you home this evening,” he said, cutting the ignition. They were in the hospital parking lot. “I’m on call.”
“That’s lucky,” she said. “I am too.”
It was a Wednesday.