Red - Jack Ketchum [40]
How he sleeps nights as well as he does.
And she wonders about this obsession of his.
This thing. This woman.
TWENTY
Genevieve sat at the end of Vance & Eddie’s bar farthest from the door nursing her second Dewars rocks of the evening and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis croon I ONLY WANT A BUDDY NOT A SWEETHEART and rattle that ol’ piana against a Dixieland band while the on the TV Giada De Laurentiis constructed some sort of pasta dish with a cream of sweet potato sauce and broiled shrimp. Which looked quite tasty.
The bar was pretty dead tonight. A handful of local businessmen up front and only she and Ginger among the regulars. She didn’t really get along with Ginger — a stringy ash blonde whose sole passions seemed to be clothes-and-shoe-shopping and local businessmen — the second of which passions she was indulging at the moment. Andrew, the bartender, she did get along with and glad of the company when he walked over.
“Care for something to soak that up, Genevieve? Mussels are fine tonight.”
“I’ll just take some fries and mayo, thanks.”
“One trip to Europe and you’re eatin’ like a frog?”
“Ribbet.”
He called in the order.
“Your little charges giving you heartaches again? You’re frowning, my dear. Bad form in a bar.”
She hadn’t been aware of it.
“They’re not so bad.”
“Boys still checking out that cute butt of yours?”
“I took a shot at dressing more or less like a nun. But nothing seems to work.”
“You should be glad it doesn’t. Keeps them interested.”
“Right. But interested in what?”
“They have my complete and utter sympathy. I guarantee I wouldn’t be able to tell a triangle from a square if I was a kid and you were bending over your daily lesson plan.”
“Sweet, Andrew. You think if I told them which way I swing it would dampen things down a bit?”
“Honey, that’d only make it worse. What’s with the paper?”
She hadn’t been aware of fingering the note in front of her either.
“A phone number. Parents of one of my students. I’m pretty positive this girl is pregnant.”
“Ouch. So you’re telling the parents?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“That’s a toughy, Genevieve. Could make things worse for her.”
“You think so?”
“I’d say that nine times out of ten if they don’t know already and some outsider does know she’s gonna have hell to pay at the family hearth and home.”
“But it’s going to be very obvious very soon.”
He shrugged. “Hey, it’s your call. My dad always told me not to try and change a woman’s mind once she’s set on something. Think I’ll heed the old man on this one.”
Down the bar Ginger held up her empty wineglass and he moved away.
She sipped her scotch and considered.
She’d left her cell phone in her desk at school again. Maybe that was a sign.
And maybe not.
Andrew was right, she knew, to think this might be a mistake. It amounted to interfering. But she wished back then and still did that somebody had interfered with Dorothy, a gifted pianist and her first lover — their brief high school affair an experiment for both of them. Dorothy had gone off to college with a double major in music and psychology only to get herself pregnant by her music teacher, who then got scared of fucking a student and dumped her.
Dorothy was just then showing according to what she heard, when they found her naked, face-up on the floor of her dormitory bathroom.
Her wrists slashed the right way.
She heard the ding of the call bell behind her and knew that would be her french fries but by then she was already on the move toward the pay phone by the rest rooms in back, paper in hand.
~ * ~
“Ah, hell,” her father said. “Never fails at dinnertime. Peg, you want to go see who that is?”
She got up from her chair and walked down the hall to the phone and waited for the answering machine to kick in.
Hello, was what she heard. This is Genevieve Raton and this message is for Mr. or Mrs. Cleek. Peggy is a student in my geometry cl…
She cut off the message. Deleted