Roadwork - Stephen King [49]
"We're almost there?" she asked.
"Fifteen minutes."
"Listen, if I was hard on you-"
"No, I was hard on you. Listen, I've got nothing in particular to do. I'll take you around to Landy."
"No-"
"Or I'll stick you in the Holiday Inn for the night. No strings attached. Merry Christmas and all that."
"Are you really separated from your wife?"
"Yes. "
"And so recently?"
"Yes."
"Has she got your kids?"
"We have no kids." They were coming up on the tollbooths. Their green golights twinkled indifferently in the early twilight.
"Take me home with you, then."
"I don't have to do that. I mean, you don't have to-"
"I'd just as soon be with somebody tonight," she said. "And I don't like to hitchhike at night. It's scary."
He slid up to a tollbooth and rolled down his window, letting in cold air. He gave the toll taker his card and a dollar ninety. He pulled out slowly. They passed a reflectorized sign that said:
THANK YOU FOR DRIVING SAFELY!
"All right," he said cautiously. He knew he was probably wrong to keep trying to reassure her-probably achieving just the opposite effect-but he couldn't seem to help it. "Listen, it's just that the house is very lonely by myself. We can have supper, and then maybe watch TV and eat popcorn. You can have the upstairs bedroom and I'll-"
She laughed a little and he glanced at her as they went around the cloverleaf.
But she was hard to see now, a little indistinct. She could have been something he dreamed. The idea bothered him.
"Listen," she said. "I better tell you this right now. That drunk I was riding with? I spent the night with him. He was going on to Stilson, where you picked me up. That was his price."
He paused for the red light at the foot of the cloverleaf.
"My roommate told me it would be like that, but I didn't believe her. I wasn't going to fuck my way across the country, not me." She looked at him fleetingly, but he still couldn't read her face in the gloom. "But it's not people making you. It's being so disconnected from everything, like spacewalking. When you come into a big city and think of all the people in there, you want to cry. I don't know why, but you do. It gets so you'd spend the night picking some guy's bleeding pimples just to hear him breathe and talk."
"I don't care who you've been sleeping with, " he said and pulled out into traffic. Automatically he turned onto Grand Street, heading for home past the 784 construction.
"This salesman," she said. "He's been married fourteen years. He kept saying that while he was humping me. Fourteen years, Sharon, he keeps saying, fourteen years, fourteen years. He came in about fourteen seconds." She uttered short bark of laughter, rueful and sad.
"Is that your name? Sharon?"
"No. I guess that was his wife's name."
He pulled over to the curb.
"What are you doing?" she asked, instantly distrustful.
"Nothing much," he said. "This is part of going home. Get out, if you want. I'll show you something."
They got out and walked over to the observation platform, now deserted. He laid his bare hands on the cold iron pipe of the railing and looked down. They had been undercoating today, he saw. The last three working days they had put down gravel. Now undercoat. Deserted equipment-trucks and bulldozers and yellow backhoes-stood silently about in the shades of evening like a museum exhibit of dinosaurs. Here we have the vegetarian stegosaurus, the flesh-eating triceratops, the fearsome earth-munching diesel shovel. Bon appetit.
"What do you think of it?" he asked her.