The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [28]
“Don’t you get lonely?” Caroline asked, thinking of herself on a usual night, sitting alone in her apartment in the evening. She couldn’t believe she was here, talking so intimately with a stranger. It was odd but thrilling too, like confiding in a person you met on a train or a bus.
“Oh, some,” he admitted. “It’s lonely work, sure. But just as often I get to meet someone unexpected. Like tonight.”
It was warm in the cab, and Caroline felt herself giving in to it, settling back on the high comfortable seat. Snow still sputtered in the streetlights. Her car stood in the middle of the parking lot, a lone dark shape, brushed with snow.
“Where were you heading?” he asked her.
“Just to Lexington. There was a wreck on the interstate a few miles back. I thought I’d save myself some time and trouble.”
His face was lit softly by the streetlight and he smiled. To her surprise, so did Caroline, and then they were both laughing.
“The best-laid plans,” he said.
Caroline nodded.
“Look,” he said, after a silence. “If it’s only Lexington we’re talking about, I could give you a lift. I might as well park the rig there as here. Tomorrow—well, tomorrow’s Sunday, isn’t it? But on Monday, first thing, you can call a towing service about your car. It’ll be safe here, that’s for sure.”
Light from the streetlamp was falling across Phoebe’s tiny face. He reached over and gently, gently, stroked her forehead with his large hand. Caroline liked his awkwardness, his calmness.
“All right,” she decided. “If it doesn’t put you out.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Hell, no. Excuse my French. Lexington is on my way.”
He collected the rest of the things from her car, the grocery sacks and blankets. His name was Al, Albert Simpson. He groped on the floor and found an extra cup beneath the seat. This he wiped out carefully with a handkerchief before he poured her coffee from his thermos. She drank, glad it was dark, glad for the warmth and the company of someone who didn’t know a thing about her. She felt safe and strangely happy, though the air was stale and smelled of dirty socks, and a baby that did not belong to her lay sleeping on her lap. As he drove, Al talked, telling her stories of his life on the road, truck stops with showers and the miles sliding beneath the wheels as he pushed through one night after another.
Lulled by the hum of the tires, by the warmth and the snow rushing in the headlights, Caroline half drifted into sleep. When they pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex, the trailer took five spaces. Al got out to help her down and left the truck idling while he carried her things up the exterior stairs. Caroline followed, Phoebe in her arms. A curtain flashed in a lower window—Lucy Martin, spying as usual—and Caroline paused, overcome for an instant by something like vertigo. For everything was just the same, but surely she was not the same woman who had left here in the middle of the previous night, wading through the snow to her car. Surely she had been transformed so completely that she should walk into different rooms, different light. Yet her familiar key slid into the lock, catching in the usual place. When the door swung open, she carried Phoebe into a room she knew by heart: the durable dark-brown carpet, the plaid sofa and chair she had gotten on sale, the glass-topped coffee table, the novel she’d been reading before bed—Crime and Punishment—neatly marked. She had left Raskolnikov confessing to Sonya, had dreamed of them in their cold garret, and had woken to the phone ringing and to snow filling the streets.
Al hovered awkwardly, filling up the doorway. He could be a serial killer, or a rapist, or a con man. He could be anything at all.
“I have a sofa bed,” she said. “You’re welcome to use it tonight.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped inside.
“What about your husband?” he asked, looking around.
“I don’t have a husband,” she said, then realized her mistake. “Not anymore.”
He studied her, standing with his wool hat in his hand, surprising dark curls sticking