The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [74]
“You can bring home anyone you like, you know.”
“So you can meet him at breakfast?”
“I suppose I could stand it if he can.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder,” she said.
“If he could stand it?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s funny.”
“What is?”
“All of this. The process of getting used to each other, I guess. If Mother had any idea. She already knew I wasn’t going back home for the summer. We had that out long ago. She didn’t quite say it, not in those words, but she’s glad I’m here where at least you can keep an eye on me.”
She had said it in precisely those words, to Hugh if not to Karen, but he had not reported on the conversation. Karen tended to make a game out of the two of them combining to deceive Anita, and he did not want to encourage this.
He was vaguely disappointed when she left. He picked up the detective story he had given up on the night before but it did not engage his interest. He tried other books with the same result. He was lonely, he realized, and restless. He could not sit still and his hands fidgeted with pipes and other small objects. He thought of Linda. “Give me a couple of days.” Yeah, he thought, but what about tonight? And smiled at the old joke, the inconsolable widower on the night of his wife’s funeral, the friend gently trying to ease his bereavement. “Time heals all wounds. In not too many months you’ll be over the shock, you’ll go out and socialize, you’ll meet a woman, in a year or two you’ll be married again.” “Yeah, but what about tonight?”
Well, what about tonight? He walked toward the bar then changed his mind. Drinking would fit his mood, but solitary drinking would be a bad idea. He had to be among people.
He drove the Buick across the bridge and parked across the street from a tavern in Lambertville. Liquor could not be sold in Pennsylvania on a Sunday; the old law was still on the books, although each year there was word it would be repealed. This was no great hardship for New Hope drinkers, given their access to taverns on the Jersey side, all of which consequently did almost as good volume Sundays as Saturdays. Several Lambertville restaurants would only sell drinks to dinner patrons on Sunday, but the bulk of the taverns had no such restriction.
Hugh ordered a scotch and soda and drank it at the bar. Two men a few stools away were discussing baseball, and neither seemed to be paying any attention to what the other said. One reminisced about the great Yankee teams of his youth while the other went on about what was wrong with the Phillies this season. Someone played a Tammy Wynette record on the jukebox. His restlessness did not dissipate. He stayed at the bar for half an hour, then left it and walked around the corner to another place. After two more drinks and a little less than an hour he was ready to get moving again. He bought a fresh pack of cigarettes from a machine, lit one, and walked out into the cool night air.
Yeah, but what about tonight?
He could go to Trenton. There were bars there where people on the prowl were apt to run across one another. He did not know Trenton well, but he knew of a few places downtown off State Street that had that sort of reputation.
But he had never liked Trenton, and didn’t feel like driving that far now. He had already had several drinks, and although he was by no means drunk neither was he entirely sober. The drive to Trenton would be no problem in and of itself. He was in decent shape to drive. If he went, though, he would have several more drinks in Trenton, probably one or two in each of the bars he would go to. At that point it would be no pleasure to drive home, and might not be safe.
Nor had he ever been much good at picking up strangers. Even on the rare occasions when he had done so successfully, the evening had never been what he had hoped it might be. He always kept a part of himself guarded, nervous that his partner might suddenly turn out to be