What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [77]
Vernon moved his hand to her knee.
She pulled away as if touched by fire. “Vernon … ,” she said.
“Arlene, I just want you to know …”
“Take me home,” she said. “Please.”
What she had wanted was a quick drive home, but instead she had to endure the slow ease of the dirt lane all the way out to the main road. Their silence deepened and she kept expecting Vernon to offer a measure of apology. He stayed quiet, and Arlene felt the tears form and fall. She had no choice but to wipe at her cheeks and she turned away to the side window to do so, but she knew Vernon had seen her.
“I’m real sorry, Arlene … ,” Vernon began when he had pulled his pickup to a stop back at the motel parking lot, but by that time, Arlene had already opened the door to the truck cab and jumped out. She hurried to the house, listening for Vernon’s truck to gear. It finally did as her hands shook, trying to get the key into her front door lock.
She felt deeply shamed for the rest of the afternoon. That’s what the feeling was, in the end, a deep shame. Arlene could not identify what it was about Vernon or his gesture or her tears that prevented her from touching her dinner that evening, that kept her with her eyes open all night, lying in bed with her hands involuntarily smoothing her stomach, as if she were trying to keep something from rising. Whatever it was, though, felt exactly like all of those afternoons in the first months after Dan had disappeared, the eyes in the café silently watching her, felt exactly like the moment she had moved through the darkness of the picture house, her shadow laughable in its anonymous anger. She was no one that anyone had to worry about, and to think that someone like Vernon might ever have held feelings for her. What a fool not to have seen it, not to have believed it. All this time, she had been thinking of herself in the way others saw her—an abandoned wife, a lowly waitress, an aging woman whom no one could even bother to gossip about anymore—but Vernon himself had not.
The next morning, she rose with a bleary resolution to apologize to Vernon, somehow send him a sign that she, in fact, understood what he was offering, that his gesture was not unlike the shine of the camera bulbs in the movie magazines, a promise of a different life altogether. He had her best interests in mind, saw her as belonging in another space, not the motel, maybe not even the café.
But Vernon did not come in for his usual breakfast, Cal sitting alone with his newspaper. The next morning, he did not come either. Cal made no mention of Vernon’s absence and she was too embarrassed to pose an innocent question to him about Vernon’s whereabouts, to ask if Vernon had taken ill. Arlene let the anticipation sit. The small dot within her knew better. It knew in the same way she knew something when she stepped out of the picture house, when she saw the taillights of Dan’s escape, when she rested her head on Frederick’s chest on their wedding night, when she spotted her brother on the road, years and years and years ago.
Things change, the small dot told her. But she was not going to be able to.
This was July 1961. Vernon never came into the café again. That fall, Cal married a clerk from the shoe store, and the two had a baby, and the farmers who came in to fill where Vernon and Cal had once sat were not much interested in either Arlene or her daily newspaper reading, the outside world being something they would rather not deal with.
She wished now that she could remember the day—the exact day—when she stopped looking at the café door in anticipation. The day she stopped waiting for a policeman to come in to report on Dan, Vernon to come in with his hat in his hands. Time just passed.
It took