Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [106]
I shook my head. “Heather, I…” What could I say? Abbie had long ago taught me that people wear their inside hurts on their outside self. Heather was no different—a beautiful girl, a good heart. Even a tender heart. How else does someone survive as a stewardess? Think about it. She served pretzels and Diet Cokes, handed out pillows and blankets and offered connection information to cranky air travelers, day after day after day. Compound that with John’s decline and she lived in a bleak present with the prospects of a dismal future. All that hurt had to go somewhere. I’m not excusing her, and I’m not blaming her. It is what it was. For my part, I didn’t see it until it was too late.
I took a deep breath, pushed the button for the seventh floor and watched her roll the sides of her thong off her hips. I rode the two floors to my room wishing I could pull that cool steel out of my back and turn it on my demons, but I’m no King Arthur. I unlocked the door and tied on my running shoes while the phone rang off the hook.
Running had become my narcotic. There were times that I would have preferred something more passive like scotch or bourbon, but I’d never developed a taste for it. Running had become my escape.
I usually ran between three and seven miles. Any less and I don’t feel like I’ve run. Any more and my knees start aching. I climbed downstairs to the fitness room, jumped on the treadmill, set it for an eight-minute pace and tried to run that lace out of my mind.
Given that my mom had died and I was more or less raised by the people who populated my trailer park, I didn’t have much of a fatherly role model. Hence, knowing how to treat a woman was something Abbie alone had taught me. The instincts were there, but Abbie had honed them. The way a man speaks to a woman who’s alone in a parking lot after locking her keys in her car, the way he holds the door for an older lady with an armful of groceries, the way he asks a question of a female police officer, the way he stops to pick up the movie ticket that the college co-ed dropped, the way he orders for his date, the way he walks her up the sidewalk fifteen minutes before her curfew because he knew her dad was counting the minutes, the way he asks her father’s permission to drive her to the lake on Saturday for a day of skiing—the way a man treats a woman is intangible. It is like a baton in a relay race—handed off and given from one to another. Abbie passed that baton to me. My learning curve with girls had been steep and mistake-riddled, but until that moment, not regret-laden.
After an hour, the treadmill had done little good so I hopped off, ran out to the parking lot, took a right turn on San Pablo and ran under J. Turner Butler Boulevard. A half mile later, I crept around a security gate and snuck out onto the golf course of a private club commonly referred to as “Pablo.” Pablo Creek is one of the more exclusive and less well-known golf clubs in the country. Membership is capped at two hundred and fifty, and if you have to ask about the initiation fee, you can’t afford it. The course makes the Masters course look like kiddie Putt-Putt. I ran all eighteen holes beneath the moonlight. About 3 a.m., I hobbled back to the clinic and walked straight to Abbie’s room.
The pain of her transplant was rather intense, so most nights, they gave her a sedative. Basically, it forced her into a twelve-to fourteen-hour coma—which was good. That meant she only hurt half the day.
I walked into the room, took one look at my wife and felt the pang of dinner at the beach. She was deep in sleep, eyes rolling back and forth behind her lids. Sweat caked across me, I rolled the silver stool up next to the bed, slid my hand beneath Abbie’s and started at the beginning. I told her about the parking lot, how Heather had been dressed, Pete’s, the buttons and skirt, then the beach and, finally, the elevator. Then I told her I was sorry and that I loved her.
It was little consolation.
I walked back to the apartment building, climbed seven floors to my room and stood in the shower nearly an