She sat at the table by the window and wondered what she should do, whether she should meet Abe at the restaurant or call now, cancel everything, not just dinner, but her songs at the bar, say thank you but good-bye, and disappear from his life.
She knew that the man in the rumpled black hat had unnerved her. But she also knew that even if the man had not suddenly appeared, she would have been attacked by the very fears that paralyzed her now.
One fact loomed over all others-she was a woman on the run. In her mind she saw Labriola’s face as it had swept up to her in the corridor, his voice slurred and drunken, You giving Tony what he needs?
She’d pushed him away, headed toward the den, but he’d grabbed her and jerked her around, You know what I say, right?
Again she’d pushed him away, this time harder, so that he’d stumbled backward, a curiously surprised look on his face, his eyes gleaming with a strange, mocking admiration, You got some fight in you, Sara.
But did she really, she wondered now, did she really have any fight left in her?
She rose, walked to the back of the room, then returned to the window and sat down again, her gaze on the street. For a moment all the mistakes she’d made fell upon her in a heavy rain of self-accusation. She’d been driven from her home by Caulfield, driven from New York by her own need to be taken care of, then driven from Long Island by the certainty that if she stayed there, she would be destroyed one way or another.
But what life had she wanted? she asked herself now. The answer was obvious and absurd. She had wanted the Big Happy Ending, the one where she wound up a Big Name Singer, but also a wife and mother, a perfect life.
She glanced about the cramped little room where that long pursuit had finally landed her. She considered how little she had, how reduced her prospects, and these bleak considerations led her to decide that she would meet Abe at the restaurant, sing a few songs at the bar, because, when you looked at the way things were, what did she have to lose?
Nothing, she thought. So if on one of the Village streets below, tonight or on some other night, the little man in the black hat came up behind her and put a bullet in her head, so be it, since no matter how you added it up, that Big Happy Ending was well beyond her now.