Roo arranged to meet him in the parking lot after the game. She wore a carefully tight cropped knit top, yellow, with white shorts that she hoped showed off the golden glow of last weekend. Standing under a lamppost, she observed as the crowds poured into the parking lot. “They won,” shouted the running back's father to someone, tossing a cap into the air. “Helluva game!” The students seemed more subdued than their parents, but Roo knew why. Their celebrating started later, out from under the glare of adult eyes.
Roo watched for Newell's blond head. He would be happy. Good.
After the crowd thinned out, Newell finally appeared, his hair wet. He found her under the light, gathered her up, and kissed her. “Sorry I took so long. Grabbed a shower.” He steered her over to his car, a blue Cavalier, closing the door behind her with a hard thump.
They drove down the dark streets of their town and up the hill, winding around until the lights flickered like sparks through the trees. Coming out to the clearing, Newell parked the car. Usually the place was packed on Friday night. “Jeff's having a party. Didn't I mention it?”
“You don't want to go,” she said. “Do you?”
“Not really.” Newell put his arm around her and reeled her in close. They kissed awhile, then he watched and waited while she pulled the crop top down into a kind of belt around her waist. “Just a minute,” he said then, his breath a loud exhalation. “I need to tell you something.”
“I thought we decided,” she said, pushing him down, leaning over him. “Tonight's going to be so special…”
“Roo…” he said, and then he said her name a few more times.
Newell started the car up and rolled down the hill. He had to be home by ten. He had promised.
When they hit Main Street, he broke the silence. “Last night my parents got really mad about how much time we're spending together.”
“They finally know about me? About us?”
“Yeah. And I guess you know how my dad is. Don't you have him for English?”
Roo nodded.
“He gets on my case and won't let go. So I blew it. I couldn't help it, Roo. I told them how much I love you,” he said, reaching a hand over to stroke her hair. “How I'd do anything for you.”
“Bet they didn't like hearing that.”
“No. They told me they're sending me to an aunt in Sacramento until school's out. Summer, we're going back East. Renting a house in Truro.”
She didn't know where Truro was, but she could imagine the clapboard cottage overlooking a blue blue sea, sunshine, and pretty girls all in a row.
“Well,” she said. “At least we can write.”
“No. They said no.”
He didn't look at her, and Roo knew why. Newell was basically a coward.
He told her how he had fought them, and how only his mother's tears and the whiteness of his father's face had convinced him that this might be a good thing for both of them.
“God, Newell. You could have told me before we…”
“I know,” he said. “Sorry.”
Well, she couldn't blame him. For months she had teased him. She knew how he felt. He had earned her, with all those dates, the flowers, the whole romance thing. She sighed. “You told them who I was?”
“Yes. Don't worry, though. My dad would never use it against you in your grades or anything. Never. He's scrupulous when it's easy. He's just a weasel when it comes to the hard stuff.”
“You shouldn't talk about your father that way.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You should have told them I didn't mean a thing to you.”
“Why would I do that?”
How could someone with his grades be so dense? “What else did you tell them?”
“My father asked if we'd had sex.”
“But we didn't until tonight.”
“No. That was lucky, wasn't it?”
While he faced the windshield, driving carefully, as he always did, his eyes swerved over to watch her. He drove her all the rest of the way home in silence, probably wondering why she wasn't crying.
In June, while sitting behind a tree at lunchtime listening to a gaggle of teenagers chat, Carl Capshaw found out exactly what his girl students thought of him. They loved having him for English. He looked like Ben Affleck, tall and dark. Deep. Also, they said, he seemed very young, although how could he be, being Newell's dad? He had to be in his thirties, at least.
On the way back to his classroom, he reran the conversation, feeling pleased.
Carl taught English literature, a sometimes arcane and dated subject, according to his students. He used any means at his disposal to keep the kids interested, including his smile, if it worked, or a sharp, mean bark if that worked better. The old songs and dances no longer did the trick. You had to work at penetrating their generally unfocused and overstimulated minds.
Passing by the lockers, waving at a few of the kids, Carl thought this year was winding up rather nicely. A group of his senior English students had rewritten King Lear in the style of Harold Pinter, full of pauses and portent, and would be staging their version next week. The junior students had just finished The Crucible, quite swept up in witchcraft and hysteria themselves, poor things, victims of spring fever en masse. They had stories to turn in at the end of the quarter.
He taught five classes and directed sixth-period study hall. According to Cath, he didn't make enough money to compensate for the aggravation factor, but then nothing he did lately satisfied her. As time passed, he had begun to wonder if anything would diminish the magnitude of his transgression, and her shocked memory of finding that motel slip in his pocket.
He didn't know why it had happened, except that Shelly, the school counselor, got so drunk that night. She had come on to him after a school board meeting, when they had retired to the bar to indulge in the general gossip and backstabbing they all enjoyed in mild forms, and he had done what was indefensible but entirely natural. He hadn't even come home very late. But, confronted with the evidence by Cath the next day, he confessed immediately.
Now, nearly a year later, at breakfast sometimes, he could see shadows of doubt and pain in Cath's eyes. The crisis in December with Newell had helped them to forge an uneasy alliance, raising a hope in him that someday she would love him wholeheartedly and without reserve again, as she always had before.
At his classroom, he stopped and fiddled for his keys. He had been taken off guard by the whole situation, surprised at himself, and surprised by the powerful aftershocks that had almost toppled his marriage. The truth was, from the moment he had that second drink with Shelly, Cath had flown out of his mind. He had never meant to hurt her. He had never even considered her.
He crumpled his lunch sack, threw it into the plastic container beside his desk, and took his seat. Somehow, he could never get being a couple exactly right. He felt like hell about it. His only consolation was the assurance he made to himself and to Cath that it would never happen again.
This virtuous thought left an indistinct emptiness at the same moment it soothed him.
As the kids raised hell and found their seats, he paused to consider the mighty pines outside the bank of windows his desk faced. He had watched them grow from seedlings. He had watched Mr. Cahill, the school gardener, prune and nurture them for his whole working life through those windows. He had watched the man's hair go gray and fall out.
Fourteen years of a man's life were summed up in those big old trees waving in the wind, looking so happy and well-fed. You could grow plants in any room in this school, as a matter of fact, particularly his classroom, he thought whimsically. You could fill the place up with hothouse flowers, the girls displaying bright blossoms, the boys buzzing around their heady perfume. When they had decided to send Newell away in December, he had tried to remind Cath about how mature seventeen felt, how full-blown, how physically electrifying. She told him Newell was just a pup, in spite of how he looked. That girl had seduced him.
Her naiveté never ceased to astound him.
Carl had met his wife at fourteen and married her at twenty-one. He had enjoyed returning to her cool gravity and good sense after a bevy of selfish, bullheaded college girls. He had experienced enough high drama between fourteen and twenty-one to last a lifetime-at least he thought so until the Shelly incident, and more recently, the escalating scenes with Newell.
At least Newell, being amenable to bribes, had been easy to fix. The promise of a trip East in summer and maybe his own wheels spun his attitude around fast.
He shuffled the papers on his desk, waiting for the kids to settle down. The air in his classroom, thick with evaporating body fluid, stinking of adolescent sexual glory, sometimes made him want to throw his arms around the kids and dance naked with them in circles around a bonfire. More times, it made him sick with longing for the sweeter smells found elsewhere.
Class began. The fifth-period juniors read minimally coherent essays on Miller in monotone, a low roar of voices their accompaniment, until he could stand it no longer. He stormed, raining down until they sat silent and he was spent.
“Capshaw's still pissed about Newell and Roo,” he heard the whisper as they scurried to the bell. “Dude's lost it.”
He cleared his throat to say over the din of their leaving, “Miss Fielding. Please stay after for a moment.”
Roo stopped in her tracks, shifted her books, marched back to the front row, and sat down, feeling curious but acting blasé.
“You're not turning in your work,” Capshaw said, when the door slammed.
Roo knew from the girls' bathroom mirror she had eyes round as plates, edged in red. She looked emotional, dramatic. She hoped he noticed. “I'm sorry, Mr. Capshaw,” she said, but he wanted an explanation. He waited long enough to make her uncomfortable.
“You made As all last year. Now you'll be lucky to get a C this last quarter. Want to tell me what the problem is?”
She looked at him, thinking about Newell. Then she talked about what a mess her life was lately, how her mom was on her case, about how her dog had died. Tears dribbled down her cheeks.
Mr. Capshaw frowned. He handed her a tissue.
“I just miss him so much,” she sobbed. “It's nothing to do with English. I'm doing badly in every class. I just can't seem to concentrate.” Her body shook. This room always felt hot, since the first day of school. Mr. Capshaw kept the windows closed most of the time, to keep the noisy equipment and traffic sounds out, he said.
“I'm sorry for your loss, but we've got another problem here. I'd like to help you. You could bring your grade up to a B with this next story. It's the last creative writing assignment for the year, so I expect everybody to do his or her best work.”
She wiped her face with a tissue. “I sit down to work. I start something. I end up crying. My mom says she cried the whole last half of her junior year. She says it's hormones.”
“Did you tell your mom about you and Newell?”
“No! She could never understand.”
“Think about telling her. And think about this story. You're going to find it hard to swallow, but you need this grade. You need it to get into college. It's dumb, but your future's riding on it.”
She stood up. “I know, Mr. Capshaw. I'll try.”
“Can you get me a preliminary proposal by Friday? It can be about anything.”
“Sure,” she said.
Friday afternoon, Carl had Roo in his sixth-period study hall. She came in looking bedraggled, her face flushed pink with heat.
“Where's your proposal, Miss Fielding?” he asked. “That is due today, last period. I thought I made that clear.”
“I'll work on it right now,” she promised. “I'll get it to you by the end of the day.” The bell rang. The other students hustled to the oak tables, hanging backpacks on chairs, littering the floor with notebooks. He sat at his desk, trying hard not to notice Roo, whose pen hovered over her paper for minutes at a time, unwavering, while she stared at the neck of the boy in front of her. When the bell rang, the fog left her eyes. She looked up with a start and caught his eyes on her face.
“Your story concept?”
“Not done.”
“You'll have to stay after today, Roo. I'll help you if I can.”
Roo called her mother from the office so that she wouldn't panic when she came home late. “I'm working with Mr. Capshaw on finishing something up, Mom.”
“He's that cutie from open house?”
“My English teacher.”
“Newell's father, right?”
How was her mother always so clued-in? “Yes.”
“Where'd he go, anyway?”
“Who?”
“Newell. You went out a couple of times, didn't you?”
“He's at another school.”
“Private school, I bet. All the public school teachers send their kids to private, the paper says. They're canceling Honors English at Obispo next year. I'm just disgusted.”
“Can I stay 'til five? I'll unload the dishes when I get home.”
“Okay, honey. Need a ride? I don't want you to walk home alone, young lady.”
“Don't worry so much. I'll find a ride.”
Roo managed a poor rehash of a story she had written in eighth grade for something to give Mr. Capshaw. He didn't really do anything to help, just sat there at his desk pretending not to look at her the whole time. She finished by five. She asked him for a ride home, explaining that her mother worried. “A guy pulled over off the road once. He got out of his car and followed me for a few blocks. Asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I was only thirteen. Since then, Mom's a maniac about safety.”
Roo had worn the lightest cotton she could find that morning, a sleeveless red blouse over sparkling white slacks. Her mom had helped her to twist her hair into a French braid, but by now she had a curly halo around her face, too messy, she felt. She excused herself for the bathroom and wetted some scratchy paper towels, getting her underarms with one, smoothing back her hair with another. She dabbed a dry towel over her washed face, licked her lips, then glossed them. She was ready.
Mr. Capshaw had parked his car under the row of eucalyptus by the far lot. By the time they got there, she was sweating again. “I hope you have air-conditioning,” she said.
“I do. My wife says it's an unnecessary extravagance this close to the coast but after all day at school, I'm ready to be pampered.”
“Me, too,” she said, wondering what his wife looked like. Maybe like Nicole Kidman, with that narrow face and rat's nest of hair. “I live kind of up in the county land. It's not quite two miles. Sorry to take you out of your way.” Newell had always raved about how pretty it was up there, how woodsy and pleasant compared to the flats. He must hate Sacramento, with its heat and tract houses.
Mr. Capshaw turned the air on full blast and rolled open the sunroof. “Is that okay?” he asked, and she nodded, half-closing her eyes as they swerved out of town.
“Last time I came this way,” she said dreamily, “was with Newell.”
Carl could smell Roo, a kind of gym class sweat he remembered from his son, mixed with a lusty odor he tried not to think about. She seemed to have fallen asleep, her head tipped back against the seat. Awkward. Beautiful.
He remembered his body at seventeen. He recalled a day stepping out into the sunshine, fresh from the shower, the sun petting his skin, the licks of air, the rank smell of wet dirt. His own juicy youth had filled him up, flooded him. For one luscious moment, all was perfection. Then, knowledge returned like a slap and woke him up. The concrete burned his bare feet…
“Shoot. Roo, wake up. We're lost.” He could see the Pacific below the road. He'd overshot his turn. He'd gone too far.
She breathed deeply and raised a hand to her cheek. “Where are we?”
“I don't know,” he said. “You're the one who lives around here. Could you take a look at the map in the glove compartment?” They climbed steadily up a winding road to a dead end.
“I can't figure this out.”
“I'll look,” he said. Stopping in a shady spot high above the ocean, he turned off the engine, turning the map over to find the town. “Okay, the high school, right here.” He traced their route. “There's where I turned wrong.” She moved in to look. “We're five miles off base. At the bottom of the hill, I go left. Then back to Foothill. Left again onto Crocker.”
“I live right there.” She drooped a long thin arm over his arm to point. Her breast pushed against him, lightly, innocently.
When she removed her hand, he folded the map. She stayed close, looking out at the trees. “Can I get out for a second?” she asked. “I want to peek at the ocean.”
“Okay,” he said. “Quickly, though. Let's not give your mom anything to worry about.”
She walked over to where the land dropped away. On top of the hill like this, the wind off the ocean hit full force. Her hair slapped and blew like sails. She stayed so long, raising and lowering her arms in the wind, that he got out to get her.
She was crying again. “I'm so lonely,” she said. Carl put her head against his shoulder and let her cry.
After a while she quieted down. She sat on a rock, still clinging to him, holding his legs. She looked up at him once. She reached up.
“No,” he said. “Roo…” He stood with the wind to his back, as lovesick as any seventeen-year-old, as deeply moved, as heartfelt, as pained.
They made love, the teacher halting the compelling rush of his lust just long enough to witness himself there, hanging over the ocean, his body disappearing into the girl's body, his past resurrected, his future destroyed.
“Did you see this?” Cath said Monday morning, holding up the “Living” section. “You give a drug addict all the drugs he needs to be satisfied, and he is not satisfied. You give an alcoholic access to all the alcohol he wants, and he is not satisfied.”
“And… what conclusions do they draw?” He had slept poorly this weekend. He sipped his coffee slowly, savoring the flavor, savoring his wife who sat in a patch of sun at the table.
“Same thing with chocolate,” she continued, “even in unlimited quantities.”
“So…”
“So the point is, people who crave a substance can never get enough.”
He found it hard to come up with the right thing to say. Absorbed by guilt, he wasn't really following. “This is not news,” he said.
“No, wait. Nothing satiates the craving. A lot of crank doesn't do any better than a little. There's no satiety. Anticipation is what drives them on. Hope.”
“Always chasing the high.”
“But the chase keeps 'em going, get it?”
“Uh huh.”
“That's you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You feel stuck in your job. Sometimes you feel stuck with me.”
“Cath…”
“You've always been the seeker. Like Emerson's traveler, who is never happy. The spot you are in is never quite good enough.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something's wrong, isn't it?”
He stood and tried to put his arms around her but while accepting his embrace, she sighed deeply.
“Nothing's wrong. It's the last day of school before finals. I'm distracted,” he said.
“That's not it.”
“Nothing's wrong, goddammit!”
The look she turned on him proclaimed exquisitely the depths of her understanding and grief. He had done nothing different than he did any other weekend, but his wife was already mourning over some unknown catastrophe. That's what a real marriage was, understanding too deep for deception. Well, he had a real one, didn't he, and now he had blown it, along with everything else.
He knew he should tell her before word leaked back, as it surely would, and soon, but he couldn't. He knew that he would try to explain, and he knew he couldn't. Cath's simple values were admirable, but there were things in his world that could not survive such astringency-delicate, complex things. Nothing could make her understand how wrapped up in that moment he had been, how obliterated he had been. How impersonal it had been. He had wandered outside her framework, and was lost to her comprehension.
He kissed her good-bye, lingering, wrapped in the smell of her shampoo, doing his own mourning in advance of the news.
In the car he tuned the radio to an all-news station all the way to school. Pasting a composed look on his face, he greeted the other teachers in the hallway with the usual salutations. They greeted him back.
So Roo hadn't said anything yet. There was still time.
Once in his classroom, he opened up the briefcase he was carrying, removed his gun, and tucked it into the bottom drawer.
“Final projects are due this morning,” he started off in first period, second period, third period. “You had the weekend to finish up,” he said while he flitted between heaven and hell.
At lunch, he sat under a tree, itching in a patch of cut grass, his paper sack untouched beside him. The gardener came unpleasantly close with his rake a few times. The teachers would not tolerate the noise of leaf blowers, so disruptive to the calm of academe. Mr. Cahill thought their position made his life harder and made his opinion known however possible. A horde of little children skating, followed by a troupe of mothers, screamed by on the sidewalk.
Another bell rang in fourth period and then there was the senior class parody, which was witty enough to shake a few nervous laughs out of him.
Fifth period. Roo.
She walked into the classroom with her friend Jayne, and sat in the back row until class started, chatting quietly.
“Stories to the front, please,” he said, amazed at his own cool. How did he do it? How could he function in the middle of the worst crisis of his life? Cath would leave him, if she knew. She would never trust him again.
He watched to see if Roo had something ready. She did.
“I need to see you after class, Miss Fielding.”
She nodded, and her eyes returned to her book.
“Now read this Katherine Anne Porter, the last story in your lit book, and answer the questions at the end. As you are reading, I want you to be thinking about how she generates a theme. What are the elements? What role do characters, plot, and detail play? Pay attention to the ending and the beginning. Look for parallels in the structure. Oh yes. We've talked a lot about point of view. We'll be talking about that again at the end of the period.”
The class groaned.
“Thought you could take it easy just because it's the last day, huh?” How normal he sounded! How pathetic and irrelevant everything he said sounded!
He had staved off the inevitable over the weekend, because he was afraid. He had justified his hesitation by telling himself he had to see Roo one last time to apologize, and that's what he would do, wasn't it, even though something sharp and nasty in him wanted to take her down with him.
He tried to write to Cath, but ended up throwing the pages away. He could not face her with this. He could not face the pain of her humiliation, and his own public downfall.
The world sucked. Everything was bound to appear so sordid, when it had been nothing but a spring day, the sunshine, the trees in an ocean breeze. Ah, how the world sucked.
Blurry in his thoughts, looking for something to get himself through to the end of the class when he would get Roo alone, or himself alone, or both of them, he hadn't decided, he picked up Roo's story and began to read.
“The Young Lady,” a new title, headlined the page. She hadn't used her synopsis at all. Roo wrote well; he usually enjoyed her assignments.
A clutching at his heart reminded him, and his moist fingers left marks as they traveled down the side of her paper. His time was up. He had done something others would see as deplorable, selfish, vile… the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his pupils, all that would be lost along with Cath, as soon as they knew.
Was Roo's time up, too? Did he have to decide this minute, or was the decision made the moment he pulled off the road that day with her? His heart began to thump. He worried someone might hear it, might find him out before he could escape.
A squirrel ran down a tree outside. A few of his students turned to watch.
The gun in his drawer made that side of the desk feel warmer, like a hearth, so he leaned that way as if its comfort could pamper him through the last few minutes of class. But as he read, he forgot the desk; he forgot the gun. His fear continued to sit in his stomach, indigestible as coal, but he gave it no attention.
He found himself driving along in a car, a young girl, feeling the pressure of an older man's eyes on her skin as she feigned sleep. He took in the fine sensory details of her clothing, her perception of this man, his handsomeness, his strength, his intelligence. She had such a crush.
And slowly, he began to understand.
Roo's story was the story of his seduction.
Way back at the beginning of the year, Roo had decided to go after him. But Carl, well-schooled in how to handle students with crushes, had not taken her bait. He threw out his arsenal of defenses to frustrate her. Nothing she did caused even a flicker of interest in his eyes. Nothing she wore made him look any closer than he looked at all the other girls.
So, she had developed a plan. She would seduce Newell. She reasoned that would draw Carl's attention. She didn't care what kind of attention she got. Negative was okay for a start. She just needed a way to rise above what she called the “herd of anonymous cattle” in the classroom. If necessary, she would sacrifice her grade, but that direction had not come until later, when Carl continued to ignore her.
With fascination swinging toward dread, he read on, recognizing only snippets of the situation he had lived. The English teacher in him marveled at the point of view, so distinct, so different from his own. Moments he remembered had been distorted into something completely unfamiliar.
Roo's girl was ready to explore a bigger world. She had put her own physical feelings on hold long enough. Her character cited Margaret Mead on the subject of adolescent sexuality.
Carl read on. Appalled by the cold analysis of her seduction of his son, he flipped a page and stumbled into her version of his own. There it was, a “tryst” on the cliff, romanticized and glossy as a magazine cover.
The story was a message to him. A confession. She wanted him to understand. She wanted him to see it from her point of view. “The young lady had a different tale to tell,” she wrote.
He sat back in his chair and felt a glimmer of hope.
She would not tell Cath. This life that he loved so much would continue. For a long time he looked out the window, watching Mr. Cahill trimming pine branches outside with a long pole.
He would not lose his job. The gun… he would not have to use it.
He picked up a pencil and went to work on her story. Mechanically, he marked spelling errors in red while his mind kept up a chorus of protests at trivializing the contents.
Contrast POVs: his story was the story of her seduction.
She would never tell anyone, the last few lines read, and she told “the man” to keep silent. His victim did not accept her victimization.
What a gift. He wanted to stand up and cheer, he felt such a gush of relief. This was better than sex. Better than falling in love. She had given him back his life!
At the end of class, she walked up to his desk. “Mr. Capshaw, how'd you like my story? Did you get a chance to read it yet?”
“I did. It's on the racy side of good taste, Roo, but you worked hard on this and I'm sure your grade will reflect that.” He struggled to maintain his poise, but she undid him, opening her mouth a little to reveal her sharp, newly minted caps. As she ran her tongue self-consciously over them, eager to hear more, he found his attention riveted on the perfect white rectangles that were all for show, not for biting better.
“I like the way you developed your theme,” he said finally, then sat back in his chair.
“Great,” she said, nodding. Her eyes said nothing special to him. Only her mouth's half-smile appreciated the joke.
“You have summer plans?”
“My relatives have a house at Tahoe. I got most of my finals done early so that we can leave tomorrow, all except for this class, and I thought you might pass on requiring a final, Mr. Capshaw. I mean, you know what I can do well enough already, don't you?”
“The final's a big part of your grade.”
She shrugged. “My mom's decided to enroll me in private school next fall. So this is my last day here. Could you possibly double the credit on the story? I worked really hard on it.” Her words, her posture were as always. Only the force behind her words betrayed the sea change in their relationship.
“I guess I could. Yes. Well, we're really sorry to lose you, Roo. Stop in to say hi next year. And you have a nice summer, now.”
“Have a hot one, Mr. Capshaw.”
He watched her leave, closing the door on his class for the year. Outside, Mr. Cahill, taking advantage of the school-wide exodus, started up the leaf blower. Ignoring the din, Carl rushed to clear his desk. He wanted to get home early and curl up with Cath in the hammock. He needed her to steady him, to bring him down from the lunatic elevation of his thoughts. Because there was no tragedy here. No harm done to anyone! No suicide! No murder! Looking around the classroom, he allowed the prosaic sight of crooked desks and beat-up linoleum to mute the twanging of his heart.
He dismissed his sixth-period study hall early and finished marking his students' stories. Before leaving, before putting the gun in his pocket to stow in the locked box at home, he reread the ending of Roo's tale.
“She would dispense with her mother's criticism, that she was a greedy girl, that nothing satisfied her. That breaking the rules led to heartache. How worth it it was to have a hope, play it out, and blunder. What did her mother understand about the moments that fed a girl's soul and in between, the pleasurable hunger of her waiting?”
She needed to cut it. She needed to tone down the florid language, be more subtle. He wrote on her paper to “watch the fragments” and gave her an A.
Laughing to himself, restored, he wondered how she would interpret her grade.
On the way home, he stopped to buy roses, yellow ones, Cath's favorite. He felt such love for her, such appreciation. He couldn't believe his luck, but he was so thankful for another chance. It had been an aberration, he said to himself in the car on the way up the hill to his house. He would never, ever do it again.
“Cath,” he cried, throwing open the front door. “Cath?”
A yellow note, very brief, had been stuck to the front of the refrigerator.
She would not be back.