Jesse pocketed his change and took his coffee and do:.uts.
.‘
“Safe trip,” the man said.
There were places like this all across the country, deon the interstate, open early, bright, smelling of not unfriendly. The interstate was an entity of its a kind of transcontinen .mi neighborhood, filled with people, who hung out in the neighborhood places. swung up onto Interstate 70 and drove east into the rain, his coffee… He still didn’t know exactly when started sleeping with Elliott Krueger. He knew she was more and later. He would stand sometimes at the winlooking out at North Genesee Street and thinking the next. car will be her. He was embarrassed with about that, but it seemed as if he had to do it. when they were having dutiful sex, a voice in which seemed not even his, would say, This isn’t first time today she’s done this. The voice was not unThe voice knew. He knew. But then he didn’t Despite the passion of their courtship, she had be come perfunctory about sex. He couldn’t imagine her being so consumed by desire that she would cheat on him. And he couldn’t imagine that she would even if she were. She wouldn’t do that to me, his own voice would say in his head. She wouldn’t do that to me. As he drove through the wet gray morning toward West Virginia he smiled at himself.
It wasn’t about me. It was about her, about what she needed, about being an actress. She needed to be an actress more than she needed to be a cop’s wife. He wondered sometimes what he needed from her. A kind of richness, maybe. The palpability of her, the odd combination of intellect and ditz that she balanced so beautifully.
Maybe it made no sense to try to figure. COuld anyone list the reasons they loved someone? Probably not. He crossed the Ohio River at Wheeling, the rain dimpling the iron-colored surface of the wide water below the bridge. He liked rivers.
They always hinted to him of possibility. The interstate was uphill now in West Virginia, and it curved around the slopes. The big trailer trucks roared through it, sending up a sheet of water as they passed him on the down slopes.
On the next hill they would slow, and he would either have to slow to their speed or pass them, only to have them roar past him again as they made up the time on the downgrade.
Time was money to truckers. He sympathized with that.
But, especially in bad weather, trucks were a pain in the ass.
It was part of his own problem, he thought, that he understood Jennifer’s behavior only in terms of himself.
She wouldn’t do that to me. But it was human. He didn’t condemn himself, though his one-wayness, too, embarrassed him sometimes when he thought of it. He’d been a cop too long not to understand the limits on human empathy.
I thought she didn’t like sex anymore, when in fact, she didn’t like sex anymore with me. Even the sex she liked, as he thought about it, .had, maybe, been about get what she wanted, which, at one time, had been him. she never really liked sex as much as she seemed Maybe once she had used it to catch what she was fish:‘for, she didn’t enjoy it anymore. Because she liked didn’t mean she had to like fish. The rain came now that it nearly overwhelmed the wipers. He shifted Explorer into four-wheel drive as the gleaming inter-wound slickly through the hills.
She denied Elliott she left him, saying she had to get away and wasn’t him for anyone. It was probably meant as a kindIt probably was a kindness at the time, and by the she dropped the other shoe and talked about Elliott, had already begun the process of shoring up his self and hear it. The night she left and he was alone in the he looked at his service pistol and picked it up and about where to shoot himself. A lot of cops shot They had the means at hand, and they knew Put them ahead of the general populace, he thought, suicide efficiency.
Probably putting the muzzle in his and shooting up and back would be the way most to take him out instantly, Cops called it eating your He sat on the bed and hefted the gun and felt eom-by it. If he couldn’t stand her leaving, if she didn’t back, it was always there. It was a comfort to know was there. Like booze. If it got bad enough he could drink. He put the gun back in the drawer by his bed went and looked out the window… The rain was a Sometimes it intensified as he drove through the spur of West Virginia. It was never gentle and some-it was intense, and Jesse drove mostly by focusing the taillights of the car ahead. He had a momentary of a ten-mile-long line of cars, each driver follow-ahead of him going one by one over a cliff the first driver in the long line missed the turn… After she had left and he decided to at least postpone shooting himself, he found that it was bad enough to drink. At first nobody noticed much. Then his partner, a fifty-twoyear-old guy named Ben Romero, talked to him about it. Jesse listened and shrugged and went about his drinking. After an incident at night when Jesse couldn’t seem to get the handcuffs on a perp, Romero asked for a new partner.
“I got five kids,” Romero said.
“Two of them in college.
I can’t risk it with you anymore, Jesse.“
Jesse nodded and shrugged. Romero shook hands with him, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it, and shook his head and walked away. When his new partner quit him in less than a week, Jesse was transferred inside to records. When he started not showing up for work, Cronjager called him in and talked to him and sent him to the police doctor. The doctor got him to AA. He thought the meetings were full of self-satisfied assholes, and he hated the higher power crap.
After the second meeting he went home and drank nearly a fifth of scotch and slept through most of the nex.t, day. The day after that Cronjager offered him the chance to resign or go through the firing process.
Jesse resigned. And went home and sat in his small kitchen with ice and scotch and found himself without connection or purpose.
I’ll drink to that. He sat and drank scotch and the tears ran down his face.
Carole Genest had the house to herself. Before she to dinner with Mark she had changed the bed linens. and Mark had had two margaritas and a bottle of white with dinner and they were laughing as Mark pulled BMW sedan into her driveway and parked under the tree near her side door. better lock the car,“ Carole said when. they got
“I don’t think you’ll be leaving
for a while.”
Mark beeped the lock button on his key ring, and the locks clicked in the car, Jo Jo Genest loomed out of shadows by the side door.
