anything that will break you free-change one thing, change
everything! You can do it if you could put your feet up in those
stirrups, you can do anything!
But she could do nothing, and it all began to tick by faster. The two
overfed crows lifted off from their splatter of lunch. Her husband
asked why she was sitting that way, was it a cramp, her saying,
Yes, yes, a cramp in her back but it was easing. Her mouth
quacked on about deja vu just as if she weren't drowning in it, and
the Crown Vic moved forward like one of those sadistic Dodgem
cars at Revere Beach. Here came Palmdale Motors on the right.
And on the lefr? Some kind of sign for the local community
theatre, a production of 'Naughty Marietta.'
No, it's Mary, not Marietta. Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary, mother
of God, she's got her hands out....
Carol bent all her will toward telling her husband what was
happening, because the right Bill was behind the wheel, the right
Bill could still hear her. Being heard was what married love was all
about.
Nothing came out. In her mind Gram said, 'All the hard days are
coming.' In her mind a voice asked Floyd what was over there,
then said, 'Oh shit,' then screamed 'Oh shit!'
She looked at the speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in
miles an hour but thousands of feet: they were at twenty-eight
thousand. Bill was telling her that she shouldn't have slept on the
plane and she was agreeing.
There was a pink house coming up, little more than a bungalow,
fringed with palm trees that looked like the ones you saw in the
Second World War movies, fronds framing incoming Learjets with
their machine guns blazing-
Blazing. Burning hot. All at once the magazine he's holding turns
into a torch. Holy Mary, mother of God, hey there, Mary, what's
the story-
They passed the house. The old man sat on the porch and watched
them go by. The lenses of his rimless glasses glinted in the sun.
Bill's hand established a beachhead on her hip. He said something
about how they might pause to refresh themselves between the
doffing of her dress and the donning of her shorts and she agreed,
although they were never going to get to Palm House. They were
going to go down this road and down this road, they were for the
white Crown Vic and the white Crown Vic was for them, forever
and ever amen.
The next billboard would say 'Palm House 2 Mi.' Beyond it was
the one saying that Mother of Mercy Charities helped the Florida
sick. Would they help her?
Now that it was too late she was be-ginning to understand.
Beginning to see the light the way she could see the subtropical
sun sparkling off the water on their left. Wondering how many
wrongs she had done in her life, how many sins if you liked that
word, God knew her parents and her Gram certainly had, sin this
and sin that and wear the medallion between those growing things
