the stairs. “Remember what I said. This is the luckiest hour of your whole life. Make it last a long time.”
And then he was up the stairs and gone.
38
Hobart began to divest. He drove to the San Jose airport to return the car he had rented, then went to another company and rented a different one with a credit card in a different name. He drove eastward into the mountains and began to get rid of things. First had to be the two cell phones: his and Theodore Forrest’s. He took both of them apart to get to the SIM cards, drove the car over the two phones, and threw the pieces down a steep cliff. He cut the SIM cards into tiny pieces and fed them out the window into the slipstream.
Hobart’s gun had to be next. He disassembled it-magazine, slide, spring, barrel, frame, grips, trigger, and sear. He hurled the springs, trigger, and sear into a lake in the Sierras, buried the frame, and pounded the barrel into the earth in the woods with a stone. He subjected Theodore Forrest’s gun to the same treatment when he reached the east side of the Sierras and the land was drier and rockier.
One by one he tossed the items he had used in the past few weeks. His suitcase and the clothes inside it, the luggage that Theodore Forrest had used to hold the money, and the clothes he had worn to Theodore Forrest’s house, all ended up in Dumpsters behind businesses in towns that he passed along the way. He kept on driving through Nevada and on to Utah, ridding himself of things.
Hobart bought a car at a lot in Salt Lake City and turned in the one he had rented in San Jose. He bought new clothes, went to a fancy barbershop and had his hair cut much shorter than he had worn it before, and got a manicure. He drank only water and ate very little during these days. When he was ready, he drove back down from Utah into Nevada. He stayed on Interstate 15 until he was back in California, and then made his way to Interstate 10. At three A.M. the second night, he pulled into the trailer park outside Cabazon and parked. He walked across the blacktop to the side of Valerie’s trailer, unlatched the door with his pocketknife, and stepped inside.
He said, “Valerie, it’s me Jerry.”
He heard rustling noises coming from the bedroom. “Jerry?”
“I apologize if I scared you, but there didn’t seem to be much sense in sitting alone out there waiting the rest of the night for you to wake up.”
She appeared at the bedroom door, a blanket wrapped around her and her blond hair in complicated tangles. “How do you even know I’m in the bed alone?”
“I don’t. I hope you are, but I don’t have a right to expect it. If you want me to go away for an hour so you can settle that, I can drive down the road to the casino and have a cup of coffee or something, but then I’d like to come back and talk to you.”
She pushed the bedroom door open all the way. “Oh, you might as well come on in. Nobody’s here.”
“I can still come back.”
“You already woke me up and I can’t sleep wondering what you want.”
She sat on the bed and turned on the small bedside reading lamp, then moved it so she could see him. “You got dressed up.” The light tilted higher. “Nice clothes. You got a haircut. Very handsome, especially for-What time is it? Three or so?”
” ” Yes.
She sniffed. “Expensive aftershave from a barbershop, too. You smell like a whore. And who would know better?”
“Not you.”
She let the light stay on his face for a few more seconds, then turned it off. “What brings you here?”
“This is my last visit,” he said. “Here’s the way it is. I’m sorry I robbed that store twenty years ago. I apologize for doing it and going to prison. I did it because I wanted to have a nice life with you.”
“It would have been a nice life.”
“I thought the money would help us get away, and that away was better. I was young and stupid. I apologize.”
“You were young. You apologized at the time, and you apologized after. But if somebody breaks something, it doesn’t matter why or how. It’s broken. Talking about it forever doesn’t make it unbroken. After the first day, it doesn’t even matter whose fault it was.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No. You went to prison, and things happened there that changed you. I was out here. I changed in ways that I wouldn’t have if you had been with me. We’re not the same people we were. We can’t have the kind of life we would have had.”
“That’s just bitterness.”
She shook her head. “I think about it all the timeabout you and me together then. I can still see us. It’s like we were the first people. It’s not the time that’s gone, it’s the innocence. We don’t have it anymore, and we can’t get it back.”
“Okay. We can’t.”
“You said this was your last visit. I take it you’ve found somebody you like better.”
“No. You’re the one that I’ve always loved, and I’m going to love you until I’m dead. I want you to do what you should have done fifteen years ago and marry me.”
“Oh, Jesus, Jerry.” She sighed wearily.
He knelt in front of her, reached into his pocket, and grabbed her wrist. “I got you a ring.”
“If this is a joke, I’m not laughing.”
He put the ring in her hand, then leaned on the bed to turn on the reading light. He picked it up and held it above the ring. It was a three-carat solitaire, and in the intense white light it looked enormous.
She said, “Now I’m laughing.” She looked terribly sad, and tears began to run down her cheeks. “Why did you do this?”
“We got off track, a long time ago. It was my fault. Now I’m grabbing us by the neck and wrenching us back on. We can’t start over like we were eighteen, but we can take what’s left at thirty-eight.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
She held out the ring in the palm of her hand. “I can see you have money. If I didn’t notice before, I would now. Where did you get it?”
“Selling electrical supplies.” He watched her face fall and her eyes harden. “All right, it’s swag. I got it by being a criminal. But I’m done now. Regardless of whether you ever see me again, I’m done.”
Y•
“Because it’s not a life. It’s just what you do when you don’t have the heart to kill yourself and hope somebody will do it for you.”
“So this is your last visit because now you have the heart. If I won’t have you, then you’ll go out in the desert and kill yourself.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to say things. I can hear you think.” She paused. “You’ll have to make me a promise.”
“What?”
“If you do decide to kill yourself, you’ll kill me first.” She slipped the diamond ring on her finger. “I recognize this. It’s the one I showed you in the magazine when we were kids. Same cut, same setting.”
“Yes.”
“When we go walking, the sun will light it up like fire.”
39
Emily flew to San Jose and rented a car to drive the rest of the way. She didn’t like the car because it was newer than her faithful Volvo, and it had a lot of mechanisms on the dashboard and the console that struck her as childish and self-indulgent. All the padding in odd places seemed to her to be designed to hide the sounds of an
