Because Birdie seemed to expect me to elucidate, I fumbled out what I thought she might want to say herself: “Grief can destroy you-or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the
After a moment, she fanned her face again, and closed her eyes.
I gazed through the windshield at the desolation of fog, which might have been the waste and void from the time before time, when mankind did not exist or any beast, when there was only darkness on the face of the deep.
Birdie said, “What you said. All of it. Same for me. So one day my emptiness was filled. First twinge came. Tuesday afternoon in May, it was. Not a physical twinge. Just a feelin’, like why don’t I drive one of the old garbage-collection routes. Wound up at Nancy Coleman’s place, former employee of ours. Husband left her a year earlier. Four hours before I show up, she gets a cancer diagnosis. Scared, alone. That year, I drove her to chemo, doctors’ appointments, shoppin’ for a wig, spent so much time together, more laughin’ than either of us would have thought at the start.”
She closed the fan and returned it to her purse.
“Another time, I need to drive, wind up at Bodi Booker’s house. Insurance agent, lifelong bachelor. Says he’s busy, I talk my way in. He’s makin’ hot chocolate. So we start talkin’ Fred. He and my Fred were bowlin’-team buddies, went fishin’ like the son Fred and I never could have. Half an hour, he tells me the hot cocoa was to wash down a bottle of pills, to kill himself. Year later, Nancy Coleman doesn’t have cancer anymore, she has Bodi, they married.”
She retrieved her white gloves and worked her hands into them.
“What about Swithin busted from bad romance?” I asked.
“Swithin Murdoch. Good man, made a fool of himself over this girl. Leanna cleaned out his bank accounts, took a powder. Swithin almost lost his house, business, the works. I made a loan, he paid it back. So why you, Harry Lime?”
“I think something bad would have happened to me at that storm drain if you hadn’t showed up.”
“Bad like what?”
Although her journey since Fred had shown her that under the apparent chaos of life lies a strange order, the truth of me would be more than she could absorb in the time that it would take her to drive the rest of the way to the harbor.
“I don’t know, ma’am. Just a feeling I have.”
She switched on the headlights and shifted the car out of park.
“For true, you don’t know?”
Whatever event had been pending at the storm-drain grate, it had been related to the peculiar behavior of the coyotes and to the porch swing that had swung itself. I did not understand what linked those three experiences, nor what power or purpose lay behind them, so I could answer honestly.
“For true,” I assured her. “How far to the harbor?”
Piloting the Cadillac back into the fog-flooded street, she said, “Three minutes, four.”
My wristwatch and her car clock agreed-9:59.
After a silence, Birdie said, “What’s so different about you, child?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe…because I spent seven months as a guest at a monastery. The serenity of the monks kind of rubbed off on me.”
“Nothin’ rubbed off. Your difference is all yours.”
Anything I could say would be a lie or an evasion, and because she had somehow saved me, I did not want to lie to her more than necessary.
Birdie said, “You sometimes sense somethin’ big is comin’?”
“Big like what?”
“So big the world changes.”
“Watching the news too much can make you crazy,” I advised.
“Don’t mean the kind of bushwa newsmen jabber. Not war or plague, not water gives you cancer or here comes a new ice age.”
“Then what kind of bushwa?” I asked.
“Some kind nobody would ever expect.”
I thought of the absolute whiteout through which the golden retriever and I had traveled, but if that had been not just weather but also a premonition, I did not know the meaning of it.
“I can’t have done right by you yet,” she said.
“I appreciate the ride.”
“Wasn’t twinged out of my cozy home just to be a taxi. What you need, child?”
“Nothing, ma’am. I’m good.”
“Place to stay?”
“Comes with my job. Nice ocean-view room.”
“Lawyer?”
“Have nothing against them, but I don’t need one.”
“Got a bad feelin’ for you.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Some need you’ve got. I feel it.”
Considering Hoss Shackett and Utgard Rolf and the kind of men who would be aligned with them, I had a long list of things I needed, starting with a platoon of Marines.
“Money?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
Solemnly, quietly, she said, “Gun?”
I hesitated before I replied. “I don’t like guns.”
“Might not like them, but you need one.”
Sensing that I had said too much, I said no more.
“It’s in the purse,” she told me.
I looked at her, but she kept her attention on the street, where the headlights seemed to bake the batter of fog into a solid cake.
“Why would you have a gun?” I asked.
“Old lady in an ugly time-she has to take precautions.”
“You bought it legally?”
“I look like Clyde’s Bonnie to you?”
“No, ma’am. I just mean, anything I did with it would be traced back to you.”
“A few days, I report it stolen.”
“What if I rob a bank with it?”
“You won’t.”
“You can’t be sure. You hardly know me.”
“Child, have you been listenin’ to me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
