She opened her eyes. Her face was half in the dirt. She could see the road, and beyond that, tree trunks, bracken, and dead leaves. The angle was wrong. It made her feel queasy. She shut her eyes. She pressed against the ground, trying to shift her weight. Her arms shook. With a stabbing pain, she rolled onto her back.
She didn’t want to move; she didn’t want to think; she didn’t want to be in her body right now. She stared into the sky. Why was the November sky, even on a sunny day, so much less blue than in October? In October, it always felt like she could reach up and touch the sky. Now, high and pale, it had retreated to the edge of the world. Soon it would snow.
The noontime sun shone straight overhead, warming her and the rocks and the dirt indiscriminately. But this was mid-November, and the sun was like a ball tossed in the sky, quick up and quick down. Within a few hours, it would be growing dark. And cold. When the sun set, the temperatures would sink below freezing. She ached so badly, she wanted to lie in the dirt and the sunshine and pretend that her dad would discover her at any moment. But she couldn’t count on that.
She rolled over again. Palms flat against the ground, she pushed herself, shoulders up, rump up, until she was on her hands and knees. She would get herself to her car. She wasn’t too far, maybe a hundred yards, maybe two hundred. If she could make it to her car, she could roll it down to the county highway. There would be traffic there, people that would stop at the sight of a woman with a bloody head. She could use the cell phone hanging off its charger.
She crawled downhill. Small rocks bit through the knees of her jeans, adding an undercurrent of teeth-gritting pain to the constant, throbbing ache that was her head and the sharp electrical jolts whenever she breathed too deeply or moved the wrong way. She inched forward, and forward, and forward, in a haze of pain and sweat and dirt and sunshine, and when she paused to see how far she had come she almost wept.
She wasn’t more than fifteen feet from where she started.
Where her car should have been, there was nothing.
A part of her mind that was well away from the pain noted that her Albany friends were right. She shouldn’t have left her keys in the car.
She wrapped her arms more tightly around her. She was cold, cold from the inside out, her feet and fingers almost numb. Okay. She was headed for the county highway. She’d just have to walk, that’s all.
So she walked.
Enough. Get to the road. She rolled to her knees and pushed against the dirt, trying to leverage herself up again. She felt a hot pain, biting and chewing at her guts. Deep inside her, something tore loose-
An Order of Service for Noonday
Shaun Reid stood in his office, considering the rest of his life. He had driven all the way home from his AllBanc meeting only to idle in the driveway, staring at his garage door, wondering what was the matter with him. Why the hell couldn’t he take the money and run? Terry McKellan was right: He’d have enough bucks to retire and live in style with his gorgeous young wife. Hell, he was still young himself, by today’s standards. Fifty was just breaking middle age. He had thirty, thirty-five years ahead of him if he watched his cholesterol and kept active.
That prospect was like looking into a puzzle box picture, where an endless series of boxes opened before him, and each box was a gray and empty room. He reversed out of his driveway and drove to the mill, down streets he had driven for thirty years. More, if you counted the times he had been sitting in the seat next to his dad.
He had loved coming to work with the old man. When he was too small to go onto the floor, his dad had given him the run of the administrative offices. He would ride round and round in the secretary’s chair that spun and rolled, and she would let him crank the mimeograph machine and swipe candy from the bowl on her desk. When he got older, he loved the way his dad would talk to him as if he were another adult, laying out facts and figures, asking for his opinion. At home, he wasn’t supposed to pester his dad, who would stretch out in his chair, tired from a hard day’s work, reading a magazine and drinking the Tom Collins Mom always served him. But at the mill it was a different story. Dad was alert, energetic, attentive. They were a team.
He had never wanted to kick loose, to move away or strike out on his own. In college, when his classmates were studying Marxist literature and marching against the war, he had lied about being a business major, because that was almost as uncool as being in the ROTC. But he never questioned that he was going back to Millers Kill, where an office next to his father’s waited for him.
He stood there now. It was small, tucked between the reception area and what used to be the payroll accountant’s office, until they outsourced payroll to a big firm that cut the checks and handled the taxes and Social Security for them. He had hoped Jeremy would one day work there, within earshot of his father, but-he shook that thought off. Entered the office that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.
Most of the old pictures, from the first days of the company, were in the reception area now, impressing anyone who got off on the quaint idea that a business might run for over a century without changing hands. The pictures and plaques in his office were personal, and looking at them, he realized how much his life had been shaped by the presence of the mill and his role in its continuity.
There were his mom and dad, and him in bibbed shorts and curly hair, squinting into the sunlight at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “new” dam and causeway, now forty-seven years old and aging fast. There were his high school and college graduation pictures. No honors. He had never pushed himself. Never had to. The picture of Jeremy in cap and gown, though, showed loops of gold braid and an Honor Society tassel. Even then, his son had been planning ahead for his getaway.
By his son’s graduation picture was a framed newspaper clipping with a picture of Shaun and Russ Van Alstyne at the 1968 trout tourney, showing off their winning fish, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Russ had left the year after that and not returned for a quarter century. Shaun had seen him a few times since he had become chief of police, at Rotary dinners and town meetings. They had nothing in common anymore. It wasn’t Russ personally. Shaun didn’t have much in common with many of the people he had called friends back in high school. They had aged into grocery clerks and dairy farmers, or they had left town and not come back. There weren’t many success stories in Millers Kill, not for the class of ’69.
He flopped onto the sofa Courtney had picked out for him. Soft leather as comfortable as an old glove. He had kicked and screamed, but once the old couch-picked out by his mother, circa 1964-had been carted away and the new one installed, he wondered why he had put up with the hard seat and scratchy upholstery for so long. Maybe
