Everything's Eventual

   Second honeymoon, that's what you call this, she thought, looking at the palms that lined Highway 867, a white bird that stalked along the shoulder like an angry preacher, and a sign that read SEMINOLE WILDLIFE PARK, BRING A CARFUL FOR $10. Florida the Sunshine State. Florida the Hospitality State. Not to mention Florida the Second-Honeymoon State. Florida, where Bill Shelton and Carol Shelton, the former Carol O'Neill, of Lynn, Massachusetts, came on their first honeymoon twenty-five years before. Only that was on the other side, the Atlantic side, at a little cabin colony, and there were cockroaches in the bureau drawers. He couldn't stop touching me. That was all right, though, in those days I wanted to be touched. Hell, I wanted to be torched like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, and he torched me, rebuilt me, torched me again. Now it's silver. Twenty-five is silver. And sometimes I get that feeling.

   They were approaching a curve, and she thought, Three crosses on the right side of the road. Two small ones flanking a bigger one. The small ones are clapped-together wood. The one in the middle is white birch with a picture on it, a tiny photograph of the seventeen-year-old boy who lost control of his car on this curve one drunk night that was his last drunk night, and this is where his girlfriend and her girlfriends marked the spot—

   Bill drove around the curve. A pair of black crows, plump and shiny, lifted off from something pasted to the macadam in a splat of blood. The birds had eaten so well that Carol wasn't sure they were going to get out of the way until they did. There were no crosses, not on the left, not on the right. Just roadkill in the middle, a woodchuck or something, now passing beneath a luxury car that had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

   Floyd, what's that over there?

   "What's wrong?"

   "Huh?" She looked at him, bewildered, feeling a little wild.

   "You're sitting bolt-upright. Got a cramp in your back?"

   "Just a slight one." She settled back by degrees. "I had that feeling again. The déjà vu."

   "Is it gone?"

   "Yes," she said, but she was lying. It had retreated a little, but that was all. She'd had this before, but never so continuously. It came up and went down, but it didn't go away. She'd been aware of it ever since that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her head—and then the little girl in the red pinafore.

   But, really, hadn't she felt something before either of those things? Hadn't it actually started when they came down the steps of the Lear

35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or even before? En route from Boston?

   They were coming to an intersection. Overhead was a flashing yellow light, and she thought, To the right is a used-car lot and a sign for the Sanibel Community Theater.

   Then she thought, No, it'll be like the crosses that weren't there. It's a strong feeling but a false feeling.

   Here was the intersection. On the right there was a used-car lot— Palmdale Motors. Carol felt a real jump at that, a stab of something sharper than disquiet. She told herself to quit being stupid. There had to be car lots all over Florida and if you predicted one at every intersection sooner or later the law of averages made you a prophet. It was a trick mediums had been using for hundreds of years.

   Besides, there's no theater sign.