Peril

The bus cruised along Sunset Highway, through the clustered towns of Long Island. Within an hour she would be in New York. She had planned her future just that far, made no plans beyond her arrival, lined up no job, booked no hotel, nothing. At thirty-eight, she would return to the city exactly as she had first come to it twenty years before, with a single suitcase, no prospects, fleeing Long Island as she’d once fled the South, caught again in the same grim vise.

“Looks like we’re going to get a little rain.”

Sara glanced toward the woman who sat next to her.

“I checked the weather station before I left this morning,” the woman added. “There’s little spots of rain all up the East Coast.” She opened a brown paper bag and took out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. “I don’t eat in bus stops,” she explained. “Too expensive.”

Sara said nothing. She wanted silence and distance, wanted only to get away from Tony and his father and from her own devouring rage.

Stop! she told herself fiercely. Put it out of your mind, everything before right now.

“Where you headed?” the woman beside her asked.

“North,” Sara said, her voice oddly stiff and inflectionless, as if it came from stone.

The woman took the sandwich out of the foil. It was egg and bacon. She took a large bite and chewed with her mouth open. “Me too. Change for Boston when I get to the city. I got a daughter in Boston. I’m staying with her for a few days.”

Sara listened as the woman prattled on and on, a low drone in Sara’s mind as she detailed the route her daughter Lynn had taken through life, where she’d gone to school, the two guys she’d married, the jobs she’d had. The dragonback of Manhattan was visible before the tale wound to its end.

“I think Lynn’s pretty settled now,” the woman concluded.

Settled.

Sara saw a field of summer corn, felt a sweetly sickening breath in her face. She should have known at that instant that nothing would ever be settled after that because from then on, even when alone, she would hear nothing but the heavy tread of something from behind, and then the frantic scampering of prey.

ABE

He jiggled the key until it opened. It hadn’t turned smoothly in years. Like everything else, Abe thought, cranky and erratic, determined to thwart the smooth flow of things.

He switched on the light, closed the door, locked it. The clock over the bar read eleven-fifteen. Jake would arrive at noon, and the daily routine would begin in earnest, setting up the bar, checking the supplies, cleaning, polishing, paying bills. Jorge would show up twenty minutes later, mop the place, break down the boxes, gather up the garbage, all the drudge work of keeping the joint relatively clean. Susanne Albert, the college girl who’d worked in the place for only a couple of months, would come in an hour before opening, do the few things Jake hadn’t finished, then sit in the back booth, reading some book about Hindu philosophy. And last, Lucille, the bar’s only entertainment, a sixty-one-year-old former Broadway chorus singer who’d been at the bar for as long as Abe could remember, the singer he’d first accompanied all those many years ago, and who he’d kept on even after he’d bought the place.

That was it, then, Abe thought, the family.

It was a far cry from what he’d intended, but it was no doubt better than tapping out “Feelings” in some seedy lounge on the Jersey shore. He was forty-eight, old enough to know that the jazz pianist’s life he’d once envisioned for himself would not have suited him very well. In fact, when he thought of it now, it was as little more than a Blue Note fantasy, like becoming a writer or an actor. Mavis had always said that he wasn’t very adventurous, that all he really wanted was the anchor of a steady, predictable life. Toward the end she’d been plenty frank about it, When you get right down to it, Abe, you’re a stick-in-the-mud.

He walked behind the bar, took the canvas cash bag he’d brought from the bank around the corner, and began to fill the register. He’d just opened the quarters into the drawer when the phone rang.

“McPherson’s,” he said.

“Abe. Lucille.”

“You sound shitty.”

“It’s the mood, you know?”

“You need anything?”

“No. I’m just gonna sleep through it.”

“Well, if you do . . .”

“I know, Abe.”

He heard the click of the phone as Lucille hung up. Okay, he thought, his longtime chanteuse was in a mood and so wouldn’t be showing up for her set. But it was a Tuesday, the slowest night of the week, so with Susanne working the tables and Jake the bar, and Jorge busing and himself at the keyboard, the bar would make it through all right.