“What is it?” I asked. “You can tell me.”
“You know what I pray?” she said, and I shook my head. “I pray he doesn’t do it in front of the children.”
She didn’t say anything else and I didn’t either. In a couple of minutes the waiter brought our main course. He placed two stemmed glasses next to our silverware, then lifted an ice bucket from the cart, in it a bottle of champagne.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t order this.”
“Compliments of the lady,” the waiter said, nodding toward the entrance. “The whole meal is.”
Kelly sat at the far end of the bar. I had no idea how long she’d been there, but I could see her wineglass was almost empty as she raised it in a toast to me, to Lee Ann.
I looked in the bar’s mirror and saw the back of Kelly’s head, saw what she saw — two people who needed a lesson in reality, and she was willing to foot the bill to make that lesson possible.
“Who is she?” Lee Ann asked, suspicion in her voice.
“My wife,” I said.
“I should have known this wasn’t right,” Lee Ann said. Her voice was as soft as when she told me she expected to be killed.
I thought she would start crying. She looked like she might, but she didn’t. She’d probably learned long ago how useless tears were.
Kelly was still at the bar, watching us.
“I want to go home,” Lee Ann said, and I didn’t argue.
I didn’t look Kelly’s way as we went out, and we were almost back to Lee Ann’s trailer before I tried to apologize.
“Was my ad so stupid you thought you could do this to me?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Was it some kind of joke?”
I shook my head.
“Why then?”
“Because I was unhappy with my marriage. I wanted to be with someone else awhile,” I said, and that was a lie, and I didn’t care. I’d had enough truth for a while, and I believed Lee Ann had as well.
She looked out the window at the yards flashing past, some with children playing in the last light.
“He sends me pictures he draws,” she said. “Pictures of me with just my head, no body. My eyes are open in those pictures. My mouth too. I’m screaming. He calls them Valentines.”
She closed her eyes and I said nothing. I didn’t want to know what she was thinking.
When we got back to the trailer Lee Ann unbuckled her seat belt but didn’t get out. I reached for my door handle but she touched my arm.
“Would you hold me?” she asked. “Please, just for a few moments.”
I placed my arm around her, awkward as a high school kid on a first date, but that didn’t seem to matter. She laid her cheek against my chest. We didn’t say anything. We just sat there as the dark deepened around us. After a while her sister drove up with the kids, and I walked her to the trailer’s battered door. I drove back home to a life where all that was required of me was that I look in the mirror from time to time.
I DIDN’T DO the article for Carolina Tempo, and I threw the thirty-eight pages of The Myth of Robert Frost in the trash can Kelly had so thoughtfully made a part of my writing room. The next time Kelly asked what I was working on, I handed her my course syllabi for the fall. She read each one carefully before handing them back.
“You’ve finally found your voice,” she said.
I don’t know what happened to Lee Ann McIntyre. Probably she left North Carolina long before her husband got out of prison, but every time the newspaper has a story about a local murder I quickly turn the page, afraid I’ll see her face staring back at me. But I do think of her quite often. What I remember most about my date with Lee Ann McIntyre was standing with her outside the trailer afterward. The night air was muggy and still, and somewhere back in the woods an owl called.
“Somehow, despite all this, I still think you’re a good person,” she said.
She took my hand, and I felt the warmth of her flesh touching mine, and I could almost believe, for a brief moment, that had we met at a different time and place we might even have fallen in love.
“No, I’m not,” I said finally, and let her hand slip free from mine.
Dangerous Love
When Ricky threw his knife and the blade tore my blouse and cut into flesh eight inches from my heart, it was certain as the blood trickling down my arm that something in our relationship had gone wrong.
“Cut the rest of it off,” a townie in a yellow ball cap yelled from the bleachers, thinking ripping my blouse was part of the show.
“Work on that dress some too,” said a man on the front row.
Another townie stepped through the tent entrance and sat down.
“What have I missed?” he asked.
“Near about a execution,” the man behind him said.
Twenty feet in front of me, Ricky stared at his empty right hand like he was holding it out for Lady Socrates to tell his future. But Lady Socrates was three tents down the midway. Ricky would have to figure it out on his own what his hand told him. The folks in the stands started whistling and yelling but Ricky just kept staring at his hand. I wondered if he saw his future in the lifeline that crossed his palm. I wondered if he saw a future that included me.
“Don’t waste your money on such as that,” Momma had said that first night, but it was my dollar bill. I’d earned it waiting on smart alecks and grumps, coming home every night with aching feet and smelling like grease and cigarettes. All that for minimum wage and a few quarters thrown on the counter.
I stared at the painting on the tent, the figure of a gypsy-looking woman with so many knives jutting out around her she looked to be sprouting quills like a porcupine. The knife thrower had his hand behind his ear, ready to hurl another knife. He wore a droopy mustache, his long hair flowing down his back. RICARDO MONT BLANC: WORLD-FAMOUS KNIFE THROWER, the caption said.
“I’m going,” I told Momma and handed the woman at the ticket booth my dollar.
The light was shadowy inside. The air smelled of sawdust and sweat. Five rows of half-filled bleachers filled one side of the tent. At the back a piece of plywood stood like a knobless door. A human outline had been drawn on the wood, like on police shows when somebody’s been killed. I sat down in the first row, the only woman in the audience.
A man opened the flap at the back of the tent, what looked like a wooden suitcase in his left hand. He was blonder than I’d expected from the poster and name, so handsome with his green eyes and long, wavy hair. He wore all black from shirt to boots. Younger than I’d supposed too, his brow unlined and mustache fine as peach fuzz. I reckoned he was about my age, still in his mid-twenties.
The knife thrower opened the carrying case. There was nothing inside but black-handled knives with long, bright blades — beautiful, deadly looking knives. He didn’t say a word, just picked one up and flung it. The knife made a loud whack as it entered the plywood, the blade no more than an inch above the outline’s right wrist. He flung another, hitting the same exact spot, except this time above the left wrist.
“Where’s your damsel in distress?” a pimply-faced young rowdy yelled from the row behind me.
“Don’t have one,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said and threw another knife, which landed between the outline’s legs.
“I figured there to be a pretty woman for you to throw at,” the teenager said.
“It ain’t nothing to throw at a piece of plywood,” an old man on the top row added. “There ain’t no risk to that.”
“Then you get up there,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said. “I’ll throw at you.”