here, and it requires you to trust me.”
She has enough confidence to look me right in the eye. Her mouth opens, pauses without forming words, as though she’s thinking twice about whatever was about to escape. I seem to have achieved one objective: By introducing myself last night and leaving her unharmed, my return has her displaying a different disposition.
I turn to fully face her, drop my hands to my sides, attempt a nonconfrontational pose. “Tell me you want me to leave,” I say. “Ask, Melody. You can do it.”
“I don’t have to ask anything. Sean comes through that door and there’ll be nothing more to discuss.”
There’s that friggin’ fence again.
I fold my arms, confrontation arrives anyway and makes itself known, passes my lips in what appear to be words of jealousy. “I find it entertaining that you call your little clam-digging friend Sean instead of marshal or deputy.”
She speaks positively but shakes her head in disappointment. “We have a sort of… connection.”
I try not to laugh too loud. “Well, expect to get disconnected very soon.”
She rolls her eyes as though anxiety has been replaced by annoyance. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? What’d you do with Sean?”
“Sean is delayed. You might say he’s having a bout of tummy trouble.”
“Oh, clever! Let me guess: That means you sliced his stomach to pieces. You guys are totally awesome.”
I need to get her out of here, but she’s starting to suck the energy right out of me. I stand back and hold my hands out, far-distanced and weaponless. “Does that seem like my style?”
“What do I know? It was definitely your dad’s style.”
I look away, would love to explain how that would never be who I am to her, and that I have traveled twenty years to undo the specific actions that caused her all this destruction, to restore her to who she was before we vandalized her life. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time. “Yeah, well, that’s sort of why I’m here.”
“Aw, your daddy send you on errand?” The fear she had five hours earlier seems to have been fully transformed into hatred. Quite unfortunate. For nearly my entire life I’ve been mentored on the way to manipulate fear into a currency that can be used to make any purchase. Hatred, on the other hand, adds up to nothing, was almost exclusively reserved for the feds and the cops and those we had betrayed.
And now I’m facing a bout of fear myself—the fear I’m going to lose her here. I search my arsenal of possibility; I’ve got nothing, can’t look her in the eye. I’ve never been defeated easily—at least never this easily—but Melody has knocked me down. I’m surprised how much it hurts.
I turn to leave, no longer caring what faces me on the other side, ready to take out that inadequate marshal with a few swift blows, give him a lesson on how seriously he should be taking his job.
“Meet me out front in five minutes.” And as I open the door and step into the sun, I say, “And be alone.”
“Wait!” she says, then pauses like she had no follow-up. “Should I bring my stuff?”
I stare at her, and with all the intention I can rally I try to drive home my point, that if she chooses the marshal over me, the existence she will condemn herself to: “What stuff?”
I close the door behind me, walk to my car. And wait.
THREE
I keep my promise. I pull next to the rusty overhang at the front of the motel. But now I am fueled, less interested in strategy than in battle; Peter would be proud. A small part of me would love to get face-to-face with her marshal—Sean, the lethargic superhero—and put a finger to his chest and a fist to his head, command him to protect her life like his own.
I decide to in-your-face this entire scene: I park my car sideways and block anyone else from driving through the entryway, display the Audi like the only ripe tomato in a struggling Delmarva crop. Then I put the top down and my sunglasses on.
I keep the engine running and watch the path Melody would walk, my eyes so fixed on any movement near the corner of the building that I can’t even distract myself with lighting a smoke.
Of the five minutes I told her to wait, four have passed and my heart starts pounding harder. I can’t help but consider going back to her