In the night room Page 0,93
me my chocolate. I’ll wait here and brood about how miserable and uncertain my life is. I’m not real, I’m a fantasy of yours.”
“Who says my fantasies aren’t real?”
With a feebleness that was only partially feigned, she raised one hand. Then she let it drop back into her lap and wilted her upper body against the door, her head leaning on the window. Cool air flowing through a vent ruffled the bottom of her sweater. “Just go, Tim. I’ll be all right.”
A geezer with a red vest and a name tag directed me down through the vast space to aisle 14, where I loaded my shopping cart with boxes of Mounds bars, boxes of almond M&M’s, boxes of Hershey’s and Kit Kat and 100 Grand bars. A little farther along I encountered trays of dark French and Belgian chocolate, and I pretty much filled the rest of the cart with boxes of French, Italian, and Belgian chocolates—Droste, Perugina, Valrhona, Callebaut. On the way back to the front of the store, I circled around the back of the bakery section, cut through aisles piled to the ceiling with cake mixes and vats of frosting, and discovered six shelves and whole flats devoted to sugar. I tossed four boxes of confectioner’s sugar onto the candies and proceeded to the rank of ATM machines at the back of the building, where I withdrew five hundred dollars.
Willy started digging into the bags as soon as I got them in the car, and in minutes candy bars littered her lap and the seat well in front of her. “Oh, my God. Perugina and Valrhona dark chocolate. And here’s some Belgian!” Her head snapped up, and she stared straight ahead. Her clean, breathtaking profile should have been on a coin. “I have an idea. By the way, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to myself.”
She took a box of sugar out of a bag, placed it her lap, and ripped two plastic glasses out of their container. Then she half-filled one of the glasses with confectioner’s sugar and filled the other with Coca-Cola from a two-liter bottle. First she dumped sugar into her mouth, then she washed it down with Coke. She repeated the process a couple of times. Powdered sugar lay scattered over her lap and across the seat.
“That’s your idea?”
“No, but this is by far the most efficient way of handling the lightness problem. It just gets in there and does the job. Chocolate tastes a lot better, of course. But this stuff, I can feel it working.”
She gave me a glance that said this, too, was not a conversation, merely a form of Q&A, and crawled over into the back seat and began throwing the useless money out of the white duffel bag. (Willy is wonderful, and I love her, and most of the ways in which she surprises me are far more pleasant than not, but she is a slob, and there’s no way around it.) In seconds, hundred-dollar bills that appeared perfectly legit until you looked at them closely were floating down all over the back seat and onto the little shelf in front of the rear window. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me to shut up. When the bag was empty and fake money lay all over the place, mingling nicely with the spilled sugar, I could hear her transferring the contents of the grocery bags into the duffel. Then she dropped the grocery bags on the floor and tramped them flat, her idea of housekeeping. After that, she climbed back into the front of the car, dragging the white duffel with her, and began pitching into it the loose candy bars and chocolates that were scattered around her. Every now and then she popped a chocolate candy into her mouth.
“I don’t actually need this now, but I might as well live it up, right?” she said. “While I can?”
I told her to feel free.
“At least now I can bring my stash with me when we go places,” she said, hefting the bag. “It’s not as heavy as before, either.”
Willy fell asleep about an hour after we crossed the Indiana state line, and she stayed that way until the outskirts of Chicago, where she began thrashing around and whimpering. I shook her shoulder, and she came fighting back into wakefulness, thrusting her hands out before her and muttering unintelligible, panic-driven words. After a couple of seconds, she calmed down and looked around, and her