a cold finger up her back, tracing the curve of her spine.
The food made her feel better, stronger and more awake. When she had finished (lingering over her coffee until she saw the Chicano busboy looking at her with unconcealed impatience), she started slowly back to the TV alcove. On the way, she caught sight of a blue-and-white circle over a booth near the rental-car kiosks. The words bending their way around the circle’s blue outer stripe were TRAVELERS AID, and Rosie thought, not without a twinkle of humor, that if there had ever been a traveler in the history of the world who needed aid, it was her.
She took a step toward the lighted circle. There was a man sitting inside the booth under it, she saw—a middle-aged guy with thinning hair and hornrimmed glasses. He was reading a newspaper. She took another step in his direction, then stopped again. She wasn’t really going over there, was she? What in God’s name would she tell him? That she had left her husband? That she had gone with nothing but her purse, his ATM card, and the clothes she stood up in?
Why not? Practical-Sensible asked, and the total lack of sympathy in her voice struck Rosie like a slap. If you had the guts to leave him in the first place, don’t you have the guts to own up to it?
She didn’t know if she did or not, but she knew that telling a stranger the central fact of her life at four o’clock in the morning would be very difficult. And probably he’d just tell me to get lost, anyway. Probably his job is helping people to replace their lost tickets, or making lost-children announcements over the loudspeakers.
But her feet started moving in the direction of the Travelers Aid booth just the same, and she understood that she did mean to speak to the stranger with the thinning hair and the hornrimmed glasses, and that she was going to do it for the simplest reason in the universe: she had no other choice. In the days ahead she would probably have to tell a lot of peopie that she had left her husband, that she had lived in a daze behind a closed door for fourteen years, that she had damned few life-skills and no work-skills at all, that she needed help, that she needed to depend on the kindness of strangers.
But none of that is really my fault, is it? she thought, and her own calmness surprised her, almost stunned her.
She came to the booth and put the hand not currently clutching the strap of her purse on the counter. She looked hopefully and fearfully down at the bent head of the man in the homrimmed glasses, looking at his brown, freckled skull through the strands of hair laid across it in neat thin rows. She waited for him to look up, but he was absorbed in his paper, which was written in a foreign language that looked like either Greek or Russian. He carefully turned a page and frowned at a picture of two soccer players tussling over a ball.
“Excuse me?” she asked in a small voice, and the man in the booth raised his head.
Please let his eyes be kind, she thought suddenly. Even if he can’t do anything, please let his eyes be kind... and let them see me, me, the real person who is standing here with nothing but the strap of this Kmart purse to hold onto.
And, she saw, his eyes were kind. Weak and swimmy behind the thick lenses of his glasses ... but kind.
“I’m sorry, but can you help me?” she asked.
3
The Travelers Aid volunteer introduced himself as Peter Slowik, and he listened to Rosie’s story in attentive silence. She told as much as she could, having already come to the conclusion that she could not depend on the kindness of strangers if she held what was true about her in reserve, out of either pride or shame. The only important thing she didn’t tell him—because she couldn’t think of a way to express it—was how unarmed she felt, how totally unprepared for the world. Until the last eighteen hours or so, she’d had no conception of how much of the world she knew only from TV, or from the daily paper her husband brought home.
“I understand that you left on the spur of the moment,” Mr. Slowik said, “but while you were riding the bus did you have any idea