the man with the dark red moustache. Instead she saw a young fellow in a conservative summer-weight suit. “Sorry if I startled you,” he said, “but for a second there I was sure you were going to step right out into the traffic.”
She looked around and saw that she was standing on the comer of Hitchens and Watertower Drive, one of the busiest intersections in the city and at least three full blocks past the Hot Pot, maybe four. Traffic raced by like a metal river. It suddenly occurred to her that the young man beside her might have saved her life.
“Th-Thank you. A lot.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and on the far side of Watertower, WALK flashed out in white letters. The young man gave Rosie a final curious glance and then stepped off the curb and into the crosswalk with the rest of the pedestrians and was borne away.
Rosie stayed where she was, feeling the momentary dislocation and deep relief of someone who wakes from a really bad dream. And that’s exactly what I was having, she thought. I was awake and walking down the street, but I was still having a bad dream. Or a flashback. She looked down and saw she was holding her purse clamped tightly against her midsection in both hands, as she had held it during that long, bewildering tramp in search of Durham Avenue five weeks ago. She slipped the strap over her shoulder, turned around, and began retracing her steps.
The city’s fashionable shopping section started beyond Watertower Drive; the area she was now passing through as she left Watertower behind consisted of much smaller shops. Many of them looked a little seedy, a trifle desperate around the edges. Rosie walked slowly, looking in the windows of secondhand clothing stores trying to pass themselves off as grunge boutiques, shoe stores with signs reading BUY AMERICAN and CLEARANCE SALE in the windows, a discount place called No More Than 5, its window heaped with dollbabies made in Mexico or Manila, a leathergoods place called Motorcycle Mama, and a store called Avec Plaisir with a startling array of goods—dildos, handcuffs, and crotchless underwear—displayed on black velvet. She looked in here for quite awhile, marvelling at this stuff which had been put out for anyone passing to see, and at last crossed the street. Half a block farther up she could see the Hot Pot, but she had decided to forgo the coffee and pie, after all; she would simply catch the bus and go on back to D & S. Enough adventures for one day.
Except that wasn’t what happened. On the far corner of the intersection she had just crossed was a nondescript storefront with a neon sign in the window reading PAWNS LOANS FINE JEWELRY BOUGHT AND SOLD. It was the last service which caught Rosie’s attention. She looked down at her engagement ring again, and remembered something Norman had told her not long before they were married—If you wear that on the street, wear it with the stone turned in toward your palm, Rose. That’s a helluva big rock and you’re just a little girl.
She had asked him once (this was before he had begun teaching her that it was safer not to ask questions) how much it had cost. He had answered with a headshake and a small indulgent smile—the smile of a parent whose child wants to know why the sky is blue or how much snow there is at the North Pole. Never mind, he said. Content yourself with knowing it was either the rock or a new Buick. I decided on the rock. Because I love you, Rose.
Now, standing here on this streetcorner, she could still remember how that had made her feel—afraid, because you had to be afraid of a man capable of such extravagance, a man who could choose a ring over a new car, but a little breathless and sexy, too. Because it was romantic. He had bought her a diamond so big that it wasn’t safe to flash it on the street. A diamond as big as the Ritz. Because I love you, Rose.
And perhaps he had ... but that had been fourteen years ago, and the girl he’d loved had possessed clear eyes and high breasts and a flat stomach and long, strong thighs. There had been no blood in that girl’s urine when she went to the bathroom.
Rosie stood on the comer near the storefront with the neon in the window and