Paul starts a joke, something about a cracker for a starving man, and stops himself.
“I should probably get to work,” Chloe says at the same time he offers to walk her out.
At her car door, Paul holds the tiny umbrella for her while she unlocks the Cherokee.
“Nice to see you, and thanks. You really are a good listener.”
Chloe is in the tunnel on her way to the Banfield before she realizes that in the final moments, neither of them had left money for the coffee.
21
Bus Number Seven
JASON
The bus lurches, throwing Penny’s slack body against his shoulder. She is like a used prison pillow, not even trying to keep herself upright. Jason puts his arm along the back of the bench, cups her shoulder and steadies her.
“How’s my girl?” he says in a low voice.
“Mmm.”
It’s the same fucking nothing response she gave the doctor today, but when he asked if she was depressed, she said no.
“I can write you a prescription,” he’d said. “Antidepressants.”
“I don’t do drugs,” Penny had said, her eyes on the toes of her shoes, black with pink polka dots, picked out from the donation box at the adoption agency.
“Why’d you lie to the doc?” he asks her, squeezing her shoulder as the bus bumps over the trolley line in the road.
“What?”
“Why didn’t you take the slip?”
“Why should I take a pill to make me feel like everything’s okay? I gave our baby away to some fuckin’ rich strangers. I should feel bad.”
Jason tries to think of something to say, but she beats him to it.
“And don’t tell me it was the right thing to do. Now if things start to change for us, get better, I won’t want them to, because that makes it worse. If Brandi really gets you a job or the doc says I’m all healed and I can go back to looking for work, then it’s like, why’d we give him away?”
Jason can’t remember what Lisle said, so he makes up the statistic. “Ninety percent of life is timing, Pen. The timing was wrong.”
“Is that what we’re going to tell him? ‘Sorry, Buddy, you came at a bad time.’”
Jason wonders what she means, when she thinks they’ll be talking to Buddy, when they’ll be offering up excuses. He looks out the window at the leftover Christmas decorations, tinsel shaped into a wreath hanging from the light posts, and the way they droop is enough to make him cry, sign him up for the fucking Prozac. Why had he looked forward to this appointment so bad—because he thought the doc was going to give them the green light to do it again? Every night he has to listen to Lisle banging Brandi, the springs on the sofa bed screeching, her yelping, his Penny’s cold back to him, the ache in his balls so bad he had to lock up in the bathroom and yank on it for an electric shock, a sliver of pleasure, a ghost of an orgasm, and finally, it would settle down and he could sleep.
God, his dick couldn’t feel any limper than it does right now. The dick that fucked the girl that made the baby that they couldn’t keep that broke the girl’s heart.
“I regret it, that’s all I’m saying.” Penny butts her forehead against her shoulder to get his attention. “I just want to see him, hold him, you know?”
“You want him back?” Jason says it slowly, rolling words in his mouth. What he wouldn’t give to be having this conversation somewhere other than on a MAX line bus, so he could be sucking off a smoke at the same time. Thinking.
“You know in the cartoons, when Yosemite Sam gets shot with a cannon, and the ball passes through, and leaves a big hole in his gut? That’s how I feel since we signed those papers, and Buddy”—her voice breaks—“and they walked out the door with me never seeing him.”
She starts crying into his armpit, his sweet Penny—the lady across from them staring at his girl’s pain, fucking public transportation, can’t even cry in private, God, they need a car, he needs a job…
Jason bends his head down and whispers, “Shhh. I know where they live.” It is an exaggeration, so he downgrades to the truth. “I know their car.” Silver Volvo Cross Country, SPR-NVA license plate. There are other things he knows; won’t be hard to find out where they live.
“What?” Penny tilts her face up to him; even with the scars,