a station playing "Amazing Grace." The next time she looked at her strange companion, she saw that he was looking out at the darkening sky and weeping. Then she chanced to look down and saw something much odder, something that moved her heart as it had not been moved in fifteen years, when she had miscarried her one and only effort to have a child.
The animal, the not-dog, the Oy... he was crying, too.
FOURTEEN
She got off 95 just over the Massachusetts state line and checked them into a pair of side-by-side rooms in a dump called the Sea Breeze Inn. She hadn't thought to bring her driving glasses, the ones she called her bug's-asshole glasses (as in "when I'm wearing these things I can see up a bug's asshole"), and she didn't like driving at night, anyway. Bug's-asshole glasses or not, driving at night fried her nerves, and that was apt to bring on a migraine. With a migraine she would be of no use to either of them, and her Imitrex was sitting uselessly in the medicine cabinet back in East Stoneham.
"Plus," she told Roland, "if this Tet Corporation you're looking for is in a business building, you won't be able to get inside until Monday, anyway." Probably not true; this was the sort of man who got into places when he wanted. You couldn't keep him out. She guessed that was part of his attraction to a certain kind of woman.
In any case, he did not object to the motel. No, he would not go out to dinner with her, and so she found the nearest bearable fast-food franchise and brought back a late dinner from RFC. They ate in Roland's room. Irene fixed Oy a plate without being asked. Oy ate a single piece of the chicken, holding it neatly between his paws, then went into the bathroom and appeared to fall asleep on the mat in front of the tub.
"Why do they call this the Sea Breeze?" Roland asked.
Unlike Oy, he was eating some of everything, but he did it with no sign of pleasure. He ate like a man doing work. "I get no smell of the ocean."
"Well, probably you can when the wind's in the right quarter and blowing a hurricane," she said. "It's what we call poetic license, Roland."
He nodded, showing unexpected (to her, at least) understanding.
"Pretty lies," he said.
"Yes, I suppose."
She turned on the television, thinking it would divert him, and was shocked by his reaction (although she told herself that what she felt was amusement). When he told her he couldn't see it, she had no idea how to take what he was saying; her first thought that it was some sort of oblique and teddibly intellectual criticism of the medium itself. Then she thought he might be speaking (in equally oblique fashion) of his sorrow, his state of mourning. It wasn't until he told her that he heard voices, yes, but saw only lines which made his eyes water that she realized he was telling her the literal truth: he could not see the pictures on the screen. Not the rerun of Roseanne, not the infomercial for Ab-Flex, not the talking head on the local news. She held on until the story about Stephen King (taken by LifeFlight helicopter to Central Maine General in Lewiston, where an early-evening operation seemed to have saved his right leg-condition listed as fair, more operations ahead, road to recovery expected to be long and uncertain), then turned the TV off.
She bussed up the trash-there was always so much more of it from a KFC meal, somehow-bade Roland an uncertain goodnight (which he returned in a distracted, I'm-not-reallyhere way that made her nervous and sad), then went to her own room next door. There she watched an hour of an old movie in which Yul Brynner played a robot cowboy that had run amok before turning it off and going into the bathroom to brush her teeth. There she realized that she had-of course, dollink!-forgotten her toothbrush. She did the best she could with her finger, then lay down on the bed in her bra and panties (no nightgown either). She spent an hour like that before realizing that she was listening for sounds from beyond the paper-thin wall, and for one sound in particular: the crash of the gun he had considerately not worn from the car to the motel room.
The single loud shot that would mean he had ended his sorrow in the