on the wrong side of the road.
What Mike had been thinking must have shown on his face because Ken put a hand on his arm and squeezed, and when he looked into his eyes again he saw understanding there, which was rare. Most people didn’t understand what he was feeling. It wasn’t for lack of trying: Bonnie’s friends had kept him fed for a few months after she died, and his own friends had turned up on his doorstep with a six-pack most nights for a long while, but he could tell they didn’t want to understand his pain because understanding it would make it real, and making it real would mean there was the possibility it could happen to them, too, and they didn’t want to think about that. He understood. He didn’t want to think about it happening, either, but it had, so he didn’t have a choice.
Anyway, Ken was a nice guy, grew up in Morgan City, Louisiana, which was where his uncle lived for a while back in the ’90s before the floods got too much for him and he moved north. They talked for a while about the Morganza Spillway and whether or not it was a waste of taxpayers’ money and how the Saints could have gone all the way last season but the team was still young and then a Jeep pulled up to the entrance and the crowd surged forward like a wave and started shouting all at once and waving their signs and the girl driving the car—she couldn’t have been more than twenty—flipped them the bird and kept driving. Nearly hit some poor woman who was just trying to express her disgust for what was going on in that building, which was her right as an American the last time he checked.
They watched as the girl got out of the driver’s side and went around to open the passenger door and a lady with a coat slung over her head so no one could see her face came out and the girl and two women, wearing high-vis vests, ushered her through the doors of the clinic, none of them listening to a word the people around them were saying, or looking at the pictures of these innocent babies, or paying them any heed at all, just heads down and straight inside like they couldn’t wait to murder another baby. Like they didn’t care in the least.
Well, after that, he’d seen enough. He took the pamphlets and Ken’s number and shook hands with the people standing out there in the baking heat and he promised them all that he would read up on things and maybe join them next time. They were all such nice people. Very welcoming, which he thought everyone could agree was rare these days.
His sister wasn’t too pleased when he took the pamphlets out after dinner and started flipping through them. Said something about those people being zealots and having no right to tell her what she could or could not do with her body and how she wouldn’t stand having that propaganda in her house and that Bonnie would have agreed with her, too, which was when he got really mad, because why did she have to bring Bonnie into all this? How could she presume to know more about his wife than he did?
There were a lot of things he could have said to her then, but instead he got up from the sofa and shook his brother-in-law’s hand and told him to kiss his nieces for him at breakfast and he walked out the front door, his sister shouting at him at first and then telling him to stop being such a damn fool, it was dark out and too late for him to drive all the way to Columbus, but he didn’t so much as turn his head toward her, he was so mad. He’d never been so mad in his life, and he thought about it the whole ride home, and about the pictures on those signs of those poor helpless little babies, and that girl driving the Jeep and the way she had just dismissed all of them like they were nothing at all.
The next morning, he called Ken and made plans to come back up to Austin the following weekend.
He got used to the new routine pretty quick. On Saturday mornings, he’d get up early, stop by the gas station to fill up the tank and pour a couple of