Don’t Look Back. Laura Lippman

caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.

      He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck – he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer – when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on Earth. He stopped and – sudden inspiration – asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped – Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface – but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make sure she gave precise directions. Only she kept getting a little mixed up over the street names, trying to give him directions according to landmarks he couldn’t know – the Baileys’ house, the nursery school where her little sister went, the High’s store.

      ‘I admit, I just can’t follow all these directions,’ he said with an aw-shucks grin. ‘Are you going that way? Maybe you could show me.’

      Oh, no, she wasn’t going that far. She just had to catch a bus to Route 40.

      Maybe he could take her as far as she was going?

      The sun was strong, so powerful that everything looked white, unreal. This was a pale girl, one who didn’t get to spend her afternoons at the pool. She was heading to work. He could take her to work, Walter said, and then she could draw him a map on – where did she work?

      ‘An ice-cream parlor.’

      ‘Friendly’s? Swensen’s? Baskin-Robbins?’

      ‘Just a local place. It’s kind of old-fashioned.’

      She could draw him a map on a napkin, then, once he dropped her off. How would that be?

      He waited until she was in the cab of the truck and they had driven a little ways before pointing out that she would be early for her shift. Right? She had been walking to a bus stop, and the bus would take so much longer than a direct shot in the truck. He was hungry. Was she hungry? Would she like to stop for something?

      She got to eat free at work, she said.

      Well, gosh, that was great, but he sure didn’t expect her to give him the same deal.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘The manager is really strict, always looking out for girls who gave freebies to their . . . friends.’

      ‘Boyfriends?’ he asked, and she blushed. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

      She considered the question, which struck him as odd. Seemed a clear yes-or-no proposition to him. Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn’t satisfy her. Maybe she was thinking about breaking up with him but was tenderhearted, didn’t want to hurt his feelings. What a nice girl she was.

      ‘Anyway,’ she said, not answering him either way, ‘it’s only ice cream, no burgers or hot dogs or even pizza. We had hot pretzels for a while, but no one wanted them and—’

      Then maybe they could stop at this little place he knew, by a stream? There was a metal stand, kind of like an old-fashioned trailer, and it made the best steak sandwiches. There was no such place, not nearby, but Walter had heard a gentleman at the shop describe the steak sandwiches he had eaten in his youth, back in Wisconsin.

      Walter got lost, looking for the steak shack that wasn’t, driving deeper and deeper into what turned out to be a state park. He made conversation, asked again if she had a boyfriend. She hemmed and hawed but finally said no. Good, he wouldn’t like a girl who would cheat on her boyfriend. She was getting nervous, her eyes skating back and forth, but he promised her that she would be on time for work. He told her he was surprised that a girl as pretty as she was didn’t have a boyfriend. He could tell she liked hearing that, yet she continued to hug the door a little. The road ran out and he parked, told her that he had screwed up, the steak place was on the other side of the creek, but they could cross it and be there in five minutes, if she would just take his hand. Once he had his hand in hers, he tickled the palm with his middle finger, a trick he had heard from Earl, before Earl ran off and joined the Marines. It was a signal and, if the girl liked you, she tickled back. Or maybe if she just didn’t jerk her hand away, he decided, that was proof enough that she was up for things.

      He tried to take it slow, but she kept talking about work, fretting about being late, and then she started to cry. She cried harder when he kissed her, and he was pretty sure he was a good kisser. She cried so hard that snot ran out of her nose, which was gross, and he stopped kissing her.

      ‘I guess you don’t want to be my girlfriend, then,’ he said. She kept crying. Why were girls so contrary? Of course, he lived pretty far away. They wouldn’t be able to see each other except on his days off. But she should be flattered, this girl who no one else had claimed, that a man, a nice-looking man, wanted her. A man who would please her, if she would allow herself to be pleased.

      ‘Are you going to tell?’ he asked.

      She said she wouldn’t, and he wished he could believe her. He didn’t, though. So he did what he had to do. He was tamping down the hole he dug when he saw the other girl coming. How much had she seen? Anything, everything? He thought fast, told her how to cross the stream. He held his hands out to her, and she didn’t hesitate. Her hands felt cool and smooth against his, which were burning with new calluses from the digging. If anyone should have wanted to let go, it should have been him. It hurt, holding her hands. He studied her face. He wished women didn’t lie so much, that there was a way to ask if she had seen anything without giving away that there had been something to see. It was like that old riddle, the one about the island with just two Indians, one who always lies and one who always tells the truth, but there’s one question that will set things straight. Only he could never remember what the question was. Something like: If I ask your brother, will he tell me the truth? No, that wasn’t it, because both would say no. What should he ask her? But he had taken too long, held her hands too roughly, and given himself away.

      ‘You’re with me now,’ he said, buckling her into the seat next to his, then tying her hands at the wrists with a rope from the bed of the pickup.

      Then, as an afterthought: ‘What’s your name?’

       Chapter Nine

      She decided to write Walter a letter, nothing more. That’s the way she characterized her decision, when she spoke of it to Peter and her parents. ‘I’m going to write him a letter,’ she said, ‘nothing more.’ A letter would be private, final. (Although she supposed his mail was read by prison officials. Again, there was the worrying detail of his confidante, the person who had written the letter on his behalf, but she didn’t want to write him in care of that PO box in Baltimore.) A letter seemed the best way to go if she wanted to keep this matter contained.

      Yet whenever she sat down at Peter’s home computer, trying to use those oddments of minutes at a mother’s disposal, she ended up second-guessing herself. A letter wasn’t a small thing, not these days. Even when she lived in London, she hadn’t written letters. Trans- Atlantic calls weren’t that expensive, and e-mails were always handy for rushed bulletins, or sharing the details of their visits home. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had written a letter, and Walter’s was the first real one she had received in years, probably since Vonnie switched to computers for those furious missives about how everyone in the family had disappointed her, a brief mania during her early thirties, when she was under the sway of a disreputable therapist, possibly her lover. But how else did one communicate with a man in prison?

      Eliza smiled in spite of herself, thinking how this question would fit nicely on the running list she and Peter kept, ‘Things We Never Expected to Say.’ They had been keeping this since their college days, almost since the day they met, and it was actually a list of things they had overheard: The bouillabaisse is dank. I left my poncho at the Ritz-Carlton. I have a fetish for fried chicken.