Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

me what?”
    She shook her head. “He’s still protecting me. Even now.” She smoothed the sand in front of her, making lines afterwards with one finger. “Leon never wanted to have kids.” Not looking at me. “He’d had a vasectomy when he was twenty-eight.”
    We sat for a long time after that. She told me more about the night she’d left, how she’d sat saying nothing in the truck for hours, just listening to Paul go on and on and on, sometimes only pretending to listen, or pretending to sleep, sitting there terrified, not understanding what she was doing, what she’d done. They’d stopped at a diner, the parking lot filled with semis, even in the middle of the night. She didn’t know where they were, not even what state they were in. She didn’t know the time. She didn’t care either.
    She told Paul she wasn’t hungry, but he insisted. He told her not to worry about the money, how often did he get the chance to eat with someone when he was working, and anyway, he told her, they were in the South, cheap living, this was New York, he might think twice. He’d meant it as a joke, to lighten things up, but Sally hadn’t laughed. She just got down from the cab, and as she was closing the door, he asked about the dog, didn’t he have to eat, too? And Sally was confused because in New York you couldn’t take your dog into a restaurant, and anyway, Leon had always fed Roy. She’d never had to think about it, about feeding him, walking him, about anything else he might need. What had she done? she wondered. Why had she taken him along? Now there was Paul making her worry about Roy when all she wanted to do was never worry about anyone again for the rest of her life. She looked toward the diner across the sandy parking lot, then back at Roy. She’d never been anyplace where you could take a dog into a restaurant but she’d read once you could in Paris, only this wasn’t France, this was the middle of nowhere, or maybe the edge of nowhere.
    But Paul had taken the leash, had whistled the dog down from the truck, and they’d gone into the diner, Maud’s, she told me. She still remembered the name. She still remembered a lot about that night, the night her life changed, the night she became a free person. The night her husband’s life changed, I thought but didn’t say, the night Madison’s life changed as well. The night their worst nightmare came true.
    Roy had gone under the table, all on his own, and Sally said she thought maybe Leon did that with him when they were out on a shoot and it got to be lunchtime, maybe he just walked in someplace with the dog and no one said boo, and Roy went under the table where no one would see him, and then Leon might feed him from his hand. That was what Paul did, first asking the old man who waited on them for a bowl of water, to put it in a take-out container if anyone was going to be fussy about eating from a bowl that a dog ate from, and the guy had laughed and told them, you going to be fussy, you’re not stopping at Maud’s, the old bat wouldn’t spend a nickel she didn’t have to. Have the fried chicken, he’d told them, it’s the only thing we can’t seem to ruin here. Some folks say it’s not half bad. When he laughed, you could see he had a tooth missing, one of his upper canines, maybe a result of eating at Maud’s. They ordered the chicken, Paul taking the meat off the thigh and the leg of his half, putting it on the palm of his hand for the dog to take. And then he’d asked her, what made you take the dog with you? And that’s when she told him, spilled it all, every single bit of it. It was the first time, too, the first time she’d ever said any of it out loud, and it felt like a cement block was being lifted off her chest, and that’s when she thought about the Keys, where she’d been happy for two days, where she felt what that was for the first and only time in her entire life.
    Paul wasn’t only a good talker. He was a good listener. He nodded a lot. He didn’t seem to judge her. And then when they got to Georgia, he’d given her money. This is for a bus ticket, he’d told her, folding her hand around the money with his, leaving it there for a second. You pick the direction. You pick the place. It’s up to you.
    He gave a hundred dollars on top of it, but when she’d asked for his last name and his address so that she could pay him back one day, he’d said no, that that wasn’t part of the deal. He didn’t want to know