Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood

that’s great, sure. We’ll walk. After you.” He swept his arm toward the water and I stepped ahead of him, my leg hitching badly even with the help of my cane. “I’m doing better than this, really,” I said. “It’s just when I first get out of a car.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, gritting his teeth. “What a goddamn shame.” His eyes followed my body—head to shoulders to arms to legs to feet, then back up again, resting on my face. I could almost feel the trail of his gaze, a kind of shimmy over the places that still hurt.
    There we stood, face to face, the water at high tide and lashing softly just below us. Strangers passed. “Let’s just walk,” I said.
    “Sure, you bet, anything you want.” As we set out he hovered at my side, not quite touching me, but cupping the air around my shoulders.
    The sky appeared dark and held back, the air moist, soft as cloth. We walked in silence for a minute or so—he was even slower than I was. Finally he had to stop, holding his wheezy chest. We’d gotten only as far as the end of the lot where the footpath began. “Cigarettes,” he said. “I keep swearing to quit.” We sat on a guardrail and gawked at the cove. A gull shrieked overhead, then spiraled down to perch on the banking.
    I turned to face him. “I heard you, you know.”
    “Say what?”
    “When you carried me off the road. You said something like ‘Jesus on a stick.’”
    He let out a long sigh and patted his pockets, a smoker’s impulse. “I don’t see how you could’ve heard that. You weren’t even breathing.”
    “I did, though.”
    He patted his pockets again.
    “You can smoke if you want,” I said.
    He glanced at me, then worked a cigarette pack out of his coat. “It’s a powerful yearning,” he said, his lips mushing together. He lit up and drew in a breath.
    “You said ‘sorry,’ before you ran off. ‘Sorry sorry sorry.’ I heard you.”
    He breathed out a trail of smoke. “Okay, so you weren’t dead. I’m a shit, first and last, a genuine class-A shit, and I swear to God what I did to you is the worst thing I ever did to anybody, I swear to God, leaving you there all alone in your dying hour.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to get caught with a suspended license, and that’s the truth of it. I didn’t need one more goddamn problem, so I ditched and ran.”
    His chipped eyes flickered over my scraped face. How had I looked, lying there in the road?
    September was barely a week old, but already fall seemed imminent. In the trees that lined the cove, stray leaves flamed prematurely in colors that intensified in the dampening air. “It’s going to rain,” I said.
    He checked the sky. “Yeah.” Then we caught each other’s eyes for a second, and I found myself glad of the impending rain. It was just weather—I understood that rain was just weather—but maybe it recalled something for us that it did not recall for other people. You saw it , I thought. You saw exactly what happened to me.
    “Was I on the yellow line?” I asked him. “When you found me?”
    “Matter of fact, yeah. Lined right up.”
    “You moved me from there.”
    “Yeah.”
    “To the side of the road.”
    “Yeah, I remember thinking, What’re you doing, Shit-for-Brains, you don’t move somebody in this condition, she could get paralyzed. But it was either that or you get run over twice.”
    “You were sort of crying. That’s how it sounded”
    “I was sober, in case you wondered,” he said, smoking hard. “I was on my way to see my daughter up to Dixfield. I swear on her head I was sober.”
    “You don’t have to swear on her head,” I said. “I believe you.”
    “I wouldn’t believe me if I was sitting where you are. I wouldn’t believe a word I said. But I’m telling the truth anyway. I was sober as a judge.” He trembled the cigarette to his mouth.
    “You’ve had some convictions, I take it?”
    “Good guess,” he said, grimacing. “I’d just got myself