Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood Page B

she wants me to call back at this time and that time, so I figure if I’m calling her from my goddamn no-heater dinged-windshield leaking-radiator shitpile of a car that’s on its way up to goddamn Dixfield maybe she’ll cave, and she does, it takes forever but she finally says all right as long as you’re halfway here, you can stay an hour, but that’s it, an hour, just to see the baby and no drinking whatsoever, which I wasn’t doing anyway, I swear.” He looked at me. “So, yeah. I had a phone. Their loss, your gain. That’s how things work, usually.”
    The clouds began to move along in gray tatters, allowing weak breaks of light into the sky. “So you’re a guidance counselor,” he said after a while. “How do you like it?”
    “A lot,” I said. “I like teenagers.”
    He lit another cigarette off the end of the one he’d just smoked. “Nobody likes teenagers,” he said.
    I smiled a little. “I do.”
    “My guidance counselor was an asshole.”
    “A lot of people say that. They have to blame somebody.”
    He inhaled deeply. “I thought you were a teenager yourself, you know,” he said. “When I looked up the articles I didn’t expect you’d be a grown woman with a good job like that.”
    “I’m back at work,” I told him. “I went back even though everybody said wait.” What came to me then was an odd little fillip of pride. I wanted him to think well of me.
    “How old are you?” he asked.
    “Thirty.”
    “That’s how old Elaine is. Somewhere around there. Thirty-five, maybe, now that I think about it. Time flies.” The water slapped against the rocks, and the gull lifted off again, circling out toward the bay. “Elaine’s a teacher, too. Little kids. It’s a good job, good benefits, time off to take care of the baby. She did great, that Elaine. Dental insurance and that. The works.” He set his elbows on his knees and looked at me sideways. “Why did you come down here?”
    “The girl who hit me never even slowed down. You’re the only one who actually saw me.”
    He shook out another cigarette, and I waited while he smoked it. It had begun to mist, but he seemed in no hurry to move. “I was in the United States Army for four years in the sixties, but I never saw a dead body.”
    “Vietnam?”
    “It was early on. Before the shit hit. I did my whole tour stateside, fixing radios.”
    “What I want to know, what I wanted to ask you—” I swallowed, and it hurt, like ingesting a thistle. “I wanted to ask you what it looked like.”
    He paused. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, did you see anything. Something that you might not want to admit to the average person. To, you know, to the average person who wasn’t there when it happened.”
    “Did I see anything?”
    I nodded.
    “Like what?”
    “A spirit?” I said, embarrassed. “An angel? Something along those lines?”
    His eyes rested on me in a way that showed not surprise, but something like what I felt—inevitability. “I—Christ, no, I didn’t see angels, nothing like that.”
    “It’s just that I felt a certain—like I was waiting for something.”
    “Waiting. Sure, okay.”
    I looked at the ground. “If someone was there—an ambassador from Heaven, something like that—I’d kind of like to know for sure.”
    “I wouldn’t know an ambassador from Heaven if he spit in my face.”
    “What about light? You always hear talk about the big white light.”
    He regarded me intently, for some moments. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
    I hiccupped, or gulped. “You saw something?”
    “Now that you mention it.” He stamped out his cigarette, frowning. “I did see a buncha light. I can tell you that. Buckets of light, just like you said, all around you.”
    “What kind? What color?”
    Harry Griggs jittered his hands through his film of hair. “White, I guess. Whatever color light is. That’s all I can tell you. Nothing more specific than that. But light, yeah, loads of it, like you said,