Cold and Pure and Very Dead by Joanne Dobson Page A

He tossed two twenties on the bar and grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here.” For someone with such a heavy load on, my companion was pretty fast on his feet. He quick-stepped out the door behind me like a man who’d exited many bars in his lifetime and knew the moves.
    No one showed any signs of following us out of Ernie’s, maybe because they too had gotten a good look at the Fenton biceps. As Jake aimed the car keys in the general direction of the brown Range Rover, I snatched them from his hand. “I’m driving, sport,” I announced, hoping Jake wouldn’t turn out to be a violent drunk. In my short years with Amanda’s father, I’d had more than a lifetime’s worth of experience with nasty drunks.
    “Good,” Jake said, climbed into the shotgun seat, and promptly lapsed into unconsciousness.
    I took him home with me. What else was I going to do with him? I had no idea where Jake lived. I could have called Enfield College Security to find out, but, perhaps stupidly, didn’t want to humiliate the novelist. If I reported it to Security, Jake’s bender would be all over campus by third period tomorrow—and my name would be permanently attached to that of a drunkenbarfly writer.
That
would be a disaster: I wasn’t tenured yet.
    Jake semirevived as we pulled into the driveway, and followed my instructions like a good boy. He stumbled out of the SUV, through my front door, and onto the couch as if he’d done it a thousand times before and knew the drill. It was almost two A.M . before I’d gotten the booze brushed off my breath and the puke spatters scrubbed off my arms and legs. Then I put myself, clean and relatively sober, to bed. Alone. Behind a locked door.
    W hen I woke up at 9:28 and made my way to the living room, the afghan was folded neatly over the back of the uninhabited couch, Jake and his Range Rover had vanished, and a one-word note in bold capitals on the kitchen table was the only sign that I’d spent the night with Jake Fenton, master of the pen and sword, eloquent interpreter of post-modern masculinity, world-famous novelist. The note read: SORRY .
    In an interpretive quandary, I read the word aloud.
Sorry?
What did Jake Fenton mean by
sorry?
Was it a curt, abrupt, pro forma sorry? Was it an abject, humiliated, repentant sorry? Or a wry, philosophical, we’re-all-in-the-same-human-condition sorry? Or an I’ll-call-you-in-a-day-or-two-and-see-if-you’re-still-speaking-to-me sorry? Or
what?
My Ph.D. in literary studies didn’t help me one bit in trying to deconstruct the meaning of
sorry
.

9
    T he short , wiry woman with the cropped gray hair sat erect in her chair, torso rigidly upright, thin shoulders squared under the drab fabric of the prison uniform. Only in her eyes could I detect any resemblance at all to the chic young 1950s writer I’d seen pictured in the
Times
. Those eyes, still intensely dark, glared at me with suspicion. “What do you want from me?”
    I didn’t know. Absolution, most likely. “I wanted to say I’m sorry—”
    “Sorry?
Sorry?
You open your mouth, and my peaceful world is shattered, and you’re
sorry?”
It seemed that Mildred Deakin Finch wasn’t in the absolution business.
    “But, Ms. Deakin, I had no intention—”
    “Finch.
Mrs
. Finch.”
    “Mrs. Finch—”
    “You
had no intention,”
she mocked me. “You destroyed my life, but you
had no intention
. What are you doing here, anyhow? What do you want?”
    “I’m not quite certain.” I could hardly tell this bitter woman that the haunting image of her younger self had kept me awake two nights running, floating in hazy black and white just below full consciousness, threatening to sink to the level of dreams. I couldn’t tell her that what I
wanted
was for that … that girl … to tell me
why
. I wanted to know what had sent a novelist at the height of literary celebrity bolting from Manhattan to seek the obscurity of the rural hinterlands. I wanted to know what placed her,