No Way Home by Andrew Coburn

with a soft grunt and was staring in with the crack of a smile. Morgan twisted the ignition key. The motor sulked, then caught. “Something to tell me, Papa?”
    “We oughta be more partial to each other, you and me. We both lost a woman.”
    “You were never good to yours.”
    “You gonna hold that against me all my life?”
    “Only what happened to her.”
    Papa’s blue eyes blazed, his face caught fire, and his head lolled as if mere threads kept him sane. “You don’t know I did it. You don’t know anybody did it.”
    “I know she didn’t do it herself,” Morgan said and shifted the car easily into reverse. “Same as I know God didn’t strike down Flo and Earl Lapham.”
    • • •
    “Go home,” he told Meg O’Brien, and she did, but returned shortly to her post with two chicken sandwiches, one for him, which he accepted gratefully. Since his breakfast with Bakinowski he had put nothing in his stomach except a Milky Way. The call came while he was sitting at his desk. Meg, perversely, put it through without asking whether he wanted to take it. Christine Poole’s voice was the coldest he had ever heard it.
    “Have you mentioned me to Arlene Bowman?”
    “Of course not.” His sandwich went tasteless. “Why would I?”
    “She knows about us. So does that woman working for you. How many others know, James?”
    “None that I know of,” he said, with no wish to speculate, for the town was full of eyes.
    “This is humiliating.”
    “I never meant that to happen.”
    “But it has!” Anger and anxiety disfigured her voice. “Good God, what if my husband finds out? What do you think that will do to him? And how can I look him in the face, James?”
    He was slow in responding, too slow, and abruptly the line went dead. Presently Meg appeared in the door and stood with formal rigor, her rupture of pony teeth showing. With customary forwardness she said, “When are you going to learn?”
    “When are you going to quit listening in?”
    “When are you going to stop fooling around in the Heights? There are solid unattached town women who’ve had their eyes on you for years. Want me to name a couple?”
    “I had a marriage, Meg. Another won’t take the place of it.”
    “Afraid to love and lose again, aren’t you, Jim?” Only during intimate moments did she forsake his title for his name. They had known each other all their lives. In the several years after his wife’s death, when he had shut himself off from any romantic life, she had occasionally invited him to her house for a light supper, always a chore for him. Their common ground was here at the station. Here she could speak her mind, and he could use his authority to shut her up.
    Very quietly he said, “Let’s drop it, Meg.”

4
    A few stray clouds, like lost sails, maneuvered through the brilliant Florida sky. On the white beach the child’s shadow marked the hour. The woman’s shadow might have been the minute. The child, a boy of no more than five or six, said, “That man’s looking at us.”
    “He’s looking at me,” the woman said, taking her grandson’s hand. “Ignore him.”
    Together they scuffed to the ocean’s edge, which gently swelled, splashed, and foamed. In the heat of the off-season the beach was sparsely populated, enlivened only by the wing-beats of pelicans. The boy played in the surf, and the woman moved to deeper water. She was in her fifties, big but not fat, certainly handsome. Her bathing suit was the sort Esther Williams had worn long ago in the movies. Lowering her head, throwing her arms out, she made an arrowhead of her hands and floated forward. When she waded back to the boy, the man was gone.
    Later, wearing a beach jacket over her wet suit, she sat alone in the patio bar of the hotel. Her table was smack in the sun, and her hair was drying into tight, natural curls. Her drink was more fruity than alcoholic. The man appeared from behind her and said, “May I?” She hesitated, then simply smiled.