Penance by David Housewright

gun?” Amy Lamb asked between mouthfuls of chicken almond ding and fried rice.
    “No.”
    “Really? I thought all private eyes carried guns.”
    “Some do. Usually they lock them away in the trunks of their cars.”
    “How much does a private eye make?” she asked, sipping her tea.
    “Depends on how much you work. Some of the larger shops charge thirty-five dollars an hour. I get four hundred dollars a day but …”
    “Four hundred? No shit?” she said and then clamped her hand hard over her mouth.
    “I don’t work every day,” I finished.
    She blushed a deep crimson. “I’m sorry.”
    “That’s all right.”
    “I never cursed before I moved down here.”
    “I’ve heard worse.”
    “I’m from Starbuck. Starbuck, Minnesota. Ever hear of it?”
    “Sure,” I answered. I knew my state map. I could even recite the names of all eighty-seven counties in alphabetic order: Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami …
    “It’s about two hours’ driving time from here,” Amy volunteered in case I was fooling. She spoke with the sing-song voice of adolescence, each sentence tailing up, ending with a question mark. She was much younger than I had originally guessed, younger perhaps than her professed chronological age of twenty. I found myself comparing her to the girl who’d sat in front of me in high school algebra, who’d scribbled her name, house number, street, town, county, state, country and then—to be exact—continent, hemisphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe into her notebook, indicating exactly where she belonged in the scope of things. Try as I might, I could not picture Amy waging a social revolution with the women at St. Thomas, although it was probably for her that they fought.
    “I really liked it,” she said of her hometown.
    “Why did you leave?” I asked.
    “It was kinda small—not much opportunity, you know? And then, after I was graduated from school, well, my parents, they were concerned about me, wondering when I was gonna get married. We’d be at the dinner table and after Daddy said grace it would begin: ‘When are you going to get married?’ ‘When are you going to settle down?’ My parents were convinced that if I didn’t get married soon all the nice boys would be taken and I’d be stuck with what was left. Y’see, in a small town like Starbuck, you turn eighteen you either go away to school or you get married, and I wasn’t, you know, college material. But I wanted more than just getting married and spending every second Saturday at the Pope County Dairy Association dinner. So, what I did, I went to the community college in Morris and studied to be a legal secretary. I figured I could go to the Cities and get a job. Boy, that freaked ’em—my parents, I mean. My father would cut articles out of the StarTribune , articles about, you know, rape and murder and stuff. Remember when that serial killer was stalking those poor Indian women? My father cut out the articles and taped them to the refrigerator door. ‘See what happens?’ he’d say. But a woman, you know, you gotta be free, so after I got my certificate, I just hopped on that Greyhound. Mom cried, but Dad, Dad was cool; kinda surprised me. He slipped me a whole thousand dollars and said I was to call every other day or he’d come down and get me. I think he might have cried, too.”
    “Parents,” I said, as if the word contained all the mysteries of the ages. “So what happens next?”
    “I’m going to get a job with the state, once Representative Monroe is elected governor, I mean. When Ms. Senske hired me, she said do a good job and she and Representative Monroe would find a place for me after the election—me and Galen. Are you married?”
    “No,” I said, without elaborating. “Who’s Galen?”
    “I don’t mean to pry or anything, but you seem so much more mature than most of the men I meet.”
    “You mean old,” I corrected her.
    “You’re not so old,” she said, flirting