The Constant Heart by Craig Nova

a word, she put her hand on mine, as she never had done in the library, and the warmth of her fingers, the touch of her palm seemed to flow into my arm, into me.
    â€œYou do what I say and you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said the man in the Hawaiian shirt.
    â€œYou don’t have to worry about me,” said Sara.
    The man stood there. Sara held my hand.
    â€œYou look like trouble to me,” said the man.
    He pointed the gun at her.
    Sara, of course, could simply blow her top and say, “You motherfucking asshole, you with the gun, you piece of miserable shit, you scum sucker, you two-bit excuse for a turd,” and so on. I put my other hand to my head.
    â€œHere,” said the clerk. He opened the cash register and took out the money. Four or five hundred dollars, I guessed, although it was hard to tell because of the way he held it. Maybe it was just a bunch of ones with a few twenties on top. The man in the Hawaiian shirt took the money and looked carefully at it. He was breathing funny, as if he had asthma. It was a fragile, labored sound that you’d hear in the middle of the night if a kid were sick. Gloria had said she wanted kids. It would be so wonderful, she said, to have a child. She was jealous when she saw a woman nursing an infant.
    â€œThis doesn’t seem like much,” said the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.
    The clerk swallowed.

    â€œPlease,” he said.
    The wall with the TVs appeared like the compound eye of an insect, a bee, say, and a hundred women in bathing suits walked across the hundred screens. If you looked at just one screen you could see that she jiggled a little, but it looked good.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing here?” the man in the Hawaiian shirt said to me. He put the money in his shirt pocket.
    â€œBuying a TV,” I said.
    â€œWhat kind did you get?” he said.
    â€œSamsung,” I said.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” he said. “The Japanese are fucking everything up.”
    â€œIt’s got a good remote,” I said.
    â€œWell, that’s just fucking great. Who do you think taught them about remote? Who wrote the book on remote? We did. The U.S. of A.,” he said.
    He turned back to Sara.
    â€œAnd what about you? What are you doing here?”
    â€œTV,” she said.
    â€œWhat kind?” he said.
    â€œHow about a Motorola?” she said. “Yeah. Aren’t they made here?”
    â€œWhere do you work?” he said.
    â€œAt the Subaru dealership,” she said. Her hand squeezed mine.
    â€œI fucking knew it,” he said. “You’re selling Japanese TVs on four wheels. What the fuck?”
    He pointed the gun at her.
    â€œI handle the used cars,” she said.

    â€œYeah? A fucking likely story,” he said.
    â€œI can get you a good deal on a Chevrolet,” she said. “Low mileage. Great rubber. Good air. Tinted glass. All leather interior. Great sound. Good spare. I’m talking under fifty thousand miles.”
    The TVs showed those bathing beauties. Jiggle here and there. Sara’s scent came to me just as it had when we looked at those pictures from the Hubble, when she refused to be romantic and when she wasn’t hard enough to deny romance all together. When she had said, “It’s all atoms in a void.”
    â€œAtoms in a void,” I said.
    â€œWhat? What the fuck did you say?”
    Sara squeezed my hand.
    â€œLook,” I said. “I just came in here to buy a TV.”
    â€œHow come she’s holding your hand?”
    â€œWe’re old friends,” said Sara.
    â€œVoid. You want to see what a void is?”
    Sara shook her head. She whispered, “You remember what you wrote to me when I got locked up, Jake?”
    â€œYes, I remember. I think about it all the time,” I said.
    â€œMe too,” she said. “How’s your dad?”
    â€œMy father’s well,” I said.
    â€œThat’s