The Last Days of October (12 page)

15.

Mike hadn’t liked
Heather’s friends from high school.
 
He
met them one time, when they all came up for a long weekend at Virginia Beach
and everybody got drunk in the hotel room—Mike, the only boyfriend present,
included.
 
He laughed and goofed around,
deployed his charm without actually hitting on any of her girls and ruining
everybody’s time.
 
He didn’t get loud or
belligerent, pass out or break anything—all things, her friends had told her,
that other boyfriends sometimes did when the liquor flowed.
 
They all loved him, this handsome young
sailor that had electrified Heather’s life with romance.
 
Out in the parking lot on Sunday, when
everyone had to again go their separate ways, Elise wrapped her in an exuberant
hug and whispered, “Hang on to that one.
 
He’s special.”

They all loved
him, and Heather had thought the feeling mutual.
 

Apparently not.

“I don’t know,”
Mike said later, “I mean, they’re cool and all, yeah, but they’re just…I don’t
know.
 
Different, I guess.”

“How are they
different
?”

This conversation
had occurred a few weeks later at a booth at Doumar’s in Norfolk, attacking
banana splits after a healthy dinner of hot dogs and fries.
 
He shrugged and dug his spoon into his ice
cream.
 
“Like I said, I don’t know.
 
Just different.
 
Jennifer and Elise are these giggly sorority
girls who have absolutely no responsibilities.
 
Get drunk, party, spend their daddies’ money, maybe go to class every
now and then.
 
They’re basically
kids.
 
And Kathy?
 
Same damn thing, only her daddy doesn’t have
any money for her to spend and so
she
gets drunk, parties, and occasionally shows up for work at K-Mart.
 
Where she’s probably going to stay.
 
She’s going to get knocked up by some loser
and make like a tornado.”

“Make like a
tornado?”

“Break a bunch of
shit and wind up in a trailer park.”

She remembered her
face burning then, her eyes narrowing with hurt and annoyance.
 
Jennifer, Elise and Kathy had been her girls
since elementary school.
 
She had no
sisters of her own; these were her siblings, her family.
 
It stung to hear Mike criticize them.
 
She felt like he was talking about her.

“That’s a nasty
thing to say,” she said.
 
Her voice came
out all wobbly, as if she wanted to cry.

“I’m not being
nasty,” he replied, “I’m just calling it like I see it.”
 
Another chunk of his banana split
disappeared.
 
He chewed, swallowed and
cocked his head thoughtfully.
 
“But I
don’t think
you
see it,” he said when
his mouth was clear.
 
“I think you’re all
like, ‘best friends forever,’ and you don’t see any of this shit.
 
You don’t see that you really don’t have much
in common with these chicks anymore.”

He raised his
spoon and shook it at her like a judge with a gavel.
 
“Jennifer and Elise think they’re better than
us,” he said.
 
“You didn’t catch that,
but I did.
 
They think they’re all big
and bad because they’re in college and we’re just stupid sailors.
 
Talking about sorority this and sorority
that, this party, that party…I mean, shut up, you know?
 
Did you hear Elise explain to me
three times
what a ‘pledge’ was?
 
I wanted to say, ‘I heard you the first time,
I don’t care, shut the fuck up.’
 
And
while you’re at it, kiss my ass.
 
My
girlfriend guards the world’s largest Navy base.
 
Our government trusts her with aircraft
carriers.
 
Nuclear submarines.
 
And you think you’re better than she is
because you’re studying Underwater Basket Weaving at the University of
I-Better-Find-A-Husband-Or-I’m-Buttass-Fucked?”

She looked down at
her dish.
 
Vanilla and chocolate ice
cream ran in rivulets over the remains of a banana and pooled around a lonesome
cherry.
 
Everything liquefying.

“And Kathy?”
 
Mike continued.
 
“Don’t get me started.
 
That girl is a
slut
, bottom-shelf welfare trainee.
 
All she talked about the whole time was going out to the bars and
finding her a sailor.
 
Between Jennifer
and Elise with their circus of a college and Kathy’s dick-seeking missiles, I
thought I was going to go crazy.”

He stopped chewing
for a moment and frowned, as if the banana split had said something he didn’t
like.
 
He swallowed slowly and looked out
the window at the parking lot beyond.
 
A gaggle
of students from the high school a block away laughed their way over to an
ancient station wagon with faux wooden sides.
 
Apparently deep in thought, Mike watched them.

“People like that
are going to get you in trouble,” he said somberly, “because they aren’t like
you.
 
They aren’t serious about life, and
you are.
 
You’re real.
 
You’re in the world.
 
You’re an adult, you have
responsibilities.
 
They don’t understand
that and they don’t like it, so they try to bring you down to their level.
 
They act like they’re your friends, but they
want to see you fuck up.”

He nodded, agreeing
with himself.
 
Heather just stared at
him,

“They want you to
be just like them.
 
If I hadn’t been
there that weekend, they’d have dragged you out to the bars and tried to get
you to sleep with some random dickhead.
 
They’d have had you drunk the whole time.
 
If your command tried to get a hold of you to
cover a shift, you’d have been too hammered or hung over to make it.
 
Wouldn’t have bothered them any.
 
Would have tickled them, actually.
 
They’d have thought it was funny.
 
‘Heather had a serious boyfriend and a real
job.
 
Let’s see if we can fuck up her
life so that she can be a loser like us.’
 
It’s scary.”

She glanced down
at the remains of her banana split.
 
She
wasn’t hungry anymore.
 
She couldn’t
imagine getting anything past the lump in her throat, the lump that threatened
to explode into tears right here in the middle of Doumar’s.
 
“What are you saying?” she asked in a
whisper.

“I don’t know,” he
said with a blasé toss of one shoulder.
 
“I guess…I’d rather pop all my toes with a nutcracker than spend another
weekend with a bunch of girls like that.
 
And I’d really prefer it if you kept your distance from people like
that.
 
I don’t want you hanging out with
them anymore.”

So she let them
go.
 
She didn’t even invite them to her
wedding or tell them when she had Amber.
 
Now, two decades later, she drove through a deserted town with her hands
gripping the steering wheel and thought,
I chose him.
 
I always chose him.

They rolled
through town at fifteen miles an hour, windows down so as not to impede their
hearing.
 
The Wal-Mart complex sat on the
southern edge of Deep Creek, where the highway forgot its country nature and
grew suburban ambitions.
 
Normally
teeming with traffic, the two lanes running in either direction were empty
today.
 
The mere sight of it filled her
with dark foreboding.

“Jesus,” Justin
muttered from the back seat.

“Yep,” Amber said.

Heather stopped in
the middle of the deserted road just before the entrance to the Wal-Mart
parking lot.
 
Amber pointed at the
store.
 
“I think the lights are on.”

Heather
squinted.
 
The giant box superstore stood
as the centerpiece in a strip mall.
 
Two
rectangular blocks of smaller stores, one on each side, ran perpendicular to
the road.
 
Seeing it for the first time
on the day they had moved here, she had thought it reminiscent of a king on his
throne with his vassals on benches arrayed before him.
 
A chiropractor, a beauty salon, a Chinese
restaurant and nearly two dozen other stores stood ready to snatch the shopping
dollars Wal-Mart didn’t consume first.
 

The parking spaces
before these smaller stores stood empty.
 
A smattering of vehicles filled the spaces closest to Wal-Mart
itself.
 
Heather followed the invisible
beam shooting from Amber’s finger all the way to the lights burning atop the
lampposts nearest the store.
 
Barely
noticeable beneath the noonday sun, the security lights mounted on the store
blazed, too.
 
Heather would have missed
it on her own.

“I thought the
power was supposed to be out,” Amber said.

“Generator,”
Heather said.
 
“So they don’t lose
everything in power outages.
 
Must have
kicked on when the power went out.”

“That’s a good
sign, right?
 
That the generator is still
running?
 
Surely there’s somebody in
there maintaining it?”

“Yeah,” Heather
said.
 
“It’s a really good sign.”

She pulled into
the parking lot, then whipped around to where the windshield faced the
road.
 

“What are you
doing?”
 
Amber asked.

“Being smart,”
Heather replied.
 
She put the truck in
park and ejected the magazine from the grip of the Ruger.
 
Amber staring at her from the passenger seat,
she loaded three more rounds to replace the ones expended the night
before.
 
“When I get out, I want one of
you in the driver’s seat, ready to go.”

“I want to come
in,” Amber said.

“You can.
 
Just as soon as I check it out and make sure
it’s safe.
 
If you hear shots, you
go.
 
If
somebody other than me comes out, go.
 
If
ten minutes passes and I’m still not out and you don’t see anybody, go.
 
Do not come looking for me.
 
Is that clear?”

“Why don’t you
give
me
the gun and let me go check
it out?”
 
Justin asked.
 
“You can stay out here with your daughter.”

“Why, because
you’re a man?”

Justin blinked at
her.

“I know I look
like a soccer mom, but I can almost guarantee you I’m better with a gun than
you are.
 
Unless you’ve gone through
military police training, too.”

He closed his
mouth.

“Ten minutes,” she
said to Amber.
 
“And keep your eyes
open.”

And with that, she
turned and began her trek across the blacktop.
 

Nobody came out to
greet her as she approached the store.
 
The autumn air, chilly and crisp, raised the hairs on the back of her
neck.
 
She stood on the broad sidewalk
that ran the length of the building and squinted through the glass.
 
Inside, lights burned as they always had
every time she’d ever come here.
 
No
signs of life.
 
Nothing moved.

She stepped
forward and the doors slid open with an electric hiss.
 
The building seemed to be inviting her in.

Come inside
, it said
.

She passed through
an entryway where carts stood in interlocked lines, waiting for shoppers.
 
A second set of sliding doors hissed open and
she stepped into the store.
 
To her left,
a shelf packed with Halloween decorations reached for the ceiling.
 
In front of her, a giant cardboard bin held
pumpkins for sale, while the deserted cash registers stretched off in a line to
her right.
 
Heart thumping, she scanned
the area for any signs of life.

Nothing.

She moved towards
the registers to her right, looking down the aisles and keeping her back to the
wall.
 
Overhead, speakers played elevator
music that she had never really noticed in here before now.
 
Beneath the music, a machine-like hum that
reminded her of riding in a car on the interstate.
 

Generator,
she thought.
 
She took a deep breath and yelled at top
volume, “IS THERE ANYONE HERE?”

No one
answered.
 
She stepped forward to a cash
register, grabbed the telephone receiver hanging on the pole beside it and
pushed the intercom button.
 
Her voice
flooded the store.

“My name is
Heather Palmer.
 
Is there anybody in
here?
 
Please respond!”