Lamb Read Free Page A

the room she was shrinking into. “I could make up any old story to tell them,” she said.
    He thought about it. Imagined what the stories could be. He looked at her bare arms and legs, her stapled, makeshift tube top slipping down her narrow chest. “Tell them I took you shopping.”
    “Oh, that’s good.”
    “Okay, then.”
    “Okay. Bye.”
    They looked at each other a second, two, and she stepped away, slammed the door shut. She turned and walked up to the building. A latchkey kid. The sort who got C’s in school. Not a pretty kid, not an athletic kid, not a smart kid. Just a skinny, slow-blooming kid desperate to keep up with her friends. Quick to make new ones. Stupid. Maybe she’d learned something today. Maybe he’d done her a favor. What’d it matter? Girl like her.
•  •  •  •  •
    That wasn’t kidnapping. It had been a favor, right? A lesson. He hadn’t kidnapped anyone. She was back in her apartment, having dinner with her parents, her girlfriends perhaps chastened of whoring each otherout for laughs in parking lots. It wasn’t kidnapping when the kid ended up safely delivered home in better shape than she left in the morning. It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place. It was fine.
    It was six. He was back in the Residence Inn. Across the hall was another man, just like him. Both their beautiful houses for sale. Both their aging wives back on the market. He and this other guy—they even had the same haircut, the same belly just beginning to roll over the same beautiful leather belt. Why was it everywhere he looked he saw an incomplete version of himself? What was he supposed to do? Complete this stranger across the hall? Why was everything such a riddle?
    He was supposed to call Linnie, drive her north along the lake. Spaghetti. Ribs. And walk until they felt the bite of October coming over the water, her eyes an unreal green in the dark. An expensive and well-educated system of reactions and responses, and he knew them all. Had known them, frankly, since years before she was born.
    Damp from the shower, he sat on the edge of the hotel bed in his towel, traffic shushing and the light failing. There was room service: the Caesar, the salmon, the spinach omelet; the steakhousenearby that would deliver; the sort of French café down the street that’d be empty—he could have a table alone and not be bothered. Or he could find someone to bother him. He took shallow breaths, his thoughts quick images of prepared food, of his father’s translucent hand, himself as he’d looked at nineteen, all his hair dark, Linnie’s young naked body from the front, the back, another plate of food with french fries on it, one image superimposed upon another until suddenly he felt the phone in his hand.
    He called Cathy. He didn’t expect an answer, but he’d hear at least her recorded voice. He wanted to hear that. But on the telephone was no recorded voice, no cheerful greeting—only the broken succession of minor notes signaling that he’d dialed the wrong number, that the number had been disconnected or changed. He paused, closed the phone, and lay back, setting it on his bare chest. His face heated and reddened and he lay still, absorbing the shock of it. This was September. This was going to be their second courting period. He was going to win her back. Linnie would be off with some other slick young guy. Everything would be all knit up by Thanksgiving. The house would fail to sell, and everything back the way it was before. She would forgive him. Shealways did. They’d build a fire and wear long pajamas and drink tea and she would touch the sides of his face and he would be sorry. And she would forgive him.
    He sat up, opened the phone, and dialed the girl.
    “Linnie. It’s me. Yeah yeah, I know. I know.” He was whispering. “I’m sorry, baby. What? Listen. I can’t talk long. Cathy’s downstairs.” His eyes watered and the