Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) Read Free

of the bus came a bang like a bomb going off—his first thought not a car but that phantom bugaboo, terrorists—the seismic impact jerked them forward, and, sickeningly, as if on a pivot, the entire rear end began to slide, and then, as the driver overcorrected, trying to bring it back, broke loose.

Odds of being killed in a bus accident:

        
1 in 436,212
        “Hang on!” someone behind them yelled, as a laptop clattered to the floor.
    Marion grabbed at him, her book already gone, while he threw his arms straight out to brace himself against the seat back. The driver braked, and the gym bag flew across the aisle, bouncing around the bikers’ shins like a loose fumble. For a second Art thought of extricating himself from her grip to fall on it, but—just as quick—saw the problem with that option, and waited, rigid, still braced for impact, as the bus slowed, then stopped.
    “What the hell.”
    Marion relinquished her grip. “Sorry.”
    “It’s all right.”
    “I don’t think that was part of the deluxe package.”
    “No.”
    “Is everyone all right?” a woman up front asked.
    “No,” an older woman answered calmly.
    The gym bag lay on its side in the aisle, safely zipped. As he bent forward, stretching to retrieve it, the biker guy reached down, picked it up by one handle and passed it to him.
    “Go Tribe.”
    Art blanked, then caught up. “You know it. Thanks.”
    “Whatta ya got in there—bricks?”
    “Ha!”
    Outside, copper-tinted snow blew through the high lights. They were sideways across all three lanes, the stopped traffic behind them cockeyed like bumper cars when the ride ends.
    Up front, the driver was checking on the woman who wasn’t all right. Across the aisle, people were collecting their possessions, craning at their windows, calling on their cellphones. Gradually news filtered back. It wasn’t a car. A U‑Haul trailer had gotten loose and run into them, or they’d run into it. There were clothes all over the road. The biker concluded—unhelpfully, Art thought—that they weren’t going anywhere for a while.
    “Great.” Marion held up her book by its flimsy cover, the pages butterflied. “I lost my place.”
    Sitting there with the bag as she flipped the pages, he allowed himself to think of all the problems it would have solved if the bus had rolled and he alone had been killed. How clean it would be. No one could call it suicide, and Marion would receive the full half-million benefit, more than enough to pay off their debts. The policy had been in place forever, so no one would suspect. It was true that more than a few times over the last year he’d imagined his own death, though he would deny he’d ever been suicidal. He preferred to think of himself as practical rather than depressed, so that even now he viewed the crash as a missed opportunity, like a crime he wasn’t quite skilled or steely enough to pull off. He suspected there was something wanting in him to think like this, some lack of courage or integrity. His life had been staid and sedate for the most part, yet now that he was being tested, he grasped at the most dire solutions.
    With a blip of static the driver came on the intercom and announced there would be a delay. He’d already called dispatch; a replacement bus was en route. He apologized for the inconvenience.
    “Just what I want to do,” Marion said, “get on another bus.”
    “Hmp,” Art snorted, to let her know she’d landed the joke, and that at heart he agreed. She went back to her book. As a complaint it was a mild one, delivered wryly, and well-deserved. He was hungry too, and tired. He understood that she didn’t want to be there, that this was just another ludicrous episode in the worst year of their lives—or possibly the second worst—and yet, while it was probably just a reflex, he was happy that, literally in the face of death, of all the possible reactions she might have had, she’d reached for him and hung