Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) Read Free Page A

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Odds of a vehicle being searched by Canadian customs:

        
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        The Peace Bridge was lit up like a carnival ride, its trusses bathed a gaudy purple. Below the road deck, red navigation beacons warned boaters away from the great stone piers, tinting the dark river, making Marion think of all the freezing water headed for the Falls. It might beat them, depending on how long they had to wait at the tollbooths. He’d called and changed their reservation so they weren’t late, but after the delay, and changing buses, she was impatient.
    Their first time they’d crossed during the day, a steamy Sunday in June, the two of them alone in his old Corolla, their friends’ squiggly shaving cream letters dried on the side windows. Just married—it was hard to recall the feeling, though she could see herself in her favorite white linen sundress, showing off her new ring to the customs agent. The idea made her wistful for that time before everything, the two of them younger than their children were now.
    She’d been doing foster care in Cleveland and met him at a farewell party for a fellow caseworker who’d had enough of the revolving door of family court.
    He was one of just a few men there, and the only one in a suit, having come directly from the office. He was tall, with broad shoulders like a football player, but had the gangly, near-concave leanness of a boy.The bridge of his nose was generously freckled, his hair a lank cinnamon brown, a little long for her taste, and from time to time as they spoke he had to dip his head to one side and swipe it out of his eyes. He wrote grant proposals for Children’s Hospital downtown. His newest was for a mobile pediatric clinic—basically a tricked-out Winnebago—that would visit low-income neighborhoods on a rotating basis. In an effort to impress her, he was overly enthusiastic, as if he was on a crusade to fix the city. She wasn’t so cruel as to tell him it couldn’t be done. As he was describing its monthly route, ticking off names of notorious housing projects where she regularly did home visits with her clients, he threw one arm wide, sloshing beer out of his cup in a liquid arc that fell splashing to the hardwood floor. Before she could stop herself, she let loose a whoop of a laugh, drawing the whole room’s attention, and to her astonishment, the overgrown boy in the suit before her blushed deeply, red-cheeked as a leprechaun.
    “I’m glad you think I’m funny.”
    “I’m glad you’re funny,” she said.
    Their courtship lasted more than a year, but in that moment she had already chosen—wrongly, it turned out, at least in one important category, which made it that much harder, now, stuck in the bus, to recall the happiness she’d felt then. Her entire life had not been a ruin. There were seasons she’d keep, years with the children, days and hours with Art and, yes, despite the miserable end, with Karen. Vacations, special occasions. The patients she’d come to love and then learned to let go. She’d be damned if she’d let Wendy Daigle poison everything.
    BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROAD , a sign advised, and they motored up a swooping approach and onto the span itself, suspended, briefly, between the two countries. Snow swirled purple through the superstructure. Earlier they’d both filled out declarations swearing they weren’t bringing any produce or plants or potentially damaging insects or animals into the country, or more than ten thousand dollars Canadian. Legally, he said, you were allowed to bring in as much as you wanted. The crime was not reporting it. The law was really about money laundering and funding terrorism, not what they were doing. Most likely they wouldn’t be searched anyway, being part of a tour. His blitheness disturbed her, as if once again he’d become that other person, the one who would say or do anything to get what he wanted. Did he understand how hard it was to believe a word he said when he lied so