“I know, honey.”
“I can’t do it, Viv,” he said. His voice cracked. “I can’t sit in a room with her and have her look at me like that. Like a stranger. I can’t do what Elmer did.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t stop driving,” I said.
He looked at me.
“As long as you’re driving,” I said, “you don’t have to get there. And as long as you don’t get there, she still knows your name.”
Mark put his face in his hands.
I couldn’t sleep.
Mark finally drifted off around one o’clock. Still in his jeans. On top of the bedspread.
I lay in the other bed and stared at the painting of the wheat field.
Ezoic
At two a.m., I got up. I pulled on my sweatshirt. I walked across the gravel parking lot to the office.
