Page 57 of Slander
I'm pulling my gloves on before he finishes.
Bjorn catches my arm at the bikes. "You want me to ride down with you?"
"Not yet." I swing my leg over. "Soon, maybe. Not tonight. Tonight she doesn't need a clubhouse on her porch. She only needs me."
He nods, and squeezes once, and lets go.
I take the highway south with the sun dropping off to my right and the wind pulling the worst of it off me, mile by mile.
Somewhere around the halfway point, with the city behind me and the pines closing in on both sides of the road, I clock what I'm doing.
I'm going home.
That's the word that's been sitting under everything since I got on the bike, and I finally let myself look straight at it.
Home.
A low brick house an hour south with a hole in the fence and a lazy hound who loves my company, and most importantly, the woman I’m falling for.
Mywoman.
I run the check. I can't help it. It's reflex now, like the way I breathe.
No lift. No race underneath it. No bright climbing certainty trying to dress itself up as love.
My heart's going the way any man's heart goes when he's an hour from the person he wants and can't get there fast enough, and that's all it is.
The sickness took a lot from me.
It took a piece of my own mind I'm still not sure I got all the way back, but it doesn't get this.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sophie
In a small town, everybody already knows your name, so there's nowhere to put your face down and disappear.
I tell myself I'm being paranoid, pushing my cart through the Piggly Wiggly with my chin up and a list I don't need, because I made myself come here on purpose.
Njal's still a while out. I could've waited in his house with the curtains drawn until he got back and handled the world for me.
I didn't want to.
I’m not going to hide in a dark room because somebody built a lie about me on a computer.
I didn't do what they say I did.
A woman who didn't do it doesn't act like a woman who did, and so here I am buying dog food I could've gotten tomorrow, head up, daring this town to look at me.
And it does.
That's the first thing I notice—not hostility, not yet, but the way the woman in the cereal aisle steers her cart a wide arc around mine and won't lift her eyes off the Cheerios.
The way two girls I taught in Sunday school four years back go silent when they see me and then start whispering before I'm even past them.
By the time I reach the dairy case, my hands aren't as steady as I'd like.
I reach for the eggs out of habit, the same case where Patricia cornered me a couple of weeks ago with the wordsisterhanging off her tongue like bait, and I think, with a flat dark humor I didn't know I had in me, that I should probably skip the eggs.
