The Passage

Then one day a man came into the diner. It was Bill Reynolds. He was different, somehow, and the change was no good. The Bill Reynolds she remembered-and she had to admit she still thought of him from time to time, about little things mostly, like the way his sandy hair flopped over his forehead when he talked, or how he blew over his coffee before he sipped it, even when it wasn’t hot anymore-there was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow. This was the same man, but the glow was gone. He looked older, thi

– What are you doing here?

– I left her, he said, and as he looked at where she stood, she smelled beer on his breath, and sweat, and dirty clothes. I’ve gone and done it, Jeanette. I left my wife. I’m a free man.

– You drove all this way to tell me that?

– I’ve thought about you. He cleared his throat. A lot. I’ve thought about us.

– What us? There ain’t no us. You can’t come in like you’re doing and say you’ve been thinking about us.

He sat up straight. -Well, I’m doing it. I’m doing it right now.

– It’s busy in here, can’t you see that? I can’t be talking to you like this. You’ll have to order something.

– Fine, he answered, but he didn’t look at the menu on the wall, just kept his eyes on her. I’ll have a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger and a Coke.

As she wrote down the order and the words swam in her vision, she realized she had started to cry. She felt like she hadn’t slept in a month, a year. The weight of exhaustion was held up only by the thi

– Why are you doing this to me?

He held her eyes with his own a long moment and touched the top of her hand.-Meet me later. Please.

He ended up living in the house with her and Amy. She couldn’t say if she had invited him to do this or if it had just somehow happened. Either way, she was instantly sorry. This Bill Reynolds: who was he really? He’d left his wife and boys, Bobby and Billy in their baseball suits, all of it behind in Nebraska. The Pontiac was gone, and he had no job either; that had ended, too. The economy the way it was, he explained, nobody was buying a goddamn thing. He said he had a plan, but the only plan that she could see seemed to be him sitting in the house doing nothing for Amy or even cleaning up the breakfast dishes, while she worked all day at the Box. He hit her the first time after he’d been living there three months; he was drunk, and once he did it, he burst out crying and said, over and over, how sorry he was. He was on his knees, blubbering, like she’d done something to him. She had to understand, he was saying, how hard it all was, all the changes in his life, it was more than a man, any man, could take. He loved her, he was sorry, nothing like that would happen again, ever. He swore it. Not to her and not to Amy. And in the end, she heard herself saying she was sorry too.

He’d hit her over money; when winter came, and she didn’t have enough money in her checking account to pay the heating oil man, he hit her again.

– Goddamnit, woman. Can’t you see I’m in a situation here?

She was on the kitchen floor, holding the side of her head. He’d hit her hard enough to lift her off her feet. Fu

– It ain’t your house, she said.

– You’re right about that. Bill took a bottle of Old Crow from over the sink and poured some in a jelly jar, though it was only ten o’clock in the morning. He sat at the table but didn’t cross his legs like he meant to get comfortable. Ain’t my oil, either.

Jeanette rolled over and tried to stand but couldn’t. She watched him drink for a minute.

– Get out.

He laughed, shaking his head, and took a sip of whiskey.

– That’s fu