Long, Hot Summer Ch. 04

But that, had it come to pass, might have happened only once. There were only so many weeks left in the summer. Hell, I thought, even fewer opportunities, really, since her daughter would probably be coming home from camp in a few weeks if not sooner.

It was too late now. The deed was done. I lit the second cigarette off the butt of the first but only managed a few searing drags of it before I had to get up and moving. My anxiety was turning into paranoia. If she told her husband, I was fucked. Or what if it turned into something even worse? I considered Eleanor Kaminski somewhat dim but mostly benign. What if I was all wrong about that? What if she was a more dangerous kind of dumb? What if she pretzeled the whole thing in her mind into a, oh shit, a rape?!

I was worse than fucked. I was fucked and dead.

.:.

My shift that night at the A&P seemed like the longest five hours of my life. I kept looking out the storefront windows, waiting for a police cruiser to pull up to the curb. I tried to work quickly when bagging groceries so people might not register my hands shaking. But I left most of the bagging chores to Jim and Sally and voluntarily took the shit assignments, like restocking bags, mopping the employee bathrooms, sweeping the aisle of all the cigarette butts, and rounding up carts.

A few hours in, when the sun was finally going down and no one had come to haul me away, I began to feel a little better. Maybe there would be no criminal consequences, but I still had an awful case of the yips about the personal ones.

I finished emptying all the trash cans beneath the registers, and hauled my green plastic sack of garbage back to the Shithole. The employee-only parts of the store were empty at night; all the dairy and produce people were long gone, and those spaces were sparely lit. But the light was on in the short hallway that led to the trash room, and when I turned the corner, Sally Speaker was there, leaning against the wall and smoking.

"Hey," I said. "What are you doing back here?"

"Waiting for you. Smoking."

"Okay."

"Do you want a drag?"

"No. I mean, yeah. Sure."

She held out the cigarette. "Don't make it all hot."

I dropped the trash bag and took the smoke.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"Yeah, sure."

"Because you've been looking jumpy as a rat all night. And you haven't noticed any of the faces I've been making behind The Mormon's back to his jag-off comments."

"I just don't feel good tonight. I was out mowing lawns all afternoon and I just... it was too hot. Think my brain got a little bit fried out there." I handed back the cigarette.

"Huh. You got a lot going on, don'tcha?"

"I guess. Maybe too much."

"Yeah. Well. I just wanted to make sure you were all right. One more hit?"

"No, I'm good."

"One more," she said. She took a long drag and her eyes shined with the orange of the burning coal. She stepped toward me, put her hand on my shoulder, tipped up on her toes, put her mouth to mine, and slowly breathed the hot smoke into my mouth. Her lips felt smooth and soft against my dry ones.

We parted. I tipped my head back and exhaled. Sally dropped the cigarette on the concrete floor and ground it out with the toe of her sneaker.

"Back to the salt mine," she said.

I don't remember much from the remainder of that shift. My mind was elsewhere. Or, not just elsewhere, but in different places simultaneously: one place dark and anxious, the other bright and thrilling. The cumulative effect was not pleasant. By the time I got home, I had an ache in my skull like something trying to kick its way out above my left eye. My mother was watching a "Vega$" rerun and working a crossword puzzle. My dad was asleep in his lounger.

"I'm just going to bed," I said as I passed through the living room.

"Wait a minute," said my mother. "What happened at the Kaminski's today?"

I felt like the top of my head was about to blow off. The shakes were back, in earnest. Shit, shit, shit...

"What do you mean? Nothing, nothing happened. I mowed the lawn."

"She called here after you'd already gone to work. She said you passed out."

"Ahh... yeah, well. I think I may have had a bit of heat stroke. It was brutal out there."

"Why didn't you tell me? Are you okay?"

"Sure. Just, like I said, a little too much sun on my head. I was fine after I cooled down."

She looked concerned but didn't press it.

"Well," she said, "She said that she'd ask you to help her with something, something about cleaning some things out of their shed after you were done cutting the grass. I don't remember exactly, I couldn't follow the woman, she was babbling. But then you fainted from the heat. And you left without taking your money."

"Yeah, I, um... I guess I did. I was still a little woozy."

"Anyway, she wants you to come by in the morning, around 9, she said, to help her with whatever it is she needs. I said I'd let you know. I didn't know if you had to work or not."

"Okay," I said. "I guess I can do that. All right, I'm heading up."

"Wait. Your girlfriend called, too. She told me to tell you that the pool is re-opened."

"Huh? Oh, yeah, right. Okay."

"The pool was closed? Why was the pool closed?"

"Some... maintenance," I said. "I don't know."

"Hottest day of the year," said my mother, shaking her head. "Figures."