*
She snapped back to the present in the kitchen like a swimmer emerging from a deep dive. The driver of the truck had sustained broken ribs and a shattered leg. John had been burned beyond recognition, their little girl, her little Terri, hardly bruised but dead and curled at the side of the road. Patsy herself had sustained only a mild concussion. She could still see the swirl of blinking lights in her mind’s eye, the noise of the flames, the rush of action as the paramedics and police descended. But there had been nothing to do, no one really to save. She’d been released from the hospital the next day, alone in a city where she knew hardly anyone at all, alone as the day she’d been born. Then the interminable calls from law firms wanting to take her case, promising the moon and stars though she knew in her heart the accident had been unavoidable.
It had been the fruition of the Thing that always waited behind the next corner, lulling her into a false sense of security to make the fall all that much harder when it actually came. She’d eventually stopped answering the phone, took to sleeping more and more in the empty bed, all curtains drawn and the lights out. The life insurance policy had paid off without her even making a call; she’d been unaware John had even taken it out. An agent had come to her door, unexpectedly one afternoon, and delivered the check with a humility that had been almost touching, though studied in some hard to pinpoint untheatrical way, before disappearing under the same stealth. And for the next two days thereafter she’d sat again in the dark room, the check lying on the bureau right next to the .38, her mind running on a different track. It had never gone unloaded since. She figured it never would again, but somehow she’d fought off its impetuousness regardless how many times she was drawn to it like a bug to a light, begging for immolation.
Then on the spur of the moment, one day soon after, she’d called Century 21 Realtors and asked to speak to someone. She told the woman they gave her exactly where she wished to look and two hours later was standing in this very same kitchen, her mind a whirl of confusion and, oddly enough considering the circumstances, relief. She’d signed the purchase agreement that day, assuring the real estate agent the house would be paid in full on the day of purchase but offering no details as to how or why. The realtor had asked no questions.
And now here she was.
For better or worse, just like the Justice of the Peace warned on the day of their wedding. Only now she was alone once more. She silently smoked through the remains of the pack of cigarettes, staring across the table at nothing this time, not even trying to imagine her lost husband and daughter seated across from her, trying to adjust to the reality of the life she’d just bought, wondering deep down if anything could actually pull her from the hole she’d unwittingly dropped into.