“Damn, did I just run over something?” She looked at Carol Anne, then shrugged her shoulders, looked in the rearview mirror. A Jeep full of teenagers pulled up alongside them, honked, pointed to the back of the car.

“What the . . . ?” Carol Anne rolled down her window, shoved her head out into the wind. She pulled her head back in. “Stop the car, Amy. Pull over.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Amy rolled her eyes, pulled into the parking lot of Rosie’s Cut Cabin, shifted into PARK and looked at Carol Anne. “What is it now?”

Carol Anne opened her mouth as if to talk, but laughter poured out. “You forgot to . . .” Carol Anne bent over in another spasm of laughter. “You left the gas hose in the car.”

Amy didn’t understand. “What gas hose?”

Carol Anne opened her car door. “Get out. Look.”

Amy opened the door, stepped around to the passenger side of the car and there, sticking out like the deformed tail of roadkill possum, was the black tubing of the gas pump. She sank onto the cold, damp pavement and buried her head in her knees, not caring about her gray wool slacks, or her cashmere sweater, or the old ladies at Rosie’s getting their hair set for the week and staring out the window at her. She brought her knees up to her chest and told Carol Anne the story of Nick and the jail while she tried not to cry, tried not to stare at the hose jutting out of her car, gas dribbling from its severed end like some vulgar representation of her life.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Amy wanted to scream, draw a deep breath and scream again. But she didn’t. She rinsed the dishes and leaned up against the edge of the sink—an old soapstone farmhouse sink she’d rescued from destruction. Two round stains, rust and brown, sat on the bottom and would not be removed. She often made up stories about how they’d come to be there, what and who had caused them. She would never know. There had been things in her life she thought she’d never know . . . and now she did; she wanted to scream loud and long.

The fact that Nick had been in jail and had never truly left her didn’t fit into the crammed facts of what her life had become. She’d repeated the story to herself a hundred times, trying to find the settling point of the story, the bottom line. Yet all she heard was his summary of it: Our vows are still there, never broken—a sentence that ran over her tongue, as rich and seductive as melted butter.