I paused. Her phone call wasn’t that bad, but I had to wait and see how far she would go with it. There were no fairy tales for me to tell her, so I just stuck to the truth.

“Theresa, we already know the answer to that. If I’m here, and we both have the time and the desire to see each other again, then we will. But if I’m not here, and you’re not where I’m at…”

“All right, I just wanted to see what you were gonna say. So thanks for being honest,” she told me.

“We’re both adults here,” I explained. “So there’s no sense in me lying about it.”

She said, “Sometimes we want the lie, but the lie fucks us up for later. So thanks for not fucking us up.”

I noticed her language and asked her, “Are you at work right now?”

She laughed at me. “I’m on my lunch break. I wouldn’t talk like this on the job, or get into my business like that.”

“Oh, okay,” I told her. “I was about to ask what kind of job you had.”

“Hmm,” she mumbled. “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”

I thought about her comment and felt bad again. The truth was, I didn’t want to know that much about her. We had a good night together, we knew each other from the old neighborhood, her older brother was my friend, and she had some nice, tight pussy. I mean, it was a terrible thought, but that was about all I needed to know about her.

I told her, “We’ll have time for that. But right now, I was just about to start packing up to hit the road again.”

“You’re leaving already?” she asked me. She had urgency in her voice.

I said, “You know, once you get used to traveling, it becomes normal to leave. That’s just my lifestyle. It’s been that way for years now.”

I was telling her the absolute truth.

She said, “Oh. Okay.” She sounded disappointed. I wanted no part of that. She was bringing my energy down.

“Well, let me go ahead and finish up what I was doing,” I told her. “You have a good day at work today.”

“I never said that I was finished talking to you.” That was the next thing that came out of her mouth.

I looked at my cell phone and shook my head. That was exactly the kind of woman I wanted to avoid.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone over there last night after all, I thought.

“All right, well, I’ma let you go ahead and go,” she finally told me.

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “And you have a good day,” I repeated.

“Yeah, you, too.”

When I clicked off the line, I vowed that she would never hear from me again, and I meant it. More contact with her would only lead to more pain.

“Let me get the hell out of here,” I said out loud. I went back to my mother’s guest room and started packing up in a hurry. I didn’t have that much to pack, so I was done and ready to go in no time. I called a taxi to take me back to the train station for my return to Chicago. Instead of calling my mother and telling her that I was leaving, I took the cop-out approach and wrote her a nice letter to leave on the kitchen table where I knew she would find it.