Read Online A Town of Empty Rooms by Karen E. Bender - Free Book Online

trucks, by the people hunched over the steering wheels, for the cool pure hope that, by finding each other, they had fled some basic sadness. They spent their marital night at a truck stop, the long, white beams from the headlights sweeping through the plain room, the trod-on blue carpet, the sharp odor of Lysol, the guttural grinding of the engines outside. She gazed at him, sitting naked against the pine headboard, one knee bent, looking out at the semis lined up in the parking lot, and the headlights fell upon his face so that he looked as though he expected to be swallowed into them, into pure light. She moved toward him, wanting, too, to be brought into his longing. He wanted to fall into her breasts, her thighs, the way she cupped her chin in her hand and peered into the darkness outside as if waiting to see something else come out of it. She loved his hope, and he loved her fear. They fell into each other, grateful for each other’s arms and legs and lips and for what they could grab from each other, and they woke to the sour, damp sheets, the pink light of the sun in the shabby room; she looked at him asleep beside her, and she felt that particular brief melting pleasure — she did not want to be anywhere else.
    The flaws were already sown, as they are with any union.

    HE HAD THOUGHT SHE WAS joking when she called to tell him that she had been escorted by security out of her office at Pepsi. He laughed, but when she was silent, he could not speak for two days; he did not trust how he would form the words. He put on a good face for the lawyers; he watched their small savings vanish; then, a few weeks later, when he walked with her out of the lawyers’ office, after they had settled with Pepsi and the company had agreed not to press charges, he leaned toward her and asked why she did it.
    â€œI missed my father,” she said.
    He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
    â€œI wanted money so we could get out of town.”
    She said this in a normal voice. He picked up a fork and began to twirl it slowly, a simple, ordinary action; he hoped it would keep his hands from trembling. “Out of town? Where?”
    â€œHe always told me, ‘Be prepared to leave.’ We talked about it. It was a kind of bond.”
    He nodded, quickly, as though to prove he understood. Her hands felt warm, but he was aware of their physicality, the bones in her knuckles, the rubbery tendons under her skin, how delighted he had been when they held hands before and he could not distinguish between her hands and his own. Now he squeezed them for a moment, but then he let go.
    â€œJust then — I missed him so much I could barely breathe.”
    He closed his eyes; she would think he was saddened, but he was thinking of something else.
    The truth was that at his brother Harold’s funeral, a few weeks before, he had been unable to feel. He was surrounded by the members of his family, weeping, his father standing back, gray, the first time he’d seen him in years, and Dan felt a hollow sensation in his chest. Harold had been the only other person who had seen their father in the garage, and Dan remembered the rise and fall of his eight-year-old brother’s breath, Harold’s hand gripping his shoulder, and how they felt like one body walking out of that shadowed garage into the golden light emanating from the lobby’s chandelier. The chandelier looked like a cluster of icicles, and they stood beneath its dim burnished light, stunned.
He waited for Harold to do something, and his brother lunged toward the light switch and switched off the chandelier. The lobby darkened; people turned toward them; Harold laughed and switched it on again. They took turns, switching the chandelier on and off, and he loved Harold then, intensely, for this, the way they controlled the lobby, the two of them, until they were sent upstairs.
    Serena was looking at him, waiting; he needed to speak quickly. This was