Free Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

around her waist, his mouth alongside her ear. She could feel the wing-brush of his lips moving. “Very close,” he said.
    She thought about this again as she went outdoors and stood there in her sleep T-shirt, her hair flattened against the side of her head and nothing attractive about her at all, currently.
    “George?” she called—yet again.
    And she stepped tenderly barefoot across the gravel drivewaytoward the garage. It was a wooden barnlike structure with high weeds growing up along the sides of it, and when she drew closer, a flurry of grasshoppers scattered, startled by her approach. Their dry wings made a maraca sound like rattlesnakes; she pulled her hair back into a ponytail and held it with her fist.
    They hadn’t driven the Maserati since they arrived here. “Too conspicuous,” George Orson said. “There’s no sense in calling a lot of attention to ourselves,” he said, and then the next day she woke and he was already out of bed and he wasn’t in the house and she found him at last in the garage.
    There were two cars in there. The Maserati was on the left, completely covered by an olive-green tarp. On the right was an old red and white Ford Bronco pickup, possibly from the 1970s or 80s. The hood of the pickup was open and George Orson was leaning into it.
    He was wearing an old pair of mechanic’s coveralls, and she almost laughed out loud. She couldn’t imagine where he had found such an outfit.
    “George,” she said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you
doing?
”
    “I’m fixing a truck,” he said.
    “Oh,” she said.
    And though he was basically still himself, he looked—what?
—costumed
in the dirty coveralls, his hair uncombed and standing up, fingers black with grease, and she felt a twinge.
    “I didn’t know that you knew how to fix cars,” Lucy said, and George Orson gave her a long look. A sad look, she thought, as if he were recalling a mistake he’d made in the distant past.
    “There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me,” he said.
    Which gave her pause, now, as she vacillated at the mouth of the garage.
    The truck was gone, and a shiver of unease passed across her asshe stared at the bare cement floor, an oil spot in the dust where the old Bronco had been.
    He’d gone out—had left her alone—had left her—
    The Maserati was still there, still covered in its tarp. She was not completely abandoned.
    Though she was aware that she didn’t have the key to the Maserati.
    And even if she
did
have a key, she didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.
    She mulled this over, looked at the shelves: oil cans and bottles of nuclear-blue windshield wiper fluid and jars full of screws and bolts and nails and washers.
    Nebraska was even worse than Ohio—if such a thing were possible. There was a soundlessness about this place, she thought, though sometimes the wind made the glass in the windowpanes hum, the wind running in a long exhaled stream through the weeds and dust and dry bed of the lake, and sometimes unexpectedly there would be a very startling sonic boom over the house as a military plane broke the sound barrier, and there was the rattle of the grasshoppers leaping from one weed to the next—
    But mostly it was silence, a kind of end-of-the-world hush, and you could feel the sky sealing over you like the glass around a snow globe.
    She was still in the garage when George Orson returned.
    She had pulled back the tarp from the Maserati, and she was sitting in the driver’s seat and wishing that she knew how to hot-wire a car. How appropriate, she thought, for George Orson to come back and find his beloved Maserati missing, and it would serve him right, and she liked to imagine the look on his face when she pulled back up the driveway sometime after dark—
    She was still fantasizing about this when George Orson drove into the space beside her with the old Bronco. He looked puzzledas he opened the door—why was the tarp off of his