Free The Whore's Child by Richard Russo

contact you. We’ll need your signature to get you and Julie out from under the house.”
    “Sometimes I think it’s the house that killed us,” he admits without much conviction, as if it’s one of a dozen equally plausible explanations he’s considered in the last twenty-four hours.
    “At least you don’t have to go back to it,” I say.
    He gives a rueful laugh, then turns somber. “I wish you’d let me take the car,” he says suddenly. “It’s really not fair that I should end up in a strange city and not even have a way of looking for a job. I mean, I’ve been a shit and everything, but—”
    In truth, I hadn’t thought of this. Failures of imagination abound. And now that he’s brought the unfairness of it to my attention, I know I can’t put him on that plane.
    “I swear to Christ,” he says. “If you let me take my car, I’ll go far away. Farther than Pittsburgh.”
    Right now, he seems about the most generous person I’ve ever known. After all, he doesn’t need my permission. The keys I’m holding are his keys. They fit the ignition to his car. Only a combination of generosity and scalding guilt can account for the fact that he hasn’t put up a fuss. By hitting Julie he has unmanned himself, losing everything but kindness. And I am suddenly sure he’ll do as he says.
    A voice comes over the intercom announcing that those needing assistance will be boarded first, then passengers traveling with small children. I hand Russell his keys.
    “I didn’t mean that about you being a cold son of a bitch, Hank,” he says as we start back to the terminal.
    “And you’d never poke me in the stones,” I add, smiling.
    At the sliding doors we shake hands, and I watch him lug his two suitcases across the huge parking lot. I don’t feel too bad about him. Almost anyplace he ends up will be better than where he is now.
    I’m left standing there holding an airline ticket to Pittsburgh that will need to be cashed in. Then I’ll have to call Faye and admit to her what I’ve done. She will have to come collect me. It seems too much to ask—of either of us, so instead I head back to the gate. I arrive just in time to see the Pittsburgh flight airborne. “You’re too late,” says a young man in an official airline blazer.
    “I guess so,” I tell him. In fact there’s no doubt about it. Odds are that she’s no longer in Pittsburgh. She’s probably married again by now, not that it matters, really. I only wanted to see her at some restaurant with half-moon booths where I might tell her about my surgery. For some reason I’m convinced that my brush with mortality would matter to her, and that I’d feel better after confessing to someone that I fear the nausea, that I consider it prophetic, a sign that some terrible malignancy remains. I remember her body and the way we made love, and I guess I was hoping that she would remember my body too. Maybe she would be afraid for me in the way I want someone to be afraid.
    Back in the terminal I feed coins into the pay phone, dial and let it ring a dozen times before hanging up and trying Julie’s number, which does the same thing. I’m too tired to be sure what this means. Probably Faye has given our daughter a sedative. Perhaps I have caught my wife in transit between houses. I wait a few minutes and try my house again, wondering if I’ve forgotten our number.
    Whoever I’m dialing is not home. I go outside onto the terminal ramp and am about to ask a taxi driver how much it would cost to take me to Durham when Faye pulls up right in front of me, so I get in.
    “I got to thinking about it,” she says, “and realized you’d give him the car.”
    I just look at her, wondering if she might also have intuited that I just missed getting on a plane to Pittsburgh, that I had a lover fifteen long years ago who I want to tell things I can’t tell my wife.
    “You think I don’t know you after thirty years?” she says, as if in answer to my unspoken