Free The Cost of Lunch, Etc. by Marge Piercy

pebbles in circles. “You don’t want me to stay, enough.”
    He sees himself returning to the city without her. The air will prickle with questions. Suppose after she leaves, he changes his mind and realizes he wants her? “Where will you go?” Her travel-worn suitcase with wheels that squeak stands at the door.
    She picks sand from the ribs of a scallop shell. “New York? Maybe I’ll go west. Maybe California.”
    Choosing a place so idly makes him dizzy. He sees her blown off like a grasshopper. People cannot just disappear. “By yourself?”
    His tedious jealousy of tedious young men. She smiles. Her heart is chipping at her ribs. The road comes over the last dune fitted to its curved flank in a question mark. She does not dare turn from him to go inside and look at the clock. Will she really have to go? Will she have to get on that dirty bus and use up her last few dollars on a cheap motel? She concentrates on his bent head: want me! Want me, damn you. She is not sure how much money she has in her purse and wishes she had counted it in the bathroom.
    He is staring at his knuckles, big for the thinness of his hands and bone-colored with clenching. “Do you love me?”
    She turns her head. Her gaze strikes into his with a clinking, the stirring of a brittle wind chime. He is thinking about girls, the difficulty, the approaching, his shyness, the awkward phone calls with silences that open under him like crevasses in a glacier.
    She is wondering what she is supposed to say. “What do you care?”
    “I have to know.”
    His long milky face, pleading laugh, set of mismatched bones. He is gentle. If he does not touch her with passion, neither does he hurt her. That is very important, not to be hurt. “Of course I love you.”
    “Do you?” Once again he ducks to stare at his knuckles.
    She must risk breaking the tension. She goes to read the clock.
    “What time is it?” he calls.
    She comes back to answer. “Five to four. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.”
    A strand of hair in the washbasin? Steel hands press on his shoulders: decide, decide. His father’s voice, rising with the effort to contain his temper. “Squeeze the trigger, Edmund, squeeze it. Come on, it won’t wait for you all day. Do it!” The rabbit bolted into the tall grass. In his relief he shot. His father strode away. Be a man, be a man. Pressure of steel hands.
    He has always been fastidious not to give pain. “Let’s walk down to the water.”
    She shakes her head. “Not enough time. I can’t miss the bus accidentally, don’t you see?” In New York it will be hot. She will call somebody. She will sleep on a couch, and the next day again she will go around to the temp agencies in whatever is still clean. Men will pester her on the street, men will buy her supper and expect to lay her as payment. “I can’t sit here any longer waiting for you to decide if you love me—can I?” She claps the sand from her palms, hatingherself for having listened to his quiet voice, for having given herself into his hands like a bag of laundry.
    He cradles his head, elbowing aside the shells and pebbles. They move him, the sort of treasures a child might hoard. He feels wrong, not sure why. He hates the carelessness of men like his father, men in the fraternity of his college years whose act of power is to give pain. He does not know what he wants, only that everything is going away. She is about to walk off with that flimsy suitcase and leave him tangled here.
    She reads his face—sullen, puzzled. He will let her go. Her skin crawls. One more defeat. “Well, want to walk me to the crossroads? It’s time.”
    But he does not rise. “Stay.”
    Hope scalds her. She wants, wants so badly that surely she must win. “Why let it drag on?”
    “You know it’s hard for me to figure out what I feel sometimes. I’m slow to react. I can’t just decide like that.”
    “You can tell if you love me. You could tell you wanted me here for the summer,