Free The Constant Heart by Craig Nova Page B

Gloria. “OK?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “You know I’d be happy to do that.”
    â€œThat way you’ll have it when I get there. I’m packing now. My flight gets in tomorrow at 6:00 AM your time. That goddamned red-eye.”

    â€œGood,” I said. “Good. I’ll have the TV.”
    â€œAh, Jake,” she said. “You’re so sweet. You really are. We can talk when I get there.”
    Danville didn’t escape the wrecking ball of the modern age any more than any other small town in the Northeast. Wal-Mart moved in, and the small shops on Main Street closed up, and then Home Depot opened, and the hardware store where my father used to buy trash cans and the new works for a leaking toilet turned into a dollar store. A couple of fires left gaps along Main Street, making it look like a junkie with some black teeth. Still, some places seemed to thrive, like Dunkin’ Donuts, a juice bar (the vegetarians from the school where I taught kept that going), some fusion restaurants, and, of course, a Radio Shack. So that’s where I went to get the TV.
    The TVs were along one wall, all tuned to the same show. A bank of TVs like that always gives me the illusion of being confronted with a lot of information, but it is only the same thing repeated over and over. Some pictures were better than others, a little more blue or red, or a sharper picture. Mostly, it looked like the Japanese ones were the best.
    Gloria’s grandmother had been watching a TV with a piece of aluminum foil wrapped around the antenna, and even with the aluminum foil it still only got two stations, depending on weather conditions. I bought a new one on sale, in the middle range, and I thought the best thing about it was the remote control. I paid for the TV, the pink slip for it in my hand, and the clerk said, “I’ll get you one in a box.”
    A man came into the store when he said this.
    The guns I know about are somewhat old-fashioned, you know, from the black-and-white private eye movies, like The
Maltese Falcon . Or maybe a sort of science fiction one from a modern movie. But the gun the guy had was bigger and more modern than anything I had ever seen, even in a movie. The first thing I felt was that I was getting out of touch in some way, standing there and not even recognizing such a gun.
    â€œI don’t want any trouble,” said the clerk.
    â€œGood. That’s smart,” said the man with the gun. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he had a little goatee, just like Neils Dieckmann.
    The door opened with that little commercial sigh of a small mall shop, a little aaagh and hiss from the pneumatic hinge, and the man with the Hawaiian shirt pointed the gun at the woman who walked in the door.
    The gun, or pistol, didn’t seem to be made out of metal, but a sort of high-grade plastic. I guess I felt dated by that material. I had always thought that a pistol was a pistol was a pistol, and that Sam Spade and his descendants would always have a Walther P38. And in one of those original shoulder holsters, too, but even these have changed, because now the shoulder holsters are set up so the pistol hangs butt down.
    The woman still had red hair and freckles, although she didn’t seem so much fresh as a little used, a little rough, as though time had an abrasive effect. My hands were damp just looking at her, and it was hard to tell whether I was terrified of the gun or shaky because she walked in, just like that. It had an air of the supernatural.
    What, in god’s name, was she doing here?
    â€œAh, shit,” said the man with the gun. “Get over there. With that guy.”
    He pointed the pistol at me. Sara walked across the room,
her gait not quite so inflammatory, but her movement still having that sultry quality, as though whatever life was doing to her, it wasn’t taking away how lovely she was. She stood next to me, and without even glancing at me, or saying