Free Please Write for Details by John D. MacDonald

by the time he entered the plane, a heavy man had sat beside her and was opening his briefcase.
    For the first part of the flight he wondered about her, and wondered why she was going to Mexico. There was a certain aura of lifelessness about her that seemed to him to be unnatural. Perhaps the result of grief or shock. It seemed a reasonable supposition that she might be going to Mexico to acquire a divorce. A very messy divorce situation could turn out all the lights behind a beautiful woman’s eyes.
    As Barbara Kilmer looked down at the brown burned landof northern Mexico she felt the first weak tremor of anticipation. After having felt nothing for so long, it both surprised her and annoyed her. This stupid Cuernavaca Summer Workshop was her father’s idea, her father’s big surprise birthday present. She had tried her best to look pleased, but she knew from the expression on his face that she had failed. The least she could so, she thought, was attend the thing. But it could do no good. Nothing in the world could do any good. She would never respond to anything again. Thus she despised herself for feeling any inward flutter of butterfly wings, no matter how feeble. It seemed a monstrous disloyalty to Rob. To his memory.
    It had happened last summer. On the third day of July, a hot still day in central Michigan. Rob came home for a quick lunch. He was tense and preoccupied. They were paving, and the segment of big divided highway was behind schedule. Yet, before he left, he had swung her up at the doorway of the farmhouse they had rented for the duration of the road job, kissed her soundly, set her down and, grinning, whacked the seat of her shorts with the flat of his hand. She had waved at the dusty car as he headed back for the job.
    Much later she had learned how it happened that hot afternoon. A wind had come up. Rob Kilmer, the young superintendent, had been standing near the big paver, talking to an engineer and a state inspector. A paper had blown off his clipboard. Rob had lunged to get it before it blew under the paver, reaching under the guard rail to snatch it. And in that instant the operator had dropped the scoop.
    By the time they got him to the nearest hospital he was dead.
    It had been all nightmare and confusion from then on. Two of Rob’s brothers and one of his sisters had flown to Michigan to do what they could, and take the body home to Tulsa for burial. They were big people, as Rob had been. Big and brown and giving that curious impression of being a little larger than life. They were stunned and bitter with grief. It was a big close family, and Rob had been the youngest of them, and, as nearly every one of them found a chance to tell her, the best.
    They had sorted his possessions and disposed of his things, giving Barbara the intimate and personal things she would want to have, and arranging to ship her belongings back to her family’s house in Youngstown. Then there was the unrealityof funeral, where she felt like an outsider. She had known him for only two years, and had been married to him for most of that time. But these people had known him for all of his life, and their grief was honest and obvious. She could feel nothing. Only a numbness and an emptiness.
    When it was over she went back to Youngstown and she moved into her old room, the room full of memories of high-school intrigues, college vacations, so that sometimes, awake in the night, she could almost believe that the marriage had never happened, that it had no more reality than some of the other dreams and visions she had had during the mystic years of adolescence.
    But in morning light it was real, and it happened to her. It had happened to Rob, and nothing in her life had prepared her for this shocking knowledge that life could be so utterly cruel, could present you with the insoluble, incurable problem of complete loneliness.
    Financially she was not too badly off. There had been compensation and accident insurance and life