Free Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood

talk more freely, and in a more fervent way, with Mike as his listener.
    â€œYou’ve never had a friend like this,” Molly said to him.
    â€œHe comes down there, he finds me,” Jeff said humbly. Jeff was well liked, but nobody much hung out in the Path lab or saw a lot of him. But Mike would get him out of the basement and make him eat lunch. “Drinks his lunch,” Jeff said. “I keep warning him. But you can’t tell him. He drinks because of the things he deals with.” Molly had never heard Jeff, who kept at a remove the worst of life that he himself dealt with, plated out on glass and magnified, make a psychological assessment of another man.
    â€œWhy deal with those things?” she said, clinging shamelessly to the subject.
    Jeff said, “Fate. Fate put him there. Look at the guy. His whole life. What’s he going to do? No money for school, smart.” Another first for Jeff, generalizing about another’s life. Usually he stuck with facts. In that way he resembled Alice, who read every page of the newspaper and knew what was happening in the world without any wish to remake it in her own words. “The guy should be teaching. When he’s done with chemo I’m getting him in to talk to the students. Why not? They all watch TV, they all want to do forensics. Smartest guy I know.” People said that all the time, because Mike had not gone to college.

    Jeff could say that.
    Molly could say, “Did you see his column today?” And so on. Nothing more. She couldn’t say, What is it? What has happened to me?
    Not for years could she ask anybody for confirmation of Mike’s effect. Finally she brought it up with her friend Rita, who had known him. Even then Molly couldn’t say anything about how she had felt. And what Rita said . . . but that came later.
    On the day he came to her house Mike said, “Are you really busy?” Molly had been working at the computer but she said no. She said it several times. He said, “I’ve just seen something terrible. I don’t even want to think about it.”
    She knew this must be the child everybody had been looking for. A six-year-old boy. They already had the man who had been seen with him. It had been in the paper for days, as helicopters circled above the woods of Seward Park.
    Mike closed his eyes and made a tent over his forehead with his hands, as if he and Molly were sitting in the sun, and for a minute the eyelashes slept on the skin of his cheeks and drove all thought of what he might have seen from her mind. She supposed if he had been her husband she would have gotten used to the sight and maybe even been mildly irritated by it, as we sometimes are by a thing that once bewitched us.
    Right away she thought he must have come from the morgue. Alice had told her his visits to the morgue figured in his drinking.
    â€œI wish I could talk to Jeff,” he said as Molly poured coffee. His eyes had opened. He shook himself like a dog.
    She could have said, Why didn’t you go to the lab if you want to talk to Jeff?
    He and Jeff had a little contest as to which one had seen worse sights, though by then Jeff was out of the county hospital where gruesome events from the newspaper drew to a close in
the cold rooms of Pathology; he was back at the university and spending most of his time looking at slides.
    â€œDo you want to call him from here?”
    â€œNo . . . no.” He swirled his coffee. “This was a kid. I can’t mention this to Alice.”
    Oh? How come you can mention it to me? But she leaned forward sympathetically and cupped her mug in her hands. His attention swiveled down to her hands. She saw it. His mind would narrow like that.
    In a low, despairing voice he said, “Your hands . . . they’re nice, they’re . . .” She set the mug down. He took hold of her hands. He folded the fingers in to make fists and raised the fists to his face and ground