Free The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford Page A

gesture, her hand on the side of his face, her thumb compressing, lightly, the skin near the wound. Thomas felt her breath on the side of his face. “Not bad,” she said.
    He was now going well below the speed limit. He hadn’t seen any other traffic, did not see why this wouldn’t be allowed, but behind him, suddenly, there was honking. He sat up straighter and looked in his side mirror. A red pickup was almost on the gate of his trailer. Thomas slowed even more, rolled down his window, and motioned for the truck to pass. As the driver pulled parallel, Thomas looked over, just in time to see the man in the passenger seat move his eyes from him to Sarah. He was dressed in red and white camouflage. He looked vaguely familiar.
    “Do you know that guy?” Thomas said. The truck had slowed to Thomas’s speed. Sarah said nothing. The man rapped at his own window, then made a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the two of them. Then the rust-gutted truck was speeding ahead into the distance, weaving in and out of lanes, as if driving a cone course. “Weird,” Sarah said. They’d been silent while it happened.
    “Someone oughta shoot his tires out,” Thomas said after a few minutes.
    “Someone will,” Sarah said. “Eventually.”
    T he flowers Joan had bought and placed on the mantel were already beginning to wilt. She turned the vase, stood back, turned it again. Yesterday, she had talked to her therapist about John, hoping he could help her out of what, in the last few days, had become a panic. Children aren’t going to be what you want them to be, he said. I don’t want him to be anything! she said back. Tears again. Some people, he said, just need more time. When she asked him how much time was enough, he fixed her over his desk, and said that was something she ought to think about. “When he talks—what he says—it’s like an infection, like an earache. I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “It has the ring of verdict to it.”
    “But you’ve told me”—here he flipped his notes, to make sure. “The two of you have stopped talking. That he only talks to your husband, now.”
    “When we talked,” she corrected. The last time she’d been on the phone with John, the last time he’d asked for her, she had been unable to give him what he needed, and he had said: I’m thinking maybe you don’t love me . And at the moment he said it, at the very moment the words were out of his mouth and coiling toward her over the line, it had been true. He had made it true. Now, lying in bed, she would listen to Thomas down the hall, saying yes, or no, mumbling inaudibly so it sounded as if the floor itself was humming softly with the murmur of her husband’s voice. Sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine John’s side of the conversation, and in her head this would become a conversation between her and her husband, the conversation they never had, a constantly invoked What have we done? To what degree is this our fault? How much longer will this take?
    “You’re confessing this to me. He sounds like he’s confessing to you,” her therapist had said. He cleared his throat.
    “I don’t think it’s love he’s after,” she said.
    “Then, what?”
    “It feels,” she said, “more like he’s looking for confirmation. Like he’s . . . begging us. For something. Some confirmation that his problems are bigger than we are. And that he wants us to prove it to him. To confirm it. I don’t know.”
    Her therapist had put his pen down, folded his arms, and made a bad-smell face. “That,” he said, “doesn’t sound quite right to me. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few months, and it’s possible I’m not getting a handle on John. But that doesn’t sound quite right.”
    This kind man, Joan thought. Letting her talk like this. Of course he wasn’t getting a handle on her son. They didn’t have a handle on him. But she hadn’t helped; she hadn’t told this man everything; she