Free The Side of the Angels by Christina Bartolomeo, Kyoko Watanabe

me.
    â€œIt’s lucky you’re good at what you do,” he said in the elevator. “You’d never survive on tact and charm alone.”
    â€œThat’s what I have you for.”

5
    T HERE WERE M ENNONITES in the dining car singing hymns. I scowled in their direction. Being forced to listen to other people’s religious views is as bad as being forced to breathe secondhand smoke.
    Here I had temporarily escaped my mother’s doom-laden reminders to repent, only to be lectured in song by people who had the path to unmechanized salvation all mapped out and were looking awfully smug about it.
    I took a large sloppy bite out of my tuna sandwich and opened my copy of
Murder on the Orient Express
, which I was rereading for the third time. I glanced over at them. The women’s faces were placid under their unbecoming caps. The men looked self-assured and jovial. For a moment it seemed so tempting: a healthy, hardworking life. The assurance that you were living the Lord’s way. Perhaps a nice, strapping husband you had married at eighteen and a few plump, sweet-tempered children.
    Then I thought of other sweetnesses, of a picnic with Jeremy at Carderock in the middle of March, when we necked on a blanket like teenagers and pulled the blanket around us when it started to rain. I thought of how in the beginning we’d slept so late and made love so long on Saturday mornings that we didn’t leave the house until hunger forced us out for a three o’clock lunch. I thought of all the boys I’d dated in college, of one in particular who drew me valentines in red crayon and kissed like a very angel. Perhaps I would try to become good in extreme old age, when men didn’t want me anymore and I needed to settle accounts with my Maker, just in case it turned out he had noticed what I was up to all those years.
    I had a whole table to myself. Not many people on this 7 A.M. Fridaytrain to Providence. Ron fussed about my taking trains because it removed me from his reach for hours, but like most people who have to fly frequently on business, I’ve grown to hate flying. Besides, I love trains. They’re still somehow both cozy and adventurous. You can walk around. You can eat whenever you want to.
    Best of all, even Ron couldn’t expect me to phone him from a train, since there is usually only one phone booth at best, and it’s always taken. I had refused to purchase a cell phone on the grounds that it would give me brain cancer, though the real reason was that I didn’t want one more electronic shackle in my life. Ron had scoffed at me, but immediately went out and bought one of those gamma-ray-shielding earpieces, or some such device. Ron was wonderfully suggestible that way. He had an air purifier in his office, a radon detector at home, and a special alarm on his car that would alert the police departments of five counties to his location should he ever be carjacked.
    Johnny had driven me to Union Station. I’d told him not to bother, but he’d insisted. We were barely a block from my apartment when he started talking about Louise.
    â€œShe was so damn fussy the other day,” he said. “Not fussy about what shoes we bought, but fussy with me. She picked on every word I said.”
    â€œNow, Johnny,” I said. “Think back. What word was it in particular that she picked on?”
    â€œI don’t know. How can I remember?”
    â€œYou’re right. It was a whole two days ago.”
    He swerved expertly to avoid a jeep whose driver, yammering, of course, on a cell phone, seemed to think that the lane markings were just suggestions for him to take or leave and that red lights were for other, less fabulous people. I gave the guy the finger and a look of death.
    â€œNicky, I’ve told you not to do that,” said Johnny. “Haven’t you ever heard of road rage? You never know who has a gun these days.”
    â€œThat little snot