Free Bow Grip by Ivan E. Coyote Page B

costs more these days than gas.” Hector turned the key and waited for the glow plug to light up. “Not exactly what I had in mind when I bought it.”
    “I used to drive a truck just like this when I was a kid. It was my first set of wheels. I loved that little truck. Mine was white.” I ran my hand over the gearshift, remembering how Sandra Jennings used to bitch about catching the hem of her skirt on it when we were fumbling out of our clothes, how the streetlight would light up the beads of condensation dripping down the windshield like pearls. It struck me that I hadn’t been laid in over a year, and all of a sudden this seemed wrong to me.
    Hector saw me eyeing a notepad and pencil taped to a string, stuck right on the dashboard.
    “That’s for when I think of things I want to write about while I’m driving.” He flipped over the top page of the pad, to hide what was written.
    “I met another one of our neighbours tonight, after I had that drink with you. The single mom and her little girl.”
    “Kelly and Raylene. She’s quite a remarkable young woman. Let me guess. She borrowed a cigarette from you?”
    I nodded.
    “That’s how I met her, too. I don’t think she can afford to smoke, poor girl. Raising the kid up all by herself.”
    “I’ll never understand how a guy could run off like that, and leave his own wife and kid to live in a motel.”
    “It sounds to me as though she’ll be better off without him around anyway. He’s a meth head.”
    “A what?”
    “Crystal meth. Nasty drug. Both those kids are better
off without that business around. Kelly’s got a good head. They’ll be fine on their own.”
    “Maybe, but they shouldn’t have to be.”
    “People make their own beds though, too, Joseph. She obviously made some bad decisions somewhere along the way. Life has consequences. Sooner she figures that out, the better. Who’s to know what passes between two people, anyway? What she was like to live with? All we ever hear is one side of the story.”
    We were parked outside the restaurant now. Hector turned off the ignition, but didn’t take his hand off the key, just sat there, waiting for me to respond.
    “So don’t you think sometimes it’s just the one person’s fault?” I said at last. “All of a sudden one half of a marriage decides, for whatever reason, that they can’t be there anymore, and they just take off, and none of it was the other person’s fault? That the person who got left behind just got screwed, like, and they didn’t bring it upon themselves somehow?”
    Hector pulled his key out of the ignition. “Do I ever think a divorce is the fault of only one half of the equation? I’d have to say hardly ever. Very rarely.”
    We sat there for another minute, both of us staring straight ahead into our own thoughts.
    “Let’s go eat, Joseph. Lock your door. You’re in the city now.”
    Hector was right. The food was good and cheap, and we both stuffed our faces without hardly stopping to talk at all. The place wasn’t long on ambiance. The waitress had long dirty blonde hair and mostly sat behind the take-out counter in the corner, talking on the phone. Every once in a while she’d set the phone down and make a quick round
with the ice water to appease the few tables that had anybody eating at them, and then return to her stool to talk, the phone cord coiled around her fingers.
    Hector insisted on picking up the tab, even tipped the phone-talker a fiver, which I didn’t think she deserved. She did get off the phone to take our money, I will give her that.
    On the way back to the motel, Hector pulled over at a 7-Eleven and came back with two pouches of Number Seven tobacco, one of those little rolling machines, and a box of cigarette tubes.
    “Does rolling your own save you much money? Seems like a pain in the ass to me.”
    “I like to roll my own. I like the ritual. These are for Kelly.”
    I looked sideways at the old man. “I thought you said she had made