Free Homesick Creek by Diane Hammond Page B

decaying of passion inevitable, like some law of marital physics?
    Rae had met him in Stanford’s student union, waiting in line for a coffee machine that turned out to be broken. After that he turned up everywhere she went. He was thoughtful to his clients and acquaintances, endlessly patient with the elderly, a gifted extemporaneous speaker much in demand by Sawyer’s Rotary, Kiwanis, Optimist, and Lions clubs as well as the Chamber of Commerce. But for all that, she couldn’t remember the fever of an early passion, only a mild annoyance at his persistence. They had never used pet names or terms of endearment, and her heart did not beat faster when she caught sight of him on the street; she at no time longed to be taken into his arms. Was there in her character a deficiency of desire? Yet there was her humiliating longing for Hack Neary, a yearning as strong and confounding as bewitchment.
    Through the showroom window she watched Jesús, the lot man, pick debris off the inventory: fir twigs, coffee cup lids, Mc-Donald’s french fry envelopes. He was a good man with a gold-toothed smile and many young children in frilly dresses and western wear. Rae liked asking him about his wife, to whom he was devoted.
La reina
, he called her: the queen. The queen was four feet ten, stout, fecund, twinkling with good humor, in possession of not a single word of English. She called Rae Señora Ray.
    “Like the ray of the sun,” Jesús had explained.
    “¿Como están los niños?”
she asked him now as he cut through the showroom to get a leaf blower from the service department. “How are your children?”
    His face lit up like Christmas.
“Muy bien, gracias,”
he said. “They are very good, thank you.
¿Donde está señor Neary?
”
    “No sé.”
Rae sighed.
“Señor está tarde.”
He was ten minutes late. Hack was never late. She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, in what had to be the joke of an unjust God, she was in thrall to a man of dubious intellect and limited sagacity whose conversations she couldn’t remember even fifteen minutes later. Yet there was something winning about him, something deeply appealing, a spiritedness, an almost childlike desire to please, to be liked, that shone unbroken through his shield of glib talk, double entendres, and incessant small lies. Now she had incurred the wrath of his terrible wife, with her nylon waitress’s uniform and sagging face, her teeth drawn and claws bared to fight for her man. It was too awful.
    “Aquí. Señor está aquí,”
Jesús said, pointing to Hack’s truck just pulling in. Rae turned in time to see him dismount from his pickup, beautiful as any prince, green-eyed, neatly coiffed and bearded, graceful. Jesús smiled at her as though Hack’s arrival were their doing, a conjuring act, and removed himself and his gleaming tools into the gloom of the service department.
    Bob emerged from the truck’s passenger side, looking greenish and frail. Hack said something to him, slapped him on the back, and split off to come into the showroom.
    “Hey, beautiful!” he called to her, smiling his best Cheshire cat smile, his normal good mood evidently restored after yesterday’s disaster. “And how am I this morning?”
    Señor
was, indeed,
aquí
. Somehow she never remembered the full extent of his obnoxious good nature until he was in her presence.
    “Bob okay?” she said.
    “Yeah, he’s fine.”
    He hadn’t looked fine, but Rae let it pass.
    Marv Vernon, the dealership owner, pushed through the showroom door, portly, hale, big-eared, small-time, brimming with satisfaction at the world over which he found himself lord. He held out his hand to give Hack a hearty handshake, then nodded at Rae. She wouldn’t let him kiss her cheek, and he refused to shake her hand.
    “So, boys and girls,” he said. “It looks like a fine day to buy a car!”
    He always said that. Rae smiled weakly.
    “Is there coffee, hon?” he asked her.
    There was