Free A Parallel Life by Robin Beeman

Thermos for another day of nailing and sawing on a fancy house that some city people were building on the old Bernard place.
    Then, not a minute later, she got to smile at Joe again as he came back in. “Can I use your car today?” he asked, flashing his two rows of peerless human porcelain. “I’m out of gas and too late to get some.”
    â€œYes, but be sure you leave me your keys.”
    â€œYou got it,” he said and bent to kiss her, letting her smell his mint toothpaste and lime shaving cream, the flowery soap and strawberry shampoo and a bit of Joe musk beneath it all—so much scent that she became dizzy with pleasure and wild with longing for him to return so she could bury her face in the presence of him.
    And Beck was on his way, driving fast and eating an early apple he’d borrowed from a tree on the roadside. He was driving fast, but not so fast that he didn’t notice, as he headed down the grade into the little valley called Tarver’s Crossing that his own 1957 Volkswagen was coming up toward him. It was the car he’d been given by a friend in lieu of a small debt, the car he’d loaned to Rita over a year ago when her car threw a rod. And there it was, passing him on its way up as he was on the way down, driven not by Rita but by someone entirely different—driven by a man.
    I wonder who that son-of-a-bitch is, Beck asked himself without rancor as he tossed the apple core out of the window—and for the first time it occurred to him that in the space of a year things might have changed. This idea disturbed him so much that when he got to town he decided to take time just to drive by the Mermaid Cafe—Rita’s place—and then to drive around all six square blocks of Tarver’s Crossing to satisfy himself that nothing had gone on without his knowledge.
    After completing this loop to his satisfaction, he stopped in at the Manhood Tavern for a visit with Charlie Manhood—and a beer, though he normally didn’t drink before evening.
    â€œBeck, you’re in town!” Charlie said.
    â€œGive me something on tap,” Beck said. “I see that things have stayed the same—more or less.” And he raised the glass of beer that Charlie slid his way, toasting the morning regulars at the other end—the Polonius brothers and a Basque whose name Beck could never remember. All three, stiffened by age, seemed more like taxidermic exhibits than men, but they managed to raise their glasses, which glinted in the dusty shafts of morning light.
    â€œMore or less,” Charlie said. Like most barkeepers, he was laconic.
    â€œIt looks about the same.”
    â€œOn vacation, were you?” Charlie asked.
    â€œYou could say that,” Beck said.
    â€œYou been by the Mermaid yet?”
    â€œNot yet. How’s Rita?”
    â€œAbout the same,” Charlie said and looked down at the section of bar he was polishing as if some nick in the finish might suddenly yawn into a gulf.
    When Rita looked up from the coffee maker to see Beck standing in the doorway, framed there, neither in nor out, her body gave a jolt as if it were on the receiving end of an electrical current. Her knees almost buckled beneath her, and she began vibrating like a tuning fork.
    Beck took a step forward and removed himself from the tentative hold of her doorway. “Turned to stone, are you,” he said, “by the sight of me?”
    â€œI can’t move,” she answered, in a whisper—which really wasn’t necessary since the breakfast crowd had gone and there was no one in the place. She whispered because she doubted that she could take a step forward to where he stood with his sideways smile showing a bit of the gold incisor, his bottle green eyes looking at her and into her, and his voice both rough and tender as the bark on a tree.
    â€œI haven’t touched anyone in over a year,” he said, “and I don’t know if I