Free A Parallel Life by Robin Beeman Page A

can touch you now. Help me, will you?”
    â€œBeck,” she said and managed to take a step forward and stretch out her hand. “Oh, Beck . . .”
    â€œRita,” he said and took another step, and another, and reached out his hand and almost, but not quite, touched hers, almost but not quite, so that the spark of need could jump the gap from finger to finger.
    They were in each other’s arms in a second and their embrace was long. When finally they pulled apart for a breath of air, Rita placed the
Closed
sign in the window and went into the kitchen to tell Cherry Vivaldi, the college girl who helped out in the summer, that she was free for the day.
    An hour or so later, Beck lay on Rita’s bed like a man who had come through a desert and finally had a chance to drink deep. Rita lay beside him, her hair wet with sweatand sticking to his chest, her heart finally slowing down.
    He slept. She slept. And when he woke he noticed clothes he had never seen in her closet, and a pair of boxer shorts on the floor. He wore Jockeys.
    When Rita woke she remembered that she hadn’t heard from Beck for more than a year and that she had let him just walk over her threshold as if the entire path of the earth in its orbit had been pulled in like a belt to let him account for no more than a normal absence from her. And she also saw the pair of boxer shorts on the floor by the dresser, and the pair of Jockeys on the floor on the rug by the bed, and she realized that she had a problem.
    Beck cleared his throat.
    Rita sat up in bed and pulled the sheet up to cover her breasts.
    â€œWho?” said Beck.
    â€œJoe—the carpenter.”
    â€œHe’s just a kid. You’ve got to be joking.”
    â€œHe’s legal and he’s a keeper.”
    â€œHe was driving my car!”
    â€œHis truck was out of gas.” She got out of bed and, taking the sheet with her, went to the closet and looked for something to wear.
    Beck leaned over and found his Jockeys. He turned his back to her when he put them on. Then, with his loins girded in baggy cotton knit, he faced her. “I love you, Rita.”
    â€œI love you, too,” she whispered, still holding the sheet. “There was never any question of that.”
    At this very moment the siren, which Charlie Manhood had mounted on the roof of his tavern, sounded, announcing a fire. The next moment Rita’s phone rang. It was Charlie saying that the VFD was a man shy on thefire truck and wondering if Beck would like to resume his position as volunteer.
    â€œWe’ll talk about this later,” Beck said to Rita and slipped into his jeans.
    At this point things got a bit complicated and even those watching intently might have missed something.
    As the fire truck on its way to put out the fire at the Polonius place ascended the narrow hillside road, Walt Tarver was descending the same road in his pickup with the two women he had discovered in his barn. They had been making love on the seat of a 1942 Reo truck that once belonged to his dead father, and he was taking them at gunpoint to the sheriff. They had been naked and avid, and their absorption in their passion made it possible for him to come upon them with a loaded .45—which he continued to hold on them while they dressed. Walt’s outrage grew from the fact that this particular trespass not only violated the hallowed law of private property but also what he believed to be a law of nature. He saw the use of the truck seat as adding insult to injury by profaning the memory of his father.
    Now it isn’t easy to drive a stick-shift truck over a rocky road while holding a loaded gun on people. Even Walt, in his fury, had sense enough to know that if the gun went off and a bullet chanced to hit one of the women, he would not be without legal problems. So things were not in perfect control when Tom Scarlatti, at the wheel of the fire truck, rounded a bend and found Walt bearing