Free The Kiss of Death by Victor J. Banis Page A

pushed her chair away from the table and got up impatiently, moving cautiously around the oddly foreign shapes of familiar furniture that peopled the darkness. In the bathroom, the door carefully closed before she turned on the lights, she stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red, as if all those tears had rusted them. She splashed water on her face.
    She wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, how on earth it had happened: she and Lisa in that awkward embrace…an unexpected sound…and looking around to see Jason in the doorway, staring at them, bewildered and, quickly, horrified—the way she would always remember him now, all the other images of him, of their years together, eclipsed by that one ugly glimpse. Stolen from her. From him, too, but at least he wouldn’t have to live with the loss.
    It would have been less horrible to her if she could even have said to herself, if not to Jason, “But I love Lisa. I enjoyed her kiss. In her arms I felt whole at last.”
    Better to be a real, an honest lesbian than a fool and a weakling. But she did not love Lisa, not in that way, assuredly. She had turned to her because she was lonely and hadn’t fitted in here, in this harsh little town, and Lisa had been brash and friendly and eager to be her companion and confidant—for reasons of her own, as it eventually turned out. Oh, how cozily Lisa had listened and advised and consoled; yes, especially consoled, whenever Claire found fault with Jason.
    “Men are like that, pet, every one of them. Believe me.”
    “But I love Jason,” Claire had insisted, loyal in the face of Lisa’s implied criticism.
    “Why, of course you do. That’s the whole point, don’t you see? It is always the woman who loves. Really, women are the only ones who can love. That’s why men have friends, buddies, pals, but women love one another….”
    And Claire had smiled, and said, in all innocence, “I do love you, for being such a friend.”
    She hadn’t loved her, though, not in the way Lisa meant it. In that way, she loved Jason. Good heavens, of course she loved Jason. He was her husband. She wouldn’t have been here at all if she hadn’t loved him so.
    She had loved Lisa as a friend, had even been willing to overlook the gossip about her.
    “Lisa is fast.” Everybody said so. It wasn’t just the numbers of men, either, of which people talked. It was the marital status of so many of them.
    She’d refused to share in the gossip, had never brought the subject up with Lisa. She was too glad to have Lisa’s friendship, someone to spend the long evenings with while Jason burned the midnight oil. Anyway, it was a small town, cold, and not from climate alone. Lisa was divorced, rich, and beautiful enough to make other women feel threatened, even good-looking women.
    “It’s no wonder they talk about her,” Claire told herself more than once. “They talk about me, too, I’m sure.”
    The big old clock on the mantle struck the hour. It was time to go. She turned off the bathroom light before she opened the door, bumped into a chair that wasn’t where she expected it to be. She got the car keys from the hook by the back door, left the house and the errant chair to their darkness. The realtor had the house keys. The house would sell with everything in it. She wanted no souvenirs of her time here. Those ashes were reminder enough.
    The car was already packed. Everyone thought she’d left hours ago. That was what she told them: “I’ll be starting out about noon, no later than one. I want to make Portland before night.”
    She drove out of the garage now with the headlights off, did not turn them on until she was nearly two blocks away. No one was likely to recognize the car. She’d sold Jason’s new Buick the day before, for a price so cheap the buyer had hardly been able to keep from clapping his hands and dancing. They’d almost never used the wagon, and it was about as nondescript as a car could be. The streets were