Free Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

someone rude?”
    “I don’t know,” Mr. Smith said. “I really don’t.”
    “She’s just sensitive,” Peter said.
    As they drove down Jefferson, Mr. Gleeson was outside pulling a garbage can to the curb. He looked up at Mr. Smith’s car and watched it slow to a stop at Peter’s driveway. “Is that Francis Gleeson?” Mr. Smith asked, leaning over the steering wheel. He sounded relieved.
    The two men spoke at the end of the driveway while Peter retrieved the key from under the rock and went into his house. They were still talking even after Peter poured himself a glass of water and went up tohis bedroom. He chugged the water with his back to the window and counted to forty. When he turned around they were still there, except they’d turned their backs to his house, as if they knew he might try to read their lips and figure out what they were saying.
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    She had a gun in her handbag. She hadn’t taken it out, she hadn’t even mentioned it, but they found it in the ambulance when they were going through her things. All she wanted was the secret weight of it hanging off her shoulder, cold and solid when she rummaged through her bag for her wallet. She hadn’t planned on using it. She couldn’t even imagine using it. It was just a thing to have. A thing that would surprise people, if it came to it, a thing that surprised her when she remembered it was there and what it was made to do. But the EMT who spotted it handed her whole bag over to the cop like it was on fire. “Your husband, he’s on the job?” the cop asked, holding Brian’s little off-duty five-shot away from himself like it was contaminated. “Local or city?” He popped open the cylinder. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and tilted the gun so that five bullets slid neatly into his palm. Anne Stanhope refused to answer. Once she’d stopped howling in the store, she was unable to speak. She had no interest in speaking. Speaking was a habit she’d gotten into years ago, in the distant past, and now that she’d stopped she felt no desire to start again. It was pointless anyway—all the blah-blah-blabbing and, still, no one understood each other. The EMT came at her with a small plastic cup at the bottom of which a large yellow and white pill rolled around. He lifted her head to place a pill on her tongue, and she spit it back at him.
    “Why’d you have this in your bag today, Anne?” They were idiots, she thought. Each one more idiotic than the last. They had no brains for nuance. They had no conception of a way of thinking that was different than their own. “Your husband. He left this at home?” They assumedBrian was at work, but Brian wasn’t at work. He was at the garage not a mile away from Food King, hoping the mechanic there could squeeze six more months of life out of his Chevy. He’d left the gun where he always left it when he was off duty—on top of the bookcase in the family room. Yes, he was supposed to be wearing it but he couldn’t be bothered. He was in Gillam. Why would he need it? Anne would have had it back on the bookcase without him ever realizing it was gone.
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    In the fluorescent light of the hospital corridor, in full view of any person who might happen down the hall, they unstrapped her from the gurney and lifted her onto a hospital bed. Someone rolled her over and someone else tugged down her pants until she could feel her bare behind was exposed for the world to see. She began laughing. They told her to be still so she wagged her behind a little to show them she didn’t care. Someone pushed a needle into her and she noticed she was sobbing. She didn’t remember that she’d stopped laughing. She turned her face to the mattress so they wouldn’t see. Now the sheet under her face was damp and would stay damp until they changed the bedding or moved her again. Someone put thick socks on her bare feet.
    When they moved away from her, she figured she had two or three minutes. Maybe less. It all depended on what