"What?"
"To take home with you?"
"No." The Get made you rude sometimes. He smiled. "It was very good. I'm just full. Thanks."
The drink came. He sipped. He looked around him. A businesswoman eating dinner accompanied by an iPad and a glass of grapefruit-yellow wine glanced his way. She was around thirty-five, round but pretty. Sensuous enough, probably Calista-level sexy, to judge from her approach to eating the artichoke on her plate (food and sex, forever linked).
But his gaze angled away, avoiding her eyes.
No, not tonight.
Would he someday have a family with someone like her? What was her name? he wondered. Sandra. Marcie. No, Joanne. I'm betting Joanne. Would he settle down with a Joanne after he got tired of the nights of Calistas and Tiffs?
March--yeah, yeah, so fucking handsome--could have asked Joanne sitting over there with her artichoke and wine, and a bit of butter on her cheek, to dinner tomorrow, and, in a month, a weekend getaway, and in a year to marry him. It would work. He could get it to work.
Except for one thing.
The Get wouldn't approve.
The Get didn't want him to have a social life, romantic life, family life.
He thought of the attack, at Solitude Creek.
How was that for a sign? Though Antioch March thought this in a droll way; he didn't believe in signs.
Solitude...
The family was preparing to leave, collecting phones, bags of chocolate sea otters, leftovers to be discarded in the mornin
g. The father had the keys of his car out. Keys didn't jangle anymore. They were quiet plastic fobs.
And, being in this damn reflective mood, he couldn't help but think about the intersection. Well, uppercase: the Intersection.
Serena had changed his life in one way but the Intersection had changed it most of all. Everything that came after was explained by what had happened where Route 36 met Mockingbird Road, reeking of Midwest America.
After Uncle Jim's funeral, driving back.
"Nearer, My God, to Thee."
"In Christ There Is No East or West."
The insipid, noncommittal Protestant hymns. They had no passion. Give me Bach or Mozart any day for gut-piercing Christian guilt. March had thought this even then, a boy.
It had been quiet in the Ford, the company car. His father, home for a change. His mother, being a wife for a change. Driving on the bleak November highway, winding, winding, winding through pines turned gray by the mist, everything still. The birch was white as fresh bone.
Then around a bend.
His mother gasping a brief inhaled scream.
The skid flinging him against the door, the brakes locking, then--
"Sir?"
March blinked.
"Here you go, sir." The waitress set the bill in front of him. "And at the bottom, you can take a brief survey and win a chance for a free dinner for the family."
March laughed to himself.