A phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. He snatched it up, glanced at Joe, and turned away in his swivel chair, as if he worried that his lips might be read.
After procedures were followed and everyone was satisfied that Joe was neither his own evil twin nor a bold impersonator in a clever rubber mask, the assistant manager, his phone conversation concluded, slowly gathered the hundred-dollar bills from other tellers’ drawers and from the vault. He brought the required sum to Heather and, with a fixed and uneasy smile, watched as she counted it for Joe.
Perhaps it was imagination, but Joe felt they disapproved of his carrying so much money, not because it put him in danger but because these days people who dealt in cash were stigmatised. The government required banks to report cash transactions of five thousand dollars or more, ostensibly to hamper attempts by drug lords to launder funds through legitimate financial institutions. In reality, no drug lord was ever inconvenienced by this law, but the financial activities of average citizens were now more easily monitored.
Throughout history, cash or the equivalent—diamonds, gold coins—had been the best guarantor of freedom and mobility. Cash meant the same things to Joe and nothing more. Yet from Heather and her bosses, he continued to endure a surreptitious scrutiny that seemed to be based on the assumption that he was engaged in some criminal enterprise or, at best, was on his way for a few days of unspeakable debauchery in Las Vegas.
As Heather put the twenty thousand in a manila envelope, the phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. Murmuring into the mouthpiece, he continued to find Joe of interest.
By the time Joe left the bank, five minutes past closing time, the last customer to depart, he was weak-kneed with apprehension.
The heat remained oppressive, and the five-o’clock sky was still cloudless and blue, although not the profound blue that it had been earlier. Now it was curiously depthless, a flat blue that reminded him of something he had seen before. The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine
—and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.
When he drove out of the bank lot, he saw that the assistant manager was standing beyond the glass doors, all but hidden by the reflected bronze glare of the westering sun. Maybe he was storing away a description of the Honda and memorizing the license-plate number. Or maybe he was just locking the doors.
The metropolis shimmered under the blind blue stare of the dead sky.
Passing a small neighbourhood shopping centre, from across three lanes of traffic, Joe saw a woman with long auburn hair stepping out of a Ford Explorer. She was parked in front of a convenience store. From the passenger side jumped a little girl with a cap of tousled blond hair. Their faces were hidden from him.
Joe angled recklessly across traffic, nearly colliding with an elderly man in a grey Mercedes. At the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, he made an illegal U-turn.
He already regretted what he was about to do. But he could no more stop himself than he could hasten the day’s end by commanding the sun to set. He was in the grip of a bizarre compulsion.
Shaken by his lack of self-control, he parked near the woman’s Ford Explorer. He got out of the Honda. His legs were weak.
He stood staring at the convenience store. The woman and the child were in there, but he couldn’t see them for the posters and merchandise displays in the big windows.
He turned away from the store and leaned against the Honda, trying to compose himself.
After the crash in Colorado, Beth McKay had referred him to a group called The Compassionate Friends, a nationwide organization for people who had lost children. Beth was slowly finding her way to acceptance through Compassionate Friends in Virginia, so Joe went to a few meetings of a local chapter, but he soon stopped attending. In that regard, he was like most other men in his situation; bereaved mothers went to the meetings faithfully and found comfort in talking with others whose children had been taken, but nearly all the fathers turned inward and held their pain close. Joe wanted to be one of the few who could find salvation by reaching out, but male biology or psychology—or pure stubbornness or self-pity—kept him aloof, alone.