A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown Page A

his own desperate longing.
    He was asleep, of course. He had been asleep all along.
    How long? When the man stood in the road and raised his hands and the car struck him and there was terror and blood and the skunk smell of death?
    Had he been asleep then? Had that, too, please God, been a dream?
    He woke up to a knock at the door, a pause, another knock. Before he could move, he heard the jangling of keys, and he opened his eyes to see the door swing open and Latangi step inside.
    “So sorry, Mr. Garrett,” she said, and she stepped back out of the doorway, surprised. “The light was off and I knocked. I thought perhaps you were out.”
    “No, no,” he said, sitting up, his back sore. “I’m here.” He reached over and turned on the lamp by the bed, the shade swinging side to side, Ganesh swaying as if the earth beneath him were quaking.
    Latangi remained outside a moment and then walked into the room. “Again I am so sorry,” she said. “There was a telephone call. They asked if you would appear at the courthouse at nine o’clock.” Henry turned to sit on the side of the bed, put his feet on the floor. He ran a hand through his hair, then looked at the clock. It was a few minutes past eleven. At night? In the morning?
    “There was an accident,” he said.
    “Yes, yes,” Latangi said. “I have learned. Sheriff Roland telephoned. He explained. I am so sorry. How terrible. These men on the side of the highway road, I have seen them. Such a terrible fate. And this man—” She threw her hands up, just as if she had watched it happen.
    “I am so sorry for him and for you and—well, it is terrible, all this.” She walked over to him now, her hand outstretched. “Sheriff Roland will send a car for you, he says. Eight-thirty pickup. I was bringing you this note.”
    “Yes, okay,” Henry said, accepting the paper from her. He saw Latangi take a quick look around the room.
    “You have not had your dinner,” she said.
    “No,” he said. “I fell asleep. I—”
    “I have made a dinner. Would you please join me?”
    “It’s very late,” he said. He could not get himself properly awake. His father. Amy. The girl. The old man stepping out onto the highway in front of his car, directly in front of him—he had been real—the man who had raised his arms as if, absurdly, to fly. Or had he been trying to suggest that he was a target, that he meant for Henry’s car to strike him?
    “It’s very late,” Henry said again, closing his eyes, opening them.
    “I am accustomed to eating late, Mr. Garrett. Plenty of work to do and little time for food. That is how I keep this figure.” She smiled and stepped awkwardly to the side, shifting her weight as if she might spin around in her sari, the red and orange one she had been wearing when he arrived yesterday. He thought about Mary dancing while she sang for the children she watched. He needed to call Mary. Why hadn’t he called her?
    “Even so, we must eat, yes?” Latangi said. “You must eat.”
    Henry nodded. Yes, he needed to eat.
    “Ten minutes, then?” she said. “Will that be enough?”
    Again Henry nodded.
    Latangi brought her hands together as though she were going to begin clapping. “Through the office,” she said. “It is modest but clean. And I am an excellent cook, you will see.”
      
    Latangi was waiting in the office when Henry arrived. She led him through a door behind the counter to her apartment, the living room larger than he would have predicted for so modest a motel but crowded with so much furniture—sofas and slipper chairs and ottomans and end tables and lamps—that it reminded Henry of Endly’s. In one corner of the room was a tower of woven rugs, in another a stack of wicker baskets. Latangi noticed Henry looking around and said, “Yes, it is a mess, I know, Mr. Garrett. My husband, he passed away five months ago. He operated a business. Imports from India. This is how we lived, I am afraid, like bulls in a china shop,