Again by Sharon Cullars Page A

red.
    She should tell him. Now. Finally. Tell him that she could see things, that she could see things about him. That she always had.
    If he didn’t believe her, she could recount the time she had kept him from going on his high school sophomore trip to the Rockies. She would tell him how she’d known that one of the buses would swerve, hit the railing, and topple over the embankment—the same bus he would have been on. Bus number 7—a fact never reported in the paper or mentioned by the school administrators.
    Or she could tell him how she knew he’d secretly given a girl money for an abortion. Although not the father, David had wanted to help. He promised never to tell anyone, and he hadn’t. But Carmen knew even before the knock on the door that evening. She opened it to find a young blond girl standing there, her eyes reddened from crying, asking if “Davey” was home. David never liked being called that.
    The older she got, the less attuned she was to her son. It wasn’t so much her getting old as it was his pulling away from her, closing her off.
    Because deep inside somewhere, he knew. He didn’t want to know, but he did. As she looked at him, she realized that he would never admit it to himself, no matter how hard she tried to convince him.
    “Call it mother’s intuition. I just thought you weren’t sleeping well. If I was wrong, I’m sorry. I worry too much.”
    He nodded slightly. She didn’t know if he agreed that she was a worrier, or accepted her explanation. He picked up his fork, polished off the pennette within bites. As she smoked, she nearly dropped her cigarette as David’s features began morphing into someone else’s. Someone handsome, brooding—and very angry.
    She blinked the image away with a dawning realization. This wasn’t his future she was seeing. It was his past.
    His past was catching up with him. No, more like it had already caught him, and was refusing to let go now that it had its quarry.
    When he looked at her and smiled, he was David again. The green was chasing away the blood.
    It was clear what she had to do. She needed to find out who the other man was. The man whose color was violent red, who for a moment looked at her with torment in his eyes. Begging for release.
     
     
     
    Tyne lay the inspirational calendar on top of her stapler, the one she bought to replace the stapler that “walked away” one day and that Stan had refused to replace. Cheap as usual. Inside the box were other items accrued during her four-year tenure at the Clarion —her coffee stein, several multicolored pens, a framed quote that said “Believe in Yourself.” These were all she had to show for four years.
    Four years that she’d included in her resume. She hadn’t faxed it yet, and David’s card was still burning a hole in her purse. It was deep in the nether regions, jumbled in with her schedule book, her cell phone, her compact, lipstick and keys. The resume was on the screen, waiting. She pressed print and the inkjet groaned to life, and began inching out her professional life, line by line.
    If she was going to do this at all, it should be today when she had a fax readily available. Everyone was packing up, getting ready for a quick exit tomorrow when the Clarion would close its doors for the last time. There would not be much time then for anything more than carting their possessions to their cars. There would be hugs, some tears, final good-byes. Not for Stan, though, who had sequestered himself in his office, barely peeking out. Probably looking through vacation brochures.
    She heard sniffling across the way. She picked up the printed resume ready to walk it over to the fax, but then heard another quivering intake of breath. Gail was taking this hard.
    Tyne didn’t like the woman, never had. Foul-mouthed, nosy, vindictive when she didn’t get her way, Gail had been one of the thorns to working at the Clarion . Still Tyne felt for her. Gail’s only son was in military school,