Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz

hand and pulled me gently to my feet and drew me against his coat. He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It may be our last night for a long, long time.”
    A light layer of snow made the tires hiss against the road as we drove and drove that night. When he tucked his arm around my waist, I couldn't remember why I'd never before slid tight against him. All along I should have been holding on to him as tightly as if there were no tomorrow.
    We stopped at a roadhouse in Racine, where I tried my first martini, and a tavern in Kenosha, where I enjoyed my second, and another place in Winnetka, where I drank, but hardly tasted, my third.
    As he steered me toward the door of a plush Chicago hotel, a tall woman with almond eyes and a long, graceful neck, smiled dreamily at me in the glass. “Look,” I said, pointing at her, “so pretty.”
    In the room, while he rang for champagne, I thought the strangest thing. This will show them, I thought. This is what happens when they leave me all alone. It almost made me cry, thinking that. But then he hung up the phone and drew me to the window to look at all the lights, and I forgot that I was alone. Forgot entirely.
    When it was over, I was frightened, sorry. I couldn't look at him, knowing what we'd done. I couldn't look at myself. I kept my eyes on the whorls of a cabbage rose patterned in the carpet. “Weshouldn't have,” I told the cabbage rose. I kept saying it over and over, sitting there on the side of the bed, bent over a pillow clutched tight over my lap. “We shouldn't have.”
    But he draped the sheet gently over my shoulder. He was so dear. He took all the blame on himself. He loved me so, he said. He couldn't help himself, he said, couldn't I understand that? He begged me to forgive him, and of course I did. I understood.
    “It's all right,” I said at last. “Of course it's all right. We'll get married now. Tomorrow morning. Or tonight, maybe even tonight, there might be someone …”
    “You know it's impossible,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he stroked my hair.
    “Well, tomorrow morning, then. Tomorrow will certainly be all right.”
    “I thought you understood,” Clement said. “I thought you knew. I'm married already.”

Chapter Five

    Clement and Theresa Owens lived with their three children in a brick house on Prospect Avenue with high ceilings and pink globes around the new electric lights and a door knocker shaped like an angel.
    Very early Sunday morning, Clement felt the smooth skin of Amanda's thigh press against his own. He awoke suddenly and threw the blanket back.
    “What is it?” Theresa mumbled.
    “Must be those stuffed peppers you made me eat last night. I told you peppers don't sit well with me.”
    Clement took himself downstairs to recover.
    Dawn found him in the kitchen, sipping coffee and staring out at the ripening day. A light was on in the big house next door, and occasionally Clement's glance would be drawn across the strip ofside lawn and through the hedge that separated his house from his neighbors'. He watched the neighbors' cook bend over to pull something from the oven and felt suddenly hungry.
    Amy had been a mistake in the end, he thought, lighting the oven. Of course, none of them were ever pleased when he broke it off. One had laughed unpleasantly, he remembered that. A couple had railed, but most cried. He was good with tears. He wasn't hardhearted. He felt bad for them. But they all knew as well as he did that the fun had to end sometime. Sometimes he wasn't even the one to call it off. He didn't like when that happened, but he never made a fuss—a lady had to consider her own situation. But poor Amy. Thinking he would marry her! Where had she got that idea? Hadn't he been perfectly clear all along? Well, if not perfectly clear, clear enough for any reasonable person to see what was what. He sighed, feeling vaguely that she had wronged him with her expectations, and slid two thick slices of bread into the oven to