Flirting With Pete: A Novel by Barbara Delinsky Page B

way.
    Tugging her baseball cap lower, she tucked in her chin, slipped her hands in her jeans pockets, and did her best to shrink from sight. But Merle Little saw her. He saw her at much the same spot most every day, as he drove home for mid-morning coffee with his wife.
    “Keep out of the road, MaryBeth Clyde!” he bellowed through the car window, seconds before he was swallowed back up by the fog.
    Jenny raised her head. “Hey, Mr. Little,” she might have said had he slowed, “how are you today?”
    “Fair to middlin’,” old Merle might have answered had he been a more compassionate sort, “and you, Jenny? My, but you’re looking pretty today.”
    She might have smiled sweetly or blushed. She might have even thanked him for the compliment and pretended it was earned. She certainly would have waved when he drove off, because that was the friendly thing to do to someone you had known all your life— someone whose family had founded the town— someone who lived right on your very own street, even if he resented that fact and wished it were otherwise.
    She walked on. The Booths’ mongrels barked, though she couldn’t see them through the fog. Nor could she see the rusted hinge on the Johnsons’ front gate up ahead, or the flowers blooming in the Farinas’ yard, but she knew those things were there. She could hear the first and smell the last.
    “Shhhhh,” she might have warned whatever children she’d had. “Keep your voices low. Old man Farina has a temper. It won’t do any good to rile him up.”
    “But he can’t come after us, Mama,” one of the children might have pointed out, “he can’t walk .”
    “He can so,” another might have argued. “He has canes. He hit Joey Battle with one, even after Deputy Dan told him not to do it. How come he did that, Mama, after Deputy Dan said no?”
    Because some people are bad, Jenny might have answered if she’d had children, and all the while she would have been hugging the baby to her hip— a sweet, silk-haired powdery little girl, so warm, so clingy with the love and need Jenny craved that Jenny would have been hard put to set her down for so much as a nap. Some people don’t care what’s the law and what isn’t. Some people don’t listen to Deputy Dan, not to one word.
    The fog shifted to give a glimpse of September-green birch leaves and peeling white bark. In another two weeks, those leaves would turn yellow. By then, Jenny mused, she might be gone.
    As the fog closed in again, she imagined a different town beyond it. She imagined something like New York City, with tall buildings, long avenues, and no one knowing where she’d come from, who she’d been, or what she’d done, and if not New York, then someplace in Wyoming, with the kind of wide-open spaces that went on and on and on. She could get lost there, too. First, though, she had to escape Little Falls.
    She drifted left again, closing her eyes now, timing the slap of her sneakers on the tar to the whap-whap-whap of Essie Bunch’s rag rug against the veranda rail just beyond the fog. She moved left again, then left even more, until she guessed she was in the middle of the road, and on she walked. Her mind’s eye counted satellite dishes, her ear caught Sally Jessy Raphael’s voice coming from the Websters’ open window, The Price Is Right from the Cleegs’, QVC from Myra Ellenbogen’s. The nearer she got to town, the closer the houses were to each other. She heard muffled voices, the flap of a flag on its pole, the buzz of a saw making firewood for the cool September nights ahead.
    The sounds were very real. Yet when she opened her eyes, the swirl of the fog suggested something unearthly— like the Pearly Gates, which was a dream if ever there was one. Jenny Clyde wasn’t going to heaven, that was for sure.
    Another car materialized deep in the fog. Its engine was smoother, newer, more intent. The crackle of its tires on the broken pavement suggested a slower speed. This car was