A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale

shoe. Simon wanted to brush the crumb away but he knew she would read something into it.
    Betty reached out and took Simon’s hands in hers. She started a soundless hum and let her eyelids droop as her gaze roamed about the place again, out the window now. She was trying to make it all look ancillary, Simon figured. The unconscious body language of a seasoned relationship.
    Shit, Simon thought. Once we’re out of here, maybe if I run really fast, do a few Gene Kelly moves down an alley, I can lose her in the crowd . . . Shit.
    The word “extrication” came to mind; and how he was going to have to manage it. Real soon. He didn’t have the energy for it tonight, but if he let her come home with him he knew they would end up in bed. Which would only make the extrication process all the more difficult down the road.
    She let go of him and reached for her purse. She took out her lipstick and compact and started fixing her lips. A blow job wouldn’t be bad, he thought. Take the edge off things. That and a couple of beers. He might end up actually falling asleep at a decent hour for a change.
    Betty was already on the porch, the keys she’d snatched from him in her impatience to get out of the rain jingled as she fumbled with the fickle lock. Simon caught up to her and grasped her gloved hand and in one concise move turned it to the right—there was the smooth, pleasant thud of the retracting deadbolt—and pushed the door open. She looked over her shoulder at him. “Show-off!” she said. He could smell onions on her breath and a hint of her Amaretto coffee.
    When he opened his apartment door his answering machine was blinking at him from the bookshelf: Mother, about the check, he thought. Betty slumped onto his bed, reaching for the TV remote with her coat still on. He looked at her footdangling over the edge of the bed, the middle toe longer than the rest, filmed in a caul of pantyhose. Her eyes were on the screen; the random blue strobe of it flattened her features, the twisted slash of her lips looking like a painted letter—Cyrillic, Persian, indecipherable, her mouth fidgeting with the flow of images like the twitching paws of a sleeping dog. When she finally looked up at him she wrinkled her nose. “This place stinks, Simon,” she said.
    â€œYeah? Well it suits me fine.”
    â€œNo. I mean really. It smells.”
    He moved to the small fridge he kept under the window; condensation was rolling down the glass onto a pile of newspapers, onto the wrinkled island of mildew that changed with the weather. Alaska, it looked like today. Last week, he had seen Jay Leno’s chin. Some of it was getting on to his stack of vintage Beatles albums that were piled on the floor beside the fridge—some of the covers were beginning to curl. His White Album not so white anymore.
    Simon opened the fridge and took out what he realized then was his last bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and handed it to Betty. “It’s the rain, something in the carpets—”
    â€œShe’s letting that dog in again—I don’t know how you put up with it,” Betty said, straightening up against the headboard and taking the beer without a word. (“She” being the word she used for the people he shared the house with: Janis and Jeff—and Jeff’s dog.) Crossing her legs, getting comfortable on his bed with her ratty leather coat on. “You don’t have to, you know.” The implication being, you can move in with me.
    â€œI like it just fine,” he said again, more to himself this time; moving over to the bookcase, thinking it would be nice if she offered him some of the beer—but how was she to know itwas the last one? He pushed the play button of his answering machine harder than he had to—hoping she would pick up on it—the loudness of the click; that it would carry across the room over the faint squeal and squall of the TV.