Mr. X by Peter Straub

were saying goodbye?”
    “More like worried,” I said. “She wanted me to drive back to Cleveland with her.”
    “Oh, no,” Laura said.
    “Just get in the car and drive away?”
    “After telling you I was leaving.”
    Laura said, “I knew it,” and Phil said, “I’ll be damned.” He checked the mirror again. “What did you say?”
    “It’s not important.”
    “I don’t know,” Phil said. “Ned, one thing about your mother, and I’ve always thought she was great—”
    “No kidding,” Laura supplied.
    “You do, too, Laura, come on, one thing about Star, she’s full of surprises.”
    I tried to say goodbye to the Grants at the security check, but they talked their way past the guards and walked me to the departure gate. We were about half an hour early. Phil wandered off to inspect a gift shop. Laura slumped against a square column and smiled at me from a face filled with complicated feeling. I remember thinking that she had never looked so beautiful, and that I had rarely been so conscious of how much I loved her. “At least you didn’t run away to Cleveland.”
    “I thought about it for a second or two,” I said. “You knew what she was going to say?”
    She nodded, and her warm eyes again met mine. “Star and I have
some
things in common, anyhow. We both want our Ned to be safe and happy.”
    I looked down the corridor, where Phil was peering at a rack of baseball caps. “What was all that about Biegelman’s? When you and Star got back, you were mad at me, and she was in outer space.”
    “Forget about it, Ned, please. I made a mistake.”
    “You thought you saw me in Biegelman’s?”
    Laura rammed her hands into the pockets of her down coat and bent her blue-jeaned right leg to plant the sole of a pretty black boot on the flank of the column. The back of her head fell against its flat surface. She turned her head toward the people moving up and down the corridor and smiled reflexively at a small boy encased in a snowsuit waddling ahead of his stroller.
    “There was a little more to it.”
    A long stretch of corridor opened up in front of the boy, and he broke into a lumbering run until sheer momentum got the better of him. He flopped down onto the tiles, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish. Without breaking stride, his mother leaned over, scooped him up, and dumped him into the stroller.
    “Eventually, I got tired of trailing after Star.” Laura was watching the boy’s mother move efficiently down the corridor. “I love her a lot, Ned, but sometimes she can make it hard to give her what she needs.” She turned her head and smiled at me again. “We got to Biegelman’s, she found exactly the right coat, it was on sale, we hadn’t seen anything else all morning, so it should have been simple. All right, it was a little expensive, but not much. I would have bought it for her in a second.”
    I was thinking:
The story always hides some other, secret story, the story you are not supposed to know
.
    “But Star didn’t like my spending so much on her, so she had to play this game. The coat wasn’t the right color. Could the clerk see if they had one in a lighter color? It was obvious they only had that one, and the only woman in Naperville likely to buy it already had it on. Mr. Biegelman came up to help, and I walked away. When I looked back, your mother was gone. Then I looked through the window, and there she was, out on the sidewalk in that coat. She was talking to you.”
    “Me?”
    “That’s how it looked,” she said. “Star seemed so unhappy … so
disturbed
… I don’t know what. You, the person I thought was you, turned his back on her and walked away. I started to go toward the door, but Star came back in and gave me this
look
, so I didn’t say anything. Mr. Biegelman gave us the extra discount, and I pulled out my credit card. But I did ask her about it on the way home.”
    “What did she say about the guy?”
    Laura pushed herself off the pillar.