The Narrows by Ronald Malfi Page A

this?
    Once she got far enough down Full Hill Road that the lights of the houses behind her had blinked out of existence, she pulled along the shoulder beneath a lamppost and slid the gearshift to Park. She clicked on the Pontiac’s interior light but didn’t look at her reflection in the rearview mirror right away. Instead, she sat in the uncomfortable driver’s seat and faced forward, staring blankly at the curve of roadway and the dense black trees that loomed up on either side. Already her mind was replaying snapshot scenes from the night’s escapades, accusatory in all their vividness. She couldn’t blink them away. Finally, she confronted the creature in the rearview mirror.
    Muddy eyes, blotchy complexion, hair askew, she was instantly reminded of those self-deprecating little moments back in high school, so many years ago now, when she had surrendered countless times to boyfriends’ lustful desires. They used to paw at her mercilessly in the backseats of their parents’ cars. She was forty-five years old now and married, with high school a distant, if not smeary and indistinct, memory, and the blotchy skin and wild nest of hair suddenly struck her as vulgar. A deep, personal resentment briefly rumbled around inside her chest, thick as a blood clot.
    She had never had an affair before—had never even considered cheating on Evan—and now, less than an hour after the deed had been done, she wondered what the hell she was doing. Was it possible she had been a completely different person just a couple of hours ago, sitting at Crossroads and nursing a Heineken at the bar?
    From her purse, which she’d tossed haphazardly onto the passenger seat in an effort to leave Tom Schuler’s house as quickly as possible, she produced a small black makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her lap then fumbled with the zipper until the contents spilled into her lap and onto the floor.
    “Fuck.”
    Get it under control, lady. You’re vibrating like a guitar string.
    She leaned forward, the side of her face resting against the steering wheel, and scrounged around in the footwell. When her fingers brushed along the thin, square packets of moist towelettes, she snatched them up and hastily peeled one open, her eyes volleying furtively between her unsteady fingers and the blotchy mask of her face in the rearview mirror. She was attractive and she kept in good shape, exercising several times a week and watching what she ate, yet the visage staring back at her was horrific.
    She exhaled nervously then began wiping the streaks of mascara that had leaked from her eyes to the tops of her cheeks. The smell of ammonia burned her nostrils.
    Fifteen years of marriage and this is what I do. Again, she unleashed a shaky breath, this time certain she could smell Tom Schuler on her. Her mouth was full of him. His perspiration was commingled with hers, too, clinging guiltily to her body like an illness. Moreover, she could still feel him inside her—a tender, vacant sensation nestled between her thighs that, even now, simultaneously nauseated and excited her. Fifteen years of marriage.
    She and Evan had dated on and off throughout high school, and even for a while after graduation. They’d fumbled through their fair shares of other relationships—Evan had even gotten engaged to a woman from Delaware, though it had never culminated in marriage—before reconnecting. At that point she had been thirty, and although she did not feel the motherly desire to have children, she knew that a woman in her forties had a better chance of being killed by terrorists than getting married. Or so she’d heard. Whatever the case, forty had only been a scant decade away at that point, and the notion that she might be doomed to spend her life unmarried and alone terrified her.
    She confessed her desire to Evan on more than just a few occasions, but Evan Quedentock, high school football star and the life of the party (as long as the party was in a bar with his