Chapter 11: One Room

Lawton laughed.

It was a terrible sound, short and dry.

"Libba," he said. "Of course it's Libba."

The officer gave him a card with a phone number on it and walked back to his car.

Clancy looked at the sky over the harbor.

It had gone the color of a bruise.

"We're not flying out in that," he said.

By four the rain came sideways across the marina.

Every flight off the island was grounded.

Clancy found one room at a small pink hotel on the harbor road, the last one they had.

"One bed," the desk clerk said, apologetic.

"I'll sleep with the plane," Clancy said. "There's a cot at the hangar. I've done it before."

"Clancy," I said.

"Rue, I've slept in worse. I once slept in a cooler." He kissed my cheek, which he'd never done. "Lock the door. Don't kill him."

The room had a ceiling fan, a narrow bed with a flowered spread, and a window that rattled every time the wind hit it.

We were both soaked to the skin.

My Sallie's T-shirt clung to the bump.

Lawton went into the bathroom and came out with both towels.

He gave me both.

"You'll freeze."

"I'm fine."

"You're shaking," I said.

He pulled his wet shirt over his head and dropped it on the chair.

He sat down on the end of the bed with his elbows on his knees.

A pale scar ran along his ribs from some old cleat.

I'd forgotten that scar.

"I used to dream she was knocking on the hull," he said, to the floor. "For about a year."

He didn't look up.

"I'd wake up and go down to the yard in the middle of the night and stand there."

"I married you because you made me laugh on that roof," he said.

"And I thought if I didn't go near that room upstairs, I wouldn't be cheating on either of you."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Was His Wife, She Was His Everything from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.