It Feels So Good When I Stop (29 page)

I LOOKED OUT Jocelyn’s front window. A maroon Lincoln Town Car was parked on the opposite side of Sixth Avenue. The driver was leaning against the outside of the door, reading a paper.

“Our car’s here,” I said. Jocelyn was buzzing around the apartment in her underwear, stuffing clothes and toiletries into a backpack. “You go down. I just need a couple minutes.” She gave me a peck, then took my face in her hands, looked it over, and planted a longer kiss, into which I fell. She pulled herself away from me. “Do you have everything? ”

“Yes,” I said, mildly annoyed.

“Passport? License? Birth certificate? ”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Just checking. I don’t want this to fall apart at the eleventh hour.”

“It won’t.”

She straightened my tie beneath my denim jacket. “I like the Sam Shepard thing you have going on. You look handsome.”

“You too.” I touched the front clasp of her white bra and ran my finger down her stomach. She sucked it in out of reach before I could go too far.

“Later,” she protested playfully.

“Now.”

“Don’t be greedy. We’re going to have each other for the rest of our lives.” She bounded off to the bathroom. She looked like she was crossing a river by stepping on the heads of crocodiles. “Now go, or we’ll lose the car.” I looked out the window. The Lincoln was still there. I was closing the apartment door behind me when I heard Jocelyn call out like a Hollywood cowgirl, “Oh, yoo-hoo? Yoooo-hoooo? ” I poked my head around the door to see Jocelyn poking her head around the bathroom door. We were two heads.

“What? ” I asked.

“Are you still here? ”

“No. I am not.”

“Good.” She was all smiles. I might have been, too.

I MADE IT about a mile, a mile and a half, back toward East Falmouth, when a cop car coming in the opposite direction flashed me. I stopped on the sandy shoulder and watched him pull a U-turn. He parked in front of me and got out of the cruiser. He stared at me. I stared right back at him. Neither one of us wanted to be the first to laugh.

 

 

 

 

The Pernice family; the Stein family; Megan Lynch, Sarah Bowlin, and everyone else at Riverhead Books; Joyce Line han; Marian Hebb at Hebb, Scheffer and Associates; Chris Parris-Lamb at the Gernert Company; Nicola Spunt; Jill Holmberg; Lou Barlow; Ken Harrington; Neal J. Huff; Dr. Gordon Yanchyshyn; John Niven; David Barker; Adam Pet tle; Jo Ann Wasserman; V. Paul Coyne; Benjamin Wheelock; Richard Bonanno; Peyton Pinkerton (Connecticut is actually the state in
his
way); Bob Pernice; James Walbourne; Patrick Berkery; Thom Monahan; Jose Ayerve; Ric Menck; Michael Belitsky; Joe Harvard; and Michael Deming.

Most of all, thanks to my wife and son for their unending love and for daring me daily.