It

'Is he?' she asked timidly.

'Yes. He is.'

'How do you know?'

'Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine,' Eddie said glibly. 'He said Mr Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars.'

'I wouldn't care if he only tipped me fifty cents, as long as he didn't shout at me.'

'Myra, it's all as easy as one-two-three. One, you make the pickup at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven P.M. and take him over to the ABC Building. They're retaping the last act

of this play Pacino's in — American Buffalo, I think it's called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet.'

That's all?'

'That's all. You can do it standing on your head, Marty.'

She usually giggled at this pet name, but now she only looked at him with a painful childlike solemnity.

'What if he wants to go out to dinner instead of back to the hotel? Or for drinks? Or for dancing?'

'I don't think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like he's going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio –phone after midnight. By then he'll have a driver free to relieve you. I'd never stick you with something like this in the first place if I had a driver who was free, but I got two guys out sick, Demetrios on vacation, and everyone else booked up solid. You'll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Marty — one in the morning at the very, very latest. I apple –solutely guarantee it.'

She didn't laugh at apple-solutely, either.

He cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Instantly the ghost-mom whispered: Don't sit that way, Eddie. It's bad for your posture, and it cramps your lungs. You have very delicate lungs.

He sat up straight again, hardly aware he was doing it.

'This better be the only time I have to drive,' she nearly moaned. 'I've turned into such a horse in the last two years, and my uniforms look so bad now.'

'It's the only time, I swear.'

'Who called you, Eddie?'

As if on cue, lights swept across the wall; a horn honked once as the cab turned into the driveway. He felt a surge of relief. They had spent the fifteen minutes talking about Pacino instead of Derry and Mike Hanlon and Henry Bowers, and that was good. Good for Myra, and good for him as well. He did not want to spend any time thinking or talking about those things until he had to.

Eddie stood up. 'It's my cab.'

She got up so fast she tripped over the hem of her own nightgown and fell forward. Eddie caught her, but for a moment the issue was in grave doubt: she outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

And she was beginning to blubber again.

'Eddie, you have to tell me!'

'I can't. There's no time.'

'You never kept anything from me before, Eddie,' she wept.

'And I'm not now. Not really. I don't remember it all. At least, not yet. The man who tailed was — is — an old friend. He — '

'You'll get sick,' she said de sperately, following him as he walked toward the front hall again. 'I know you will. Let me come, Eddie, please, I'll take care of you, Pacino can get a cab or something, it won't kill him, what do you say, okay?' Her voice was rising, becoming frantic, a nd to Eddie's horror she began to look more and more like his mother, his mother as she had looked in the last months before she died: old and fat and crazy. I'll rub your back and see that you get your pills . . . . I . . . I'll help you . . . . I won't talk if you don't want me to but you can tell me everything . . . . Eddie . . . Eddie, please don't go! Eddie, please! Pleeeeeease!'

He was striding down the hall to the front door now, walking blind, head down, moving as a man moves against a high wind. He was wheezing again. When he picked up the bags each of them seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He could feel her plump pink hands on him,

touching, exploring, pulling with helpless desire but no real strength, trying to seduce him with her sweet tears of concern, trying to draw him back.

I'm not going to make it! he thought desperately. The asthma was worse now, worse than it had been since he was a kid. He reached for the doorknob but it seemed to be receding from him, receding into the blackness of outer space.

'If you stay I'll make you a sour-cream coffee-cake,' she babbled. 'We'll have popcorn . . . . I'll make your favorite turkey dinner . . . . I'll make it for breakfast tomorrow morning if you want . . . I'll start right now . . . and giblet gravy . . . . Eddie please I'm scared you're scaringme so bad!'

She grabbed his collar and pulled him backward, like a beefy cop putting the grab on a suspicious fellow who is trying to flee. With a final fading effort, Eddie kept going . . . and when he was at the absolute end of his strength and ability to resist, he felt her grip trail away.

She gave one final wail.

His fingers closed around the doorknob — how blessedly cool it was! He pulled the door open and saw a Checker cab sitting out there, an ambassador from the land of sanity. The night was clear. The stars were bright and lucid.

He turned back to Myra, whistling and wheezing. 'You need to understand that this isn't something I want to do,' he said. 'If I had a choice — any choice at all — I wouldn't go. Please understand that, Marty. I'm going but I'll be coming back.'

Oh but that felt like a lie.

'When? How long?'

'A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that.'

'A week!' she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. 'A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie! Pleeeeeee —

'Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop.'

For a wonder, she did: stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No . . . you could flush the supposed. He knew it was. Already he felt lik e something living in the wrong end of a telescope.

But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching Hardcastle and McCormick or Falcon Crest and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasn't all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator?

Or was it . . .

Could it be that . . .

These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one tune or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird.

Could it be that Myra was even more frightened than he was?

Could it be that his mother had been?

Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one day — he thought he could have been no more than five or six — and told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr Gardener, who was one of the shoe-