Page 10 of Dear Wife

BETH

The storm blows north so I point the Buick south, aiming the nose toward Dallas. It’s not the most efficient way to get to the East Coast, but I’m not in any sort of hurry, and it’s an easy, roundabout route that circumvents my home state of Arkansas entirely. Even though you are hours, hopefully days behind me. Even though you’ll be on the lookout for a brunette in Marsha Anne’s black sedan, not a blonde in a gas-guzzling Regal, already down to a quarter tank, now is not the time to take any chances. I flip off the air-conditioning and roll down the windows, letting in the humid highway air. One advantage of this stupid new hair, it doesn’t blow into my eyes while I drive.

My eyelids are dangerously heavy, and I stop often. To grab another coffee and some snacks, to splash cold water on my face, to load up on gas and an IHOP breakfast platter. Eggs, biscuits, sausage, the works. It’s not my normal kind of meal—you like me thin and waiflike—but ever since leaving Pine Bluff, I’ve been ravenous. Maybe it’s the relief of finally breaking free, or maybe it’s that I’m no longer my normal self. I’m Beth now, and Beth eats whatever the hell she wants.

I’m nearing Atlanta when the sun comes up, streaking the sky with a spectacular orange and pink, so psychedelic bright that I reach for my sunglasses. My heart skitters in anticipation of my final-for-now destination. A city I visited for the first and only time with you, ages ago, for a college buddy’s booze-fueled wedding. The reception was loud and rowdy and at the rotating restaurant atop the Westin downtown, where you twirled me around the dance floor until we were dizzy—me from the shifting skyline, you from the cheap Russian vodka. When we stumbled downstairs to our room, I asked if you were drunk and your answer was to shove me into a wall. Atlanta was the first time you hurt me that way, and the last place you’ll think to look for me now.

I know I’m close when a giant Delta jet lumbers over my head, its belly white and shiny, its wheels braced for landing. I catch a whiff of jet fuel, brace for the roar of its engines, a sound somewhere between an explosion and a NASCAR race. It rattles the steering wheel, the windows of my car, my teeth. All around me, people slam their brakes, and traffic grinds to a halt. Six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, red taillights as far as I can see.

I’ve studied the map, so I know where I’m going. Merge onto the downtown connector, follow it to I-20 east, then take a left on Boulevard to Cabbagetown. “Eclectic” and “edgy” is how the internet describes the east-Atlanta neighborhood, but what sold me on it is its affordability. Especially the Wylie Street Lodge, where one can rent a small but fully furnished room for a whopping twenty-two dollars a night. I’ll have to share a bathroom and kitchen, but still. I’ve already prepaid for the first week.

An eternity later, I pull to a stop on Wylie Street and climb out. The road under me might as well be on fire, a steaming, sizzling furnace melting my tires and the soles of my sneakers, but it’s the house I’m looking at, my stomach sinking at the sight. The yard is a foul-looking patch of dirt and scraggly branches that has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a porch littered with trash and a ripped brown sofa, where three raggedy men drink from paper bags. If it weren’t for them and the hooker advertising her wares from a second-story balcony, I’d think the place was abandoned.

I stand on the sidewalk, thinking through my options.

I could cut my losses and leave.

I could march to the door and demand my money back.

I could suck it up and stay.

The men eye me from the front porch, and I know how they see me. The rusty Buick with Oklahoma plates, the soccer-mom shirt, my fried hair. I’m the naive country girl come to the big city. I’m an easy target.

The hooker calls down to me. “Hey, blondie. You looking for this?” She pulls her tube top down to reveal breasts as enormous as the fat rolls holding them up. She jiggles them back and forth like a bowl of caramel pudding.

“Uh, no thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”

She barks a phlegmy laugh, and she’s not wrong. Beth is going to have to work on her one-liners.

I drop into my car and motor away.

Around the corner, I squeeze my car into a spot at the edge of a crowded parking lot. After the car, the hotels, the food, Nick’s fee and debit card, I have just over two thousand dollars in cash left. Tens and twenties mostly, siphoned from grocery funds, birthday and Christmas money, forgotten bills swiped from your pockets when you were passed out. Saving was a long, laborious process that took me almost a year to do in a way that you wouldn’t notice. I bought things on discount and shopped sales. I switched to cheaper toilet paper, coffee, washing powder. Ironically, I stopped cutting my hair. My stash of money grew slowly, deliberately. Anything else would have gotten me killed.

But two thousand dollars won’t last long, not even with a strict budget. Hotels are expensive, and most require ID. Even if I got a job tomorrow, staying in one would blow through my cash.

For a city of six million souls, Atlanta has an astonishing lack of beds for abused or homeless women, of which I am both. I could sleep in my car, but it doesn’t feel safe, and I probably wouldn’t do much sleeping. A better option would be to find another lodge, one that is cheap and won’t ask for identification. Like the ones I found before settling on Wylie—rooming and boardinghouses, a hostel or two, some seriously sketchy motels—if only I remembered their names.

And no, I didn’t write any of them down. I couldn’t. If you’d found anything even remotely suspicious—the search parameters on my laptop, a new number on my phone log, a faraway address scribbled on the back of a receipt—you would have confronted me. That was the hardest part of this past year, staying one step ahead of you.

I’m reaching for the burner phone to start my new search when I spot a sign at the far end of the lot for a Best Buy. Best Buy means computers, banks and banks of computers. The internet at my fingers, free and with no tracking, unlike the data on this piece-of-crap prepaid phone. I crank the key and head farther up the lot.

The store is packed for a Thursday morning. People everywhere, jamming the aisles and forming lines a dozen people deep at the MacBooks display. I push past them to a lonely, unmanned Dell at the end of the counter.

I navigate to the internet and pause. Stare at the blinking cursor. Check behind me to make sure no one is watching. Old habits are hard to break.

Two seconds later, I’m typing in the address for Pine Bluff’s local news website. I hold my breath and scroll through the headlines.Arkansas man accused of killing wife for changing TV channel. State police investigate Monticello murder. Pine Bluff officer shot in “ambush” attack.Nothing about a missing woman. Nothing about me.

And yet, I’ve been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Why is there nothing on the internet? Is the police department sitting on the story? Are they holding out on the press? Or has the media just not sniffed it out yet?

The Pine Bluff Police Department website doesn’t make me any wiser. Their home page is as generic as ever, the last item on a long list of to-dos for the department, updated almost as an afterthought. The most recent post on their newsroom page is from 2016.

On a whim, I surf to Facebook, and I’m in luck. Gary Minoff, a middle-aged man from Conyers, Georgia, forgot to sign out. No one will think anything of him nosing around on the Pine Bluff Police Department Facebook page, which is much more current than their website. I scroll down their wall, past posts about robberies, murders, a deadly hit-and-run, and the knot between my shoulder blades tightens. Maybe something happened, and you haven’t yet figured out I’m gone. Maybe I have more of a head start than I think. I can’t decide if the old adage applies here: Is no news really good news?

“Best priced laptop in the place,” a voice says from right behind me, a ginger with facial hair and a Best Buy polo. He gestures to the Dell. “Intel Pentium duel core processor, two megabyte cache, up to 2.3 gigahertz performance. All that and more for only $349.”

I have no idea what any of that means. I give him a smile that is polite but perfunctory. “I’m just looking, thanks.”

“For a few bucks more, you can upgrade. Tack on some more memory, or some cloud-based backup storage.”

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