Love on the Road 2015 by Sam Tranum Read Free Book Online

fine link in my gold-chain necklace. I felt fingers, not my own, touch my ring and pry my fist open. My hand was swollen. The ring was a blue ballooning aneurysm sprouting from my knuckle. The only way to get it was to take my finger. I stared at a hand that was attached to a wrist that was mine. The knife made a tentative move toward the ring.
    ‘No, no, please, no,’ I whimpered.
    I lay perfectly still, transfixed. I wondered, in the time it took for the point of the blade to rest gently under the sapphire, how I would tell Richard that I lost the ring. I looked at the gaunt man-boy straddling me. Our terrified eyes met.
    And I knew: this was his first time, too.
    He dropped my hand and flicked the blade carefully between my watchband and my wrist. Not a scratch, and the watch was his.
    The smiler was losing patience. He pulled his partner off and kicked me toward the edge of the caldera. I would not survive the drop.
    I didn’t want my children to see.
    Oh. God. No. I live in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The concierge said it was safe here. Richard promised I’d be safe. I squeezed my eyes shut. Pain was coming.
    I don’t know how long I waited to die. When I opened my eyes, the men had disappeared.
    ‘Richard!’ The wind swallowed my scream. I had come to rest at the cliff’s edge, my hand dangling into the abyss. The ring remained embedded in my swollen finger.
    *
    Later I thought how desperation cushioned my attackers’ flight, their thin-soled sandals no match for foot-slicing outcroppings. Later when I felt poetic rather than mugged, I heard the rocks in the caldera calling the sapphire back home. In the years after we returned to our estate overlooking Lake Roland, our children took to calling us Madre and Padre. When they talked about our time away, they described it as demarcated by the volcano: Madre, before and after. I knew what they meant.
    In the beginning I told what I remembered. Then I left the story to my family. Their personal embellishments made heroes of whoever the teller was. Daniel and Julie both claimed they saw me first, when they climbed up out of the plateau and pulled me back away from the ledge. Chloe Kate said how she was the only one not afraid to go down the stone staircase by herself to get Padre. Laurie said how she saved her Padre by making him leave before the bad men came. Richard described his chase over the sharp-as-broken-glass terrain, with shots fired by both him (with a borrowed pistol) and the armed guard, like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
    There were things I did not tell. Some days I felt hands on my neck. Some days I wondered who got our dollars: the man-boy’s family, maybe a baby sister or brother, a grandmother? Some days I felt so light, a good, strong wind could have carried me away. The children stopped singing the reading-maps-backwards song. Richard called me hard and guarded because I looked directly at him and sometimes said no.
    One day I said no at the wrong time. He was talking at me in our bedroom. One hour. Two hours. Three hours. He had so much to say about how disappointed he was: why I didn’t trust him, why I didn’t respect him, why I wanted to get a job now that the children were growing up. I should have wanted to be with him. And there was so much yard work to do. We could do it together. Except for the months that he was in the Congo doing his medical philanthropy.
    If I were working, who would pick up the black walnuts all over the property that the squirrels wanted to bury in his newly seeded lawn, all four acres of it?
    ‘I bet Phil and Hugh next door will be happy to earn some spending money,’ I said.
    And who would keep the wood stove going?
    ‘Turn on the furnace until I get home,’ I said.
    It was getting dark and late, dinner time. Laurie and Chloe Kate were downstairs pretending we were ‘in conference’, which was Richard’s way of telling them that he wanted me all to himself. Daniel and Julie were away at