Rose Madder by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

not, but you never knew stuff like that for sure unless you checked. And sometimes a person got lucky. Sometimes? Hell, often. They didn’t call it the Land of Opportunity for nothing.
9
    T he next large city to the west was only two hundred and fifty miles away, and that felt too close. She decided on an even bigger one, five hundred and fifty miles farther on. It was a lakeshore city, like this one, but in the next timezone. There was a Continental Express headed there in half an hour. She went to the bank of ticket windows and got into line. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her mouth was dry. Just before the person in front of her finished his transaction and moved away from the window, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and stifled a burp that burned coming up and tasted of her morning coffee.
    You don’t dare use either version of your name here, she cautioned herself. If they want a name, you have to give another one.
    â€œHelp you, ma’am?” the clerk asked, looking at her over a pair of half-glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.
    â€œAngela Flyte,” she said. It was the name of her best chum in junior high, and the last friend she had ever really made. At Aubreyville High School, Rosie had gone steady with the boy who had married her a week after her graduation, and they had formed a country of two . . . one whose borders were usually closed to tourists.
    â€œBeg your pardon, ma’am?”
    She realized she had named a person rather than a place, and how odd
    (this guy’s probably looking at my wrists and neck, trying to see if the straitjacket left any marks)
    it must have sounded. She blushed in confusion and embarrassment, and made an effort to clutch at her thoughts, to put them in some kind of order.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said, and a dismal premonition came to her: whatever else the future might hold, that simple, rueful little phrase was going to follow her like a tin can tied to a stray dog’s tail. There had been a closed door between her and most of the world for fourteen years, and right now she felt like a terrified mouse who has misplaced its hole in the kitchen baseboard.
    The clerk was still looking at her, and the eyes above the amusing half-glasses were now rather impatient. “Can I help you or not, ma’am?”
    â€œYes, please. I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?”
    â€œOh, I guess about forty. One way or round trip?”
    â€œOne way,” she said, and felt another flush warm her cheeks as the enormity of what she was saying came home to her. She tried to smile and said it again, with a little more force: “One way, please.”
    â€œThat’s fifty-nine dollars and seventy cents,” he said, and she felt her knees grow weak with relief. She had been expecting a much higher fare; had even been prepared for the possibility that he would ask for most of what she had.
    â€œThank you,” she said, and he must have heard the honest gratitude in her voice, because he looked up from the form he was drawing to him and smiled at her. The impatient, guarded look had left his eyes.
    â€œA pleasure,” he said. “Luggage, ma’am?”
    â€œI . . . I don’t have any luggage,” she said, and was suddenly afraid of his gaze. She tried to think of an explanation—surely it must sound suspicious to him, an unaccompanied woman headed for a far-off city with no luggage except her purse—but no explanation came. And, she saw, that was all right. He wasn’t suspicious, wasn’t even curious. He simply nodded and began to write up her ticket. She had a sudden and far from pleasant realization: she was no novelty at Portside. This man saw women like her all the time, women hiding behind dark glasses, women buying tickets to different timezones, women who looked as if they had forgotten who they