Chapter 6 - An Unscheduled Meeting
The transfer to Kittanning was thirty miles north, but on Monday morning, Rebecca Sloan was still behind the high laminate counter of the Millhaven county transportation office.
Claire knew this because she didn't go to the library, and she didn't go to her shift at the hospital until three in the afternoon. Instead, she drove her grey sedan into the employee lot at eleven in the morning, parked in a visitor space between two salt spreaders, and walked through the heavy glass doors marked *Administrative Personnel Only.*
The air in the front office smelled of industrial floor wax, stale coffee, and the faint, sweet scent of carbon paper. Behind the counter, a woman with grey hair was typing rapidly on a keyboard, while Rebecca Sloan stood near a bank of olive-drab filing cabinets, holding an armful of yellow maintenance logs.
Rebecca was wearing dark blue slacks and a cream blouse. Her hair was pulled back into a clip at the nape of her neck. When the bell above the door chimed, she turned, a professional, practiced smile already forming on her lips.
The smile died instantly.
The color did not drain from Rebecca’s face; it seemed to curdle, turning a blotchy, mottled grey beneath her makeup. Her fingers tightened around the yellow folders until the cardstock buckled.
The older woman at the desk looked up. "Can I help you?"
"I’m here to see Rebecca," Claire said. Her voice was moderate, polite, the tone of a woman inquiring about bus schedules. "Just for five minutes."
Rebecca swallowed. Her throat moved in a dry, painful spasm. "It’s okay, Brenda," she told the typist, her voice barely audible over the clatter of the dot-matrix printer in the corner. "I’ll... I’ll take my break."
Rebecca led the way down a narrow, linoleum-lined corridor to a small breakroom containing a vending machine, a laminate table with two folding chairs, and a window that looked out onto the gravel lot where Daniel’s pickup was parked near the repair bays.
Rebecca shut the door. She stood against it, her hands clasped in front of her waist like a schoolgirl waiting for a reprimand.
"Claire," she whispered. "You shouldn't have come here. If Daniel sees your car—"
"Daniel is under bus number twelve replacing an air brake line," Claire said. She did not sit down. She stood in the center of the small room, her purse hanging from her shoulder. "He won't be out until noon."
Rebecca looked down at her shoes. "Did you get my note?"
"I got it."
"I meant every word of it. I'm leaving. The paperwork went through this morning. I’ll be in Kittanning by next Monday. You won't ever have to see me again."
Claire looked at the woman’s hands. They were small, the nails painted a pale, frosted pink. These were the hands that had touched Daniel’s stubbled cheeks. These were the hands that had passed her ham across the Christmas table.
"Why him, Rebecca?" Claire asked.
The question had no heat. It was delivered with the cold curiosity of a biologist examining a specimen under a lens.
Rebecca flinched. "I told you in the letter. I was lonely. He was kind."
"There are twenty men working in this yard," Claire said. "Half of them are single. Three of them are divorced. Pete Miller has been trying to get you to go to the bowling alley with him since October. Daniel told me that back in November."
Rebecca’s face flushed a dark, angry red. "Pete Miller is a drunk who doesn't wash his hair."
"And Daniel is married."
"I didn't plan it!" Rebecca’s voice rose, cracking with a thin, desperate edge. "You think I wanted this? You think I wanted to fall for a guy who smells like diesel fuel and talks about his daughter’s braces every twenty minutes? You have everything, Claire! You have the house, you have the kid, you have a husband who comes home every night and doesn't hit you or spend his paycheck at the track. You take it for granted!"
Claire took one step forward. Just one. But Rebecca pressed her back harder against the breakroom door, her shoulders rising toward her ears.
"I take nothing for granted," Claire said, each syllable dropping like lead shot onto glass. "I work forty-eight hours a week on my feet turning over stroke victims who weigh two hundred pounds. I come home and I balance the checkbook down to the nickel so my daughter can have straight teeth. I scrub the toilets. I mend the coats. I built that life with him out of nothing, year by year, nickel by nickel."
"I know," Rebecca sobbed, tears finally breaking over her mascara and tracking down her cheeks. "I know that."
"You didn't want Daniel because he was special," Claire continued, her voice dropping lower, cutting deeper. "You wanted Daniel because he was *finished*. You wanted a man who had already been trained to be decent by another woman. You didn't want to do the fifteen years of work it took to make him that way. You just wanted to step into the kitchen after the meal was cooked and take a bite."
Rebecca covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent, ugly sobs. "Please go. Please. I said I was sorry."
Claire looked at her for another long, quiet second. The rage that had sustained her through forty-eight hours of sleeplessness didn't vanish, but it shifted, solidifying into something heavier, colder, and far more permanent than anger: contempt.
"The letter was pathetic, Rebecca," Claire said softly. "You didn't write it to help me. You wrote it so you could leave this town feeling like a tragic heroine instead of what you actually are."
Claire turned and walked toward the door. She reached for the brass knob, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder.
"Leave the note out of your head," Claire added. "He isn't yours to give back."
May you like
She opened the door and walked out into the corridor, her rubber-soled nursing shoes making no sound against the county linoleum as she passed the administrative desk and walked into the noon sun.
***
