THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  She folded up her register tape and placed it in the lockbox at her feet before flipping the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. Looking up at the agent for the first time since he’d started his spiel, she tried to affect a detached businesslike manner. “We’re closed now. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave.”

  He smiled at her. “ ‘We’ll?’”

  Heat flushed her face. Her voice hadn’t sounded nervous, but strong and self-assured, but the lapse had given her away. She had never before tried to take charge in her dealings with the insurance agent, had always behaved submissively and followed his lead, and now her one attempt to stand up for herself had backfired. “You’ll,” she corrected herself in an attempt to regain lost ground. “You’ll have to leave.”

  His smile grew wider, and maybe it wasn’t quite so bland, wasn’t quite so agreeable. “You’ll have to purchase small business insurance.”

  “Look,” she said, trying to appeal to reason. “I have no other employees. So I don’t need workman’s comp and… all the other things you mentioned. I have plenty of insurance for myself. You sold it to me.”

  “Yes. And after analyzing your needs, I have determined that you require small business insurance.”

  Her heart was pounding, but she walked around the front counter, past him, and opened the front door, jiggling the keys in her hand. “I simply can’t afford it right now.”

  “You can’t afford not to get it.”

  “I can’t afford it,” she repeated more firmly. “And the store is now closed. Good day.”

  He nodded in a way that might have been deferential, might have been patronizing. “Very well,” he said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He smiled at her, nodded, and stepped onto the sidewalk.

  Dolores quickly locked the door behind him. Her palms were sweating, her hands shaking, and she had to take a series of deep breaths just to get enough air into her lungs, as though she’d been holding her breath for the past several minutes. On the counter, she noticed, he’d left a pamphlet advertising commercial insurance for small business owners, and she crumpled it up and threw it away.

  She took out the register tape and this time really counted the receipts—not that there were many to add—and checked the number against the cash on hand before putting everything in the lockbox, turning off the lights, and exiting through the rear of the store. She put the lockbox and her purse in the car, double-checked both the front and back doors to make sure everything was secure, then headed for home.

  Not until she pulled into the driveway of her apartment complex did Dolores realize she had forgotten the box of Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks she’d bought off a longtime customer that morning for an unconscionably low price. She was hungry and tired and wanted nothing more than to heat up a Healthy Choice lasagna, sit in front of the TV, and watch a rerun of Friends. But if she didn’t get the books tonight, she wouldn’t be able to put them up on eBay until tomorrow evening and she needed an infusion of cash as quickly as possible.

  The Internet was a godsend when it came to unloading collectible books. Things that would have sat in her store for months, maybe years, before finding a buyer, were now selling in a matter of weeks, sometimes days.

  The sun was dropping fast, the Rincons in the east already lost in the gloom of night, the Tucson Mountains little more than a black shape against the orange sky of dusk, and it was nearly dark by the time she reached the store. She pulled up in front, parking next to the sidewalk, not wanting to drive through the alley and park in the small back lot at night.

  She got out of the car, locked it. Only then did she notice movement inside the bookstore.

  She stopped where she was and stood unmoving on the curb, looking in the window, her heart rate accelerating so fast she could feel the pulse of blood in her ears. Inside, in full view of anyone walking or driving by, a gang of young toughs were ostentatiously tearing out the pages of books, throwing paperbacks at each other across the room, pulling whole shelves of books onto the floor. Only they weren’t all young. Standing near the back wall, by the bathroom, was a hefty stoop-shouldered man in a broad-brimmed hat. She couldn’t see his face from this far away—he was little more than a silhouette to her—but she knew somehow that he was older than the rest of the attackers, and that he was the instigator of this melee.

  She wanted to rush back, grab the baseball bat she kept under the counter and just start whaling on those punks, ordering them to get the hell out of her store.

  And she probably would have.

  But the man in the hat scared her.

  He scared her in the same way the insurance salesman did, in some instinctive gut-level manner, and she found herself withdrawing, moving off the curb, onto the street, staying in the shadows as she made her way carefully back into the car.

  The punks were now toppling the bookcases themselves, and one knocked over the two behind it, like dominoes.

  I guess I should’ve bought business insurance, she thought.

  In the back of the store, the man in the hat remained unmoving.

  Dolores started the car and pulled onto the street without turning on her headlights, not wanting to be seen. She did not flip on her lights until she reached the end of the block.

  She turned right and sped toward the police station.

  EIGHT

  1

  Hunt asked Beth to marry him in January.

  They’d been dating for nearly eight months, living together for the past four. He talked it over with Joel first, told Edward and Jorge before he asked her, and while that didn’t sit right with him, he felt he needed some perspective, some outside opinions to make sure he wasn’t moving too fast or in the wrong direction.

  No, they all assured him, Beth was great, the two of them were a perfect couple, marriage was the next logical step.

  Beth not only said yes, but she wanted to do it as quickly as possible. “I hate long, drawn-out engagements,” she said. “Once a couple makes the decision, they ought to just go for it.”

  And that’s what they did.

  Neither of them was enamored of the idea of a big church wedding, particularly since neither of them went to church, but they also did not want the dry formality of a civil ceremony at city hall. So they opted for nondenominational nuptials conducted by a friend of Joel’s from the college philosophy department who was also an ordained minister from one of those legally recognized but spiritually suspect mail-order New Age churches. They planned to have both the wedding and the reception in a cabana at one of Tucson’s prettiest parks, a park that would conveniently be closed for the day to the general public for tree trimming and repairs.

  Beth’s father had passed away, but her mother flew out a week early from her home in Las Vegas to help Beth pick out a dress and flowers and get ready. She slept in the guest room, and if she heard any unusual noises or saw anything out of the ordinary in there, she didn’t mention it. When she awoke each morning, she appeared refreshed and relaxed, so Hunt assumed that all was well.

  His own parents came out from Minnesota, dragging along a caravan of distant half-remembered relatives: aunts and cousins, and his father’s uncle, whom he had never met. There was deep snow on the ground in Park Rapids, his mother reported, and he could tell by the way she said it that she wished they’d never left Tucson. But his dad seemed rejuvenated by the move, happier and more alive than he’d been since… well, since as far back as Hunt could remember.

  Joel was his best man. Since they weren’t having a regular wedding, there wasn’t a whole lot for Joel to do other than give a toast at the reception, but he still seemed touched by Hunt’s invitation. In lieu of the traditional bachelor party, the two of them returned to William Bodie Junior High for an extended game of Horse, just as they used to do when they were thirteen. The gym was locked up, but the outside courts were free and empty, and the two of them practiced shooting baskets before settling down to the game. The school seemed smaller than Hunt remembered, but oddl
y enough the baskets seemed taller—and the metal backboards were just as annoying as ever.

  Joel did a reverse layup, then tossed the ball to Hunt. “Remember when we stole that beer from my dad’s refrigerator in the garage and we shared it and came over here to play and halfway through Pig you were puking all over your shoes?”

  Hunt laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

  “And Mr. Hunter was grading papers and saw it from his classroom and came out to investigate? And I told him that Bill Groff made you eat a bug and that’s why you were heaving?”

  Hunt laughed harder. “And Groff got detention for a week?”

  “Those were the days, my friend.”

  “We thought they’d never end.” He perfectly copied Joel’s layup, then attempted a hook shot from midcourt that bounced off the rim of the backboard and sailed into the chain-link fence.

  He had missed Joel all those years, although he hadn’t realized it until he’d returned. Hell, he missed all of his old buddies. Life had a way of pulling people apart, of winding away in different directions, of breaking up childhood friendships and substituting them with less intimate, more superficial relationships. As the narrator in Stand by Me said, he never had better friends than the ones he’d had as a boy, although Beth maintained that the same was not true for girls.

  Hunt looked over at his friend, trying to see in this sedate and settled college instructor the rabidly anti-intellectual, anti-authoritarian rabble-rouser of his youth. That boy might have been in there somewhere, but he’d grown up and his edges had been softened and he’d become exactly the type of person he’d once scorned.

  It happened to all of them, Hunt supposed. He himself had changed a lot since junior high. He was less arrogant, less cocksure, more willing to bend and compromise, less judgmental, more sympathetic.

  Yet, somehow, they were friends again. They were both totally different people than they had been as children, they’d both grown into adults far different than either they or the people around them would have ever supposed, but they were once again in sync, their lives having come full circle.

  Joel made an easy jump shot. “So, you told your ex yet?”

  “Eileen?” Hunt shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure where to reach her.” He perfectly imitated Joel’s jump shot, then put his hands on his knees and crouched down for a moment to rest. “I thought about it, though. It seems weird not to have to…”

  “Check in?”

  “Exactly. I mean, I wasn’t happily married, but I was still married, you know? It feels like I’m lying or something to pretend that it never happened, that she doesn’t exist.”

  Joel crouched down next to him. “You don’t still have, you know, feelings for her, do you?”

  “Oh God, no. At least not any positive ones. And Beth… Beth’s great, she’s perfect. I just wish that this was my first time, you know? That I wasn’t bringing all this baggage with me.”

  “Does Beth care?”

  “No. At least she says she doesn’t.”

  “Then why should you? Forget about it, man. You’re getting married for real this time. That was just a practice run.”

  “You’re right. You’re right.”

  “I know I am.”

  Joel won the game, and afterward, they went over to Pancho Muldoon’s, a bar by the U of A that had been one of Hunt’s college hangouts. It was still a college hangout, though, and they were a decade past the target demographic, and after one beer they both felt so hopelessly out of place that they left and headed home.

  “Adulthood,” Joel said. “Ain’t it a bitch.”

  The big day was chaotic. There seemed to be a hundred people at Beth’s house—their house—all of them getting ready at once: he and Beth, her mom, his parents, assorted relatives from both families, friends.

  He was going over minister payment and tip etiquette with Joel in the kitchen when Beth’s mother popped in for a quick glass of water. “I was watching the news last night, and they said it might rain today,” she declared. “You should have gotten wedding insurance, just in case. That way, you’re not out a bundle if everything gets ruined by rain.”

  Insurance.

  Hunt met Joel’s gaze and saw there the same uneasiness he felt at the sound of that word.

  “Don’t worry,” Hunt said. “Everything’ll be okay. Everything’ll be fine.”

  And it was. The ceremony itself was short and sweet, and though clouds did indeed roll in around noon, they served only to keep the temperature down; the threatened rains never came. Afterward, at the reception, Edward got drunk and nearly got into a fistfight with the philosophy professor, and Jorge and Joel had to hold him back. “I’ll rip your arms off, you dickless scrim!” he shouted. One of Bern’s old club-hopping friends puked into the duck pond.

  His parents seemed slightly taken aback by these events, and in a delayed-adolescent-rebellion way, Hunt was proud of that. This was his wedding, these were his friends, and he was an adult. He could choose to hang with whomever he pleased.

  But he might have been reading more into that than was there, for later he saw his dad deep in conversation with Jorge and caught his mother laughing uproariously at a ribald joke told by one of Beth and Stacy’s work friends.

  Both of his parents seemed to love Beth, and for that he was grateful. He wanted her to like them and wanted them to like her. He’d been a little nervous about it because they’d been genuinely fond of Eileen, but he needn’t have worried. Apparently, they saw the same qualities in Beth that he did, and it was a load off his mind to know that they were all going to be one big happy family.

  They spent their wedding night at Westward Look, a luxury resort at the foot of the Catalinas with an awesome view of the city at night. There were thunderstorms to the south, toward Tubac, and from the window of their suite they could see jagged flashes of bluish white lightning beyond the array of multicolored lights that was downtown Tucson.

  “It’s beautiful,” Beth said, snuggling next to him as they stood before the window.

  It was. The lightning gave brief delineation to dark nighttime thunderheads, illuminating a billowing majesty that he would not have suspected was there, and the juxtaposition of the wildly random weather with the stationary artifice of the city’s electric lights seemed somehow magical.

  They stood like that for quite a while, until the lightning storm died down, and then moved back to the bed, where they removed each other’s clothes and made slow passionate love. Originally, they’d had a much more elaborate scenario in mind. In an effort to make their wedding night special, to differentiate it from an ordinary evening, they’d planned to engage in a series of exotic offbeat sex acts that neither of them had tried, but they found that that wasn’t necessary. The night was special on its own; it didn’t need any forced distinction. The regular way was fine.

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  The next morning, they set off on their honeymoon. Hunt had wanted to go to Montana or Wyoming or maybe even Canada, spend time alone together in the wild, but Beth wanted to go to California, hit all the tourist spots, and he had readily acceded to her wishes. He missed California, and he liked the idea of taking her around, showing her the sights.

  They went to Hollywood, Disneyland, Griffith Park, the Huntington Library, but what she really wanted to do was spend time at the beach. The weather was warm and sunny, more the summery splendor of August than the gloom of June, and he took her to Seal Beach, where they walked his favorite pier and then ate at a Mexican restaurant on Main Street. But she wanted to swim, and the water at Seal Beach was usually filthy and contaminated. So they drove down the coast to Crystal Cove. A lot of other people obviously had the same idea, because it was impossible to find a parking spot. Hunt drove around the lot twice, slowly, before finally seeing two teenage girls walk across the asphalt to a topless VW bug. He stopped, waited, but the girls took their time. When they finally backed out, a red Mustan
g swerved around him and took the space.

  Hunt leaned on his horn, rolling down his window. “You stupid son of a bitch!” he yelled.

  Beth put a hand on his arm. “It’s not worth getting all worked up about. Look, there’s another spot opening.”

  Sure enough, the brake lights of a Nissan pickup two spaces ahead had come on. This time Hunt took no chances. He pulled almost directly behind the vehicle, blocking off any possible end runs. His plan was to creep slowly in reverse as the truck backed up, keeping as little space as possible between them—a technique he’d perfected in college when competition for campus parking spots had been at a premium.

  The pickup started to pull out, and Hunt put the car into reverse, but an old Chevy van was right on his tail, blocking him in. The truck continued backing up. Hunt pressed his horn, but both the truck and van drivers either ignored it or did not hear it. He had no room to move.

  The pickup hit him.

  Instantly, the driver was running out to survey the damage. “I’m sorry!” he said. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! I didn’t see you there! Are you all right?”

  Hunt and Beth got out of the car. “We’re fine,” Hunt said. He gestured behind him. “That moron was blocking me in. I couldn’t get out of the way.”

  The Chevy van had backed up and was waiting for a red Jeep to pull out of another parking spot several spaces back.

  “My truck’s okay. How’s your car?”

  Hunt and Beth both examined the Saab’s front end but could see no dents or damage. The other driver looked, too. “I don’t see anything,” he said hopefully.

  “No,” Hunt admitted. “I don’t either. Looks like we all got off lucky this time.”

  “Maybe we should exchange insurance information just in case.”

  Insurance.

  Hunt shivered involuntarily despite the warm day. “No,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  “You might find something later—”