“You all right? You look like you swallowed a bee.”
I took the knife out. I opened it where he could not hear a click because my thumb had already done the work in the pocket. There was no speech. There was no philosophy. There was a driveway at noon on a Saturday and a boy two streets over whose father would not look up from a phone, and Luis’s eyes going from friendly to a question to the beginning of a word.
He grabbed for my wrist. He was stronger than the faded shirt suggested. The van rocked. His knee hit the console. The clipboard slapped the windshield. Coffee from the thermos jumped and ran a dark line down the dash. He tried to shout and I put my other hand over his mouth and the sound died against my palm, wet and furious. His wedding band scraped my knuckle. The phone lit up again, a missed call already, the mall still waiting.
The seatbelt he had never taken off trapped him in the worst possible way. He twisted against it. The van became a small room with too much weather in it. There were elbows and there was breath and there was a sound like a cough that was not a cough.
I will not tell you the rest of the minute. It was not cinematic. It was weight and panic and the ugly arithmetic of a closed space. Then the van was very quiet except for the tick of the engine and a radio station somewhere in the lot behind us that could not decide what song it wanted.
Nobody came.
The neighbor’s mower kept mowing. A car passed on Maple without braking. The balloons at the dealership were still taped to chairs I could no longer see. Luis’s phone buzzed in the cup holder, the food court woman again, or a wife, or a dealership dispatcher who thought a shuttle was late.
I sat in the smell of lemon cleaner and spilled coffee and the metallic heat of what I had done, and my hands would not stop shaking, and the thought that had lived in me since I was old enough to lie well was no longer a thought. It was a driveway and a van and a phone that would not stop asking where he was.