Page 32 of The Space Between

It’s Todd and Jay, walking to their cars. “You two found each other,” Todd says. “We weren’t sure that you were coming, Booker.”

Bill clears his throat again and Jeanie watches as he closes the shutters behind his eyes and puts a big grin on his face. “Hey, guys. I just got here, and I saw Jeanie leaving. Wanted to pick her brain a bit about today’s lecture.”

Jeanie nearly gets whiplash from how quickly he’s able to shift gears, but she keeps up. “Good to see you all, and thanks for inviting me,” she says, walking back to the bench and grabbing her purse by its strap. “But I should get home. See you all at work.”

“Bye, Jeanie,” Todd says, lifting a hand as she goes.

“See you tomorrow,” Jay adds.

This time when Jeanie puts her key in the lock her hands are shaking and she fumbles for a second. When she climbs inside, she shuts the door quickly in spite of the fact that her car has trapped the heat inside for the past hour and it feels like a furnace. She breathes deeply in and out as she jams the key into the ignition and turns the car on. The engine rumbles to life.

With both of her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes on the road, Jeanie drives all the way home in a daze.

She can’t feel the things she’s feeling towards Bill. She simply cannot. Being in Florida is all about her career. Her future. It’s about being a part of something bigger than herself, and finding a way to touch the stars.

She swings into her spot at Sunny Tides and turns off her car, listening as the engine ticks and settles. The windows are down and she listens as two neighbors out walking their dogs in the green square at the center of the resort talk loudly about the weather, which never changes, so far as she can tell. Florida is just hot, hotter, and slightly less hot.

Jeanie puts her head against the steering wheel and closes her eyes. She came here to find a way to forge her own path, to become the newer, bigger, better version of the girl she’s always been.

She didnotcome here to fall in love with someone else’s husband.

CHAPTER 14

Jo

In her heart,Maxine knew that something was bugging Winston, she just didn’t know what it was,Jo writes. She’s sitting on the floor of the living room late one night during the first week of August, and her back is pressed to the couch, legs tucked under her as she taps away at the typewriter on the coffee table.He’d been different lately; coming home from work late and with a faraway smile, and not telling her as much about what went on during his days.

But that was no crime, surely—a man had a right to leave work at work when he came home, and he also had a right not to have his wife prying into everything he did. Maxine would love to know who he ate his lunch with, who he talked to in the hallway as he walked from one part of the building to another, or who he sat next to at the bar on his way home from work, where he stopped a few times a week with the guys from his team. But as any smart wife would, Maxine gave him space.

“Here,” Winston said, standing next to Maxine one evening as she washed dishes at the kitchen sink. Her arms were submerged in the bubbles up to her elbows, and he was takingsoapy dishes from her and rinsing them before he dried each one carefully and put it in the cupboard.

“If only,” Jo says aloud to herself, stopping to take a sip of water as she imagines Bill doing the dishes with her. That would be the day. She shakes her head and puts her hands back on the typewriter keys.

“I saw you,” Maxine said without preamble.

“You saw me what?” Winston stopped rinsing the glass dish in his hand and set it on the counter. He turned to his wife. “Where?”

“I saw you leaving the bar the other day. I was driving home from volunteering at the Red Cross, and I saw you standing outside of The Shuttle with…some woman.”

Winston frowned and took a beat. “Are you sure it was me?”

Maxine lowered her chin as she stared at the man she’d been married to for nearly fifteen years. “Yes. I’m sure.”

“Huh.” Winston picked up the dish, finished rinsing it, and dried it slowly. “I guess it could have been the day when I chatted briefly with Helen before I left to come home. I ran into her there.”

Maxine turned back to the sink. Helen Smithers was the only female engineer on Winston’s team, and while Maxine quite liked the woman, there was something she simply didn’t trust. She pursed her lips as she thought about it, realizing that it wasn’t Helen herself that she didn’t trust, per se, but more the idea that a man and a woman could truly just be friends. It seemed that any sort of work friendship was destined for one of the parties—or both, heaven forbid—to decide they had feelings for the other.

“I see,” Maxine said after a long and drawn out pause. “And how is Helen?”

“Helen is…”Jo stops writing here mid-sentence, letting her hands fall into her lap. She isn’t sure where she’s going with thistrain of thought, and she wants to get it right. If she’s using her own life as fuel for her writing, and if she’s using her writing as some sort of catharsis—and she knows that she is—then she needs to at least get her feelings right.

It’s after midnight now, and it’s useless to keep writing a scene without a real purpose, so Jo pulls the page from the typewriter and puts it into the file where she keeps her work in progress. She tucks everything into the drawer of the credenza in the living room and leaves her typewriter where it is. It’s heavy and unwieldy, and banging around in the middle of the night as she puts it away is just an invitation for Bill and the kids to be woken abruptly.

Bill is snoring lightly in their bed when Jo lets herself into the room, and she steps out of her slippers and drapes her robe over the chair in the corner. The moonlight is casting enough of a glow that she can see her way to the bed, and she pulls back the covers gently, trying not to wake her husband.

Bill rolls over and his snoring stops briefly as Jo settles, but soon enough he’s breathing deeply again, oblivious to the fact that Jo is essentially writing the story of their current lives. She knows he wouldn’t be thrilled, but so far he hasn’t even bothered to read her stories, so in a way, it serves him right.

There’s also the small matter of Bill’s blossoming friendship with Jeanie Florence, and Jo had, in fact, seen them standing outside of The Black Hole together by her VW Bug one early evening as she’d driven home from the hospital. They were alone, and Jeanie was standing with her back to her car, looking up at Bill’s face. As Jo had driven by, she’d been tempted for one brief moment to swing into the lot, but in the blink of an eye she’d driven right past the turn, so she simply kept going, stunned by the shroud of intimacy that seemed to have fallen over Bill and Jeanie as they’d stood there in the hot parking lot.

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