The End of the Road Read Online Free PDF

had I been her husband I should doubtless have been proud that my wife still retained such trimness and spirit at age forty. But I was not her husband, and so I made no such allowances: she was a forty-year-old pickup, and only the most extraordinary charm could survive that classification.
    All the way to the motel Miss Rankin chattered, and I honestly didn’t hear a word of it. For me this was unusual, because, although I admired the ability to lose oneself in oneself, I was far too conscious of my surroundings, as a rule, ever to manage it. A real point against Miss Rankin, that.
    “This is the place,” she said presently, indicating the Surfside, or Seaside, or some such motel along the highway. I pulled into the driveway and parked. “Gee, I sure appreciate your doing this. Thanks a lot.” She moved lightly out of the car.
    “I’ll take you back,” I said, without any particular inflection.
    “Oh, would you?” She was very pleased, but not overwhelmed with either surprise or gratitude. “Just a minute, while I run get my keys.”
    “Have you got anything cold to drink in there, Peggy? I’m pretty dry.” This was as far as I was willing to go in the nonsense line just then: I decided that if she didn’t ask me in, I’d take off at once for Wicomico.
    “Sure, come on in,” she invited, again not entirely stunned by my request. “There’s no refrigerator in the room, but there’s a soda fountain right next door here, and I’ve got whiskey. Why don’t you get two large ginger ales, with lots of ice, and we’ll make highballs.”
    I did, and we drank in her little room, she curled on the bed and I slouched in the single chair. The gloom was still on me, but it grew somewhat easier to endure; especially when we found that we could talk or not talk with a reasonable degree of ease. At one point, as might be expected, Miss Rankin asked me what I did for a living. Now, I didn’t necessarily subscribe at all to honesty as a policy in adventures of this sort, and I can’t imagine myself answering such stock questions truthfully as a rule; but “I’m a potential instructor of prescriptive grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College” is so nearly the type of answer one usually dreams up at such moments that without really thinking about it I told her the truth.
    “Is that so!” Peggy was genuinely surprised and pleased this time. “I graduated from WTC myself—so long ago it embarrasses me to remember! I teach English at the high school in Wicomico. Isn’t that a funny coincidence? Two English teachers!”
    I agreed that it was, but in fact I was so appalled that I felt like turning in my highball and calling it quits. It was necessary to move very rapidly to keep the whole situation from disintegrating. There was only a half inch of highball left in my paper cup: I tossed it down, dropped the cup into the wastebasket, immediately went to the bed, where my colleague lay propped on one elbow, and embraced her with some élan. She opened her mouth at once under my kiss and thrust her tongue between my teeth. Both of us had our eyes quite open, and I was pleased to accept that fact symbolically. Let there be no horse manure between teachers of English , I declared to myself, and without more ado gave the zipper of her bathing suit a meaningful yank.
    Miss Rankin froze: her eyes closed tightly and she clutched my shoulders, but my ungentle attack was not repulsed. The zipper undid her down to the small of her back and so gave me access to a certain amount of innocuous skin, but I could go no farther without her assistance.
    “Let’s take your bathing suit off, Peggy,” I suggested cordially.
    This injured her. “You’re in a great hurry, aren’t you, Jake?” she said quietly and more or less bitterly.
    “Well, Peg, we’re old enough not to be any sillier than we have to be.”
    She made a noise in her mouth, and, still holding my shoulders, pressed her forehead against my chest and began to