The Driving

THE DRIVING / hen Roberts When she got to Cook's Taxi Stand, the yellow light shone from the window onto snow piled three feet deep by the curb. It was almost ten p.m. when she suddenly realized it was twenty below, that she'd been standing there for minutes in her bathrobe. As she gradually knew where she was she also remembered where she had come from, the small flat rising in her memory like a dead fish, unexpectedly, to the surface of a lake. She thought of the two boys in their pajamas, the pock-marked man probably still sitting at the white table, drinking the bottles of beer. She wondered if she had cancer. They had a fight, she remembered sticking him in the stomach with a butcher knife. My God, she muttered, but just then an old couple walked by, the woman staring, the man looking into the yellow window where Mr. Cook sat at his table. And where could I go, she asked the parking meters as she started to walk home, the snow no longer pricking when it touched her slippered feet, the snow feeling good, cold like that until she actually thought about lying down in it, there on Remsen Street, letting them find her there, letting them see what she had been driven to. The Missouri Review -227 ...