Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

Fuller took a sip of seltzer and regarded the countertop. “Did you decide, after all, that he was inconvenient?” she asked in a furious whisper. “This is inconvenient, Fuller.” She placed his hand on her stomach. “But it’s mine—mine at least to ease into the world. Too bad there’s no one down on F Street that you could pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars to to have Tim killed.” For all her disgust, her sense that he had done the most despicable thing possible, another part of her felt grateful to him, because what made the act despicable also made it definitive, the surest means of ending what had to end, now or later, with Tim’s broken heart. And she knew, looking at Fuller, that his reasoning matched her own. “You think you did this for his sake, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve convinced yourself of that, haven’t you?” “No, I did it for me. You’ll do the other part, the part that’s for his sake.” “And how will I do that, Fuller?” “By putting me beyond the pale.” “You want me to tell him the truth.” “Make it hard on him.” She got down from the stool and closed her coat. A coed who was with her boyfriend smiled, enviously, in her direction. She wondered, absurdly, whether she could get a cab outside Quigley’s or would have to walk to the main entrance of the department to find one. “What about you?” asked Fuller. “Me?” “Were you ever in love with me?” He asked it with an absence of ego, just a kind of sympathetic curiosity, taking the opportunity to tie up a loose end. “N...