I tried to imagine shackling myself to a loser just because I couldn’t wait any longer for one big night, then discovering someone like Sam a day too late. The best way to prevent that from happening, besides not getting married, was never meeting someone like Sam.
Half a block away from the bar, I finally looked back. The girl gestured wildly with her free hand while she talked into her phone, but I couldn’t tell how old she was. She was too far away. The bar seemed small, isolated in a sea of abandoned buildings, pitch-black behind their barred windows.
The music was still loud enough for someone to hear on the other end of my phone, so I kept walking, even though I didn’t feel safe here. Nobody was around. A single car swooshed by slowly, stopped at the traffic light at the corner, and moved on without backing up to kidnap me. I kept walking to the next streetlight and stood under its glow, as though the light were a force field that could keep me safe. The problem was, I couldn’t see clearly beyond the brilliance.
I scrolled through my phone—three new drunk texts from Toby—and hit Julie’s number. She’d waited for my call nearly every night this year. My face had flashed on her screen, and she’d picked up before the phone rang on my end even once. Not this time. I listened to one hollow ring, then two.
As I stared into space, waiting, a tall figure appeared around the corner across the street. I couldn’t make out colors or details outside my pool of light. He could have been a college student coming to my concert at the bar. He could have been anybody. The first thing I noticed about him that alarmed me—besides the fact that he’d been lurking in an empty lot—was that he stepped out into the street without looking both ways for traffic. Granted, there wasn’t any traffic and he wasn’t in danger, but most people would have looked all the same. And if he’d been headed for the bar, he probably would have walked down the sidewalk on his side of the street first before crossing. He wasn’t headed for the bar. He was headed for me.
I didn’t panic. Julie’s phone still rang in my ear, and there was a chance she’d pick up any second. As the figure drew closer, I could see that he was an older man, not a college student. He had a full beard. His clothes were shabby and looked way too warm for this hot night. He was homeless, maybe, but I had no way of knowing that. And even if he were, that didn’t automatically mean he was racing across the street to assault me. This is what I was thinking. I knew I ought to be alarmed and I also knew if I was alarmed I was making a lot of baseless assumptions.
Meanwhile, I should have felt a spike of adrenaline—he was coming closer, he was running now, he’d reached the center line in the street, I could see his face, his eyes on me—but I didn’t feel a thing, just watched him coming and thought this was how I would die.
“You’ve reached Julie Mayfield!” Julie’s voice mail chirped. “Shout out!”
As the man loomed in front of me, I still didn’t run. He would catch me. I just wanted to click my phone off before Julie’s voice mail beeped and recorded what happened next, so she wouldn’t have to listen to it. My thumb hit the button to end the call. The man entered the glow of the streetlight, his face dark with dirt and shining under sweat. I could smell him just before he reached out one hand to touch me.
“Back off!” Sam shouted, shouldering himself in front of me, knocking me so hard that I nearly dropped the phone. He was between me and the man now. Down by his side I saw the flash of a knife blade. I meant to cry out or pull him back to stop him, but the man had seen the knife. He backed into the street, again without looking, then spun around and ran.
Sam returned his knife to his pocket. Breathing like he’d dashed all the way here from the bar, he watched the man until his shadow disappeared behind a temporary wall around the new construction at the end of the street. I’d thought all day that Sam’s young face belied the old beard he was trying to grow, but at that moment, dark eyes narrowed against danger, he looked as world-weary and tough as Johnny Cash himself. He scanned the area, turning in a slow circle—something I hadn’t thought to do. If a second man had wanted to attack me from behind, I never would have seen him.
“Walk,” Sam barked, giving me a little shove on the small of my back. I started down the sidewalk in the direction he pushed me, toward the bar. Normally I would have protested being pushed around, but he still looked furious. As he walked beside me, he demanded, “What were you doing?”
“Making my phone call, like we discussed.”
“Did you have to walk to Georgia? You were calling your boyfriend, weren’t you?”
“My boyfriend?” I repeated, confused and disgusted at the thought of running out of a gig with Sam to convey some breathless secret message to Toby. “No.”
Sam was jealous. This registered with me on some level, blank as I felt.
But the next thing he said made me think he wasn’t jealous after all, only wary that I was manipulating him. “You called someone who you didn’t want to hear the music,” Sam insisted. “Someone you didn’t want to figure out where you are.”
“It was just my sister.” I caught the pointed toe of my boot on the broken sidewalk and tripped. Sam saved me from falling with a hand on my elbow. He held me for a few seconds while he looked over his shoulder again in the direction the man had gone.
Several minutes too late, the little good sense I usually possessed came rushing back. I began to realize how close we’d both come to tragedy. I squealed, “Were you going to knife that guy?”
“No,” Sam said firmly. “I was going to show him my knife and get you away from him. Which I did. Were you going to let him grab you?”
I didn’t know. Now that I had my wits back, I couldn’t quite puzzle out what I’d been thinking when the strange man stalked like a shadow into my bright circle.
“You were going to let him grab you,” Sam said incredulously. “Do you have some sort of death wish?” As we walked, he looked behind us, then to our right at the empty lots, then to the left across the street, ahead of us at the bar, and behind us again.
“Me!” I exclaimed. “He could have turned that knife around and used it on you. Why are you walking around with a concealed weapon, anyway? Is this neighborhood really that unsafe?”
“I didn’t expect you to walk a mile down a deserted road to make a phone call,” he said testily. Then, glancing sideways at me and looking almost sorry, he said, “I didn’t know it wasn’t safe. I think it would be safe if you hadn’t wandered in that direction alone.” When I glared back at him and didn’t give in, he sighed. “Okay.” He pulled his knife out of his pocket to show me. I drew back in surprise before I saw it was his shiny silver guitar slide covering his entire middle finger.