He stared impassively at the girl who had approached him—at her dark brown eyes and golden skin, and her large puffy lips, and though he said nothing she did not move away. She batted her eyelashes and smiled. She had tiny pimples all over her forehead, and she smelled faintly of yeast. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘You want company? You very handsome.’ The petite Filipina girl was not at all attractive to Ed. She wore chunky sandals with a miniskirt and her toes were awful and squarish. She had not even painted them. Her feet revolted him. ‘No, I do not want company.’ ‘You have wife?’ she asked. ‘Yes. I have a wife.’ He still had the frozen guy’s gold wedding band on his finger. There had been a time when Ed used to wear one like it at least once a week, on his nights off when he was cruising for girls. He used to enjoy polishing it up. Over the years he had learned that it put girls at ease to think he was on his way home to a wife. It made him seem harmless. The wedding band sealed the deal, when the offer of a lift home in the rain from a kindly bespectacled good Samaritan was tempting, but not quite tempting enough to make a girl let her guard down and get into his van.
