“Short fella?”
“Yeah.”
“Gone. He was here two nights ago, left this mornin’.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Darlin’, why would I know that? Half times, people leave ‘cause they can’t pay for the room. If he went anywhere, you might check the Y.”
I press my face to the window and look inside, just in case, but the bedspread is flat and the pillows covered. “Thanks,” I say, and the man nods. In my rearview mirror, I watch him watching me leave.
APRIL 28, MONDAY
The coffee shop is closed, so I wait with the window rolled down in the shade of a hackberry. Ten minutes until opening, according to the sign, but the girl arrives five minutes early and parks her car next to mine. I bend to see her through my passenger-side window and ask if I can come in.
“Sorry,” she says. “We’re not open yet.”
“Oh, no, I know. I just want to check on something. It’ll take two seconds.”
“Five minutes,” she says, walking toward the building. She unlocks the door and then closes and locks it behind her.
Seven minutes later, she plugs in the neon ‘open’ sign and waves me in from behind the long window.
“I didn’t even notice,” she says, looking from behind the counter at the spot on the wall. “It must have gone yesterday or the day before. I have weekends off.”
“And there’s no way of knowing?”
“Not until I talk to Sherry. She was here.”
“Maybe she wrote it down somewhere. You guys don’t have a book, or something?”
“We have a book, but Sherry is the owner, and she keeps the books. I can’t help you,” she says. “If you want to come back later, she might be here.”
“Might?”
“She comes and goes.”
“You don’t know when?”
“No.”
“Can you ask her if she knows who bought it?”
“She won’t give out that kind of information.”
“It’s just a painting,” I say. “Just a stupid painting of a stupid house. What’s the secret?”
“If you want to make an appointment with her, I can give her a call later and set one up for you.”
“Forget it. It’s not—never mind.”
The girl pours a bag of beans into a grinder.
“Are you always alone during the week?” I say.
“Pretty much.”
“Are you—is she…Sheryl?”
“Sherry.”
“Is Sherry hiring?”
The girl presses the button and the machine, loud, whirs and grinds. “I don’t think so, no,” she almost shouts.
MAY 4, SUNDAY
“Mia. Donny. Donaldson. I got a—I got beer, and I got—uh—I got—what the…? Bourbon, brand new, fresh in the bottle and never opened…Yet…But we don’t got to drink. You can have soda or water…whatever…It’s a bad day…I’m out…Outta the house…a week, now? Naw, two weeks…No chance. No chance, she says…I got a place.” Laughter. “A real fine place on Riverside. Rooms. A front desk. Bellhop and room service and a spa…This is Doctor Donaldson speaking…Come over. Midtown Motel, room eight…Or call. Four five oh eight.”
“Zero,” I say from the couch. “Four five zero eight.”
______
Water drips from the kitchen faucet. The television is green, night time at war, a few hours from sunrise. Now full color, a shot of the sky where something was before it wasn’t.
I’ve put the clock keeping track of Jake’s time next to the computer. I don’t need it by the TV, anymore, because their graphics people have designed one for the corner, a cheerful banner that flips through the stateside time zones and, now, war time. It’s green and blue and red and the letters—the numbers—are big and white, like grammar-school numbers, and they flip, flip, flip, in a happy soothing rhythm like a…like something that would do that. Doesn’t matter, really, what it is, because it’s just a happy silly graphic, and it’s my time and war time and all the time is war time. A time on a clock. An exciting time, this time in history, all other countries, the rest of the whole wide world, forgotten by the media for this
very exciting time
in history, this progress, this momentous action on the part of the administration that has burped the rest of the planet into oblivion, off the
sip
priority list, and if they would just stop. Cut to a commercial. Cover Japan or Havana so I could blink, sleep dreamless for a minute or two, relax distracted by the world between me and Jake and the something that was there before it wasn’t.
________
Not the TV.
I need that.
The wall.
It’s louder than I expected. One of the chunks lands on the shelf and breaks the plate he bought at the Grand Canyon.
Shit. Not that.
This!
And this!
________
Someone knocks at the door, knock knock knock, has been for what seems like hours. I reach for my coffee, but it’s cold, and when I get up to bring it to the kitchen my head spins. I steady myself on the chair and feel strangely tall, the kitchen is crowded, too small for me. I take a step and Chancey runs underfoot and I kick out, catching his tail. Knock knock knock. I close the mug in the microwave and set the time, watch the glass dish spin around and around and—
“Mia.”
The microwave dings.
“Let me in.”
I pull the mug from the microwave and it is hot on my palm. I set it on the counter, pick it up by the handle and walk to the door, open it. Denise shoves in and closes the door and walks straight to the living room. Her footfalls stop short.
The cup really is very hot. I set it on the counter and open the refrigerator and stare at white grated shelves, white walls, a wrapped slice of cheese, orange against the stark brightness. I push at the door to the butter bin. Empty.
She stands now in the kitchen entry. I lean in to check the date on a half gallon of milk. Bad.
Bile or something like it floods my throat, fights against being swallowed down.
Denise takes my hand and leads me to the living room. “…no word…,” they say through the small holes on the side of the TV. Denise asks what this is.
“It’s my living room.”
“What did you do to it? The shelves are bare.”
Yes.
The shelves are bare.
Her nails are rough and scrape into my palm. I pull my hand free and she grabs me again—my wrist, this time—but more gently.
“Is this any way to treat your things?” She smiles, tugs my arm. “Some of them were so beautiful.”
Yes. Beautiful. But it can’t be owned, beauty, can’t be trapped in my lungs and tasted on my breath when I exhale. It’s fleeting, like a silk scarf lost to the wind. An abstract, empty, satisfying indulgence, so I threw—hurled, really—the geodes, but they wouldn’t break, or even chip. Edges like painted glass, and inside, a cavern of dazzlingly perfect crystals, so perfect I wanted to eat them, wanted to pluck out the individual shards and push them into my eyes. I read somewhere that people are doing that, having garnets of all colors embedded in the whites of their eyes. Eye jewelry. But then, they can’t see it unless they look in a mirror.
And the jade figurine, a bird on a stump with carved flowers—pansies, I think—at its feet. It was heavy. Solid. The petals folded delicately open and the feathers, chiseled so smooth, promised to fan. But what good? I took pleasure in all of it, in decorating, in placing the bird just so next to the old dictionary. Jake enjoyed it, too, putting things here, putting things there. His things, my things. The apartment was ours because our things lived here. The first night, all moved in, we made hot chocolate and sat on the couch and looked at our arrangement of things.
Denise picks up the half of the bird she finds partially hidden under the lowest shelf. “Pretty,” she says. She drops it on the floor and it dents the wood. I
look at her feet. She’s standing in rubble. She nudges our things with her toes. Pieces of a painted gourd Jake picked up at an import store. Gray rocks from my Zen garden. Shards of baked clay from the matching pottery jugs we bought at a street fair from a man with red cheeks and blue wool mittens.
Stereo cords coil under the mess and the speakers are on separate sides of the room, one of them upside down, the other facing the wall. The stereo lies face-own in the middle of the room with a split spreading across the case.
She asks where my broom is. My dustpan.
“Why?”
“I’ll find it,” she says, and she does. What’s not broken, she sets on a shelf. What is broken, she sweeps into a pile and dumps in a paper bag. She asks where the cat food is and I tell her I fed him an hour ago—or several hours? today, anyway—and that his water is fresh. “Just checking,” she says, but she shakes the bag of food anyway, calling, “C’mere, kitty.” He doesn’t, which is unusual, because even when he’s not hungry, he usually does. I ask her if it’s possible he sneaked out when she came in.
“I would have noticed,” she says.
We search the apartment until we find him behind my hamper in the bedroom closet.
“Maybe you scared him.”
I ask her how.
She picks up the bag of broken things and puts it outside the front door. “I wonder, Mia.”
________
Quarter after eight in the evening, Jake’s. Denise has been here an hour and a half.
We’ve done nothing. Watched the news. News and more news. We turned our attention to the machine when Olivia called and left a message—“I don’t think it’s him, hon, but if it is, you’ll be okay. We’ll just have to help each other through it.”—and then went back to waiting.
“Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she says. “I left messages. Didn’t you get them?”
“I wanted to keep the line open.”
“Not just today. It’s been over a week.” She runs through the channels again, ending on the original station. The screen has cut from night vision to the news desk. No new information, they say. No names because they’re “awaiting an investigation and family notification before revealing specific details.”
“I’ve been out trying to find a job.”
She says, “Your car is in the same place it was the last time I left. Exactly.”
“It’s a good spot.”
She sighs.
I ask her if she wouldn’t rather be at home.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Now stop.”
The phone rings. We look at it. On the machine, I suggest the caller leave a message at the beep. Beep. Olivia says, “Mia, are you there? Pick up if you are, hon.”
Denise looks at me, whispers, “What if it’s something?”
I shake my head.
Olivia chews gum into the phone. “I’m just so worried about you,” she says. “You know Jakey would want you to be strong at a time like this.”
Denise says, “Are you sure you don’t want to answer?”
I shake my head.
“Well, okay.” Olivia exhales. “No one has called me yet, or come over, heaven forbid, but as soon as they—oh, will you listen to me? Of course I mean if—if anyone does, I’ll call you right away… I’m so sorry you have to rely on me to do it. Sometimes I wish you two were married, hon, because I think I’d much rather hear the news from you…Anyway, call me when you get this and we’ll muddle through together.”
Denise waits until Olivia hangs up and says, “Encouraging.”
The news takes a commercial break. A woman wearing a shapeless pink collar shirt and equally shapeless khaki pants dances with a dust mop, her uninspired hair swinging neatly against the base of her neck.
“Yeah,” Denise says. “Dusting’s a blast.” She picks at the seam of her jeans. “I need a drink.”
“So do I.”
“What do you have?”
“It’s only noon, though.”
“What do you have?”
She pours two glasses and we lean against opposite counters. The television is loud enough to hear from the kitchen.
“Strong.” She coughs and clears her throat.
Behind me, the faucet drips.
“I really don’t think it was them,” she says. She takes two cigarettes from the pack she set on the counter and lights them both with that shiny lighter, hands me one.
I hold it between my fingers and watch the tip turn to gray ash. I want it, but my stomach is unsettled. Jake would say that probably means I should put it out.
Two days ago, I stopped thinking about him while waiting in line at a drive-through window. It was sunny, warm, and I was hungry and the chicken smelled good. A minivan stuffed with children idled at the ordering box, their small heads bouncing up and down, front seat and back again, changing orders, adding sides. I turned the radio up loud and sang with a song I hated. I thought only of the lines, wondered how I somehow knew every word, and then I thought about the food I would bring home, and how much longer it would take for that minivan to pull out, and how loud and messy kids are.
Then another song played, a favorite of Jake’s.
How long had it been? Minutes? An hour? Forever. That could have been the moment he died, his absence from my thoughts a sign, a goodbye.
I open the kitchen window and pull up the blinds to let out the smoke.
“I can feel it,” she says. “About William and Jake. Sometimes you just know.”
“How can you feel that? How can you be sure?”
Drip.
Drip.
“Your faucet is dripping.”
“Is it?”
Denise crosses to the sink and turns the handle tight and stands beside me. “I haven’t heard from him in days,” she says. Heavy powder—too heavy—shines in flecks under her eyes and her hair, up close, looks stringy. Normally so put-together, so well maintained.
“You will,” I say.
“It must mean something.”
“He was probably busy.”
“I don’t know. It’s not like him. Even if he’s busy, he usually finds a way to contact me.”
“I’d be more worried about him being alive.”
“Oh, he’s alive, all right,” she says. “But, you’re right. Sometimes I wish he were dead. It would make all of this a hell of a lot easier. Not really, of course. But, have you ever—”
“Jesus Christ, Denise. You know they fly together a lot.”
“What are you talking about?” she says, and, “Oh, no. Oh…Mia, I was—” She runs water over her cigarette and drops it in the disposal. I almost don’t hear her say, “I wasn’t talking about William.”
I understand, then, why she’s so sure of their safety. It’s the confidence of someone with nothing at stake.
________
“Mia…Are you there…? Pick up if you’re there.”
“What are you doing?” Denise mutes the television and stares at me. “Aren’t you going to pick it up?”
“Damn it. I just can’t seem to catch you at home. . .You don’t know how bad I want to hear your voice…The machine isn’t enough…If I could hear you laugh, then—”
“Mia,” Denise says, “if you don’t pick it up, I’m going to.”
“—everything, this whole day, would be just a little better…Something happened … don’t want to talk about it, sorry, but—well, maybe it’s on the news—but I just want you to know—”
I can’t breathe, but she is right. I have to pick up the phone.
“You have to pick it up, Mia. You can’t just—”
There is a knock at the door. I wait for more from Jake. Wants me to know—wants me to know what?
Can’t just breathe, and it should be easy.
“—that I love you.”
Denise sets her glass on the desk. “I’ll get the door. You talk to Jake.”
“I love you so much…and I
kind of hoped I’d be able to use this time to ask you about your last letter…You sounded so angry, M…and that you would write to me and accuse me—”
There’s a pause, a wait, and I rush to the desk and pick up the phone. “Jake?”
“Talk to him!” she screams from the hallway.
“I am,” I say, and Jake says nothing. “Jake?” Still nothing. I blow into the phone and hollow air comes back, then two, three clicks, like connecting to something that won’t connect. I slam down the receiver, and then I slam it down again, again, again, and squeeze and twist it in my hands.
Denise stands in the doorway, her arms and body limp, heaping forward. I hang up the phone, pick it up to check for a working dial tone, then hang it up again.
Denise says, her eyes not quite focused on mine, “It was a shorter speech than I thought it would be.”
________
She fixes drink after drink, not saying a word, and smokes cigarette after cigarette. Her fingers shake.
Jake hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
But Jake is okay. Jake is safe. Jake is alive.
William is not.
________
It could have been Jake.
But it wasn’t.
I don’t feel like smiling—there’s nothing to smile about—but I have to fight not to.
I can’t look at her. When I do, my lips, my cheeks, all of it tugs toward a grin.
Jesus. I don’t want to laugh. I don’t feel like laughing.
If Jake died, would I be this way at his funeral?
When I feel her looking at me, I pretend I have an itch on my upper lip so my hand covers my mouth. My eyes water and I look down. There is a hole in the toe of my sock.
Denise says, “Are you smiling?”
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