by Roger Bray
With the drawer closed, Alice stood looking at it, wondering when, if ever, it would be opened again. There would be no more appeals, try as she might there was nothing more she could do, she had exhausted everything any lawyers were able, or willing to do.
She felt her mood start to dip, and she took a deep breath. She needed to get out; she needed to get away for an hour, maybe a week or a lifetime but she would settle for an afternoon; she snatched up her bag and headed out for some retail therapy. If she didn’t buy, she could look at least, but she was sure that she would see something to buy, if not in the clothes shops then Rubensteins always had something new in for the house. She might even treat herself to a meal at The Granary Pizza Company near the markets. Maybe manage to drag the day into the evening; it had been a long, long time, she thought, since she had gone out and mindlessly wandered around only for herself.
Walking from her house south of Pioneer Park, she started with a coffee at Full City on Pearl, this time, though, her usual cappuccino and by the time she left the café the lunch time crowd had started to clear as the afternoon moved on. She started to feel a lot calmer as the morning visit to the penitentiary faded a little to the back of her thoughts.
She had no destination in mind, except maybe the pizza later, so she took a slow and leisurely walk through downtown Eugene, dipping in and out of different shops as they took her fancy or if something in the front window display caught her eye. She bought a nice lacy top in one shop, and body lotion and shower gel in another. Briefly looking at some lingerie she sighed quietly as she let the flimsy material fall from her fingers and slowly turned away from the display racks. When she was married, she had never bought anything like this, Brian would have hardly noticed her wearing it after their first five years together anyway and now she had no one in her life who might appreciate her in it. Passing those racks, she settled on a nice pencil skirt in red, still a little risqué she thought, she would probably never wear it, but the way the material clung to her slim hips felt good and it looked nice on when she inspected herself in the long mirrors in the change room.
It was a few minutes after six o’clock when, with her few purchases, she found herself moving toward the public markets for a last look at the shops around there before heading to the Granary where she would, she had already decided, have a Meatapalooza pizza and probably a couple of drinks as well.
Climbing the staircase up from the center of the markets toward 5th Avenue, Alice was feeling the happiest that she had in quite a while, her attention was distracted as she admired the potted plants at the top of the stairs and as she reached the sidewalk, and was looking slightly backward, she walked straight into another pedestrian, who had chosen that moment to check something on his cell phone.
They both stopped and started to apologize to each other, so they could continue on in their embarrassment, when they both stopped talking.
“Alice?” Steve broke the silence first.
She frowned before slowly recognizing him.
“We had coffee together last week; well we shared a table at least …”
“... and you kindly bought me a coffee, yes I remember. Steve, that’s right?”
He smiled, pleased that she had remembered him, and he was hopeful that he might, after all, have made a good impression. As she hadn’t ignored him he was thinking that it wasn’t all bad.
“Shopping?” he glanced down at the bags she was carrying.
“What, oh yes, odd and bits, nothing of importance.”
“A lazy afternoon?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“So … I, er …” Steve didn’t want to waste this chance meeting.
She looked at him while he stumbled on.
“Can I buy you another coffee?”
She was about to say, “No thanks” and keep walking when something stopped her. She was opposite the pizza place that she was heading to and it would seem rude to walk across the road. The only other alternative was to make her excuses and pretend to leave, walk around the block and arrive back where she was in ten minutes time. But that had the potential of being even more embarrassing if she ran into him again in almost the same place.
Alice looked at him and smiled, “Actually I was about to get a pizza, so thank you, but maybe another time.”
“I haven’t eaten,” Steve persevered, “why don’t you let me get that instead?”
Alice was a bit flustered and waved her hand at him as she refused, “No, no, no thanks. Thanks, but no.”
“Oh, c’mon what do you have to lose, free pizza and a charming man for company?”
“You’re charming, are you?” she asked.
“Well,” he said modestly, “I am trying.”
“Yes, you are,” she muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
From nowhere, Alice felt a rush of emotion; sadness and happiness at the same time but before she could consider it, the moment passed, and she heard herself say, “OK, thank you. Yes, pizza would be nice.”
Steve grinned broadly and made a show of escorting her across the road to the door of The Granary Pizza, which he opened with a flourish, and a small bow.
She couldn’t help but smile as he continued his chivalrous act across the floor to one of the booths lining the wall and pulled the chair out from the table and held it for her as she sat down. Alice felt exhausted, but in a nice way, an innocent way from her aimless afternoon wandering around Eugene that had allowed her, she suddenly realized, to have been bordering on happy for a few hours. She immediately felt a small stab of guilt about Alex and the damned prison but angrily pushed the thought aside and picked up the menu.
She looked up at Steve, sitting opposite, smiling at her, but hesitantly, as if he had seen the moment her mood had darkened. Alice put the menu back down; she hadn’t needed to look at it at all, she had already made her choice when she had decided to come here and had only picked it up to hide the sadness she thought her face might show. Looking at him she was drawn in again by his blue eyes and warm smile, questioning her, encouraging her, and she smiled softly back at him.
Steve glanced quickly at the menu in his hands and picked the same as her, it was early and there were not many people in the place, so the waitress was already hovering, waiting to take their order.
“Two Meatapaloozas and beer?” he asked Alice who nodded.
“And two beers, thanks.”
The beers arrived within a few minutes and they both took a drink before Steve opened the conversation.
“So, divorced then?”
“What?” she asked as she licked the beer foam from her top lip.
“You told me the other day that you are divorced.”
“I did, yes, I am.”
“How long?”
“We’ve been separated for a while, but the final documents came through a few months ago.”
“That sucks.” he said.
Alice thought for a moment as she took a drink of her beer before she shrugged her shoulders.
“Sucks? No, not so much, actually not at all, we ran out of steam, not that there was much to start with, anyway.”
“Wrong guy?”
She nodded, and thought that about summed it up, the wrong guy but to be fair to Brian, she was probably the wrong girl as well, for him anyway. So, if there was blame they both shared it, but she didn’t consider it a matter for blame. It was what it was. That’s how it had been and she considered that they had made a mistake and got through it.
“Amicable?”
She looked at him.
“The divorce, was it amicable, did you part as friends?”
She shook her head, “No I would have to say we didn’t. It was amicable; we both knew it wasn’t working, and it was the right thing to do, for both of us. Did we part as friends? No, not friends but not enemies either. Now he’s someone I,” she struggled for the right word, “… know, someone I knew once and sort of lost t
ouch with. If we met in the street, we’d chat for a few minutes but that would be about it, we would be pleasant and then go our separate ways.”
Steve nodded, had he been asked, he would have admitted to feeling a little relieved. There was no messy divorce in the background and she was not jilted and bitter; and better, that there was no jilted and homicidal ex to worry about.
He nodded and considered for a moment.
“It’s that,” he paused, “when I helped you pick up your papers the other day I couldn’t help notice that they seemed to be legal papers and I thought it must be from your divorce when you mentioned it. I imagine that sometimes these things go on for a long time, but why else would you be carrying around legal papers a few months after your divorce has finalized.”
“I would imagine they do, but not in my case. Brian and I sorted everything out quite fairly, split what we wanted to and sold what we needed to, in the end it ended with a fair split.”
She hesitated, wondering whether to say anything else to him; denial that the legal documents were connected to her divorce would lead to the inevitable next question, but a lie may be exposed quickly if he had glanced at any of the documents as he helped her pick them up and he was already questioning why she would be carrying them.
“No, not from the divorce, something else; something else that’s finished anyway,” she added, with a rush of sad emotion as the realization swept over her.
They drank in silence for a moment before he continued.
“I thought that, so do you work in the law?”
Alice almost laughed at that, for the past three years most of her life had been about the law but she couldn’t say she worked in the law, suffocated, almost drowned by it maybe, almost destroyed by its slow, but incessant needs but certainly, not work in.
She shook her head, “No, no I don’t, nothing like that. It was something … personal.”
“So, what do you do?” he asked, changing the subject as he could see the previous one was depressing her somehow.
“I,” she thought for a moment, “I work for myself, by myself, well with my brother as well, sort of …”
She was flustered and surprised by her inability to answer his straightforward question. It was one that she should have expected to have been asked and she should have been prepared for it. It was a question which should have been easy to answer but as she hadn’t expected to be sitting here having any sort of conversation, or needing to answer the question anyway, it had thrown her.
Alice tried again to give Steve a coherent answer, anything less would inevitably lead to more questions, and she was starting to feel foolish with her stuttering and stammering replies.
“Web design and applications, you know apps for cell phones, that sort of thing,” she continued.
“Oh, for the Apple Play store or whatever it’s called?”
She finally smiled, “yeah, something like that.”
“And you work with your brother, a pair of geeks, eh?”
The change of subject had, without Steve realizing or knowing, led them straight back to the first subject, legal stuff and Alex imprisoned in the Oregon State Prison. Alice realized that whatever they talked about it was going to lead them to this place again, and Alice couldn’t see an easy way around it.
It was no secret, Alex’s trial and conviction were all on the public record, openly available and there for anyone who could be bothered to look into it to see, but it was a hard subject to throw into a conversation casually and, she feared, it would probably put an end to any sort of friendship, it certainly could bring a conversation to an abrupt close. Once she was known as the sister of “that guy that killed his wife” any attempt at normalcy seemed to fall far short of anything normal.
She was beginning to regret agreeing to come into the pizza place with him at all and she felt her mood, which had been lifted quite well by her frivolous afternoon, was slowly slipping back down to its darker normal state.
Steve watched as she tried to explain what she did for a living and he could see her mood swing and the abrupt change in her; from almost smiling to her now looking morosely into her beer. He knew that he had said something wrong to bring this on.
He considered the conversation to this point, not that there was much of it, her divorce, her work, her brother and something legal; but not about her divorce, she made that plain, but not something that she wanted to talk openly about either.
Was she concerned or was she feeling guilty or embarrassed? He couldn’t fully read her mood and wasn’t sure what was causing this.
Steve didn’t think that the conversation had anywhere to go to now, except maybe further downhill. If that was at all possible?
He could persevere with inane chatter, while Alice’s mood slipped further down, probably because he kept hitting a bum note without realizing it or he could try to approach the problem head on, which was how he normally approached problems and what, he had to admit, normally got him into trouble. But he liked this girl. He liked the way she laughed although he had to admit that he hadn’t seen much of that up to this point. He liked the way she dressed and looked, the way she held herself and her soft-spoken voice. He could hear the sadness in it, but he could easily imagine the same voice with happiness in it and he wanted to be around when that happened.
So, he jumped. He started with a smile looking at her while she seemed worn down by the moment.
“Look, I’m sorry. For the life of me I do not know what it was that I said but if I said something to upset you, then I’m sorry, Alice. That was not what I wanted to do.”
Alice was a bit taken aback by this and almost laughed that he thought that anything he could say would have this effect on her. Her depression was so long lived and deep seated that a mere conversation from this stranger would not dent it, either way, for better or worse. She felt a small bolt of anger rise up in her at the thought, which surprised her enough to stop it before she could react. It had been so long since she had felt any real emotion that even anger was a sort of happy surprise, but she was unsure if the feeling of anger that rose in her was directed at Steve or at the circumstances which wouldn’t allow her to enjoy a meal and a quiet moment with someone without intruding.
Alice knew that whoever she spoke to and whatever they spoke about, anything could bring her back to this. It was impossible to live her life without this raising itself up all time and she couldn’t understand why now, with this man who she hardly knew, she was finding it so hard to reconcile her reality with a simple conversation.
She sighed quietly and almost cried but instead she pursed her lips before taking a breath and looking at him. She tried to smile.
“No, look Steve, it’s nothing you said. I wasn’t, I’m … I’m sorry it’s that I’m not great company at the moment.”
“Are we talking about in general, with anyone, or just with me?”
She almost laughed at that.
“Is it your divorce?” He persevered, galloping toward the possible precipice because of his usual blunt, honest approach.
She shook her head, “No, it’s not my divorce, that’s been and gone and well in the past now.”
“Money?”
She shook her head again.
“My aftershave?”
She did laugh that time and Steve smiled to hear it. He was determined with his twenty questions approach to get to the bottom of this but pulled himself up before he sounded rude. His previous life was starting to intrude into the conversation and he felt that he would be interrogating her in a moment and he didn’t want that. He sensed that if he pushed too hard, it would have the opposite effect on her and, instead of opening up, she would shut down even more, probably take offense at him, get angry, and leave.
“Look Alice, I’m sorry, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, of course it is. I completely understand, I suppose that I’m disappointed in myself that I seem to have caused this.”
Again, she felt the small moment of
anger, he hadn’t caused it but then again, he had, but had it not been him it would have been somebody else with the same questions. But Alice couldn’t blame him, any conversation would probably lead to this and she was sick of it. She was sick of the depression, and of the hiding and of the once or twice a week, every week, trip up Highway Five to OSP, though she would never admit that to anyone, especially Alex.
Alice was so sick of this and she knew it, and she wasn’t stupid and knew the effect it was having on her. Her inner jokes about a spinster’s life were coming true because of her, not because of Alex, not because of the awful situation that she found herself in but because she refused to move on with it and that was her own fault. In that moment, as if the foreign stab of anger had jolted her into action, she realized that she had a decision to make.
There were two things she could do now, she could make her excuses and walk out, leaving him with two pizzas and the check, or …
“Fuck it.”
Alice wiped her hands on the napkin and took a small drink from her beer before looking up. The color in her green eyes seemed to lighten as she looked straight into Steve’s eyes. She took a breath and then let it out slowly...
“It’s about my brother,” she said quickly before she could change her mind and chicken out, “he is all the family that I have, and he’s in the OSP for murdering his wife. The legal file that got scattered across the café, that you helped me to pick up, was the file and the result of his last appeal, and it was probably the last appeal he can make.”
She held her gaze up, looking straight at him, expecting and waiting for a reaction.
To his credit, Steve managed not to blurt anything out as another person might, but he had to admit to himself later that this was not what he had expected at all, of all the things he thought she might say, a murdering brother doing time was not one of them.
But he’d asked and had wanted to know the answer; well now he did.
