It’s then that the sound of Priddy’s thin, metallic voice summons me by name, interrupting my thoughts. “Alex,” she says to me, and as I turn, I see her long, crooked finger draw me to her side, her fingernails painted a cantaloupe orange. Before Priddy, on the display case, is a cardboard box and a plastic cup complete with fountain drink. Inside the box are a BLT with a mountain of fries and a pickle on the side. Same as always. We don’t do deliveries, but for Ingrid Daube we do. And today it’s my turn to go. Usually I look forward to the trips to Ingrid’s home—a break from the mundane routine of the café—but today isn’t one of those days. Today I’d rather stay.
“Me?” I ask stupidly, staring at the box, and Priddy says, “Yes, you, Alex. You.”
I sigh.
“Take this to Ingrid,” Priddy says to me, with no please and no thank-you, but rather an edict: “Go.” I loiter a fraction of a second, my eyes on the woman with the ombré hair—Pearl—as Red passes by and refills her coffee mug for a third time.
Pearl has been here for an hour now, maybe two, and although she finished her meal long ago, she doesn’t go. The dishes have been cleared. It’s been a good thirty minutes since Red placed the check on the table beside the coffee mug. The waitress has asked three times if there’s anything else she needs, but the girl only shakes her head and says no. Red is getting antsy, eager to gather up another measly tip that she can complain about as soon as Pearl decides to split. And yet she doesn’t split. She remains at the window, gazing out, sipping coffee with no apparent plans to go.
I tell myself I’ll hurry. That I’ll be back before she leaves.
Why? I don’t know why. For some reason I want to be here when she goes, to watch her put the black hat back on her head, obscuring the ombré hair. To watch her wrap the scarf around her neck and gather the canvas bag in her hands. To see her slip into the checkered pea coat. To see her rise up off the chair, to see which way she goes.
I tell myself I’ll hurry; I’ll be back before she leaves. I say it again. If I time it just right, maybe she’ll be leaving just as I return—back from my delivery to Ingrid. Maybe.
I’ll hold the door for her. I’ll say to her, Have a nice day.
I’ll ask her her name. New to town? I’ll say.
Maybe. If I time it right.
Also, if I’m not being a chicken shit, which I probably will be.
I don’t bother to put on my coat for a quick trip across the street. I grab the box and the drink and slip through the glass door backward, using my backside to open the door for me. The wind nearly swipes the box from my hands as I step outside, and I think it’s times like these that I wish I had hair. More hair. Much more hair than the burr cut on my head, which does nothing to keep my scalp and ears warm. I could use a hat, too, and my coat. Instead, I wear my café-issued attire: the cheap, pleated pants, the white button-down shirt and a black bow tie. It’s tacky, the kind of thing I’d prefer not to have to be seen in public in. But Priddy gives me no choice. The sleeves of my shirt flutter in the breeze, the wind getting trapped beneath the polyester, making it puff up like a parachute or a birthday balloon. It’s cold outside, the air temperature reaching no more than forty degrees. The windchill is another story. The windchill—also known as the one thing everyone will be talking about for the next four months to come. Only November and already meteorologists are calling for a cold winter, one of the coldest on record, they say, with subzero temps, record windchills and bounteous snow.
It’s winter in Michigan, for God’s sake. What else is new?
Ingrid Daube lives in a Cape Cod right across the street from the café, a small Cape Cod circa 1940-or 1950-something. It’s a light blue house with dark blue shutters, a roof almost as tall as it is wide. It’s a good house, a charming house. Quaint and idyllic, save for the hustle and bustle of the main street, which does anything but hustle or bustle this time of year. It’s quiet. From Ingrid’s upstairs dormer window, she has a bird’s-eye view of the café and there I see her, standing in the window like an apparition, eyes watching mine as I wait for a passing car and then scamper across the street. She waves at me through the glass. I return the wave and watch as she disappears from view.
I start climbing the steps of Ingrid’s wide, white front porch, and that’s when I hear the high-pitched squeal of a squeaky door hinge, followed by the slamming of a screen door from the home next door, a blue cottage converted into an office for Dr. Giles, the town shrink. It’s been less than a year since he moved his practice in. As I peek over, there he stands in the doorway, saying goodbye to a patient before peering up and down the street—hands in pockets—as if waiting for someone else to appear. Does he hug her? I’m quite certain he does, an awkward one-armed hug not meant to happen in plain sight. That’s what makes it weird. He checks his watch. He looks left, he looks right, up and down the street. Someone is late, and Dr. Giles doesn’t want to be kept waiting. He seems miffed that he has to wait. I see it in his squinty eyes, in his vertical posture, in the way his arms are crossed.
I don’t like the man one bit.
The patient who leaves thrusts a hood up over her head, a fur-lined hood on a thick black parka, though whether it’s for warmth or privacy, I can’t say. I don’t know. I never do see her face before she scurries away, down the street the other way. I don’t see her, but I hear her. Half the town hears her. I hear her crying, a distraught wail that can be heard a half block away. He made her cry. Dr. Giles made the girl cry. Add that to the list of reasons I don’t like the guy.
There was a whole scandal when Dr. Giles moved his office into the tiny blue cottage. A scandal because the ladies in town took to lurking around the café, to puttering up and down the street, so they could see the comings and goings of Dr. Giles’s clientele: which of the town’s members was seeing the headshrinker and why. Proving what people hated most about small-town living: there is no such thing as privacy.
Ours really is the paradigm of a small town. We’ve got one stoplight, and we’ve got a town drunk and everybody knows who the town drunk is: my father. Everyone gossips. There’s nothing better to do than throw one another under the bus. And so we do.
Ingrid opens the door before I knock. She opens the door and I step inside, wiping my shoes on the woven floor mat. She smiles. Ingrid is about the same age my mother would be if my mother were still here. Don’t get me wrong, my mother’s not dead (though sometimes I wish she was dead), she’s just not here. Ingrid has one of those short hairdos forty-or fifty-year-old women sometimes have, the color of wet sand. She has welcoming eyes. She has a nice smile, but a sad smile. There isn’t a person in town who could say a bad thing about Ingrid, but rather the bad things that have happened to Ingrid. That’s what they talk about. Ingrid’s life is the definition of tragic. She’s gotten the short end of the stick, that’s for sure, and as a result she’s become the town’s charity case, a fifty-year-old woman too terrified to step foot out of her own home. She has panic attacks any time she does, chest pressure, trouble breathing. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, though I don’t know her whole story. I make it a point not to meddle in others’ business, and yet I’ve seen Ingrid get loaded into an ambulance and whisked off to the emergency room when she thought that she was dying. Turned out everything was fine. Just fine. Just an ordinary case of agoraphobia, as if it’s ordinary for a fifty-year-old woman to stay in her home because she’s scared to death of the world outside. She doesn’t leave her house for anything, not to get the mail or water a flower or pick a weed. Within the gypsum walls she’s perfectly fine, but outside these walls is another story.
But all that said, Ingrid isn’t crazy. She’s about as normal as they come around here.
“Hi, Alex,” she says to me, and I reply, “Hi.”