“I was only getting a drink. Or hoping to anyway.” I glanced at the bartender, who was refilling a beer for one of the old men and paid me no notice. “All right.”
I slid off the stool and followed Jeremy to a table by the window. In a T-shirt and jeans, he looked younger than he had in the button-down shirt and pants he wore when he came to the house. As a matter of fact, he was a year younger, I realized; I’d been held back that one year in kindergarten. When he motioned to the waitress, she came over right away, pulling out her notepad from her apron. She was a blonde, busty woman in a tank top and black jeans, and spoke with a smoker’s gravelly voice. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked him sweetly. He opened his palm toward me.
“Could I have a gin and tonic, please?” I asked.
“Sure thing. Anything to eat?”
“No, just the drink. Thank you.”
“I’ll have the burger, medium, with fries,” he said. “And a glass of water.”
“Coming right up, hon.”
The waitress left. I slipped my purse off my shoulder and hung it on the arm of my chair.
“How are you holding up?”
A question I had been asked by my roommate and friends a few times already, and for which I still had no answer. Since my father’s death, it was as if my life had stopped and I remained stuck in the same moment, the same place. “I’m not,” I said with a shrug.
“I’m so sorry, Nora. I know how devastating this is.”
There was so much kindness in his voice. For a moment, my eyes pricked and it seemed as though tears were finally coming, but somehow the feeling passed. I rested my chin on the heel of my hand and looked out of the window for a while. The sky was the color of peach. Cars passed now and then on the highway. A delivery truck pulled up in the middle lane and the driver climbed out to deliver a package. How odd, at this late hour. “He left me all this money,” I said, turning to look at Jeremy. “Can you believe it? Me, the fuck-up.”
“You’re not a fuck-up.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know fuck-ups. Trust me.”
The waitress came back. “Here’s your gin and tonic. And here’s your hamburger, hon. Ketchup and mustard are right there. Can I get you two anything else?”
“No, I think we’re good,” he said.
“You didn’t want a beer with your burger?” I asked.
He squeezed ketchup on the side of his plate. “I don’t drink.”
“At all?”
“No.” After a moment of hesitation, he said, “I get really bad insomnia. It was taking five or six drinks to get me to sleep, and after a while even that many weren’t enough. I didn’t like where I was headed, so I stopped.”
“And the insomnia is gone?”
“Well, no. It comes and goes.”
I stirred the ice with the little black straw and took a big sip, all the while watching him. He sat with his back straight and ate quickly, though nothing about his composure suggested he was in a rush. It was so strange running into him at McLean’s. I hadn’t thought of him in ten years, and now I’d seen him twice in a week. It struck me that this was yet another consequence of death, that it disturbed long-established patterns, even something as insignificant as this. Outside, the delivery truck was gone, leaving a clear view of the strip mall across the street. A woman was closing up the nail salon, testing the locks with both hands before walking away to her car. “Isn’t that where the ice-cream parlor was?” I asked, pointing to the salon.
“They tore it down a couple of years ago and rebuilt the whole thing.”
“I used to go there with Sonya Mukherjee after Spanish class.” In high school, Sonya and I had few friends. We were the only girls in the jazz band; we had last names that teachers always shortened to an initial; we celebrated holidays that were not listed on the school calendar; we were cast as the Magi in the Christmas play every year, despite our protestations that we were girls, always the Magi, with flowing white scarves covering our long hair, and robes dissimulating our budding breasts and hips. We were both thought to be Muslim and Sonya often had to say, No, no, I’m Hindu. Then in September of our sophomore year, two planes were flown into the World Trade Center and strangely that distinction seemed to matter less, not more. We were both called the same names. Ragheads. Talibans. Sometimes, raghead talibans. In Spanish class, at least, we got to be brown kids among other brown kids, an anonymity we craved all the more for its new rarity. After an hour of conjugating verbs—yo me voy, me fui, me iba, me iria, me ire—we often went to get ice cream.
“I remember,” he said.
“You were in Spanish, too?”
“No, I worked at the ice-cream parlor two days a week.”
“Right. Sorry.” An image came back to me now, blurry and yet also solid, of Jeremy Gorecki standing at the cash register in a white polo shirt and red apron, waiting to ring up our orders. I felt the heat rising to my cheeks and was conscious of him noticing it. For a moment, I was quiet, thinking about those long-gone days. Whatever happened to Sonya? She had gotten into NYU and sent enthusiastic emails for the first few weeks, but I hadn’t heard from her in years. I’d have to look her up someday.
“I remember one time you and Sonya got into such a giggling fit you knocked down the spoon rack. The whole place was a mess.”
“For the record, Officer, it was the cup display, and we got kicked out for that.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“But you never got into trouble.”
“?’Course I did.”
“Like what?”
“Kid stuff. I can’t think of anything specific right now.”
“Because there wasn’t any,” I said with a smile. Oh, God, I thought, I’m flirting with him. But it was a distraction from the intolerable fact of loss and the constant feeling of grief. His face was familiar—he had the same blue eyes, the same prominent nose—yet adulthood had made it new again. And the last ten years had clearly left their mark. There was a new hardness around his jawline, tempered by the early signs of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes.
I finished my drink and motioned to the waitress that I wanted another one.
“What’s it say?” he asked, looking at the tattoo on my wrist.
“It’s Latin. ‘A voice crying out.’?”
He reached across the table and touched the inside of my wrist, then turned my hand toward the light to get a better look. “Any reason?”
“I went to a rally out in the Bay Area when I was in college. Remember the law that would’ve made felons out of undocumented immigrants? Back in ’06?” He seemed on the verge of saying something about the rally, or the law, but instead he drew back his hand and waited for me to finish the story. “Anyway. When the police ordered us to disperse, I couldn’t find a way out and I got arrested. They put me in zip ties and had me sit on the curb while they waited for transport. It was my first protest, and I couldn’t believe I was getting arrested. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I’d need to be bailed out, my mom would find out, I’d have an arrest record. I kept telling myself I was fine with that, but the truth was, I was scared. Terrified, really. I was sitting there with my head on my knees when one of them asked me how old I was. I said nineteen. He asked where I went to school. I said Stanford. And then he cut off my ties and said, ‘Go home, kid, and mind your own business.’ I was so relieved to be let go, I didn’t think to tell him that this was my business. Everyone’s business.”
“I’m sure he knew you weren’t much of a menace to society. And he probably hated being there as much as you hated getting arrested.”
The waitress brought a fresh G&T. I stirred the ice in my glass and took a sip. The juniper spirit was doing its work; my stomach felt warm and the knot between my shoulder blades was starting to loosen. I was glad to have run into Jeremy, it was better to have company than to drink alone. “So you like being a cop?” I asked.
“There are good days and bad days.”