While I placed the order, he put a bunch of paper towels under the tap and wiped the dirt and blood from his face. His right eye was closing fast and his left was turning blue. “I think I have a Coke somewhere in the fridge,” he said. “Help yourself.”
I found a bag of hash browns in the freezer, stuck behind two empty vodka bottles, and gave it to him. He held it to his eyes, one after the other. I could already feel a massive headache settling in, and the cut on my eyebrow throbbed. What I wouldn’t do for a shower now. What I wouldn’t do to be back in bed, away from all this. While we waited for the pizza to arrive, he opened another beer. “Remember Rodriguez?” he asked.
“Rodriguez from Texas?” I said.
“No, Rodriguez from New Jersey. I’ve never seen anyone drink as much Coke in my life. Dude could down three cans in an hour, easy.”
“Well. Let me tell you a story about Rodriguez from New Jersey. He was driving us on a recon, and he’d had so much Coke he had to take a piss. But he couldn’t hold it. ‘I gotta go,’ he kept saying. ‘I gotta go.’ We found him a plastic bottle and he did his business, but when he tried to cap it he dropped it on the floor. We had to sit in a Humvee for three hours smelling his piss.”
“Dumb fuck.”
“I wonder what happened to him.”
“Back in New Jersey, last I heard. Delivers sodas.”
“No way.”
“Dude. I swear it’s true.”
When the pizza arrived, we ate quickly, stacking the slices one on top of the other like hamburger buns. Then Fierro wiped his mouth with a napkin. “This is good.”
“Yeah. Not bad for Domino’s.”
“No, I meant us. Here, like this.”
“I can’t be around all the time, man. I have my own life.”
He watched me for a moment. “All right. Listen, I’m sorry I showed up at your girl’s place. I wasn’t trying to scare her, I really wasn’t. I didn’t know where you went, that’s all. It’s not like I’m some pervert or anything. Besides, you never talk about her. I didn’t even know you were still seeing her. You’ve been avoiding me, like you’re ashamed of me or something.”
But I wasn’t ashamed of Fierro, I was protective of Nora. That was why, from the beginning, I’d tried to keep the two of them apart. Maybe that had made things worse. “You need to get help. Medical help. I thought I could help you, but I can’t.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“You’ve said that before, but here we are.”
He shook his head slowly, like I didn’t get it. “Sarge said I could stay with him for a while. Help him out with the bees.”
“Fletcher called you?”
“No, I called him.”
This felt like a punch in the gut. He knew how I felt about Fletcher, and yet he’d reached out to him, and brought it up at this particular moment. I was angry, but mostly I was tired, so very tired. I could see that he still wasn’t ready to face whatever troubled him, that he was only trying to run away to a different place. He’s made his choice, I thought. And I would make mine.
That was the last time I saw him, though I heard from him a few more times. The first time was about two months later, when I was working the Labor Day shift, and was alone at my desk. He told me he’d been learning a lot about bees, because Fletcher had 40,000 of them. Queens can lay as many as 1,500 eggs each day, drones are kicked out of the nest every fall, if a queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees can develop reproductive organs and lay a replacement queen. But he didn’t like the Waynesboro area very much and complained that people in the South weren’t as nice as he’d expected them to be. Another time, maybe eight months later, he called me in the middle of the night to ask if I wanted to meet him for drinks, he was only four hours away in Nevada. He was calling me from a pay phone near a freeway overpass, and the sound of traffic made it harder for him to hear me. I had to tell him twice that I couldn’t go anywhere, I had to work early the next morning. I didn’t ask what he was doing in Nevada.
The Marines had brought us together, two dumb kids from the desert, and although we’d fought side by side for years, in the end we’d come out just as we’d gone in: two different people. Now it was time for us to go our separate ways.
Nora
Somewhere on the Grapevine, a truck had crashed on the northbound side of the 5, spilling its cargo of toys and turning the freeway into an obstacle course of nerf guns, action figures, and assorted dolls. Traffic was blocked for miles. So it was almost midnight by the time I reached the 880 and glimpsed, with relief, the orange and green lights of Tribune Tower. I had worked there as an intern one summer, back when the Oakland Tribune still had its offices in the building. It was one of my favorite places in the city. My apartment was on the third floor of a pink Victorian house with no garage, no elevator, and no laundry room, and until recently I could afford it only because I had a roommate. That night when I came in, I found Margo in the hallway, still in her jacket, having just returned from a late dinner at her brother’s house. “How are you holding up?” she asked as we hugged. “Let me help you with your bags.”
“This is it,” I said, dropping my duffel bag on the wood floor.
“I wish I’d been able to come down for the funeral.” She hung her jacket in the coat closet. “I just couldn’t get away.”
“No, I understand.” I put my keys in the bowl on the console and slipped off my shoes. Margo was studying my face, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something, and an uncomfortable silence fell between us. “All right,” I said. “I’m going to turn in for the night.”
Without switching on the light in my room, I took off my clothes and got into bed, covering myself with the blanket I had bought after Max complained that my apartment was too humid. The neon sign from the movie theater down the street lit the ceiling an intermittent red, and I turned to the wall, falling quickly into a heavy and dreamless sleep. I didn’t stir until almost noon, when the sun was bright against the window shades. I had spent only a couple of months in the desert, but I had already grown accustomed to its open space and uninterrupted silence: the moment I opened my eyes, my room seemed cluttered, my bed too narrow, the street too loud.
When I walked out of my bedroom, I found Margo at the dining table with her laptop. She worked as a math tutor for a test-preparation company, and often her mornings were spent answering rescheduling requests from difficult parents. These requests she met with a midwesterner’s patience, coupled with a freelancer’s anxiety to get paid. Dvo?ák was on the stereo, a piano and violin piece that mercifully drowned out the hum of the street. After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I came to sit across from her at the table.
“How was it?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”
In the texts and calls we’d exchanged since I’d left, I’d only shared with her the broadest outline of what had happened, but now I began filling in the picture, telling her about my mother’s refusal to keep the restaurant, my attempt to run it even while the Bakers stayed next door, what had started with Jeremy and how it had ended. As I spoke, I felt something shifting, as if a spell I had been under for several weeks was finally broken. I had tried to fill the hole my father had left in my life by holding on to his things—his cabin, his diner, his secrets—and I saw clearly now that none of these could be a bulwark against death. Grief demanded surrender. I had to let go. I had to learn how to live with just the memories, nothing else.
But either I’d chattered for too long or Margo’s capacity to console hadn’t been deepened by the experience of death, because her eyes kept shifting. “I’m sorry,” she said. After a suitable pause, she asked, “So you’re back here for good?”
“That’s the plan.” The pile of mail she had saved was waiting for me, and I started idly sifting through it. A lot had accumulated in just nine weeks: bills, credit-card offers, magazines, mailers from art or music organizations.
“Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
I looked up from the junk mail. “What is it?”
“I’m moving out.”
“What? Where to?”