After the truck left, I stepped back to admire my new sign. It had come out even better than I expected and, pleased with my work, I felt energized to take on another little project. The pendant lamps that hung over the leather booths dated back to 1959, when the diner had first opened, and although they were made of beautiful cream glass, they were so dim that they made the place look ghostly at night. I decided to upgrade the lightbulbs to 75 watts—bright enough to see the menu, but still intimate enough for a cozy meal. So that night, I told Marty to go home and that I would close up.
I locked the front doors and brought out the bulbs from the storage room. With only the pale light of the counter to see by, I went from table to table, changing the old lights with the new. Then I flipped the switch on, and the row of booths came into view. I stepped out into the parking lot, to see how the diner looked from outside. The whole place was so bright and inviting that I was half-tempted to leave the lights on all night. From the corner of my eye, I saw Baker’s son stepping out of the arcade. He paused next to his father’s Crown Vic and observed my restaurant for a minute, as if he had a stake in it, too. He used to be a lanky, shifty-eyed boy, but now that he was a man, his frame had filled out and he had a direct gaze. Almost too direct. Again, that feeling of being watched came over me.
Still, it was a good day’s work, and as I left the diner and locked the doors behind me, I was filled with hope about the future. I’m doing it, I thought, I’m finally doing it. Tonight, I would tell Maryam about Beatrice and me; I would delay it no longer. Jiggling my keys in my hand, I walked to my car.
Jeremy
I was walking down a hallway that had recently been sprayed with graffiti, blue and yellow scribblings whose shapes I couldn’t quite make out. A tall crate partly blocked my way and as I rounded it, three of them came upon me. I fired, killing one and injuring the other two. Then the doorbell rang. I pressed Pause, my rifle frozen in the center of the screen, and checked my score. Just four points behind Damien85, a Canadian gamer I’d been trying to beat for weeks. Taking out my wallet, I went to the front door, trying to remember whether the lamb masala was $14 or $16. But it wasn’t the delivery guy, it was Nora. My heart lurched.
I stuffed the money back into my wallet and stepped aside. She came in, a faint scent of perfume trailing behind her. No makeup on her face. That silver necklace around her neck. And in her hands, I noticed now, a brown shopping bag with my hiking shoes and hats and clothes poking out of it, all the little things I’d left at her cabin. So this was it, then. We’d arrived at the fork in the road, the place where love ends. For weeks, I’d braced myself for this moment, and yet it had come and found me unprepared. “You can just leave that right there,” I said, raising my chin toward the nearest corner.
But I wasn’t ready to return the dress that hung in my closet, the dress into which I’d buried my face until I could no longer detect her scent. I wanted to keep the enameled pillbox that held her vitamin supplements, and that still sat where she’d left it on the bathroom counter. I couldn’t give up her copy of The Fire Next Time on my bedside table, the margins filled with notes sometimes so long that they spilled out over the edges and onto the next page. Signs that she had been here. Signs that she’d shared her life with me for a little while. She put down the paper bag and took in the mess in my living room: a first-person shooter game on television, frozen at the moment when blood spattered the screen; the pile of clothes over the couch where I slept, or tried to sleep, most nights; the bottles of beer and whiskey; textbooks and notebooks tossed under the coffee table, gathering dust. Then she fixed her eyes on me. “How are you?” she asked.
“Never been better.”
I was trying to provoke her, but she ignored my sarcasm altogether. After a moment, she said, “I heard from Detective Coleman.”
So this was why she’d come. Just this, nothing else.
“I can’t believe A.J. killed my dad, then let his father take the fall for him.” She shook her head in disbelief. “And we would never have known if not for that traffic stop.”
“I had no idea it would lead to this,” I said with a shrug. It hadn’t occurred to me simply because I didn’t know what it was like to have a father like Anderson Baker, who would have sacrificed anything to keep his son safe.
“Either way, thank you, Jeremy.”
I gave a quick nod of acknowledgment. Still, the sound of my name on her lips brought fresh pain. Go, I thought. Go. Make it quick. The doorbell rang again. Relieved at the interruption, I went to answer. It was Joe, the delivery guy. I’d been ordering from the Indian place two or three times a week, and there were days when Joe was the only person I talked to that I wasn’t working with or trying to put in jail. “Hey, man,” he said cheerfully, handing me the paper bag with the receipt stapled to it, the total highlighted in yellow marker. “It’s $21 even. Samosas were half off tonight.”
I took the bills from my wallet again and quickly counted out $25.
“Is that your girlfriend?” he asked, glancing over my shoulder.
“What?”
Joe broke into a smile. “Your girlfriend? She’s cute.”
I handed him the money and took the brown bag, kicking the door closed with one leg. The smell of warm naan and garlic and lamb wafted from the bag, but I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I set the food on the kitchen counter, and when I turned around, I found Nora in the doorway. To be this close to her was unbearable. A knot formed in my throat and I had to swallow hard before I could speak. My words came out halfway between a cry and a question. “You just left.”
She came to stand against the counter, across from me. “I thought everything that happened before was going to happen again. Only with me, instead of my dad.”
“I told you, I would never let Fierro hurt you.”
“That’s not something you can promise.”
“So you leave? You don’t call, you don’t write, you just disappear. It’s like I meant nothing to you, like I was just a crutch you got rid of when you didn’t need it anymore. You just moved on.”
“I didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m just as broken as before.”
All I’d wanted was to take care of her, and somehow I had managed to do the opposite. “I fucked up,” I said. “I know I fucked up.”
She touched my arm, and in that instant the memories came back in a flood. How she’d leaned into me the first time I’d kissed her, out there in the desert. How she’d pressed her lips against my skin when I’d told her about Fletcher. The Neruda poem she’d slipped into the pocket of my jeans while I was in the shower one morning and that I’d found when I was fumbling for my keys later, in the parking lot of the Stater Brothers. I’d stood beside my car with the ten-pound ice bag I’d just bought melting in the sun, and read it again and again. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries / the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself. It was the closest she’d ever come to telling me she loved me. The few weeks I’d had with her were the barometer against which the rest of my life was measured. A moment earlier, I’d been so angry with her I’d wanted her to leave, and now I felt light-headed with longing. “I miss you,” I whispered.
“I miss you, too,” she said.
Love was made of echoes like this, and now that I could hear them, I knew we could figure it out, find a way forward together. I opened my arms and she stepped into them, her body fitting so perfectly against mine it was as if she had never left. All we needed to do was to keep talking.
Nora