Lydia gulped, and when she stood from the chair it rocked forward and bumped the back of her knees.
“You haven’t seen Lyle, have you?” she asked.
“Now that you mention it,” Wilma said, “I haven’t. Not since Joey’s death.”
“Let me know if he shows up, will you?” Lydia said, then lifted the bed-wetting book. “And thanks for this. I’ll bring it back in a few days.”
“Take your time,” Wilma said, walking away. “It’s not our most popular title.”
Lydia did take her time, standing in the Parenting alcove and studying the two books side by side, trying to figure out why Joey had labeled the one with the other. As far as she could tell, they had nothing in common except that, at some point, they’d both been in Joey’s hands. She shuddered and gave up. When she left the Kids section, both books tucked under her arm, Wilma was kneeling on a pillow, reading a picture book to herself, dabbing a Kleenex against her nose.
That kid had a giant hole in his heart, she’d said, and if anyone could measure its depths—could drop a pebble into its well and listen for the plunk—it was Wilma.
On the pedestrian mall a few blocks up from Bright Ideas, Lydia sat alone on a sidewalk bench. The morning was cold but sunny, carved with the sharpened shadows of Sixteenth Street.
She set her coffee and the two books on the bench next to her and retrieved a small box of raisins from her jacket pocket. As delicate as a shorebird, she stuck her fingers into the tiny box, moved each raisin to her lips, and chewed. As she nibbled she studied the red box until the sounds of passing traffic disappeared. The woman printed on the raisin box was as she’d always been: young and glowing, wearing a red bonnet and holding her bounty of grapes against a giant yellow sun. Picking, chewing, swallowing, Lydia was a child again. Raisins! How had she forgotten about raisins? The way the smallest seeds stuck in her teeth. The way she felt when her fingers were little and— A shadow crossed her eyelids. A delivery truck hummed past. A man stood next to the bench.
“Is it really you?” the man said. The sun was bright behind him and Lydia had a hard time seeing his face.
“Excuse me?”
“You are Lydia, right? Of course you are. My god. Hello.”
He took a step toward her and Lydia nearly flinched. She thought for a second he had something in his hand, but it turned out it was just his hand.
“Who do you think you are?” she said, but she still had raisins in her mouth, and as usual, she sounded more apologetic than pissed.
“This must seem strange,” he said, stepping back. “Showing up like this, no warning.”
Lydia’s eyes were adjusting to his silhouette in the sunlight and his features soon were clear. His skin was rich and dark, his black hair clean and mussed, and the brown of his eyes was so brown, the white so white, that she felt as if she were looking at a photographic negative. He wore a suede sport jacket, rough blue jeans, embroidered belt. He was slightly chubby but stood sturdy, confident—irritating.
“Lydia? You really don’t recognize me? Little Flower?”
Now she did recognize him.
“Oh my god,” she said, and her breath gave a little jump when she thought about this man, as a boy, wearing a buckled jumpsuit and gazing at her with adoration. “Raj?”
He opened his arms and Lydia, after a quailing pause, stood into a hug.
“Look at us,” he said, “both alive.”
Lydia took a step back and grabbed the nape of her neck. Her impulse was to sprint down the sidewalk as fast as her awkward feet would carry her—but then somewhere inside she felt a small bright glimmer, and she was greeted with a simple image of the two of them as children, sitting on the carpet in her father’s library, leaning back-to-back, encircled by books.
She almost smiled. “I just can’t believe you’re here, Raj. Because it’s been like—”
“Like twenty years.”
“Wow. Twenty? Sheesh.” She nodded into the cold, then lifted her coffee and moved her books into her lap. “So? Sit with me. Yeah. Sit already.”
Both sat on the slatted bench. A pigeon flapped past in the street.
“I saw your picture in the newspaper,” Raj said.
“You’re not the only one,” she said. “You do realize that was like two weeks ago.”
“It took me that long to gather the nerve to come down here, to be honest.” He nodded in the direction of the bookstore, a few blocks west. “I wasn’t expecting to find you on the way.”
“I sit out here a lot.”
“Lucky for me,” he said. His teeth still gleamed, just as they had when they were kids, and his hair was still a shaggy mess, and his skin still glowed. “I wasn’t even sure you wanted to see me again. Otherwise, you would have—”
“Otherwise I would have looked you up when I moved back to town? It really wasn’t intentional, Raj.”
“You don’t have to explain, Lydia. It doesn’t get more loaded than us.”
“No,” she said, smiling, “it doesn’t.”
“We’re carrying some serious baggage,” he said. “Especially you,” he added, then gently closed his eyes. “Sorry. That was probably the wrong thing to say.”
“Only because it’s true,” she said, and lightly slugged his arm.
“I guess I’ll see you in another twenty years.”
Both of them were smiling now, unable not to. Lydia surprised herself by grabbing Raj’s hand. She didn’t say anything and he didn’t either, but after a minute Raj let go and slid over to his half of the bench.
“So, how long have you been back?”
“In Denver? Gosh, like six years?”
“And here all this time I thought you were hiding in the mountains,” he said. “Address unknown.”
“For a long time I was.”
“One day there was a For Sale sign on your lawn and that was it for my pal Lydia.”
“The plan was to stay in touch,” she said, “but then—you know.”
“I know.”
“I tried.”
“I know.”
And Lydia was being truthful: when she and her father had fled Denver in the middle of her fourth-grade year for the small town of Rio Vista, Colorado, she’d done her best to write letters to Raj, even if it simply meant letting him know she was alive and safe and missing his friendship. She’d spent more time decorating the letters’ margins with flowers and forest creatures than she had on the sullen details of her days. Her father always read and redacted her letters carefully before driving to distant towns—Salida, Gunnison, Leadville—and mailing them without a return address. Since no one could know where they’d ended up settling, Raj never had the option of writing her back.
Eventually, predictably, her letters had stopped.
Lydia looked down at the sidewalk’s gray and pink granite pavers, arranged to resemble the scales of a diamondback slithering through downtown. It was quiet between them. She reached across the bench and gave his wrist a little shake.
“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “I mean it.”