“Raj,” she said, failing to sound strong. “It’s pretty late to just pop in.”
Raj looked intensely into her eyes but didn’t speak. Since their reunion on the sidewalk the other day, he’d shown up at the bookstore a few times, a frequency that may have bordered on stalky except for the fact that he lived in the neighborhood and was, of course, her oldest friend.
“Come back another time,” she said, and started to close the door. “Okay? Earlier.”
“I wanted to see you,” he said, then added, almost as an afterthought, “and to show you something.” He shifted the doughnut box awkwardly in his hands so he could fish something out of his pocket. At the sight of his bumbling, Lydia felt a small glow inside, the spark of an old ember.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out to grab his arm. “It’s okay. Come in, come in.” Raj, she reminded herself, shouldn’t need a reason to visit her, even after dark. “I just get a little spooked when David’s out of town.”
Lydia had no intention of cheating with Raj, yet as he crossed the threshold into her apartment, brushing accidentally against her chest, she found herself wondering whether David would ever cheat on her. She knew she didn’t have to worry about his blowing his paycheck at a strip club or a massage parlor—he wasn’t the type, as far as she knew—but she sometimes wondered what he would do if he connected with a woman who was more wholesome and cheery than she was, someone who was more his type. Maybe because of the education conference he was presently attending, she found herself imagining David sharing wheat-germ muffins with one of those nurturing homeschooler babes, the type who dressed like Laura Ingalls Wilder and chugged milk straight from the udder. She shared more with David than she ever had with anyone—her anxiety around crowds, the nibblings of sadness she often felt in her gut, her penchant for afternoon sex—yet she was fully aware of the one thing she could never reveal: her night with the Hammerman. She just hoped she wasn’t pushing him away.
Raj wandered around the small apartment hugging the doughnut box under his arm. His blue jeans were hacked at the shins and he wore tube socks and black leather sandals despite the cold. She couldn’t help but notice that he was slightly plump, as he’d always been, yet he was still attractive and had an aura of comfort and solidity. When he paused in front of her books—each one a dusty time capsule of the hours she’d spent within it—Lydia grew self-conscious of her secondhand shelves, doubled up with books, some tripled, and the sight of them left her feeling obsessive and antisocial. But as she studied Raj’s profile, watching him hug his doughnuts, she thought he appeared equally obsessive, equally antisocial.
“You do anything but read?” he said.
“Not much.”
“Sounds nice.”
Raj poked around her apartment, and at one point he stopped in front of David’s meager shelf of books—fat programming manuals and a few collegiate musts, like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—and picked up a little robot that David had made out of bottle caps. Perhaps Raj was reminded of his childhood, lost now, spent building plastic model cars in his bedroom.
“How are your parents anyway, Raj? They doing okay?”
“I guess they’re fine,” he said, shrugging. “I worry sometimes about my mom. She never takes a break. She burned her hand recently, really bad this time, but the next day she was right back at work, wearing this mitten of gauze. The woman refuses to take a day off.”
“So same as always,” Lydia said with a pensive grin.
“Same as always: Dad’s a crab and Mom’s a smiling wreck. You should stop in and see them sometime. Really. If you can handle it.”
“I’ve driven by,” she said, shrugging. “Just never stopped.”
Which was true. Countless times, Lydia had passed Gas ’n Donuts while taking the Colfax bus, or riding shotgun with David, or heading on thrift-store excursions with Plath, but her nostalgia for the place had never been strong enough to outweigh her dread of dredging up the past. Despite the paint peeling from its fa?ade, the building itself had remained a deco landmark, with wraparound neon and curved stucco walls and glass bricks lining either side of its entrance. She’d seen Mr. Patel a few times through the street-side windows, slogging around under the smoke-stained American flag that still hung on the wall over the counter. He’d grown a thicker beard and a gut the size of an engine block, and even from a distance she could tell that he still wore those stretched white T-shirts and frayed gray hairnets, and he still carried himself exactly as he had when she was a girl—which is to say he moved through the world like he wanted to kick its ass. As for Mrs. Patel, Lydia had only seen her in passing once: smiling wide and wearing an apron over her sari, politely holding open the door for a customer who was carrying a box of doughnuts and a cardboard tray of coffee—just as she always had when Lydia was a girl.
“I really should stop and say hi,” she said. “You’re right.”
“They’d love to see you. I’m telling you, that place is like a time warp. Nothing’s changed.”
She watched Raj with a wistful smile. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but you seem the same, too. Unchanged. In a good way.”
“Okay,” Raj said, nodding with mild amusement, “my turn. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought you’d be way different. You don’t seem screwed up at all.”
“We’re all screwed up, Raj. Modern living.”
“But look at this place. It’s all so grounded. No dirty dishes in the sink. No lipstick on the windows. No pet tarantulas. You really pulled your shit together.”
“I work at a bookstore,” she said. “That’s not exactly corporate law.”
“But I expected you to be curled up in an asylum somewhere. I was actually kind of hoping for that.”
“So you could save me?”
A grin cracked his lips. “So we’d have more in common.”
Raj leaned against the bay window and looked out. From the right angle during the winter, when the leaves were stripped from the trees, the golden dome of the capitol could be seen gleaming in the distance.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, and the words came in a burst, before she had a chance to stop them. “What was it like for you after I left? I wrote you all those letters, but you weren’t able to write back, so that’s something I’ve always wondered about. If you even remember, I mean.”
“What was it like?” he said, turning his head but not turning around.
“For you.”
“Horrible. Not like it was for you, but still really horrible.”