“I’ll pick you up there.”
Ava wished she’d dressed better, with her highest heels. It was probably better that she looked like she normally did. People would notice differences in her appearance and get suspicious. For sure somebody would see her get in Jay’s car and whisper to the others and by the next workday everyone in the bank would have heard that she was with a man they did not recognize, a black man yes, but not her husband. “Come by at six. I’ll try to be done by then. If you aren’t here at six, I’ll be on my way home,” Ava said.
“I’ve been waiting a long time. I’ll be there. I’ll be early.”
“Don’t be early. You’ll just be waiting. I won’t be done until six today. Okay, JJ?”
“I’ll be there.”
20
“I can take you to a nice place, Ava. Let’s go to Hickory.” Jay kept his hands on the steering wheel, determined to drive away from the Simmy’s parking lot.
“This is fine. I just want a greasy burger. Just don’t tell Mama, JJ. I mean, Jay. I’ll get used to calling you that,” she said. She had not drunk the whiskey she’d asked Lana for, so she thought she deserved the greasy food. If she was lucky someone would tell Henry and he would know that she hadn’t wasted a second before she’d forgotten completely about him. “You probably don’t remember how she is about this place.”
“I’m not telling.” Jay doubted Mrs. Sylvia cared anything about Simmy’s anymore. What more damage could happen that hadn’t already been done anyway? Everybody was keeping the wrong secrets. Jay looked around the restaurant as they walked in. Don’t let Carrie be working, please, please, he thought. Ava waited for him at a booth in the corner. “One second,” he said to Ava as he walked to the front counter and got the attention of the fifty-ish white woman behind the cash register. “Y’all can sit anywhere you want,” she told him.
“Is Carrie working?” Jay whispered.
The woman looked hard at him, like she wasn’t sure if she recognized him or not. “She’s not coming in tonight.”
Jay nodded and joined Ava at the table. He had no idea what he would have done if Carrie had been there. Gotten Ava the hell out of there was all he knew.
“What’s going on?” Ava said.
Jay shrugged and sat down across from Ava.
“I hardly ever come here, but some of them from work bring takeout every week or so,” Ava said. The same waitress followed him to the table and took their order. The waitress’s lipstick was old and creased in the lines of her lips, her eyes lined too heavily with a dark brown pencil. She was pretty but not as young as she hoped you thought. “Your order might take a couple of minutes. We have so many callins tonight. Everybody has to have a king burger one last time, you know.”
“Thank you.” Ava watched the woman walk away from them. Her Bermuda shorts, the kind older women preferred that covered wrinkled knees, hung straight up and down like a young boy’s might, with none of that middle-aged spread. Poor women, Ava thought. Always worrying about what some man might think. “Men suck, you know that?”
“Yep, I do.” Jay laughed.
“That’s the best answer,” Ava said and sipped from her water. “Tell me where you’ve been. I’ve wondered where in the world you might be.”
“I’m boring.” Jay chuckled. “There’s not much to tell.”
“Well you can’t be more boring than me,” Ava said.
“I’ve thought about you a hundred times. More than that. I usually think about you in your house. That’s where I imagine you most,” Jay said.
“That’s where I’ve been for the past hundred years. Tell me what’s been going on with you,” Ava said.
Jay told her a story about his life in the army, about the months that turned to years when he meant to write or call her or e-mail her, but couldn’t imagine what he would say. He told her about traveling and spending so much time alone he talked aloud just to hear another voice in the room. He’d lived in Texas for two years, but he couldn’t get used to the heat. “Nothing prepares you for it,” he said. A certain kind of dry air still made him gulp oxygen like a starved man. For years he had lived in an apartment complex where he didn’t know the names of any other tenants. He told her about his time in a small town in Pennsylvania and the crows that darkened the sky every evening at dusk on their way to Crow Hill. Jay laughed at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe them. I heard an old man say one time they were around when he was a child. They tried everything to get rid of them. They cut down trees, played music, made all kinds of noise,” Jay said. “But they couldn’t get rid of them.” He laughed again. Jay told her about seeing his sister and her saying her life was full without him. That’s just what she’d said, that her life was full. He told her about being alone and feeling like the last of his kind.
“Why didn’t you come back here?” Ava asked. “You could have come back home.”
“I’m here. I did.”
“Took you long enough.” Ava tried to count up her years and distill them for Jay. Nothing felt important enough to recount. She had lived and worked and the years had piled on like cordwood virtually indistinguishable from each other. She wished he’d reached out to her.
“I looked you up on Facebook. There are more JJ Fergusons than you think.” Ava had searched through the list of JJ Fergusons and found teenagers, white girls, JJ’s of all ages and descriptions. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if she’d found him, probably sent him a note and tried to sound light and breezy like he was never important to her, something like “Hey stranger!”
“I looked for you too.”
“You knew where I was, Jay. I’ve just been here. Have you seen Alice’s yet?”
“A couple of weeks ago. The place is run-down. Same as ever. The barrel where she had me burn trash out back was still there.” Every few days before trash burning day, Jay had had to jump in that barrel, tamp down the trash that accumulated. Nothing else he had to do in that house made him feel more forlorn, like the boy in the novel begging for gruel.
“What’s going to happen to the house? Does her daughter want it?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think she spoke to Alice for years. I don’t care. I really don’t, Ava. I wouldn’t care if it burned to the ground. Don’t worry about me. I just went there to see the end. If I saw the house, then that part of my life happened. I hope it makes sense to you, because it doesn’t to me,” Jay laughed. “I just started thinking that I could put it behind me. How many times do you get to see the end of anything?”
“You’re looking for closure? Is that it?” Ava asked.
“Maybe.”
“Did you get it?” Ava asked.
“Not so you’d notice,” Jay smiled at her.