“Maybe it’ll come. If it does tell me what it feels like.”
The waitress brought the burgers to the table in red plastic baskets, mounds of shoestring fries spilling over the side. “Pure fat and salt. I’m going to miss these,” Ava said, holding a fry. “I’m not worried about you.” Ava smiled.
Jay picked up the burger, the bun glistened with grease. He took a huge bite and wiped his face.
“Are you married, Jay?”
Jay wasn’t sure how much he wanted to tell Ava about another woman. He took another bite of the burger to consider what to say. The waitress watched him from behind the fifties-style counter. He couldn’t tell if she watched him because he was a suspect or a patron. It could be both. “I spent about five years with a woman. Not married. It should have been two years.”
“What was her name?”
“I shouldn’t tell you. That was a long time ago,” Jay said, but it had only been three years.
“I’m not sure why that matters, but it does. What happened?”
“Bea said I was unreachable.”
Ava nodded sagely like she was intimately acquainted with a world of unreachable men. “Did you try to get her back?”
“It had played out. With some people it plays out like that.” By the end, Jay had imagined himself on an ice floe and Bea on another. At first they pretended not to notice the drift. Once the distance became unavoidable, they’d just kept going. Jay had loved Bea’s kids. The three of them had been little when he and Bea started together, and he had not wanted to leave them behind. He had told this to her, to stay together, let the children have the best of both of them. She’d looked at him like he had lost his mind. It pained him to think that someday in the not so distant future those children would not even remember his name.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Ava said. They looked at each other and laughed. “We all get disappointed.”
“Maybe.” Jay shrugged. “We want what’s missing. Everybody wants what’s missing. That’s it, Ava.”
Ava pushed her food away and wiped her mouth. “Henry’s got a child. I just saw him.”
Jay nodded.
“He is beautiful. God, Jay. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I hated him. That’s the first thing I felt about that beautiful child. Isn’t that terrible? I felt almost nothing for his mother. You know that doesn’t make sense.”
“You didn’t hate anybody. I know you. You were sad, baby,” Jay whispered.
“I would never have done anything to him. I don’t know what I felt.”
“Hey you know what? People think crazy shit all the time, and you get to think crazy shit. That’s all allowed.” Jay looked around the restaurant to see who heard him. He hadn’t mean to get loud. “You get to think anything you want to. Okay? Listen to me, Ava. Don’t worry about it,” he whispered.
Ava stared at Jay an uncomfortable amount of time.
“What? What is it?” Jay asked.
“You don’t know me, Jay. Maybe you used to know me, but I’m not the same.”
“People don’t change, Ava. I wish they did. You can hide but you can’t change. I’ve tried everything to improve.” Jay laughed.
“That can’t be true. We have to be able to do better. Right?” Ava felt her lip begin to tremble. She was not going to cry in goddamn Simmy’s.
“Y’all need anything else?” The waitress mercifully addressed the question to Jay. If she saw Ava crying she did not let on.
“Maybe in a minute,” Jay nodded.
“Let’s talk about something else. You caught me at a strange time, but maybe every time is strange. I miss being young. Not my twenties, they sucked,” Ava laughed. “But you here makes me remember being a kid. I’ve wondered so many times what it would feel like to see you again.”
“Take a look. It must be good. To see me, I mean,” Jay said.
Ava smiled at him. His teeth were slightly bucked, his lips large with a tendency to chap. His face fuller now than the skinny boy she’d known. He had a thoughtful more than handsome face, a kind face. Had she never noticed his very curly lashes? She couldn’t remember.
Jay tried not to return her stare. Who knew what registered on his face? He probably looked like he wanted her to say that he was in her thoughts; that he had never left her, that their time together however relatively short had meant as much to her as it had to him. He wanted her to say that there were days, many of them, that on the job, in the grocery store, in the car on the way to anywhere that she found herself breathless and disconsolate at the loss of him.
“Don’t think I’m going to say something nice, Jay,” Ava said.
Jay reached for her hand.
21
Night crept on them as they drove the curvy road to Jay’s house. Ava closed her eyes for most of the trip. No need to see the fine details of the landscape that blurred by. The first time she flew she imagined a giant movie reel outside of the plane, the landscape playing like a film, the plane unmoving. When they finally landed, she would not have been entirely surprised if the pilot announced they were in just the place they started. The landscape on the mountain was unchanging, tree after tree, curve after curve playing on the window screens.
Ava followed Jay to his front door. The yard was still hard-packed red clay, but the possibilities were enormous. Her mother would love to see all these big open spaces ready for planting.
“I’m glad we got here before dark.” Ava turned her back to the door. The house sat in the middle of a flat expanse at the top of a rise. Behind the house were large trees, the tangled woods and weeds that did not invite hikers or walkers. The front yard sloped to another flat-ish space of land that one day could be a tennis court, a camping space, a massive garden, anything your heart and pocketbook could imagine.
“Watch this,” Jay said as he punched numbers into the keypad. Four quick beeps and the locks clicked open. “Keyless.”
“Check out James Bond,” Ava said.
Jay turned on the light and let Ava look into the rooms and the staircase from the foyer.