He looked at the two glasses in front of her, one stuffed with a napkin, the other brimming with brown liquid. “We don’t know it’s her yet. And Sam is still your friend. You’ll still see him. I know you’re sad, Esther, but think how happy he is.”
“He is, isn’t he? I never saw him look quite like he did at the wedding, and I thought I knew him best.” She lifted the glass and sniffed it. She shook her head. “I don’t understand what I’m feeling. I am happy for him. Mostly. But I also feel like I’m going to die of grief. I don’t understand it. I have a wonderful life. It’s astonishing, really, how much I have. Most days, I look around, and I think, This is exactly right. This is my path, and it’s a goddamn good one. At the very least, I’m sitting here. Still here.”
He said, “It’s a big change. How long did he live at the house with you?”
She tilted her head. “Twenty-three years. I was twenty-five when he rolled into town and he was twenty-two. Babies.”
“Long time.” He sighed. Tics of exhaustion pulsed at the back of his eyes, and something else, too, a bright, tight ache of memory, his young past self fumbling with conviction, fumbling with a girl in the dark hallway of a dance hall, her braid in his hand like a rope to safety. Conflicted, he’d fled from his plans for priesthood to the secular life, to pharmacy school, to this town. But he’d returned to his faith. He’d found his way back on his own.
He turned to reflex and said what he always said. “Have faith. Lean on God.”
“Oh, come on, Tom. Give me something I can use.”
He took another swig of beer, and he thought again of that girl. Peppermint breath, pink-tipped fingers clutching his tweed lapels, tracing the crooked scar on his cheek he’d gotten from a childhood dog bite. She came to him on nights like these, when his guard was down, his faith a little frayed at the seams.
He set his glass down hard. “For shit’s sake,” he said. “Why does everyone think I have the answers?”
She smiled. “Isn’t that the deal? Straight line to God?”
He leaned close to her. “Go home, Esther,” he said. “The answers aren’t here.”
She pushed the glass away and raised her hand to the bartender. “A house is not a home, honey.” She nodded at his glass. “At least let me get you one.”
He clenched his hands in his lap. He tried a smile. “All right. Sure. One more.”
The bartender brought the priest a beer and slid the woman a glass of water. She smiled at the bartender, that boy turned man. “Beto Navarro,” she said. “You look great. You look like a million bucks.”
He smiled back. “Thanks. You too. It’s Roberto now.”
The woman said, “Roberto. Yes. Lovely.” She stared at him a moment longer. “You wrote so beautifully. About something in space, yes? I remember a ship sailing across the sky.”
“Yes,” he said. “Once.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember it was beautiful.”
She turned to the priest and started to talk again. She said something about how she liked to watch sunlight, the way it filtered through dust in a window. She told him about her grandmother, how she wasn’t always so rotten but she’d had a hard life. Lost her daughter, inherited a five-year-old kid out of the blue. She said, “She was a good baker.” She asked, “Do you think she’d be proud of me now?” She told him about Judas’s hands. “Like kielbasas, seriously,” she said. She smiled, and then looked at the far wall, long into the middle distance. Those azalea bushes in her front yard—still there, still blooming like mad every spring. How was that possible? Such fragile blooms—one freeze, and it was sayonara, sweetheart.
The priest let her go on. He checked his watch once, feeling the lead of his limbs, the exhaustion rimming his eyes. He nodded and said “Um-hmm” and “Sure” and “I see,” his smile pinched. He thought of Stevie Prentiss, who’d come into the pharmacy all those years ago with her fake injuries. He’d tried to fix her anyway. He humored her as he humored the woman now because no matter the time of day or place, it was always someone’s dark hour.
She wiped under her eyes and said, “A priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Hey, what is this, a joke?’ ” She laughed and slapped the bar.
The priest said, “Good one.”
She said, “And then he quacked up. No, no, he cried fowl!” She howled with laughter, loud enough that other patrons glanced their way. Then she placed her head down on the bar. Her back heaved, buckling with the force of her sob.
The priest put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Esther. Let’s get you home. Time to go home.”
She nodded, slipping off the stool, hiding her face in her hands.
A woman walked out of a bar, crying, holding the elbow of a priest, who left his duck behind. The handsome bartender with the broad forehead watched her go, a tightness in his chest. He remembered the story she’d mentioned, one he’d written in a frenzy at the kitchen table. He remembered how in high school, she would pace at the front of the classroom as if caged. He remembered how she said one of the great questions of literature was about knowledge, about how humans know one another. “Think about it,” she’d said. “Do we really know anyone? How?” She’d leaned over his desk, her face close enough he could see the faint blond fuzz over her lip. “You can’t see my thoughts. You can’t see my heart. My heart is an inferno,” she’d said, thumping her chest, “but how would you know?” The other students had laughed and rolled their eyes, at her over-the-top, vein-in-the-throat passion, at her weirdness—and of course they’d snickered at him frozen in his seat, because people snickered at him then. But he hadn’t laughed. He hadn’t then, and he didn’t now as she slurred and stumbled out with the priest. As she opened the door into the warm night, he squeezed his hands into tight fists and lifted them to his face. Each the size of a heart. Beating. Ablaze.
Traces
June–August 1991