I’ll admit, it does feel weird—almost illicit—going to meet her again. Nonetheless, I want to get more details about Eli and Elaine, and I want to see if she will reveal anything else about Neil or The Pact. Last time, I was certain there were things she wasn’t telling me. I got the feeling that maybe she just wanted to get a better sense of me, to renew our old friendship before she got down to the real details.
I don’t leave my phone with Huang. I take Uber to a coffee shop near the ball park. While waiting for my hot chocolate, I remove the battery from my phone. Then I head over to the Caltrain station and take the first train south to Hillsdale. I buy the office some chips and candy bars at Trader Joe’s, so I’ll have a bag to carry around the mall. I walk through Trader Joe’s and Barnes & Noble, alert to my surroundings. As far as I can tell, I’m alone. I wander through a few more stores, just to make sure.
Ten minutes before the hour, I set up in the corner at the far end of the food court, about a hundred yards from where JoAnne and I last sat. I watch the doors, waiting for her to walk in. I buy a couple of corn dogs and another green lemonade.
I wait. Ten minutes, nineteen minutes, thirty-three. I keep checking the time, watching all the entry points, getting more nervous by the minute. At some point I look down and realize that I’ve eaten both corn dogs, though I don’t even remember putting them in my mouth. The lemonade is gone too.
JoAnne doesn’t show. Shit. What can it mean?
At twelve forty-five, I stand, clear my table, and retrace my steps, up the escalator, back into the mall. What do I do now? I didn’t plan for a no-show. For some reason, I’d convinced myself that JoAnne was as eager to talk to me as I was to talk to her.
I walk around Nordstrom, through Uniqlo, and out the back of the mall. I’m confused. Anxious. Worried for JoAnne, worried for myself, and—okay—maybe disappointed. Maybe there was something more to this meeting than wanting to learn about The Pact. I realize guiltily that some part of me just really wanted to see JoAnne. If Alice was someone else in another life, so was I. Not to the same extreme, and for me it was so long ago. By the time I met Alice, I was fully the adult version of myself. But before that, there was college me—not exactly confident, but blindly hopeful, na?vely idealistic—and JoAnne was there during those years. JoAnne knew that version of me.
I try not to let paranoia set in. I decide to head back, give the food court one last chance. I stand at the top of the escalator that leads down into the food court. I can see almost every table from here. Nothing. As I’m about to step onto the escalator, I notice a large guy in a black turtleneck standing in front of the tempura place. He isn’t with anyone, and he isn’t eating anything. I’ve been watching him for a couple of minutes when he pulls out his phone and makes a call. I’ve never seen him before, but something seems off. He’s not Declan, the guy who came to take Alice to Fernley, but he’s certainly a reasonable facsimile. I quickly retreat into the mall. Then I escape through the Gap and out a side door.
A black Cadillac Escalade is idling by the curb. There’s a woman sitting at the wheel, but I can’t make out her face through the tinted windows. Is it JoAnne? Five parking spaces down from the SUV, I see an empty Bentley. Blue, very nice, just like Neil’s. With the rise of Silicon Valley, all of the recent IPOs, the vesting of Facebook and Google, there’s a lot of money on the Peninsula these days, so a Bentley isn’t really that surprising. Although what would a guy with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car want to buy at the mall?
There are a million reasons JoAnne might have missed our meeting today, and I run through each of them on my long journey back to the office.
53
“How did your meeting go yesterday?” I ask Alice. It’s the end of March, and I’m looking forward to the start of a new month. Spring always makes me feel optimistic, and I tell myself this year should be no different.
“Okay,” she says, kicking off her heels in the entryway. “Dave took me for an early dinner at a Mexican place by his office. He can be a jerk, but in the end I think he means well.”
“That’s awfully forgiving of you, after the way he behaved.”
She heads into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of orange Calistoga. “I asked him about all that, actually.” I take down two glasses, and Alice pours. “He said he almost lost his first wife due to working too much—he didn’t want to see me go through the same thing.”
“So,” I say, unable to hide my sarcasm, “he was doing it for me?”
“Yes. We are happy now, aren’t we?”
“Of course.” I take some cheese out of the fridge and melt butter in a skillet. I put the cheese between slices of sourdough bread. “You’re almost all done with Dave, then.”
“Actually, he hired me for a suit he’s filing against a builder. It’s small, but it won’t hurt with the partners.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? How do you know he’s not just hiring you so that he can continue to pry into our lives?” The butter sizzles and I slide the sandwich into the pan.
“It’s not like that,” she says, staring into her glass. Yet I don’t trust Dave.
“I got you something,” she says. She goes into the entryway and returns with a wrapped gift. I can tell without opening it that it’s a book.
“You didn’t need to do that. You just gave me a birthday present.”
Alice gives me an appraising look. “You still haven’t finished The Manual, have you?”
I flip the sandwiches with a spatula. “It’s so long.”
“Gifts related to special occasions, to include birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays such as Valentine’s Day, should not be counted as satisfaction of the monthly gift requirement,” she recites.
As I tear off the wrapping paper, I realize I’m in trouble. I don’t have anything for Alice. Shit, I should have kept the scarf. Inside the box, I discover a copy of a Richard Brautigan book, Willard and His Bowling Trophies. For years, I’ve been collecting first editions of the novel, Brautigan’s best. As they’ve become increasingly hard to find, the joke has grown that I might soon own every copy. Alice has snapped up several copies online, but she takes particular pride in the ones that require actual legwork. Whenever she travels outside of the Bay Area, she checks used bookstores to see if she can find another copy.
It’s a nice specimen, even signed on the title page with an inscription to a girl named Delilah. Brautigan was popular with the hippie girls.
“Perfect,” I say. I go into the living room and put it on the bookshelf beside the other copies. Back in the kitchen, I find Alice plating the sandwiches with some raspberries and spoonfuls of crème fra?che. She carries the plates into the dining room and beckons me to sit.
“I thought this was the thirtieth,” I say.
“Thirty-first.” She checks her watch. “It’s seven twenty-nine. You can still pick something up if you hurry—try Park Life, maybe.”