I shrugged. “How was the job fair?”
“Great.” She pushed at her hair. “Really great. Really, really, really great.” She smiled sardonically, but her eyes were anxious and scared, staring into some kind of bad future. “It was the sort of thing, the first day is all applications, meeting the people, then people call you back on the second day if they want you to come in and interview.” I remembered the stack of paperwork on her lap, dog-eared photocopies, ballpoint pen smearing everywhere. “So, you know, anyway,” she said. “Here I am at the pool.”
Well. I had my own thing going. I had my own problems.
A clutch of new kids came in, white kids, shrieking. A girl maybe thirteen plus two twin brothers just about Lionel’s age, the girl with freckles and the boys with flat midwestern crew cuts. They all splashed on in there, and the boys immediately got into some kind of tussle with Lionel, the way kids that age do, making themselves into animals, sliding around each other, surfacing on each other’s shoulders.
“So what’s your story?” Martha asked me, and I lingered, polite as Dirkson was polite. “Business or pleasure? I’m going to guess business.”
“Why do you guess that?”
“Oh, well, you know. A gentleman traveling alone? In Indianapolis? It’s a nice town, but it’s not, like, I don’t know.” She laughed. “Cancun. Right?”
“Right.” I smiled. “Yes. I travel quite a bit for business.”
As soon as I said it, I wished I had held my tongue. It was a foolish thing to say. Unnecessary. Martha was interested, too. “Cool,” she said. “God. I wish I traveled a lot. What do you do? Why are you here?”
“I work for a company called Sulawesi Digital as a site analyst.” She blinked. I smiled. “It’s a cellular service provider. Based in Indonesia.”
“What was it? Sula—what was it?”
“Right, well”—I smiled, apologetic site-analyst smile—“see, that’s what we’re working on changing. The company’s wanting to start opening some American locations. Raise brand awareness. So I’ve been traveling to some cities, investigating available retail properties in storefronts and shopping centers, and then what I’ll do is submit an analysis to Jakarta as to the relative desirability of each potential location.”
I had delivered this short speech, with the same dull Dirksonian earnestness, ten or twelve times in the past. Most people, you could watch them glaze over the minute you said words like analyst, words like relative desirability. But this girl, this Martha—her eyes were open to the story. She was nodding with fascination, as if I’d announced that I was a contract killer.
She even asked a follow-up question, asked what makes a location suitable or unsuitable, and I gave her the combination of factors: pedestrian traffic, neighborhood demographics, competition, while Lionel shrieked and giggled with his new friends. I could keep this up all day if she wanted to. My identity was researched: backed up, backstopped, and double-backstopped.
Martha sighed. “I’ve been to, like—Vincennes. That’s my world travels.” Her eyes were far away. “What’s the best place you’ve ever been?”
“Best?”
“Yeah, best. You know. Most interesting.”
Bell’s Farm. Bell’s Farm was interesting. “Chicago,” I said.
“Aw! Chicago! I would love to go to Chicago. Have you been there a lot?”
“I actually—” My throat felt rusty. The room breathed chlorine. How long had it been since I spoke to anyone this way? “I lived there for some time.”
Lake Shore Drive, the first time, skyscrapers lordly and glass-walled, hovering magisterially above Lake Michigan, reflecting gloriously at one another. My astonishing, terrifying sentinels of liberty.
“I’ve never been,” Martha said. Her shoes were off. Her toes were in the water. Among her tattoos were twin butterflies, one on each ankle, perfectly symmetrical. I noticed. I notice everything. “You believe that? I’ve lived in Indiana my whole life. I even lived in Gary for six months once. And I never got up there.”
“That does seem like a shame.”
“You’re telling me!”
She closed her eyes, like she was picturing it: picturing herself in Chicago. I pictured myself there, too, eating a hot dog. I pictured Castle. I opened my eyes again.
“I don’t know,” Martha was saying. “I never got hold of the right weekend, I guess. And then the kid happened, and—well. You don’t have kids, huh?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, they’re great.” She leaned into me, gave me a big stage whisper. “But they fuck everything up.”