It’s Lonnie at the door, a surprise.
She comes into the house carrying a cardboard box. “I caught up with that reporter, Bartolomo,” she says. “Wasn’t much there, either because he doesn’t have it or he still somehow thinks I’m playing for the other side. One paper, I reminded him. There are no more sides.” She holds out the box, which is strangely damp on the bottom. Jay takes it from her hands. She’s wearing a Mizzou sweatshirt and black jeans. She smells like nicotine and root beer, a bittersweet scent that suits her. “But I thought we might want to look at some of my old notes from the first two girls.” And then, as if it’s just now occurred to her that she hasn’t laid eyes on him in nearly a year, hasn’t been inside his house in as long, she goes in for an awkward pat on Jay’s back. “Where are the kids?”
Jay nods toward the den, a wide room with exposed ceiling beams, just past the formal living room and the kitchen. He follows Lonnie, the sagging cardboard box pressed against his chest, setting it down beside the leather sectional, where Ben is lying, flat on his stomach. “Lonnie!” he says when he sees her. She opens her arms as he jumps toward them. There used to be a time–after the Cole story broke, Lonnie getting her byline on the front page of her old employer, the Houston Chronicle–when she spent a great deal of time with Jay’s family, coming over to dinner at least a couple of times a month. Ben grew up around her, in fact. She left the Chronicle in ’92, met a girl she liked and bought a little house in the Heights, and waited for her star to rise at the Post, careful to keep her private life private this time, convinced it had caused her problems at the Chronicle. And then from out of nowhere the shit all fell apart. First the Post went, then the girl, then the house. The losses hit Lonnie hard, and depression made her scarce. And then Bernie got sick, and they kind of lost the thread of their unlikely friendship. Jay and the kids, they haven’t seen her in months. She gives the little one a hug, asks him how his gin rummy game is going. She taught him to play when he was six. Jay offers her a beer, leftovers from the fridge. She shakes her head, peeling off her sweatshirt and reaching into her back pocket for a pack of Parliaments. “Not in the house,” he says. She nods, remembering, and slides the sweatshirt right back on. “Let’s take this party outside then,” she says. She hefts the cardboard box against her hip, heading for the patio. Jay opens the sliding glass door for her. “Where’s El?” she says, as they settle on opposite sides of a wrought-iron table, the weight of the cardboard box listing it to one side. The house is a one-story ranch, more wide than deep. The rest of the lot is all yard, a cool, green expanse stretching a quarter of an acre to a wooden fence.
“ ’Preciate you doing this,” he says, nodding toward the box.
“Please,” she says. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing for the past two months?” She pulls the cigarettes from her pocket again, fishing out a book of matches too. “You ever heard of something called ‘online dating’?”
“No.”
“Good,” she says, lighting a Parliament. “That’s part of my pitch. Old shits like you who read magazines to keep up with what the young folks are doing, even if just to shake your heads at their foolishness. AOL, that Internet company, they’ve got these chat rooms. And there’s something called Match.com. Apparently, it’s a thing, meeting people on your computer,” she says, shaking her head at the sheer absurdity of it. “You tell people what you like, what you’re into, and see if they’ll write you back. The same personals shit that paid half our salaries at the Post, only now you can lie about your height in the privacy of your own home.” She blows a line of smoke into the dark, and Jay smiles. He’s missed her, he realizes. “In the past six weeks, I’ve put on my best ‘straight girl’ jeans, and been on a dozen of these blind dates, each guy a bigger asshole than the last. Actually, the assholes I prefer. It’s the ones that look like they’re going to take my purse when I go to the bathroom that scare the shit out of me. The last one ate his fingernails at the table. He actually called me ‘Ma’ twice.” The amber-colored deck lights are on a timer, and they went out a few moments ago. Jay waves a hand, and they snap back on. He wishes he’d grabbed a beer for himself. “Anyway, I’m thinking of writing a feature about it, hoping it’s something a major monthly might be interested in.”
“How’s your money?”
“It ain’t great.”
“You need a little something, I can–”
She waves him off at first. But then, thinking it over, she says, “Yeah, maybe.” She sucks the Parliament to the filter. “It might come to that.”
She stubs out the cigarette with the heel of her leather boot.
“Where’s El?” she asks again.
“On the phone,” he sighs. “She’s always on the phone.”
“Fifteen,” Lonnie says. “I remember.”
She lifts the flap of the box, revealing a mound of loose paper. “This is it, by the way. Everything I walked out with last year. I pulled some of my notes on Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells this afternoon. No news on the search, huh?”
“I don’t think so.”
From the box, Lonnie pulls out a crinkled batch of notebook paper. “I’m thinking about going out there tomorrow, see what’s what.” Jay can see his inquiry this morning has stirred something in her, stoking a reporter’s curiosity.
“What did Bartolomo say?”
“Well, the girl was definitely working on a campaign, the search is on for which one.”