The Broken Teaglass (39 page)

The cook behind the counter called our number, and Dan got up for our sandwiches. As he set mine in front of me, I realized I didn’t have much of an appetite. The sub looked heavy and stunk of overcooked peppers. As I stared at it, I remembered Mona’s chipotle burrito. How lonely Dan must have been that day he bought her lunch. And yesterday, after I left his office. And the day of the Christmas party. And for years, stretching back to before I was in college, before I was sick. To think that all the time those seeming eons of my life passed, before I even knew what the word
solitude
meant, he’d been sitting up there on that silent second floor, shuffling little papers, trying to explain the meaning of all and everything to the oblivious and ungrateful masses.

“It was a just thing you did,” I told him. “Even if you didn’t know it at that exact moment. You probably saved a few girls’ lives, in the end.”

“I’ve spent my life putting life’s complexities into pat, formulaic little nuggets. I prefer not to do it with my own moral ambiguities.” Dan paused and then pointed at my sandwich. “Eat.”

I took a bite that I didn’t wish to swallow.

He took a bite of his own sandwich.

“Would you like a soda?” he offered. “I forgot about drinks.”

I felt my eyes filling with tears. I shook my head vigorously hoping to hide them. He returned to his own sandwich and, I hoped, took no notice of my discomposure. I tried to take another bite. A slice of meatball fell out of my sandwich. I put the sandwich down.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said. “I won’t ever say anything.”

“I appreciate that. You needn’t keep assuring me.”

As I watched him chew and study the Michelob poster, I thought about my last couple of anniversaries, and how each one had fallen a little flatter than the last. I thought of all of my teenage righteousness. The clumsy, experimental spirit that had worn off in my first year of college. The friends I’d rejected for their presumed naïveté. The philosophy I’d thought would make everything clear.

“It isn’t our most courageous or most cowardly acts that matter most,” I said. “It’s what comes after those moments. It’s what we do
next
that defines us.”

Dan turned from the poster and reached for a napkin.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just more pat, formulaic nuggets.”

When I called Mr. Phillips and
asked him what his favorite dessert was, he said “blueberry grunt” so quickly and firmly that I didn’t dare question it. No matter that I wasn’t sure what a grunt was, or that when I later looked up the recipe online, I discovered that it wasn’t something that could be easily transported from my kitchen to his apartment. Mr. Phillips gave a snort when I called him back and asked him what he was doing the afternoon of New Year’s Eve.

“Rereading my Kahlil Gibran, same as last year,” he said. “You?”

When I arrived at his place with all of the needed ingredients, he waved off both of my apologies—for my bizarre behavior the other night, and for the blueberries being frozen, not fresh.

He humored me for a few minutes while I showed him a picture I’d cut out of
Motorcyclist
—of the Kawasaki I planned to buy in the spring. It was one of my New Year’s resolutions, I told him, to start putting money aside.

“Wait till March at least,” he said. “Don’t put yourself on that thing until it warms up a little and the ice melts.”

Then he handed it back to me without further comment. He seemed more eager to talk about Dan than anything else. About how cool he’d been when Dan called him, and what a worrywart Dan tended to be.

He sat at his little round kitchen table and talked as I poked around in his cabinets and drawers to find the right equipment—a fork, measuring cups, a cast-iron skillet that looked twice as old as me. Then I listened while he talked, letting the berries bubble and mixing up the biscuit dough. Eventually, the smell of blueberries covered up the hot-dog smell of Mr. Phillips’s apartment.

“He said he knew he could count on my discretion,” Mr. Phillips said, “and that this was really Mary Anne’s secret to either tell or to keep. And I said to him, ‘Dan, you’re like a nephew to me. You can trust me to—’”

“‘Nephew’?” I said, putting the lid on the berries and biscuits. “Why not ‘son’?”

“Because we both would’ve known that’s ridiculous. Even ‘nephew’s’ a little bit of a stretch. But I told him poor old Mary Anne’s business is nothing to me. If he wants to keep those sad little slips in the file, it doesn’t hurt me any. Or anyone else. Except maybe Dan himself.”

“How’s that?”

“Seems a little pathetic, doesn’t it? Him pining away all these years over his little supergirl? Guarding those slips she wrote like a bunch of lost sea scrolls?”

I was afraid my face might say more about Dan than even Mr. Phillips needed to know, so I changed the subject.

“So why do
you
think Mary Anne was so into the Korean War?” I asked. “Dan said something about a family connection, I think. Her father was there, plus her mother’s first—”

“A personal connection, yes.” Mr. Phillips wrinkled his
nose and thought for a moment. “Something like that. But I like to think it was more than that. Maybe she liked to know about things everybody else tends to forget.”

I wasn’t sure why my face reddened as I turned back to my biscuits and berries. We were silent for a while, until a little burping noise escaped from under the skillet’s cover.

“You hear that?” Mr. Phillips said, cupping his hand around his ear. “That’s why they call it
a grunt
.”

“I would’ve thought it’d be from the satisfied grunts you make when you eat it,” I said.

“No,” Mr. Phillips said. “Wrong again, Homer.”

I watched him sit back, close his eyes, and take in a long breath of blueberry-scented air. I wondered what the smell made him think of, and what other questions I’d forgotten to ask.

Mona and I spent that night
soaking up a little Claxton culture—a New Year’s fireworks display by the river. We parked downtown and walked to the bridge, talking the whole time about Mona’s romantic prospects with Dan.

“Did you know I tried to flirt with him a little at the Christmas party?” she asked.

“Really?”

“Yeah. We were talking about our mutual love of dark chocolate. I implied that we should do a taste test sometime. Maybe at that shop next to Cool Beans Coffee in East Claxton.”

I stifled a laugh, thinking of Dan coming upstairs in the middle of the Christmas party, flushed and “perplexed.” I wondered if his confusion came from Mr. Phillips’s behavior or Mona’s—or both.

“An implied date,” I said, sucking air through my teeth.
“Hmm. That was definitely a risk. And your topic was pretty intense. Dark chocolate is awfully sensual, you know. You might have started a little gentler.”

“I had to work with what came up in conversation. We were standing at the dessert table.”

“You’re definitely resourceful. That’s pretty admirable. But I think you need to look at the big picture here, Mona,” I said. “I’m going to level with you.”

“Okay. Please do.”

“
If
Dan were ever to date someone half his age,” I assured her, “I think you’d have a pretty decent chance. But would he ever do that? That’s the real question.”

“Well, what do you think?”

We’d reached the bridge. I followed Mona as she squeezed through the throngs of our fellow Claxtonites, finally settling on a spot by the railing at the far end of the bridge.

“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t think he ever would. It’s that quiet dignity thing. Grabbing at twenty-three-year-old ass just doesn’t jibe with quiet dignity. Maybe if he were ever having a nervous breakdown or an identity crisis, you could break him, but would you want him under that circumstance?”

“I suppose not.”

“Yeah, see … I think the stuff you like about Dan—the gentlemanly manner, the intellect, the quiet respectability—would have to seriously break down for him to consider dating a young employee … the Dan you
wanted
wouldn’t be the Dan you’d get.”

“If he was willing to take the May-December plunge, he wouldn’t be the kind of man I want?”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s the unfortunate paradox of your situation.”

“My life has been a series of unfortunate paradoxes.”
Mona sighed and looked across the bridge. “I think the show’s about to start.”

“Don’t talk like that on New Year’s,” I said. “Maybe this year will present you with a fortunate paradox.”

“Maybe,” Mona said.

I’d forgotten my gloves. I jammed my hands into my pants pockets and felt a little piece of paper on the right side. It was that one cit I’d kept the day I’d returned the rest. The one that prompted me to knock on Dan’s door and ask one last question. As I pulled it out of my pocket, the first rocket exploded, and Mona and I both looked skyward.

It wasn’t until after midnight, after the ball had dropped on TV and Mona had left my apartment, that I remembered the thing and checked my pocket again. The slip was gone. Maybe I’d let it slip out of my fingers as I turned my attention to the first crack of the fireworks and the first lights in the sky. I imagined it still lying on the bridge, maybe surrounded by confetti and paper casings from the exploded fireworks.

I wondered if it would be swept up the next morning. Or if it would be left to skitter down the street, into downtown Claxton, or out to one of the residential streets. Maybe it would get kicked around awhile, until it reached someone who’d pick it up and, ignorant of its significance, carry it off into oblivion. Then passed around till it reached the hands of someone who’d never know where it had been and how it had come to be there. Someone who wouldn’t know how a word gets into a dictionary, or that in all this swirling humanity, all this endless discourse, only a few occasional bits get caught, taken down, made official. The hands of someone who wouldn’t even know what they were holding. Someone who could know, but would never need to.