When You Were Older (19 page)

‘Yeah. Well. Whatever. Water under the bridge, you know?’

And the door eased shut again.

I picked Ben up at three fifteen. Needless to say, I was careful not to be late.

‘You’re on time,’ he said, as he put on his seat belt.

‘I’m almost always on time. Yesterday was the only day.’

‘But yesterday you were late.’

‘I
know
that, Ben. I just
said
that. Yesterday was the
only
day I was late. Every other day I’ve been on time.’

‘But yesterday you were really late.’

‘Ben! Drop it!’ It was a full-on snap. I was on a short fuse. I hadn’t slept well, and my morning had left me in a strange state of unfocused misery. And I really bit his poor head off.

‘But you
were
,’ he said, pitifully. As if to stress how justified he’d been in mentioning it.

Then he sulked quietly, and, much as I enjoyed the silence, I felt like shit for hurting his feelings.

‘Let’s talk about something different,’ I said.

‘OK. Like what?’

‘Like … tell me about your day.’

‘OK! It was good.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Tell me something that happened at work today.’

‘I bagged groceries.’

‘Something more specific.’

‘I bagged a lot of groceries.’

‘OK. Never mind.’

‘Wait! I know! I’ve got one. I know something. Mrs Durst came in. And she bought a great big giant-size thing of kitty litter. But she had it on that bottom thingy part of the cart, and so when Eddie walked her groceries out to the car he never put it in her trunk. And so then when he brought the cart back in, there it was. This great big thing of kitty litter. So Mr McCaskill had to call her, and she had to drive all the way back, and I had to carry the kitty litter out to the parking lot so she wouldn’t have to come in again. And then guess what happened?’

‘I have no idea, Buddy.’

‘It turned out it never got rung up, either. Cause it was down below. But Mr McCaskill said to just forget it. Because he was embarrassed that she already had to come back. But he really gave everybody a talking-to about being more careful.’

‘There you go. See? It was a pretty eventful day after all.’

A silence. Then, as I turned the last corner toward the house, Ben said, ‘Oh. Oh. And another thing, too. I saw Anat. She came in the store.’

A predictable pounding from my heart. Embarrassingly, no more than the mention of her name was required.

‘Did she talk to you?’

‘Yeah. She always talks to me. She’s nice.’

‘She is,’ I said. ‘What did you talk about?’

‘You.’

I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine.

‘What about me?’

I already had the instinctive sense that I wasn’t going to like this.

‘She said your eye looked really bad, and she felt bad for you. And I said yeah, I felt bad for you, too, but Mark wouldn’t have hit you if you didn’t hit him first. And I said I told you about how you shouldn’t hit, but you said you sort of had to hit, because what Mark said about her was mean.’

I sat there for a moment, then dropped my head to the steering wheel.

‘And then what did she say?’

‘She wanted to know what he said about her, but I told her I couldn’t really remember, because even though I was there, nothing Mark said sounded mean to me, but that he
was
talking about her, so probably I just missed something. Are you OK?’

‘Not really,’ I said, my forehead still pressed to the wheel.

‘I wish you would be OK.’

‘Me, too,’ I said, and forced myself to rally. ‘I wish I would be OK, too. Let’s just go inside.’

IN THE MORNING
I stepped into the bakery at the usual time. Through my new choice of doors.

I noticed a bell that sounded as I opened the door, and I wondered if it was newly installed, or if I really could have missed that on previous days. I tended to be dazed and preoccupied on my way in, so anything was possible.

Anat looked up, then down at her work again. There was definitely something to be read in her reaction to me. But I had no idea what. Well. I had some idea. And it wasn’t good. I was just short on specifics.

I stood on my side of the counter, staring at her, until she looked up again.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I have something I need to tell you.’

At first she looked as though she didn’t intend to stop working. But in time – too much time, really – she wiped her hands on a small towel and came and stood
on
the other side of the counter from me. When she looked at my eye, I saw her reaction. It wasn’t literally a full-on flinch. But close.

‘That looks even worse today.’

‘I know. It hurts more, too.’

‘What did you want to tell me?’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth yesterday.’

I paused, in case she wanted to comment. She didn’t.

‘I guess I thought it would only make you feel bad to know. But it’s one of those decisions you make fast, on the spur of the moment, and then you look back later and realize it only works for the short term. In the long run I think it’s always better if everybody knows the truth. But right at that moment, yesterday, when you asked me, I just felt like I couldn’t handle seeing the look in your eyes if I told you. I guess it was more selfish than anything else. But I’ve been under so much pressure lately. I feel like I’m walking some sort of tightrope, and any little thing could unbalance me. So I ducked that moment when I should have told you the truth. And now I regret it.’

‘Because you got caught?’

‘I don’t think so. I think I would have regretted it anyway.’

‘And would you have come and told me?’

‘Probably not. I would’ve wrestled with myself about it. Because I would’ve been afraid it was one of those things that would do more harm than good. But I’m glad things worked out the way they did. So I didn’t have to leave it that way.’

‘Wow,’ she said, her eyes flickering up to mine and then away again.

‘Wow what?’

‘You’re very honest for a big fat liar.’

I laughed a little. Happy to let off a puff of tension.

‘I usually am pretty damn honest. Actually. Sometimes too much so.’ Silence. It stung. ‘So …’

‘So?’

‘Am I forgiven?’

Anat sighed. ‘It’s not that big a deal,’ she said. Not sounding like she meant it. ‘Well, it is. It is, but it isn’t. Next time I want the damn truth whether I’ll like it or not.’

I reached my right hand over the counter and offered it to her to shake. It took her a long time to notice it, and a little while longer to figure out what she was supposed to do with it.

But then we shook on our new deal.

IT WAS TWO THIRTY
in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep.

Then it was three. Then it was three thirty.

Ever since I’d given up going into the kitchen to be alone with Anat in the morning, I’d had a miserable time sleeping at night. It was almost as though holding back the urge to enjoy that time with her was like capping steam. The pressure just kept building, making normal things impossible. Like living.

I’d even switched to decaf coffee in the morning. In case that was part of it. That wasn’t part of it.

Then it was four, and I started wondering what time she came in. I started engaging in dangerous thinking. Because if she came in at four, there would likely be no one on the street at that hour. I could tell her I couldn’t sleep, which, God knows, was true. And I could see her. Really see her.

And not like a customer.

And I could be back in plenty of time to drive Ben to work.

I wrestled with myself for a while. After all, she’d looked at me with such love when I said I didn’t want to bring trouble into her life. I should stay here.

Then again, I could tell her with absolute honesty that I was in a bad way, and needed to be with someone. Talk to someone.

Well. Her. I needed to be with her.

By about twenty after four, I lost patience with the wrestling. I got up and got dressed, careful to put on the shirt I liked best. Of my three. Of course I had more clothes. But not locally.

I turned on the overhead bathroom light before brushing my hair and my teeth. The bruise around my eye was turning sickly shades of yellow and light purple, and the eye itself was shot through with blood.

There was no way around it. I looked a sight.

But I was going.

I parked the car around the corner, rather than right out front.

My heart hammered as I walked to the kitchen door, but I kept my stride even and brave. I stepped up to the bakery window and looked into the dimly lighted kitchen, already raising one hand to wave.

And there, inside, was … Nazir.

It hit me like a mule kick to the gut. This must be Monday. Had I known this was Monday? Obviously
not,
but why not? How could that have been a whole week? I couldn’t make it all mesh in my brain.

Meanwhile Nazir was waving back. He shot me a broad smile and came to open the door. His smile flickered slightly when he got a look at my new face. But he didn’t comment or stare.

‘Hey,’ I said, not yet coming in. As if I had to apply for his permission first. Which was possible. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m having a hard time. With … I don’t know … everything. I needed to talk. I thought maybe I could come talk to you.’

Thankfully, somewhere in the middle of that last sentence, the fog in my brain cleared and I understood the importance of giving the impression that I had known it was Monday all along. That I had come by at four thirty to talk to him. Not to Anat.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. You are my good friend. Well. New. But good. Please come in.’

He stepped back from the doorway to allow me to enter. The bakery kitchen seemed to be infused with a long-lost warmth. It looked the way home might look after you’ve been lost in a storm for days, thinking you might never see it again.

I stepped inside and breathed deeply.

‘Pour yourself a coffee,’ he said. ‘I have a pot going.’

I did as directed, then rejoined him in the kitchen.

I leaned on a stool, and for the longest time I watched him scrape down the inside of the big industrial mixer as it turned. Without speaking.

In time he looked up at me.

‘You don’t do much talking for a man who needs to talk.’

‘True. I guess I’m having trouble getting started. Maybe you could get me going. Ask me what’s wrong, or something.’

‘I don’t have to ask you what’s wrong,’ he said. He turned off the mixer and leveled his bold gaze on me. ‘Your mother just died. The place where you worked was attacked, killing most of your colleagues and friends. No one can take care of your brother now but you, and he’s not easy. And someone has apparently been beating on your face.’

I nodded three or four times.

‘That sums it up surprisingly well. I wonder why I even need to talk about it now.’

Nazir shrugged. ‘You tell
me
,’ he said.

I watched him remove the mixer bowl and hoist it on to the table, turning and scraping the mountain of donut dough on to the floured surface.

I sipped the coffee. It almost blew the back of my head off.

‘I make it strong,’ Nazir said.

I hadn’t known he was paying such close attention to me.

‘I feel like I’m stuck in some kind of bad dream,’ I said. I turned my gaze out the window. A streetlight illuminated the empty miniature intersection. Like a dollhouse. This town was sleeping. And possibly not
real.
‘I hitchhiked here with nothing but what I could fit in my big backpack. Because there were no planes. There was no transportation to be had, but I had to get here. And it’s like I stepped into this dream, and now it won’t let me go again. I wasted a month’s rent on my apartment in New York.’ I never said Jersey City. New York sounded better. ‘Because my stuff still lives there. Now I’m going to have to pay another, soon. For all intents and purposes right now I own like, two pairs of jeans and three shirts and four pairs of socks. And I don’t even know when I can get to New York to get my stuff because Ben probably can’t be left alone that long. I thought I’d go back there. To live. Or at least to make some arrangements to really move. But I don’t see how I can. But everything I have is still there. Except me. It’s like I don’t even know where I live.’ I dropped my head into my hands for a minute, and then made a sort of growling, angry noise. ‘Listen to me. I’m pathetic. I should pull myself together.’

‘You are too hard on yourself,’ Nazir said.

‘Am I?’

‘Much too hard. Anyone would be having a hard time in your situation. And you would be patient with them. Why won’t you be patient with you? If my mother had just died, I would be a mess. Even just that one thing. I would be a mess.’

‘Is your mother alive?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She died ten years ago. When Anat was only ten. I was a mess.’

My brain ran in circles, figuring out that Anat was only twenty. Somehow I’d thought she was my age. Or close, anyway.

‘You have friends you can talk to?’ Nazir asked, interrupting my brain.

‘I guess not, or I wouldn’t be here. I have Ben, but I can hardly talk to him. There was a woman before I left New York – just a friend, nothing more – but I’ve broken that off. And there was one guy at my office who survived, but I don’t really know him. Anat has been very nice. And you. You’ve both been very nice to me. But I’ve only known you for …’

I stopped to think how long I had know them. Had it been the fourteenth or fifteenth of September when I stumbled into town? This was the twenty-second of October. I had known Anat a little over five weeks. That didn’t seem possible.

While I was trying to wrap my brain around this readjustment, we were startled by the sound of glass shattering. Nazir made it around the counter long before I did. I let the moment freeze me.

When I caught up with him, the dark seating area in the front of the bakery looked like a broken-glass sea. I could feel the cold of the wee hours of our Kansas morning pouring through. Nazir turned on the lights, and I was able to make out some of the bits of glass painted with what I knew were the letters of his name.