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by Kristen Tsetsi

  “I thought about spinach, but I wasn’t sure you would like it.” She wipes her mouth with a small corner of her napkin.

  “Raw or cooked?”

  “Cooked.”

  “No. I wouldn’t have liked it.”

  She takes another bite of fish and looks at me while chewing, then swallows. “Have you had any luck finding a new job?”

  “You were only gone a week.”

  “That’s not enough time?”

  I wonder if she left anything in there with William. I would leave something with Jake, I think.

  There’s no sign of a flag, anywhere. The one they would have given her.

  “You look good,” I say, and she does. Not like a widow, or the way I’d imagined a widow would look. Her hair is back to perfect, her makeup dark and overdone the way it always was, shirt stiff and creased and buttoned low, fake nails applied and painted the color of blackberries. When she opened the door, her smile was wide and she said I had to come in so she could show me her souvenirs from D.C.

  “I look okay. Life goes on, right?” she says.

  Life goes on. Life goes on goes on goes on. Goes. On.

  The pilaf turns blurry. Or not. Too hard to tell, so I look at the fish. The fish is blurry. I nod and poke my fork around on my plate.

  “No,” she says. “No, I don’t mean that. That is, I do—because of course life does go on—but it’s not as easy as that. What I mean is, it goes on whether or not you…” She sighs, exasperated. “It just goes on, regardless.—Are you okay?”

  I take a bite of food, say “Fine,” and chase a clump of rice with my fork and wait for my eyes to dry. Yesterday, maybe the day before, whoknowswhocares, I started worrying about me. I might die before he comes home. A car wreck, an aneurysm in the shower, choking on swordfish bone.

  An apartment fire.

  And what if he moved on the way Denise has? What if he were okay?

  If Jake dies and, like Denise, I end up moving on, what will that mean?

  “You just do what you do,” she says and takes a deep breath. “Anyway. Do you like the fish?”

  “Fuck the fish.”

  I am about to apologize—I hadn’t expected to say that—but I don’t, because Denise goes on to tell a story about a girl she knows, a friend of a friend, who died in a car accident two weeks after her husband left for Iraq.

  “You never think it will happen that way,” she says, shaking her head. “He gets a month home, and then he has to go back.”

  Would a month be enough? Could Jake go back to work after a month? Pity for the girl’s husband turns into pity for Jake when I remember the fire, that it could have happened to me, to us. That I might have actually killed myself. I might have killed the neighbor whose newspapers I stole, killed Paula and Safia and their cats and Chancey, all of us choking and melting and clawing at the burning walls.

  “I think it tastes a lot like regular steak,” she says. “Don’t you?”

  I look around at Denise’s walls, white, cool, and not burning, and think of my own, gray but sound. And Paul and Safia and the red-haired girl are alive. I’m alive. Chancey was there this morning to pull at my toe. But it could have happened. Everything else aside, so much bad could have happened and didn’t.

  Did I even say that? About fucking the fish?

  I laugh. And I tell her I don’t usually like fish. “But this is good.” I tap it with the tip of my knife and then get up for a paper towel—

  “Want one?”

  “Please.”

  —and notice a thick stack of collapsed moving boxes wedged between her refrigerator and the counter.

  She takes the towel from me when I sit down and another bite of the fish confirms it is the most flavorful fish I’ve ever eaten. Between chews, between swallows, my focus has drifted from myself and the time on the clock to the things that are missing around her house.

  “Moving?”

  She nods.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Where?”

  “Home. Not with my parents; I’m buying a house.”

  “Buying? How?” I wonder if we’ll get a house when he comes home. A small one with yellow siding and a cheerful face—the way doors and windows can make a face—and a mailbox with “Lakeland and Sharpe” stenciled on the side.

  She flattens some rice into a patty, then uses her fork to press a criss-cross pattern into the top. “Insurance.” She doesn’t look at me.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “About two-fifty.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even have kids.”

  She shrugs again.

  “Are you keeping it all?”

  “What else would I do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Give it to his parents?”

  “Right,” she says. “I didn’t think about that.”

  We look at one another across the table.

  “How soon is ‘soon’?”

  “It depends on when the money comes through,” she says.

  “What about Brian?”

  But she will not talk about Brian, so I ask instead for more details on her trip to Virginia and she answers without mentioning the funeral. I learn that the temperature was slightly cooler. The grass was very green and the sky seemed to her to be a different shade of blue from what we have in Tennessee. (I try to imagine how the sky can be different shades of blue from state to state.) She tells me the Metro is “so fun, and so efficient! The rest of the country would truly benefit from public transportation like that,” and that someone, “the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen,” helped her onto the platform by reaching out for her hand. “I would never sleep with someone just after meeting him, but if he hadn’t disappeared into the Metro, who knows?” She winks, then says, “You know I’m only playing.”

  “Sure.” I mix some rice with some fish and blend it with the smallest taste of wine. As Donny’s friend Judy might say, heaven.

  “I even bought a hotdog from a street vendor near the Mall,” she says. “I asked for everything—ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, onions. He called it ‘the works.’ Then I added chili. Everything. Have you ever had a hotdog from a city vendor?”

  “No.”

  “It was awful.” She laughs. “The worst hotdog I ever had. But I had to eat the whole thing. You know?”

  I don’t. “No,” I say. I drink more wine and the nausea builds. Damn it.

  “Anyway,” she says. “Virginia was beautiful. And there were the most heart-ripping paintings on display at the Mall, all of them being sold by veterans. There was one…” Her eyes tear and she wipes them without hiding. “I forget what it was called. A man in a briefcase leans forward with his hand against the Wall—you know the Wall?—and on the other side, in the reflection, are…well. You’d have to see it. I can’t—you would really have to see it.”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about because I’ve never been to D.C. and haven’t seen the painting, but I listen, anyway, and sit quiet when she stops.

  “Do you like the wine?” she says.

  “It’s fine.”

  “William’s mother knows wines, and this is her favorite. It’s brisk, I think, and nice and light.”

  I taste it again. Light? Sure. Brisk? I have another sip, but can’t taste the briskness.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she says, “about William’s lighter. Did you ever find it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You’ll let me know if you do?”

  “Sure.”

  “His father gave it to him on his twenty-first birthday.” She twirls her own lighter in her fingers like a coin. “William used to smoke. He started at sixteen and thought he’d hidden it from his father for all those years, until he unwrapped the lighter. He quit that day.”

  “I’ll be on the lookout.” I say, “Brian was worried when I couldn’t find it.”

  She turns in her chair to open a drawer in the hutch beh
ind her and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. She hands one to me and lights it for me. “He knew how important it was,” she says, leaning to open the window, the cigarette hanging from her mouth.

  “What were you going to do with it?”

  “I wanted his father to have it.”

  “Do you think he would want it?”

  “Probably. Wouldn’t you?”

  He carries a state quarter in his pocket, the one with St. Louis’s Arch on the back. I gave it to him one Valentine’s Day because it reminded me of our first weekend away. A bride and groom had been having their pictures taken in the downtown square, and we’d sat on the stairs and watched. Later that night while we waited for pizza to be delivered to our hotel room, I asked Jake what he thought of the bride’s dress (I’d thought it frilly). He said, “I don’t remember. I was watching you.”

  That quarter, a simple twenty-five cents, belongs to him and getting it back would be the same as—or worse than—having never given it to him.

  It was the right decision, not handing over William’s lighter.

  “You have it, don’t you?” she says.

  “Hm?”

  “William’s lighter.”

  “What would I want with his lighter?”

  Denise leans back in her chair and crosses her legs and her arms. “I’m not sure, Mia. What do you want with it?”

  “I don’t have it.” I hold her stare until I think she believes me.

  “Well. If you do find it—”

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “I’ll give you my parents’ address.” She takes a deep drag from her cigarette, so deep I see her hide a gag when she flicks off the ash. Her face is contorted and ugly when she exhales.

  For what might be half an hour we make empty conversation. She asks again about my job hunt and nods uninterestedly when I tell her I’m on the verge of finding something.

  “Where?” She studies an acrylic nail.

  “The paper,” I say. “They’re looking for a proofreader.”

  “You’d get to use your degree again.”

  I want to tell her that any moderately literate moron could be a proofreader. “That’s right,” I say. But it’s a good idea, actually, and I make a mental note to look into it. She tells me there were a lot of jobs in the D.C. classifieds, then tells me about the professional “aura” of the city, the exciting lives they must all lead.

  “Surely not all of them.”

  She ignores me and goes on about the day she spent with William’s parents. They dressed like “rich city people” for lunch at an expensive restaurant, and then they changed into “street clothes” to visit Mount Vernon.

  “Thank God it’s the last time I’ll ever have to see his mother,” she says. She taps a finger on the table. “You know what, though, Mia? She wasn’t even that bad. All the complaining I did, all the whining—I was incredibly immature. Once I realized she was no longer my mother in-law, I started to see her differently. As a woman instead of as William’s mother. And she’s a pretty wonderful lady.”

  I want to ask her, I need to know, what does dead look like, because until you see it, it can’t be real, can it? “How was she? At the funeral, I mean.”

  “Crying. Sad. What else?”

  “Did…uh…how did—? William?”

  “What do you mean, ‘William’?”

  “Sorry. I mean, was it an op—”

  “Oh. No.” Her look says Don’t ask and so I don’t. “I still can’t get over it,” she says. “Do you know what I mean? An accident. It could have happened here! He went all the way over there to die in some…” she shakes her head, searching, “…some foolish accident. He should have been shot down,” she says. “That would make more sense than flying into wires. Then again, he was the only one who ever said he was a good pilot. How do I know if he was or not? Maybe he was the worst they had.”

  “Jake always said he was very good,” I say, which is not true. Jake said nothing about William’s flying one way or the other.

  She shrugs. She shrugs a lot, and I never noticed. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Dead is dead.” She refills her glass, then mine.

  “Brian said William asked for it,” I say. The wine is good. Too good. My glass holds all that remains of the Pinot, and the nausea hasn’t left, but I’m getting better at ignoring it.

  She sets down her glass. “No, he didn’t.”

  I tell her about Brian’s visit, the things he said.

  She shakes her head. “He didn’t mean it that way. You would have to know Brian.”

  The way she says Brian—vowels drawn out, soft—and the way she strokes her glass…it was her. In his car, on my street.

  I think about his hand on her thigh, repulsive just days after William’s funeral, and on the heel of my disgust trails an odd sexual excitement, the same conflicted—and fairly recent—thrill that swells when, considering a possible future, I imagine Jake attracted to someone else. He smiles at her, some anonymous beautiful woman, and kisses her in the dark of a helicopter on the tarmac at night. I hate him in those moments and believe I could probably kill in a passionate instant. I’m also inexplicably aroused. But only for a second. It must be a consequence of all this abstinence.

  “Brian dodged the war.”

  “He didn’t ‘dodge,’ Mia.”

  “Close enough.”

  “I guess that’s it, then!” she says, throwing up her hands. “I officially dislike him, now.” She lights another cigarette. She’s been smoking them quickly, one after the other. She used to space them out, unless I count the night she found out about William. “What do you think? Do you think we’re two strangers who’ve spent the last few years sweating under the sheets without a word to one another? We know each other, Mia. Do you understand? It’s not a torrid tryst, not some cheap affair. You and I have already talked about this.”

  “I know.” Still, there is a determination to destroy her confidence in Brian’s devotion, her easy acceptance of William’s death. It’s not at all fair to her. She fell out of love, is all, and maybe he did, too, at some point. Can it ever be only one person who falls out of love? William had to have let go, to some degree, or he couldn’t have stayed. Not without destroying himself.

  I say, “I just don’t understand how you can be okay.”

  “I’m not ‘okay,’” she says, “but, I am better than I could be. I don’t want to go into why, if you don’t mind. But I do have my reasons. Do you trust that I’m not evil, not cold?” She pauses while I nod. “What about you?” she says. “How are you?”

  “I’d rather talk about you.” Which is true. Since I arrived, I haven’t thought about the messages Jake hasn’t sent.

  She lays her cigarette in the ashtray and comes around the table to hug me. Her arms are thin and her shoulder bone is sharp on my cheek. The closeness is awkward, but even so I want to hold her close far longer than she stays.

  We don’t look at one another again until she’s back in her chair on the other side of the table. “He’ll come home,” she says.

  Before leaving, I pretend to have to use the bathroom and snatch one of her souvenirs, a porcelain model of the White House, from a shelf in the hallway.

  Outside, after goodbyes and when I’m sure she’s not watching from the window, I set it in front of my tire and listen for the pop of the hollow glass when I pull away from the curb.

  MAY 20, TUESDAY—MAY 26, MONDAY

  The local newspaper’s editorial office will call if something becomes available, but for now, the woman says, they think they’re okay.

  I want to tell her they’re not, no, and that in the space of four days I found two misplaced apostrophes, four typos, two errant commas, and at least seven sentences lacking parallel structure.

  “No one pays attention to that stuff,” Denise says when we meet one afternoon for coffee. I tell her they should, that attention to detail is part of what keeps us civilized.

  She does not ask abou
t her White House.

  I use Jake’s card to buy a new television, a small thirteen-inch, and put it in the bedroom for the nights I can’t sleep. Without it, I lie awake listening to Chancey moving between rooms, pawing at his litter, scooping water with his tongue. Listening to the computer humming and waiting for the email chime to ding.

  Time, too much time, passes with no word from Jake, no visits from Denise, not even a call from Olivia, and I wonder if I am dead. If, as in some movies, we die and aren’t conscious of our deaths until a spirit guide takes us to see our lifeless bodies, bloodied and grotesque, or pale, limp, and peaceful. I might have had a stroke in my sleep, it occurs to me, and the days I move through are not real, but are instead my own creation, something I continuously conjure to ease the transition into the eternity I’ll be spending here on the second floor of this nondescript apartment building. The real panic comes when even Chancey ignores his name being called and I can’t find him anywhere, and when I hear a voice outside—Safia!—I thrust the window fully open and say “Hey!”

  A long few seconds pass without a reaction and I start to feel weak, but then she turns, looks up, and waves, and Chancey walks in with a string of dust hanging from his whiskers.

  Jake’s card also buys more darts for my gun. During press conferences, I hold it the way Jake instructed when we visited a range a few years ago. His chest bumped the back of my neck and he held his arms straight against mine to demonstrate. “You have to not be aware that you’re pulling the trigger.” His hands cupped my hands. “It should be as natural as breathing, and your breathing should be even and relaxed. Squeeze, actually—don’t pull—slowly toward you—slowly—and when the bullet fires, you should be surprised.”

  The gentle-squeeze method doesn’t work well with the toy gun; the trigger is stiffer and clicks roughly into place. But my aim is improving. I’ve made some dead-on shots, even from the kitchen doorway. Chancey chases the darts that bounce off the screen.

  I send Jake one more email: I need you.