Vinnie's Diner

by Jennifer AlLee

  “Like in that old Jimmy Stuart movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. The angel, Clarence, couldn’t get his wings until he helped out George Bailey.” I try to peer around past his shoulders, but they’re pressed against the back of the booth. Surely if he had wings, I would have noticed them by now. “Is that it? Do you need to get your wings? Is that why you’re helping me?”

  His shoulders shake up and down. He’s actually laughing. I’ve amused my angel. “No, I don’t need any help in the wing department. But thanks for asking.”

  I’d like to know more about the wings. Does he really have them? Are they hidden? Do they only come out when he needs them? But I’m pretty sure he’ll just dodge those questions. Better to move on. “So I’m not your project?”

  “No. But you are my assignment. I’m here to take care of you, Allie.”

  Now I have to laugh. “No offense, Vinnie, but if that’s your assignment, I think you need more training.”

  Rather than taking offense, he leans forward, clearly intrigued by my reasoning. “How so?”

  “Hello! I was in an accident!” I start gesturing wildly, pointing behind me toward the front door. “I rolled my car in the middle of the desert. Remember the EMTs? They pulled my body out of the wreck. And now I’m nonresponsive and in some hospital.”

  “I remember,” he says with a nod.

  “So if you’re supposed to take care of me, why did you let all that happen? Isn’t your job as a guardian angel to keep me out of danger?”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you?” He leans back with a sigh. “Most people think exactly like you do. But when you’re in my line of work, there’s only one rule: The Boss knows best.” He jerks his thumb toward the ceiling. “See, we all get to glimpse different parts of the picture. You know your part, which is usually pretty small and exclusive to what directly affects you. We angels have a slightly bigger view of the picture. We see what’s necessary to do our jobs. But The Boss, well, he sees the whole thing. What you’d call the big picture. And when he tells us to do something, we do it, even if we don’t understand why.”

  Sounded like a thankless job. “What if you don’t want to do it?”

  A frown contorts his lips. “We have free will, just like you do. We can make a choice. There have been those who decided to do things their own way. But it didn’t end well for them.” He shakes his head and the corners of his mouth tip back up. “Personally, I’ve never considered disobeying orders, because I know The Boss’s way is perfect. My way would just mess things up.”

  “So you’re saying you weren’t supposed to prevent the accident?”

  He points his finger at me like he’s aiming a gun. “Exactly. You assume the most important thing to worry about is your physical safety, but it’s not.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Your soul, Allie.”

  I swallow hard. “My soul?”

  “Yes. Your body is temporal. It’s going to die one day, no matter what I do. But your soul, that’s eternal. My assignment is to be with you now and walk with you through this journey you’re on.”

  So that’s it. That’s what all of this is about. A chuckle bubbles its way through my throat. Now that I know the truth, my ordeal must be coming to a close.

  Vinnie drops his hand to the table and reaches out, like he’s going to touch me, but then he pulls back. “I know you’ve been through a lot already, and I know you probably think it can’t get any worse. But you’re not done yet.”

  My joy is replaced by a choking sob. Figuring out who Vinnie is should have signaled the end of all this craziness. But now he’s telling me there’s more. And it sounds like it’s not going to get any easier. What could be worse than what I’ve already gone through?

  When I’m finally able to speak, my words come out in a pathetic whimper. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Now he does touch me. He takes the card from my fingers, sets it next to the chest, and wraps both his hands around mine. “You have to hold on, Allie. It may not make sense now, but this is something you’ve got to walk through. I’m here with you. And even though you can’t see him, so is . . .” he hesitates, then grins, “Joe.”

  I glance at the front door, then turn back to Vinnie. “Joe. Is he an angel, too?”

  Vinnie’s grin twists, and he seems slightly appalled. “No. You’re not thinking big enough.”

  I open my mouth, but before I can ask anymore questions, the door swings opens. My heart thuds once, twice. I really want it to be Joe, but the music that starts to play tells me it can’t possibly be him. I’ve heard that guitar riff before. For a couple of months, four guys moved into the apartment next to Sandy and me. They were real metal heads, and we got used to hearing their music thumping through the paper-thin walls at obscene hours of the day and night. This particular song had been one of their favorites.

  AC/DC. “Highway to Hell.”

  Panic constricts my chest. From the radio, an unfamiliar voice says, “Her heart rate’s a little high.”

  I grab Vinnie’s arm, clutching at the fabric of his shirt sleeve. “What do I do?”

  His expression is calm, strong, exactly how he looked on the prayer card. “Face it. It’s all you can do. You’ve got to face it eventually.”

  I look back to the front of the diner. The shape of a man, dark and shadowy, fills the doorway. I turn from him and look at the chest on the table. There’s more stuff in there, I know it. There are things in my past we haven’t gotten close to yet. I don’t want to examine anything else, but it could be the lesser of two evils. It could buy me some time before I have to face whatever waits for me in the doorway.

  I make my choice. Maybe Vinnie’s right. Maybe I can’t escape whatever’s going to come at me next, but I can post-pone it.

  I plunge my hand into the chest, fishing around until my fingers close around something hard and round and cold. I don’t have to look at it to know what it is. Memories slam into me, pushing me against the back of the booth seat, making me gasp for air. I squeeze my eyes shut. I feel myself hovering, swirling in midair, on my way to another memory. Another part of my life I don’t want to revisit.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  20

  Back at the university—one month earlier

  The swirling stops.

  I open my eyes. I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of a pizza place. The door opens, and I watch myself—the me from just a month before—walk out.

  “Seriously?” Jake asks the question as he holds the door open for me . . . for Allie.

  “Yes.” She walks past him, tip-toes around something questionable on the sidewalk, and heads in the direction of her apartment building. That’s where Jake left his car. “Victor Garber played Jesus in the movie Godspell.”

  Jake shakes his head. “It’s hard to imagine Jack Bristow breaking out in song.”

  She laughs and so do I. Even now, I remember having the same reaction when Aunt Bobbie and I watched the Godspell DVD at her house. With his big seventies fro, red suspenders, striped pants and Superman t-shirt, Victor Garber as Jesus was a far cry from the deadly serious, emotionally withdrawn spy daddy I’d gotten to know watching DVDs of Alias. “Just goes to show,” Aunt Bobbie had said, “you never can tell about people.”

  “You never can tell about people,” Allie says to Jake. “Did you know he was the only guest at Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s wedding?”

  “Really?”

  “Yep,” She says with a nod. “And he officiated.”

  Jake’s eyes get a little bigger. “Is that legal?”

  She shrugs. “Sure. He got a license through the internet, and they were good to go.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Not really. Lots of people do it.”

  He laughs. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What then?”

  “You. You’re amazing.”

  A weird, snorting kind of laugh bursts out of Allie. It’s a n
oise I try never to make in front of people. But at this point in our relationship I was comfortable enough to let him see that much of the real me. “Yes, it’s amazing all the worthless information I’ve crammed into my head.” I sometimes have trouble with the sevens and the nines on the multiplication table, but I can tell you who won the 1950 Oscar for best picture—All About Eve—without blinking an eye.

  “It’s not worthless. Hey, you’re an award winner. Don’t forget that.”

  That’s the thing about Jake. He is unusually positive and always goes out of his way to build me up. Sure he’s human and must have faults, but I have yet to discover any. Sometimes, he seems too good to be true.

  He’s certainly too good for me.

  I had so wanted to ask Jake to come on the Vegas trip with me, but there was no way I could. Early into our relationship, Jake told me he was a Christian and asked if I was. Of course, I told him yes. I liked hanging out with Jake, and something told me he wouldn’t date a girl who didn’t share his beliefs. I wasn’t lying to him, not really. I’d been baptized as a child, although I think that was less for spiritual reasons and more for the ceremony. My mother must have loved posing for pictures as she held her chubby little baby who was being swallowed up by the heirloom christening dress. As for God, I believed there was one out there somewhere. He just hadn’t done me any favors.

  So I played the part, even going to church with Jake on the Sundays when I couldn’t think fast enough to come up with an excuse to stay home. As far as he was concerned, I was the model Christian girlfriend. Inviting him to share a room with me in Sin City would have blown my cover for sure.

  Allie sighs. “It’s so weird, having everything end at the same time. In three weeks, there’ll be no more Shakespeare, no more trivia, no more late night pizza, no more . . .” Her words trail off, but I finish the sentence for her. No more you.

  “That sounds pretty final. I hope you’re not saying goodbye to everything you discovered in college.” Jake puts his arm around her shoulder, hugging her to him as they walk. The gesture pulls her slightly off balance and she does a funny little foot-crossover step to right herself.

  She puts her arm around his waist in response, sliding her thumb lazily into the belt loop of his jeans. “No, not everything.” She pauses dramatically, then adds, “I just broke in my LBU sweatshirt. You know I’ll be hanging on to that.”

  He laughs and kisses the top of her head.

  Walking along behind them, I almost melt through the pavement. The feelings from that night wrap around me, as strong as the first time I experienced them. All I’d wanted to do was live the rest of my life in that moment, on that street, feeling as safe as I did right then. But I knew, like everything else that had ever been good in my life, it wasn’t going to last. The only reason Jake and I stayed together as long as we did was because I knew there was a clear end in sight. In a few weeks, he’d go back to Kansas to spend the summer on the farm with his parents before heading to med school in the fall. I’d either move on to my dream job or to some boring corporate gig. And we’d never see each other again.

  At the corner, Allie and Jake go in two different directions, pulling apart from each other. She gives him a questioning look. He smiles and holds his hand out. “Want to take a walk in the park?”

  She hesitates, starts to frown, but then smiles and takes his hand. “Sure.”

  They walk down a footpath, then around a corner, passing a few other people. One man makes an incongruous picture, his beefy hand wrapped around the skinny pink leash of the minute Pekinese prancing around his feet. Allie bites her lip as they walk by, not wanting to burst out laughing and embarrass the fellow.

  “That little guy would make a great midnight snack for Grimm,” Jake says.

  Allie bumps her shoulder against his. “Grimm wouldn’t lay paw on him. He’s a lover, not a fighter.”

  Jake laughs. “For a non-fighter, he sure has a lot of scars.”

  “That just proves he had a tough life before I found him. Grimm’s a survivor.”

  “That he is.” Jake pulls Allie tighter against his side.

  They don’t say anything else until they get to an empty bench. Jake sits, pulling her down with him. She snuggles in against his shoulder, ignoring everything and everyone around them.

  “My parents are coming out for graduation.” Her fingers splay out on his chest. I know she’s not really paying attention to what he’s saying. She just likes being so close to him.

  “That’s nice,” she mumbles into the soft cotton of his t-shirt.

  “I want them to meet you.”

  She jerks away, pushing against his chest, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly open.

  When he said that, warning sirens had gone off in my head. Why did he want me to meet them? You didn’t introduce a temporary fling to your parents. I certainly had no intention of introducing him to my mother, even if she did show up for the graduation ceremony.

  Now, Jake looks at the woman sitting next to him, his face full of hope and excitement and something else. Something that makes my stomach take a free fall.

  “Your parents? I thought they couldn’t get off the farm.”

  “That’s why I was alone at Christmas, remember? So they could afford to come here for graduation.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, that’s great.”

  The skin between his eyebrows wrinkles, and he takes both her hands in his. “Allie, I hope you know by now how important you are to me. The last few months have been pretty incredible.”

  She looks down, swallows, then looks back up at him. “I feel the same way.”

  It was the right thing to say, the expected answer. But as I hear myself speak the words aloud, I know they are true. Jake wasn’t just a fling. He wasn’t just someone to have fun with. We’d connected, and I was happy with him, at a deeper level than I had ever thought I could be.

  “But meeting your parents . . . that’s a little scary.”

  He laughs. “I have the least scary parents in the world. Besides, they’re going to love you.”

  “Oh yeah? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I love you.”

  Even though I’ve lived this before, that phrase still robs my lungs of breath. I’ve had guys tell me they love me, but only as a precursor to getting me into bed. After that, they rarely stuck around for more than a week. But it was okay, because we were playing the game, saying the words to pave the way for a physical release. I never expected, or wanted, anything more from them.

  But Jake was different. Jake and I had kissed—a lot—but he had never pushed for anything else. It had been five months of wonderful, no pressure friendship. There had been times when I thought about loving him, how it would be so easy to fall into that place. But every time I pulled myself back, because I knew deep down how wrong we were for each other. So to hear him say it, knowing that he meant it, and knowing how much I wished I could say it back . . . well, it was new territory for me.

  Jake looks into Allie’s eyes and smiles. “You’re the answer to my prayers.”

  Whoa. No guy had used that line on me before.

  Allie blinks hard, sending tears oozing out between her eyelids. “What?”

  Chuckling to himself, Jake nods his head. “It sounds crazy, I know. But when I was a kid, my mom used to tell me that God had big plans for me, including the woman I would marry. She encouraged me to pray for my wife, even though I hadn’t met her yet. So I did. I prayed that God would protect her, keep her safe, and that I’d know her when I saw her.”

  Allie tilts her head, and a tear skitters across the bridge of her nose.

  Watching them, I shake my head furiously. He couldn’t mean that. It was all wrong.

  Jake cups her cheek in one hand and wipes the tear away with the pad of his thumb. “The day I saw you in the library, I knew. Before we even started talking, I knew it was you.”

  I feel myself being sucked into the scene, being drawn closer to the couple on the be
nch. I pull back, refusing to relive this moment. But it’s already taking me over. A geyser of emotions erupts within me at the same time. Joy, excitement, uncertainty, anger, euphoria, fear . . . they press on me from the inside out, trying to escape from my pores, making every cell pulsate with the effort. They soak up the liquid in my body, leaving my mouth dry and parched. My eyes, once overflowing, are now dry as the California desert and burn as if I’ve been staring into the sun.

  And now I’m there, sitting on the bench, feeling the warmth of his hand on my face. I press my cheek into his palm, begging for things to stay this way. Willing him not to say anything else that will move the moment forward. But I’m mute, unable to utter a single syllable. I just stare at him.

  He pulls his hand from my face, leaving my cheek cold and exposed. He dips his head, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out something. It glints under the glare of the street lamp.

  “Will you be my answer to prayer? Will you marry me?”

  He holds out a ring. A small, simple ring. But that’s not what I see. Instead, I see a gold cross hanging from a thin, broken chain. I see Ethan’s face pressed too close to mine. Smell Ethan’s sour breath, feel the stubble of his cheek scraping against me. I hear Ethan’s voice in my ear, “I’ve been waiting for this since the first day I saw you.” Had I been Ethan’s answer to prayer, too?

  I can’t breath.

  “Allie, are you okay?”

  I shake my head. Jake is close enough to touch, but far away, too. Everything has gotten so dark. The colors are saturated, almost inky in their density. Something catches my eye. A movement off to the side, near a tree. I turn my head, but it’s so hard, as if I’m up to my ears in quick-drying cement. I try to focus, but everything’s blurry. Finally, I make out the figure of a man. He’s wearing a long, black coat like someone straight out of The Matrix. His hair hangs in dirty blond strings to his shoulders. His face is dominated by sharp angles and sunken cheeks. His lips are pulled back in some kind of a grotesque smile. Everything about him makes me think of a carnivore ready to pounce.

  I turn back to Jake, extending my hand, stretching my fingers as far as I can. “Help me.” I try to scream, but only a whisper escapes.