Moonlight on Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I’m the one who’s interrupting you,” he added, gesturing at her textbook. “And that looks like pretty important stuff, Jody.”

  “Jody?”

  “That’s what it says on your name tag,” he said, pointing to it.

  She glanced down at it. “Oh, no, that’s not my name. I lost my name tag, actually. But the owner makes us wear them, so I borrow Jody’s.”

  “So, mandatory name tags, huh?” he said, glancing around. “I knew this was a classy place.”

  And Mila laughed, because under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, the coffee shop looked like exactly what it was. Which was a dump.

  He smiled at her now. “Seeing you laugh was worth waiting for,” he said. “If I could keep making you do that, I wouldn’t care if you ever took my order.”

  Mila blushed now. She was used to customers flirting with her. But there was something about the way this customer was flirting with her that was different. He was doing it with an intensity, and a single-mindedness that was new to her.

  “So what can I get for you?” she asked him again, indicating the menu that was sitting on the counter in front of him. But he didn’t look down at it. He looked at her instead. Looked at her in a way that made her think he wasn’t particularly interested in the day’s special. Unless, of course, she happened to be the day’s special.

  “What’s good here?” he asked finally.

  And Mila blushed again. “Honestly? Not much. A cup of coffee’s always a safe bet. And if you’re really hungry, I can get our fry cook to scramble you up some eggs. It’s hard to ruin those. But I think he’s on a smoke break now.” She glanced back at the empty kitchen behind her. “So if it’s eggs you want, you may have to wait a few minutes.”

  “Uh, no thanks. I think I’ll pass on the eggs,” he said, still not taking his eyes off her. “But what about the pie?”

  “The pie?”

  “There’s a sign outside that says ‘Try Our Pie.’

  “Oh, that,” Mila said. “That sign’s been there forever. But the pie . . . the pie is actually not that great.”

  “So ‘don’t try our pie’?” he suggested.

  She laughed. “You can see it if you want to.” She brought him the pie in its plastic-domed pie cover and set it down on the counter in front of him. “What do you think?” she asked, removing the cover.

  “Hmmm,” he said, studying it, and probably thinking, like Mila, that it didn’t look very appetizing. The crust, for one thing, looked kind of soggy, and the filling, which was some kind of gelatinous red substance, was just sort of leaking out of it.

  “What kind of pie is it, exactly?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Red, maybe?”

  He laughed, and Mila laughed, too. “You know what?” he said. “I don’t think I’ll try your pie. But how about that cup of coffee?”

  So Mila covered up the pie again and slid it down the counter. Then she went to get the coffeepot, relieved to have a moment to collect herself. Her face felt warm, and her stomach felt funny. She wished he would stop looking at her in that way he was looking at her. But then again, she would have been disappointed if he had.

  She carried the coffeepot over to him and flipped over the cup sitting in front of him on the counter. Then she filled it up and pushed the cream and sugar over to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking away from her long enough to pour cream in his coffee. “Are you going to have a cup, too?”

  “Me?”

  He nodded, looking at her in that way again.

  “Um, we’re not allowed to socialize with the customers,” she said, flustered. “I mean, not any more than is strictly necessary.”

  “No?” he said, amused. And then, “You know, there are a lot of rules here. Kind of surprising, don’t you think, given the quality of the food?”

  “Maybe,” Mila murmured. But now she couldn’t look away from him.

  “So what do you say? One cup of coffee with me?”

  An hour later, Mila was sitting on the stool next to his—his name, she’d discovered, was Brandon—drinking her third cup of coffee. She’d probably never sleep again, she thought, but right now, that was just fine with her. Because as long as she kept talking to him, sleep seemed completely inconsequential. And Brandon didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get to bed either. He’d gotten off work from the late shift at his construction job, and now he seemed perfectly content to sit here with Mila all night. Luckily for them, no one else had come into the coffee shop, and Javier, the fry cook, was in the kitchen, talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend in Guatemala.

  “What was that book you were studying when I came in?” Brandon asked now, placing a hand lightly on one of her bare knees, which were just visible below the hem of the ugly pink uniform she was required to wear while waitressing there. (Another rule.) The way she was behaving tonight was totally out of character for her, she thought. She’d never crossed the line with a customer at work before. And now, she’d not only crossed it, she didn’t even care that she’d crossed it.

  “Um, I’m sorry. What . . . what did you ask me?” she said, as his hand lightly caressed her knee.

  “I asked you what you were studying” he said, gesturing with the hand that wasn’t on her knee to where her book was still sitting, a few feet away, on the counter.

  “Oh, that,” she said, following his eyes. “That’s my organic chemistry textbook.”

  “Organic chemistry,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. I’m only taking it because I have to. And it’s killing me.”

  “So don’t take it,” he suggested.

  “Oh, no, I have to take it,” she said, marveling at how nice his slightly rough hand felt on her knee.

  “Why do you have to take it?”

  “It’s a prerequisite for nursing school.”

  “You want to be a nurse?” he asked skeptically.

  She nodded.

  “Why would you want to do that?” he asked. “I mean, isn’t that just, like, changing people’s bedpans for a living?”

  “No, it’s not,” Mila said, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. “Most nurses, in fact, don’t change bedpans at all. But for the ones who do, it’s only a small part of their jobs.” She moved her knee then, out from under his hand.

  “Oh,” he said, looking surprised and contrite at the same time. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I obviously don’t know a lot about nursing.”

  Her irritation waned, a little. “You’re not alone,” she said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about nursing.”

  “Well, then, maybe you can educate me about them,” he said seriously.

  “Maybe,” she said, softening a little.

  “Like tomorrow, maybe. Or should I say ‘today,’” he added, glancing at his watch.

  Mila shook her head. “Not today. I don’t get off work until five A.M. Then I have to go home and go to bed. Then I have to wake up and go to class. And then I have to start all over again.”

  “That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” he said, glancing down at her bare knee like he wanted to put his hand on it again.

  “It’s not supposed to be fun,” she said. “It’s supposed to get me into a good nursing school.” But she swayed a little bit closer to him. Even under the coffee shop’s fluorescent lights, he looked good. Really good.

  “So, ‘work,’ ‘sleep,’ ‘study,’” he said, putting his hand back on her knee so softly that she had to look down at it to confirm it was actually there.

  “That’s my life,” she agreed, and she suddenly felt too warm in her hideous polyester uniform.

  “Do you think you could make time in your life for one more thing?” he asked, giving her a smile that almost made her fall right off her stool.

  “Maybe,” she said softly.

  “Good,” he said, giving her knee a little squeeze.

&nb
sp; Mila made time for Brandon, but seven months after she’d met him at the coffee shop that night, she was locked in her bathroom, wishing she could get that time back now.

  “Mila, please. Unlock the door,” he said, from the other side of it.

  But she shook her head violently, even though Brandon couldn’t see her do this.

  “Mila, please. Open the door,” he pleaded. “Just for one second. I need to see you. I need to know you’re all right.” The anger was gone from his voice now, and the blind fury that had erupted from him had apparently subsided as quickly as it had boiled up. He sounded remorseful. Tender, even. But still, it was impossible to ignore what he’d done to her, especially when she had the fat lip to prove it.

  “Go away,” Mila whispered to the bathroom door, and she choked back another sob.

  “Mila, sweetheart, please. I won’t hurt you. I promise. I won’t even touch you, if you don’t want me to. But I need to come in,” Brandon said gently. Cajolingly. “Look, I know there’s no excuse for what just happened. And I don’t blame you for being angry at me. But I need to talk to you, Mila, face-to-face. Please.”

  Mila didn’t answer him. Instead, she walked over to the mirror that hung above the bathroom sink and looked into it. She flinched. Her lip looked even worse than she’d imagined it would. One half of it was already swollen to twice its normal size. There was no way she’d be able to go to class tomorrow, and that went double for work. Nobody wanted a fat lip with their dinner order, she thought, as fresh anger welled up inside her, and new tears burned in her eyes.

  She reached for a washcloth, ran it under cold water, wrung it out, and held it up to her lip. She winced. It hurt like hell. But she kept it there anyway, hoping it would bring down the swelling. After a few minutes, though, she gave up. The washcloth wasn’t cold enough. What she really needed was a bag of ice, and she couldn’t get that unless she was willing to leave the bathroom. And she wasn’t willing to leave the bathroom. She was planning on staying there, in fact, until Brandon gave up and went home.

  “Mila, say something, please,” he said now. “Just so I know you’re all right.”

  But she ignored him and sat down on the bathroom floor, resting her back against the side of the bathtub. She was tired. Beyond tired, really. And she wished, desperately, that Brandon would go just home so she could crawl into bed and have a good cry. As far as she was concerned, this was the end of their seven-month relationship. It could never survive this. Though even before this, she had to admit, it had been far from perfect.

  In the beginning, she hadn’t been able to see this. Everything was happening so fast. One minute, Brandon was flirting with her over a cup of coffee, and the next minute . . . well, the next minute stretched into hours, actually. Brandon wanted to be with her all the time, whenever she was free, and sometimes even when she wasn’t free. Before she’d met him, she’d never missed a class or called in sick to work. But after she met him, she did both of those things occasionally. She knew it was wrong to shirk her responsibilities, but Brandon’s feelings for her were so insistent, so passionate, and so all-consuming that sometimes she had trouble thinking clearly, trouble thinking at all, really, except, of course, for when it came to thinking about Brandon. Brandon, who’d told her he was in love with her—crazily, madly, wildly in love with her. And she believed him too. How else could she explain the complete single-mindedness with which he’d pursued her? Or the absolute devotion he’d shown to her after she finally gave in to him?

  It was exciting, at first, not to mention flattering, to be wooed the way Brandon wooed her. There were the love notes he wrote to her and tucked into the pages of her college textbooks so that she would find them later while she was studying. And there were the presents he surprised her with, including the beautiful bracelet he slipped into the pocket of her waitressing uniform that she discovered when she reached for her check pad and pencil. And there were the grander gestures, too, gestures that reminded Mila of scenes from some impossibly romantic movie, like the time he drove her out to the country and surprised her there with a picnic that included champagne, strawberries, and several kinds of unpronounceable French cheeses.

  Even in those early, heady days, though, there were signs of trouble. For one thing, Brandon needed to know where she was every second of every day. And if she wasn’t in class or at work, he expected her to be with him. And only with him. She’d introduced him to a few of her friends, but she quickly realized that he had no interest in spending time with them. And what was more, he had no interest in her spending time with them either. In fact, he seemed to resent it when she did. So, gradually, Mila saw less and less of them, until her already limited circle of friends shrank to just one friend: Brandon.

  But Brandon’s possessiveness wasn’t the worst thing about him. His jealousy was. It had started with him being suspicious of her male friends, no matter how innocent her relationships with them were. He was convinced, for instance, that Ted, her study partner in her anatomy class, had a thing for her. And nothing Mila said could convince him otherwise. Finally, she told Ted she couldn’t study with him anymore. She was sorry, too. They worked well together. But she was tired of arguing with Brandon about him.

  Even after she stopped seeing Ted, though, Brandon found men in her life to be jealous of. An old friend from high school she and Brandon ran into at a movie theater once. Or a man from down the block whose dog Mila stopped to pet. It was worrying to Mila that Brandon could make even her most innocent social interactions seem fraught with intrigue. And lately, it had driven a wedge between the two of them that had Mila wondering if she could stay in this relationship any longer.

  But here she’d been torn. There were good things about Brandon, too. He could be charming, and sweet, and, for all his seriousness, he could be funny, too. He always knew how to make her laugh, and not only that, but he always knew how to make her feel needed and loved, too.

  But tonight, tonight had changed everything. Brandon was waiting for her when she came out of the coffee shop, and, at first, she was happy to see him. She’d gotten a biology exam back that day that she’d done well on, and she was in a celebratory mood. She told him, in fact, in his arms outside the coffee shop, exactly how she wanted to celebrate. But Brandon, she quickly realized, was preoccupied, and while she chattered all the way back to her apartment, he remained silent. Finally, when they got back, he spoke.

  “Who was that man at the counter tonight?” he asked, sitting down on her living room couch. “The one with the Minnesota Twins baseball cap on.”

  And Mila groaned inwardly as she sat down on the couch beside him. They’d had this conversation before. Not about this customer. But about other customers. “Brandon, I don’t know who he was,” she said honestly. “Some guy who wanted a cup of coffee. He was probably getting off a late shift or something.”

  “So you think he was just there for the coffee?” he asked her, in a tone that implied she was naive.

  She sighed, but then decided to use humor to try to diffuse the situation. Humor because logic, apparently, didn’t work with Brandon.

  “Actually, Brandon, he wasn’t just there for a cup of coffee,” she said conspiratorially. “He’s FBI. He was there to meet a high-level informant. And our fry cook, Javier? That job is a cover. He’s actually—”

  “Okay. Very funny. I get it,” he snapped. “You think I’m paranoid. But I saw the way that man was looking at you, Mila. And that’s not the way you look at someone when all you want from her is a refill on your coffee.”

  “Brandon, he wasn’t looking at me. He was reading a newspaper.”

  “Mila, I saw him looking at you. And I saw him talking to you, too.”

  “I took his order, Brandon. That’s my job.”

  “No, you did more than take his order. You had a conversation with him. I saw you, Mila. I was watching you.”

  She paused. She had spoken to that man, briefly. But she’d spoken to him long before the end of h
er shift, long before Brandon was supposed to pick her up. “How long were you watching me, Brandon?” she asked then, not really wanting to know the answer.

  He shrugged. “A while.”

  “How long is ‘a while.’”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “A couple of hours? Are you serious, Brandon? Why would you do that?”

  “Because I wanted to know what you do at work when I’m not around, Mila.”

  “I wait tables, Brandon,” she said, exasperated. “I think that’s pretty obvious. And I don’t like the fact that you were watching me do it without my knowing it. It’s . . . it’s kind of creepy.”

  “Creepy?” he repeated, tensing. “You think I’m creepy?” There was an air of menace in his voice that she’d never heard before. It frightened her a little.

  “No, I don’t think you’re creepy,” she said carefully. “I think what you did was creepy. There’s a difference.”

  And then it happened, so fast that she didn’t even see it coming. One minute they were sitting next to each other on the couch, and the next, the back of his hand was connecting with her face. She screamed, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God, Brandon,” she said through her fingers. “Why did you do that?” And before he could answer her, she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in. That was an hour ago, and their uneasy standoff had continued since then.

  “Mila, please, let me in,” Brandon was saying now. “Please. I am so sorry. I don’t even know what happened. Really, I’m as shocked as you are. I’ve never done anything like that before. Ever. I swear.”

  “Brandon, just go home,” she said finally. Wearily. “I’m tired, and I need to get some sleep. If I can get the swelling in my lip to go down, I’ll have to go to class and work tomorrow.”

  “Your lip . . . your lip is swollen?” he asked. He sounded horrified.

  “Yes, Brandon. It’s very swollen.”

  “Oh, Mila,” she heard him say softly. And then a moment later she heard something else. At first she thought she was imagining it. But when she got up from sitting on the floor and pressed her ear against the bathroom door, she realized she wasn’t imagining it. It was actually happening. Brandon was crying.