One morning, instead of bagels, she whipped up a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast. When Arn sat down to it, she asked him if he would like to marry her.
Arn set his orange juice down.
“Is this a citizenship issue?” he asked.
“This is a I’m getting old issue. You like me. I’m good-looking.”
It occurred to Arn that you could ask someone to marry you right away, like the Asian lady was doing, or else you had to wait a long time and pick the right moment and be sure of everything. They seemed equally good methods.
“We get married and you manage the new shop.”
“Wow,” said Arn.
The lady laughed. “You think about it.”
“I will,” said Arn. “I’ll think about it.”
The Asian lady took more bites of bacon, like she was getting comfortable with it, like she’d never eaten it before. “You think,” she said. “You say no, I’ll ask the man who owns the barbecue place near my shop. He’ll say yes, for sure.”
“If I say no, you’ll ask someone else?”
She nodded vigorously. “The guy who owns the barbecue place. He’ll say yes right away.”
CECELIA
She had received another song and then another. One whole side of the cassette was full. The songs arrived in flurries or at least pairs, and then there’d be stretches of dead air in between that could go on for days. Probably Cecelia was facing one of these stretches now. The songs never had anything to do with her life — no college, no crappy cars, no arson. She had no idea how many were coming. She could not begin to imagine where Reggie might be. Cecelia had made a deal with herself to try to keep her emotions out of this, to perform her duty of recording the way one did laundry or dishes. Since she’d made this deal, the songs were coming even easier. She’d learned how not to resist them or be delighted at their arrival, to simply receive. The last song had been about an old businessman who goes searching for a girl he’d loved in grade school. As a child he’d shown his affection by throwing the girl’s shoes in the lake near their houses. As an old man, he returns to the lake and dives to the bottom, trying to find the little sandals and boots and roller skates.
During the day, Cecelia avoided the house. She’d caught her mother crying one evening, indulging in redundant sobs. Her mother had been standing in the kitchen near the window and letting herself blubber and this had made Cecelia want to yell at her. She hadn’t, of course. She’d slipped off, her mother never aware she was there. More than once Cecelia had come home in the afternoon and seen her uncle’s car in the driveway and had passed right by. Maybe he could help her mother. Or maybe she’d drag him down with her. Whatever they were doing, Cecelia wasn’t going to disturb them. She didn’t know why her uncle was coming around all of a sudden and didn’t care to know.
Cecelia felt both proud and empty when she thought of Nate’s barn. She’d kept the clothes from the fire in her car in a plastic grocery bag for days, unable to figure out what to do with them. If she took them somewhere and tried to burn them someone could catch her in the act. She didn’t want to throw them away, not smelling like gas. She was being paranoid, probably. Cecelia wondered if the fire department had come to Nate’s house. They must’ve, in that neighborhood. She wondered what Nate’s mom and dad thought. She wondered what had happened to the rabbit. Cecelia had seen nothing about the fire in the newspaper, heard nothing around campus.
SOREN’S FATHER
Gee was the first person he’d let in Soren’s room who wasn’t part of the clinic staff, his first social visitor. She usually stayed about an hour, and while she was in the room Soren’s father felt relief from his loneliness but he also felt intruded upon. The clinic wasn’t fun or freeing like when they went out to dinner. Gee always went over to Soren when she arrived and again right before she left and pressed her forehead against him and whispered things to him that Soren’s father couldn’t hear. She never brought flowers, but often she brought food. Today she had éclairs, and though Soren’s father wasn’t wild about sweets he ate one and made sure to seem he was enjoying it. Gee had also brought coffee. She couldn’t stomach the clinic brew.
She finished eating and stood at the window with her short foam coffee cup, a look of certainty on her face that for some reason irked Soren’s father.
“Albuquerque is so ugly, it’s beautiful.” Gee’s coffee cup was making a patch of fog on the window. “God made this place ugly and humans made it uglier, and that was just what it needed. It needed to be uglier.”
Soren’s father knew he wasn’t required to respond to such statements. Especially here in Soren’s room, he could stay as quiet as he liked. Gee came away from the window and sat. The chairs were orange and the table was small and high. She told Soren’s father she was through with the art world. She was through consulting on galleries and she was through with her own art too.
“I’m making the same roadrunner over and over. That’s not art, it’s craft.”
Soren’s father told Gee he’d seen a real roadrunner out the window earlier that day, strolling right down the roadside.
“The real thing is always better than the artifice.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Soren’s father said. He tipped his cup toward her.
“I’ve had enough food of the spirit. I’m ready to deal with food of the stomach.”
“The restaurant,” Soren’s father said.
“I found a space that would be suitable. Not perfect, but suitable. I paid them to hold it for me a couple weeks.”
“You must be about ready to reveal the idea.”
“I am. Asian-influenced chicken wings, served with watermelon.” Gee’s eyebrows perked.
“Is that an appetizer?”
“That’s the whole menu.”
“Oh, okay,” said Soren’s father.
Gee explained that the wings would boast a more complex spice pallet than usual hot wings, and the watermelon was a Southern twist on celery and tasted better than celery. Instead of bleu cheese, she was concocting her own dipping sauce with local goat cheese as the base.
“If you’re cooking it, I’m sure it’ll be good,” Soren’s father said.
Gee gave him a long look but didn’t say anything. She was deciding, Soren’s father knew, if it was the right time to talk to him about going in with her. She’d talked about it before and she would talk about it again. Soren’s father was enjoying a break from loneliness, but he was also looking forward to being alone in the room again. It was a wrong feeling, he knew. Gee was wonderful. That was a fact. He was craving solitude and he also found that for some reason he was looking forward to the next vigil in the parking lot. That was the kind of company he wanted, company that was quiet and didn’t know what it was after. Soren’s father had purposely never invited Gee over on a Wednesday. She seemed totally unaware of the phenomenon of the vigils and that was okay with him. He didn’t care to hear her opinion on the matter.
“Once I commit to this,” she said, “I’m in for about seventy hours a week. That’s doing it without quality help.”
Soren’s father set his jaw. He didn’t take a sip of coffee or glance over at his son.
“It would be nice to get my memoir in order, but this space won’t sit around forever. I guess it’s just as well. I’m a chef, not a writer.”
“You’re a lot of things. You got enough brains and heart to make four or five women.” Soren’s father blinked his eyes clear. “And here I am this one old man.”