“Yeah,” he admits.
“Sure you only kissed her?”
“Well.”
“You did more than that, didn’t you?”
“Maybe a bit,” he says. “Her parents were at home,” he explains. “It’s a small panel apartment.”
“That’s why you didn’t fuck her?”
“Not only that.”
“I’ve been wondering, actually,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“You live in a small panel apartment,” she says. “You and your mom.”
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“How does that work?” she asks.
“How d’you mean?”
“You know what I mean. When you bring people back.”
“What makes you think I bring people back?”
“Don’t you?”
“Not really,” he says. “Sometimes.”
“Well, when you do.”
“What?”
“Well, I’m sure your mom doesn’t want to hear what you get up to.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t.”
“I know what the walls are like in those apartments.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“So?”
“Usually she’s out,” he says.
“Okay.”
“What about you?” he asks.
“What about me?”
“D’you take people back to your parents’ place?”
She still lives with her parents too—or at least with István’s uncle and her mother.
“Gábor was there all the time,” she says. “You know that.”
“No, I mean since then,” he says. “That was different. I mean Gábor was like part of the family, wasn’t he.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” she says, taking another cigarette out of the packet, using two of her long, fake nails to pry it free of the others in there. She has fake eyelashes too. A lot of makeup.
“What happened with him, actually?” István asks.
“What happened?” She lights the cigarette.
“Why d’you split up?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” he says. “I was just wondering.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
She lights the lighter and stares at the flame.
“Busy, isn’t it,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the deserted space under the vaulted ceiling and beyond it the brownish glare of the street on the other side of the glass.
She sort of smiles, though obviously she doesn’t find it funny, or maybe her thoughts are just on something else.
He pinches his damp T-shirt front and flaps it to try to get some air onto the skin inside.
“You had a vacation this summer?” he asks.
“You know I haven’t,” she says.
“Want to go to Balaton?” He’s been planning to ask her that for a while.
She doesn’t seem particularly surprised.
She doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic either, though, which is disappointing.
“When?” she says.
“Whenever. Just for the day. Have a swim, whatever. When’s your next day off?” he asks her.
“Sunday,” she says. “Or Monday.”
“How about Sunday, then?”
At first she doesn’t say anything. Then she says, “Wouldn’t that be a bit weird?”
“Wouldn’t what be weird?”
“Us going to Balaton together.”
“Why?”
“I just think it would be a bit weird,” she says.
“Why?” he says again.
“Wouldn’t it?” she says.
“Why?”
“Can you stop saying why,” she says, with a laugh.
He laughs too. “I don’t know why you think it would be weird,” he says.
“I just do,” she says.
“I don’t know why.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that clear.”
“Seriously,” he says, “why?”
“It’s just how I feel.”
“Okay.”
Trying not to show how disappointed he feels, he flaps his T-shirt again—it’s from a secondhand shop, one of the ones that sells stuff from the West, and the picture of the baby swimming after the dollar on the front of it has already half faded away.
“Do you really not see what I mean?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“Whatever,” she says. “Just, we’ve never done anything like that.”
“So?”
“So nothing. I’m just saying.” She laughs. “Are you sure you want to spend an entire day with me?”
“No,” he lies, smiling at her.
She laughs again. “I’m not sure I’d want to spend an entire day with you.”
He isn’t sure to what extent she’s joking, if at all. He laughs anyway.
It’s only yesterday that he saw her last so why does it feel like he hasn’t seen her for weeks? He walks into town, through the warm evening. The Tex-Mex place is a garish cluster of lights in an otherwise dreary side street. He pushes open the glass door. She isn’t there. He sees that straightaway. That other waitress is there. “Hi,” she says to him. It’s still quite early and the place isn’t full. He just stands there for a few seconds and then says, “Noémi not in?”
The other waitress shakes her head.
“I thought she worked Wednesdays,” he says.
“She asked to swap,” the other waitress says.
“Yeah?”
The other waitress nods.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” the other waitress says.
From the phone box on the corner he tries her parents’ house. Her mother answers. “She’s out,” she tells him when he asks if Noémi’s there.
“I don’t know where she is,” she says in answer to his next question.
Starting to sweat in the hot phone box, he asks her if she knows when she’ll be back.
“No,” her mother says.
He leaves a message for her to phone him when she gets in.
She doesn’t phone until the next morning.
“Where were you last night?” he asks her.
“Where was I?”
“You weren’t working.”
“I know.”
“So?”
She laughs. “What’s it got to do with you?”
“Just wondering.”
“I was out.”
“Okay.”
“Seeing someone.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah, a friend.”
She says what she actually phoned to tell him was that she asked her stepbrother Miki if she could borrow his car to drive to Balaton on Sunday, and he said yes.
On Sunday morning the sky is partly overcast. Enough that he worries she’ll phone and say she doesn’t think it’s worth going after all.
He worries about that until, looking down from the kitchen window at about ten o’clock, he sees Miki’s old red Škoda arrive.
“Why don’t you ask her up for coffee?” his mother suggests, joining him at the window to see what he’s so interested in.
“We should get going really,” he tells her.
When the entry phone sounds his mother invites her upstairs anyway.
He stays in the kitchen fiddling with the coffee percolator while his mother lets her into the apartment.
They talk in the entrance hall for what seems like a long time.
Eventually Noémi appears in the kitchen doorway and without even looking at her he says, “Want coffee?”
“Actually no,” she says, smiling. “I’ve had too much already. I’m shaking like a leaf.” She holds out her hand.
“Yeah?” he says, washing a spoon.
She laughs.
“What’s funny?” he asks her.
“I don’t know,” she says.
They leave ten minutes later.
István offers to drive.
“Miki specifically said that wasn’t allowed,” she tells him.
“Fuck Miki.”
She hesitates and then throws the keys across the roof of the car, its red paint starting to come away in places to reveal something paler underneath, like skin after sunburn. “You better be careful,” she says.
“I’m always careful.”
“That’s such shit,” she says. “How long have you had your license anyway?”
“Few months,” he says, adjusting the seat.
“If you have an accident I’ll have to say I was driving,” she says.
“Fine.”
“No, it’s not fine.”
He’s poking around with the key, trying to find the slot in the steering column. “I won’t have an accident,” he says, and turns the key.