My father sighed. “That’s no reason to up an’ leave,” he murmured. “You could have come to me. There’s always-” At that moment a bus whizzed by, drowning out the rest of his words. I could not hear, and I liked that. It was easier than admitting I did not want to know what my father was saying.
“Paige?” my father asked, a question I had missed.
“Dad,” I said, “did you call the police? Does anybody know?”
“I didn’t tell a soul,” he said. “I thought of it, you know, but I believed you’d come through that door any minute. I hoped.” His voice fell low, dull. “Truth is, I didn’t believe that you’d go.”
“This isn’t about you,” I pleaded. “You’ve got to know that it isn’t about you.”
“It is, Paige. Or you wouldn’t ever ha’ thought to leave.”
No, I wanted to tell him, that can’t be true. That can’t be true, because all these years you’ve been saying it wasn’t my fault that she left. That can’t be true, because you are the one thing that I hated leaving behind. The words lodged in my throat, stuck somewhere behind the tears that started running down my face. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Maybe I will come home someday,” I said.
My father tapped his finger against the end of the receiver, just as he used to do when I was very little and he went on overnight trips to peddle his inventions. He’d send a soft whap through the phone lines. Did you hear that? he’d whisper. That’s the sound of a kiss runnin’ into your heart.
A bus from I don’t know where was coming through the dark tunnel of the station. “I’ve been out of my head with worryin’,” my father admitted.
I watched the bus’s wheels blot the herringbone-brick terminal drive. I thought of my father’s Rube Goldberg contraptions, the inventions he’d made just to entertain me: a faucet that sent water down a gully, which released a spinning fan, which in turn blew a paddle that connected a pulley that opened the cereal box and poured out my serving of Cheerios. My father could make the best out of anything he was given. “Don’t worry about me,” I said confidently. “After all, I’m your daughter.”
“Aye,” my father said, “but it seems you’ve got a bit of your mother in you too.”
After I’d worked two weeks at Mercy, Lionel trusted me enough to lock up. During the down times, like three in the afternoon, he’d sit me down at the counter and ask me to draw pictures of people. Of course I did the workers on my shift-Marvela and Doris and Leroy-and then I did the President and the mayor and Marilyn Monroe. In some of these portraits were the things I didn’t understand. For example, Marvela’s eyes showed a man dark with passion, being swallowed by the living sea. In the curl of Doris’s neck I’d drawn hundreds of cats, each looking more and more like a human, until the last one had Doris’s own face. In the fleshy swell of Marilyn Monroe’s peach arm were not the lovers you’d expect but rolling farmland, rippled wheat, and the sad, liquid eyes of a pet beagle. Sometimes people in the diner noticed these things, and sometimes they didn’t-the images were always small and subtle. But I kept drawing, and each time I finished, Lionel would tape the portrait over the cash register. It got so that the pictures stretched halfway across the diner, and with each one I felt a little more as though I truly belonged.
I had been sleeping on Doris’s couch, because she felt sorry for me. The story I had given was that my stepfather had been making moves on me and so the minute I turned eighteen I had taken my baby-sitting money and left. I liked that story, because it was nearly half true-the eighteen and the leaving part. And I didn’t mind a little sympathy; at this point, I was taking whatever I could get.
It was Doris’s idea that we do some kind of blue-plate special-tack two bucks onto the price of a turkey club, and you’d get a free portrait with it. “She’s good enough,” Doris said, watching me sketch the frizzy lines of Barbra Streisand’s hair. “These Joe Shmoes would be Celebrity for a Day.”
I felt a little weird about the whole thing, kind of like being a circus sideshow, but there was an overwhelming response to the notice we stuck in the menu, and I got bigger tips drawing than I did waiting tables. I drew most of the regulars on the first day, and it was Lionel’s idea to make those original sketches free and hang them up with my others for publicity. Truth be told, I could have drawn most of the diner’s patrons without their posing for me. I had been watching them carefully anyway, picking up the outlines of their lives, which I would fill in in my spare time with my imagination.
For example, there was Rose, the blond woman who came for lunch on Fridays after having her hair done. She wore expensive linen suits and classic shoes and a diamond wedding band. She carried a Gucci pocketbook and she kept her money in order: ones, fives, tens, twenties. Once, she brought in a balding man, who held her hand tight throughout the meal and spoke in Italian. I pretended this was her lover, because everything else in her life seemed so picture perfect.
Marco was a blind student at the Kennedy School of Government, who wore a long black overcoat even on the hottest days in July. He had shaved his head and wore a bandanna around it, and he’d play games with us. What color is it? he’d ask. Give me a clue. And I’d say something like “McCarthy,” and he’d laugh and say Red. He came in late at night and smoked cigarette after cigarette, until a gray cloud hovered at the edge of the ceiling like an artificial sky.
But the one I watched most was Nicholas, whose name I knew only because of Lionel. He was a medical student, which explained, Lionel said, his odd hours and the fog he was always in. I would stare at him point-blank because he never seemed to notice, even when he wasn’t reading, and I tried to figure out what was so confusing about him. I had been at Mercy exactly two weeks when I figured it out: he just didn’t fit. He seemed to gleam against the cranberry cracked vinyl seats. He held court over all the waitresses, holding up his glass when he wanted a refill, waving the check when he wanted to pay, and yet none of us considered him to be condescending. I studied him with a scientist’s fascination, and when I imagined things about him, it was at night on Doris’s living room couch. I saw his steady hands, his clear eyes, and I wondered what it was that drew me to him.
I had been in love in Chicago, and I knew the consequences. After all that had happened with Jake, I was not planning to be in love again, maybe not ever. I didn’t consider it strange that at eighteen some soft part of me seemed broken for good. Maybe this is why when I watched Nicholas I never thought to draw him. The artist in me did not immediately register the natural lines of him as a man: the symmetry of his square jaw or the sun shifting through his hair, throwing off different and subtler shades of black.
I watched him the night of the first Chicken Doodle Soup Special, as Lionel had insisted on calling it. Doris, who had been working with me since the lunch rush, had left early, so I was by myself, refilling salt shakers, when Nicholavin Ahen Nichs came in. It was 11:00 P.M., just before closing, and he sat at one of my tables. And suddenly I knew what it was about this man. I remembered Sister Agnes at Pope Pius High School, rapping a ruler against a dusty blackboard as she waited for me to think up a sentence for a spelling word I did not know. The word was grandeur, e before u. I had stood and hopped from foot to foot and listened to the popular girls snicker as I remained silent. I could not come up with the sentence, and Sister accused me of scribbling in the margins of my notebook again, although that was not it at all. But looking at Nicholas, at the way he held his spoon and the tilt of his head, I understood that grandeur was not nobility or dignity, as I’d been taught. It was the ability to be comfortable in the world; to make it look as if it all came so easily. Grandeur was what Nicholas had, what I did not have, what I now knew I would never forget.