The home nurse came in to take Old Rudy’s vitals, before giving him a shot. Hector made to leave but Old Rudy waved at him to hold on. The nurse turned him over and swabbed a spot on his sunken rump and stuck him with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She checked his air and refilled his drink cup and changed out his bag and told him it was time to rest.
“Rest for what?” he said.
“For whatever you want, honey,” she answered, and then she left.
Old Rudy was fading fast and turned his head to Hector. “Tell your friend Jung not to bother with the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore. I won’t be around anyway.”
“Okay,” Hector said. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“I want to be left alone,” Hector said, realizing that for the first time in years he was meaning we, as in he and Dora. Which was why he would have never asked before. “That’s all.”
“What, you think that’s up to me?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” Old Rudy said, almost smirking at him now. “Who the hell gets left alone?”
In the car, Jung had been ecstatic with what Old Rudy let pass, but then berated Hector for not trying to claw back the money they’d brought after the dying man fell asleep.
If anyone could glide through the flak, slip past all disturbances, it was the estimable Jung, but Hector had to wonder if he and Dora could ever do the same. Some did get left alone, didn’t they? It seemed he and Dora had just broken into the clear. They were no more or less special than anyone else (well, maybe a little less), and maybe all it would take was for them to stay here inside Hector’s little rooms, one-to-one, hidden from further view.
Dora called out that the steaks would be ready soon and Hector strode to the bedroom holding only a hand towel to cover himself. She wolf-whistled after him. He almost blushed, unaccustomed to being naked before her in the light. In the bedroom, courtesy of Dora, were freshly folded clothes on top of the rickety thrift-store bureau, his usual T-shirts, but he decided to look for something better in the closet, which she’d also organized, hanging up even his dungarees and his several shirts. He would put on a proper one for her, and maybe for himself, too. It wasn’t half bad, to button oneself up in something clean and creased that didn’t smell of the unreachable corners of a bar and his own sloughed skin. Of course he normally laundered his own clothes, but he never paid attention to which mini-box of soap he’d get from the dispenser, and he noticed that Dora slipped a small white sheet into the dryer of their commingled things and now he smelled of lilacs, or what he thought were lilacs, the same waft as from the narrow side yard of his family’s house in Ilion, where his mother tended her flowering vines that exploded each spring in densely petaled ropes of white.
The smell of the steak and onions made his mouth water, and though Dora wouldn’t have minded his sitting down to the meal in his undershirt and shorts he decided to put on clothes he hadn’t worn in years. Maybe he would even take her out this Friday, somewhere other than Smitty’s; there was a new place on Lemoine where younger people drank colorful cocktails at the polished metallic bar, and though he’d normally steer miles clear of such a place he thought Dora might get a kick out it, and maybe he would as well. Visit the yuppie zoo. When it came to drinking, the day of the week never mattered before but now it seemed wrong somehow to do the same things over and over again, Dora herself suddenly complaining anew about the lack of a women’s room at Smitty’s, where she’d otherwise peed happily.
In the closet he found a secondhand suit given to him some years ago when he did some custodial work at a thrift store, still in its black plastic coverall. He held the suit jacket to his nose and didn’t like what he smelled but the trousers weren’t as funky. He couldn’t find a neck-tie or a decent belt but he had black shoes and when Hector stepped out into the kitchen Dora nearly dropped the spatula, as surprised as if he were a stranger come in from the street.
“My goodness, Hector,” she said, catching her breath. “How you clean up!”
“You don’t like?”
“Gosh, no, I like, I do. Come here.” She touched his shirt collar and ran her hand down the pressed crease of the sleeve. “You could be a businessman, just home from the office.”
“Yeah, but there’s no money in these pockets.”
“Let me see.”
Dora put the spatula on the table and stepped around him and slipped her hands into his trouser pockets. Her fingertips raked gently at his thighs and then with one hand she massaged him in the soft parts but just when he was coming alive the smoke alarm went off in the short hallway to the bathroom. The steak in the pan. He was surprised there even was an alarm, and while he went to take out the battery, Dora hustled over and took the pan off the heat.
“Oh, now look!” She was wincing and getting a little panicked, frantically scraping up the onions that had stuck to the pan. “This always happens in the end. Whatever I do. I ruin it.”
“No you haven’t.”
“I have! Look at the meat. It’s charcoal.”
“Just one side. Anyhow, it can be good well-done.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Not so.”
“You are.”
“Okay, maybe I usually like it rare.”
“Oh damn!” She nudged him in the chest and he pulled her to him and they kissed long enough that their dinner was in danger of going cold.
She told him to sit while she made up their plates. She had roasted some potatoes and he was glad to see that the oven worked. She served steamed sliced carrots and peas, a bowl of which was set beside a stack of dinner rolls. The table itself looked remarkably nice; she had conscripted a white bedsheet as a tablecloth, folding it in half to cover the gouged and scratched wood veneer top. He couldn’t remember, but like everything else in his apartment he’d either bought it at a charity shop or found it on the sidewalk, and he would still pick things off the street if he thought he needed them, for the sake of cost, of course, but really more because he’d long attuned himself to the aesthetic of the broken-down, the used-up, the worn.
But now he wished the table legs weren’t so deeply scratched, that the chairs were less wobbly, that he had thought to paint the walls just once at least, rather than simply having moved in and squatted, all to match if only by half the simple, clean decency that was abounding with her presence: along with the food she’d picked a small bunch of wildflowers from the vacant lot down the street and had placed these in a glass. Paper napkins were folded in half and topped with silverware he didn’t recognize as his own, for she’d buffed out the water spots. His plates were a puke-colored earthenware but Dora now dressed these up, too, by arranging the potatoes and onions in the tuck of the steak, which she’d sliced thinly on an angle and then fanned in a semicircle. She made a quick pan gravy with butter and flour (did he really have flour in the cupboard?) and a little splash of the red wine he had picked up just for her, and as she spooned the rich dark sauce on the meat his mouth watered intensely enough that his tongue ached. He waited for her to sit and poured her a full glass of wine, and then he ate ravenously and unself-consciously, like an adolescent might, mashing the potatoes with his fork and slathering it on the meat and swirling it all in the sauce before wolfing it down.
“Is everything okay? How are the onions?”
“The onions are sweet,” he said.
“They look burnt to me,” Dora said. “How do you like the steak? Do you want more?”
“Yes, thanks.”
Dora sliced him some more, and she ate, too, but not half as exuberantly as Hector. She was enjoying the wine he’d bought her, which came in a regular-sized bottle, with a real cork; he could have spent less and gotten her four times as much of the jug wine she favored but the label was illustrated with a pen drawing of a duck nestled among reeds and it had reminded him of Dora, or at least the way she always seemed snugly reposed, even when perched on a barstool at Smitty’s. She nipped at the wine to start, as it wasn’t juice-sweet like her brand, but she was quaffing it now in deep, regular pulls, saying it was lively and tart on her tongue.