She walked slowly past the prep table, stopping to look under it, where the pans and plates were stored. No one.
There was no back door that she could see. He had to be in here.
A soft clank. Some hanging spatulas moving. She crept toward them, looking around at the large dishwashing sink and the cold storage room.
The cold storage room. A heavy magnetized door. Was it slightly ajar?
She reached out her hand, slowly, so slowly. Fingers around the handle. The kitchen was empty and silent. No one out in the diner seemed to be watching. Even the woman with the clipboard had returned to her usual business of marking off new entrances. She was alone and no one would help her if anything went wrong.
“Story of my life,” she said, and flung open the magnetized door. Shelves of meat and produce, nothing else. There was nowhere she could see to hide.
A crash from behind her. The blond man pushed away the pile of plates he had been hiding behind in a shout of broken ceramics. She tore after him, and they both slammed through the steel swinging doors. She was just behind him as they weaved through tables and surprised customers.
The clipboard woman was adding something up on her clipboard, mouthing the equations as she went, apparently uninterested in the chase.
Jackie sprinted through the diner as quickly as a person can sprint after a stranger through a diner, which was not quickly at all. The blond man burst out the front door and Jackie was moments behind him. She was younger and she was faster and she would catch him. Her feet slapped hard on the asphalt, so hot in the midday sun that she could feel the heat through the soles of her shoes.
“I’ve got you,” she shouted, before she had him.
“Troy!” Diane shouted, running from her car. “Troy, I need to talk to you.”
The blond man broke right, toward the road and the abandoned gas station across the street.
Diane and Jackie both turned to follow, and collided with each other. Subsequently they both collided with the ground.
“Goddammit!” Jackie shouted into the blacktop, a long red scratch on her face. Diane had the makings of a bruise on her thigh but didn’t know it yet. They both looked toward the gas station, but the man was gone.
“Goddammit!” Jackie repeated with her mouth. “Goddammit!” she repeated over and over with her palm onto the asphalt.
Diane glared at her, rubbing her leg.
“Why were you chasing Troy?” she asked.
Jackie glared at her. Diane Crayton, John had said. Diane was involved, and didn’t this prove it?
“Why was I chasing him? Why do you have that paper?”
Diane didn’t understand what that question had to do with anything that had just happened. Jackie looked back at the gas station.
“I almost had him, Diane. That weird dude.”
“You almost had him? What did ‘that weird dude’ do to you, Jackie?”
Jackie tried to come up with an explanation as to why her actions made sense. Her head hurt. “He just stares and smiles. What’s his deal? I mean…”
“Maybe you’re too young to understand this, but you don’t just run after people because you want to know what their deal is.”
Diane had slipped into didactic mom voice without meaning to, and they both heard it.
“Ah, so the mature approach is to body-tackle people in parking lots. Awesome. I’m sure when I’m as old as you I’ll remember that.”
Diane sighed and stood up, seeing if her body could still do that. She looked the teenager up and down.
“If you want to be treated as an adult, Jackie, you have to act like it.”
In her head, Jackie heard the voice of her ex-friend Noelle Connolly, brimming with parental condescension: Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?
“Screw you,” she said.
“Oh, good. That’s good.”
Diane turned and walked back to her car. Jackie walked after her.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going? How do you know that guy? How did you know his name was Troy? Like, seriously, what’s his deal?”
Diane collected herself and spoke with only a mild tremble.
“This is none of your business. Troy is someone from my past, and I’m trying to talk to him so that things will be right with my son. My son, who is the only child I am interested in raising right now. You’ll have to find someone else to do that for you.”
She slammed herself into her car. Jackie made a gesture through the window that succinctly responded to many of the points made. Diane shrugged and reversed the car out of the spot.
“I’m finding out who that guy is and what you have to do with him,” Jackie shouted after her. “I’m getting to the goddamn bottom of this. You just stay out of my way while I do.”
Diane responded with acceleration. Jackie threw the paper after her.
“Screw you,” Jackie said.
“KING CITY,” the paper said, back in her hand.
“She has no idea what she’s talking about,” Diane and Jackie said simultaneously and separately, but about this they both had their doubts.
Chapter 23
Sitting in her car, which sat in front of her house, which was not thinking anything at the time, Diane took out her phone and the paper that Evan had written on.
Diane did not remember much from her meeting with Evan at the diner. But she did remember he had texted her. She had also taken photos of him. She had also asked him to write down his name.
She remembered Jackie chasing after Troy. Diane, thinking of this moment, rubbed the burn marks on her left forearm. Why was Jackie looking for Troy? There was a great pit of the unknown under the rickety bridge of her and Josh’s relationship, and every time she looked down the pit was deeper than before. She felt annoyed with Jackie but furious with Troy. Another young person caught in the wake he was creating as he moved lightly through his careless, carefree life.
She looked at the piece of paper. It said “KING CITY,” and on the back it had Evan’s name. His name was not Evan. She looked at the name on the page and said it aloud. She said it again, and then put the paper down.
“Evan McIntyre,” she said aloud, and shrugged. “That’s just what it’s going to be then.”
Diane opened her photos and looked at one of the pictures she’d taken of Evan at the diner. He was wearing a tan jacket. She stared at the picture, then closed her eyes, hoping to burn the image into her mind, or onto the backs of her retinas, or into the mystic cloud of the collective unconscious, whatever it is that makes us remember images. She was no scientist.
She muttered his name with her eyes shut, trying to hold on to the image of him. His eyes, nose, mouth, hairline. Nothing. She looked back at the photo. She took in his lips, and thought about the many adjectives that could be used to describe them. Then she looked at his nose, and took in the adjectives that could be used to describe it.
Upon staring at the nose, she forgot those adjectives she thought about the lips. She looked back at the lips and forgot the nose. She never even got to the ears.
Diane searched her text history and tried texting Evan back. Another way to remember someone is to create more memories with that person. The more there is to forget, the longer forgetting takes.
She typed: “Hey, good talking to you the other night. Let’s do it again.”
It sounded like a date. She deleted the text without sending.
A horsefly sitting on the right rear headrest flew to the left rear headrest.
Diane saw it do this.
She wrote a different text: “Evan, I can’t remember what we talked about. Can you come back?”