Soon.
7
Shortly after Grace left, Diandra called. Stan Timpson would give me five minutes on the phone at eleven.
“Five whole minutes,” I said.
“For Stan, that’s generous. I gave him your number. He’ll call you at eleven on the dot. Stanley’s prompt.”
She gave me Jason’s class schedule for the week and his dorm room number. I copied it all down as fear made her voice sound tiny and brittle, and just before we hung up she said, “I’m so nervous. I hate it.”
“Don’t worry, Doctor Warren. This will all work out.”
“Will it?”
I called Angie and the phone was picked up on the second ring. Before I heard a voice, there was a rustling noise, as if the phone were being passed from one hand to another and I heard her whisper, “I got it. Okay?”
Her voice was hoarse and hesitant with sleep. “Hello?”
“Morning.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “It’s that.” There was another rustling noise from her end, a disentangling of sheets, and a bed spring groaned. “What’s up, Patrick?”
I gave her the rundown on my conversation with Diandra and Eric.
“So it definitely wasn’t Kevin who called her.” Her voice was still sluggish. “This makes no sense.”
“Nope. You got a pen?”
“Somewhere. Let me find it.”
More of that rustling sound and I knew she’d dropped
the phone on the bed as she rummaged around for a pen. Angie’s kitchen is spotless because she’s never used it, and her bathroom sparkles because she hates filth, but her bedroom always looks like she just unpacked from a trip in the middle of a windstorm. Socks and underwear spill from open drawers, and clean jeans and shirts and leggings are strewn across the floor or hang from doorknobs or the posts of her headboard. She’s never, as long as I’ve known her, worn the first wardrobe she’s considered in the morning. Amid all this carnage, books and magazines, spines bent or cracked, peek up from the floor.
Mountain bikes have been lost in Angie’s bedroom, and now she was looking for a pen.
After several drawers were banged open and change and lighters and earrings were moved around on the tops of nightstands, someone said, “What’re you looking for?”
“A pen.”
“Here.”
She came back on the line. “Got a pen.”
“Paper?” I said.
“Oh, shit.”
That took another minute.
“Go ahead,” she said.
I gave her Jason Warren’s class schedule and dorm room number. She’d tail him while I waited for Stan Timpson’s call.
“Got it,” she said. “Damn, I got to get moving.”
I looked at my watch. “His first class isn’t till ten-thirty. You got time.”
“Nope. Got an appointment at nine-thirty.”
“With who?”
Her breathing was slightly labored, and I assumed she was tugging on jeans. “My attorney. See you at Bryce whenever you get there.”
She hung up and I stared out at the avenue below. It seemed cut from a canyon, the day was so clear, striped hard as a frozen river between rows of three-deckers and brick. Windshields were seared white and opaque by the sun.
An attorney? Sometimes in the heady flush of my past
three months with Grace, I’d remember with something like surprise that my partner was also out there living a life. Separate from my own. Her life with its attorneys and entanglements and minidramas and men who handed her pens in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning.
So, who was this attorney? And who was the guy who handed her the pen? And why should I care?
And what the hell did “soon” mean?
I had ninety minutes or so to kill before Timpson called, and after I exercised, I still had over an hour. I went looking for something in my fridge that wasn’t beer or soda, and came up empty, so I walked up the avenue to the corner store for my coffee.
I took it back out onto the avenue and leaned against a light pole for a few minutes, enjoyed the day, and sipped my coffee as traffic rolled by and pedestrians rushed past on their way to the subway stop at the end of Crescent.
Behind me I could smell the stench of stale beer and soaked-in-wood whiskey wafting from The Black Emerald Tavern. The Emerald opened at eight for those getting off the graveyard shift, and now, close to ten, it sounded no different than it did on a Friday night, a gaggle of slurred, lazy voices punctuated by the occasional bellow or the sharp crack of a pool cue making impact with a rack of balls.
“Hey, stranger.”
I turned and looked down into the face of a petite woman with a hazy, liquid grin. She had her hand over her eyes to block the sun and it took me a minute to place her because the hair and clothes were different and even her voice had deepened since the last time I’d heard it, though it was still light and ephemeral, as if it might lift off into the breeze before the words had time to dig in.
“Hi, Kara. When’d you get back?”
She shrugged. “A while ago. How you doing, Patrick?”
“Fine.”
Kara pivoted back and forth on her heel and rolled her eyes off to the side, her grin playing softly up the left side of her face, and she was instantly familiar again.
She’d been a sunny kid, but a loner. You’d see her in the playground scribbling or drawing in a notepad while the other kids played kickball. As she grew older and took her place on the corner overlooking the Blake Yard, her group filling the place my group had abandoned ten years earlier, you’d notice her sitting off to herself against a fence or porch post, drinking a wine cooler and looking out at the streets as if they seemed suddenly foreign to her. She wasn’t ostracized or labeled weird because she was beautiful, more beautiful by half than the next most beautiful girl, and pure beauty is valued in this neighborhood like no other commodity because it seems more accidental than even a cash windfall.
Everyone knew, from the time she could walk, that she’d never stay in the neighborhood. It could never hold the beautiful ones and the leaving was entrenched in her eyes like flaws in the irises. When you spoke to her, some part of her—whether it was her head, her arms, her twitching legs—was incapable of remaining still, as if it were already moving past you and the boundaries of the neighborhood into that place she saw beyond.
As rare as she would have seemed to her circle of friends, a version of Kara came along every five years or so. In my days on the corner, it was Angie. And as far as I know, she’s the only one who thwarted the strangely defeated neighborhood logic and stuck around.