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The coffee shop is closed,
so I wait with the window rolled down in the shade of a hackberry.
Ten minutes until opening, according to the sign, but the girl
arrives five minutes early and parks her car next to mine. I bend
to see her through my passenger-side window and ask if I can come
in.

“Sorry,” she says. “We’re
not open yet.”

“Oh, no, I know. I just want
to check on something. It’ll take two seconds.”

“Five minutes,” she says,
walking toward the building. She unlocks the door and then closes
and locks it behind her.

Seven minutes later, she
plugs in the neon ‘open’ sign and waves me in from behind the long
window.

“
I didn’t even notice,” she
says, looking from behind the counter at the spot on the wall. “It
must have gone yesterday or the day before. I have weekends
off.”

“And there’s no way of
knowing?”

“Not until I talk to Sherry.
She was here.”

“Maybe she wrote it down
somewhere. You guys don’t have a book, or something?”

“We have a book, but Sherry
is the owner, and she keeps the books. I can’t help you,” she says.
“If you want to come back later, she might be here.”

“Might?”

“She comes and
goes.”

“You don’t know
when?”

“No.”

“Can you ask her if she
knows who bought it?”

“She won’t give out that
kind of information.”

“It’s just a painting,” I
say. “Just a stupid painting of a stupid house. What’s the
secret?”

“If you want to make an
appointment with her, I can give her a call later and set one up
for you.”

“Forget it. It’s not—never
mind.”

The girl pours a bag of
beans into a grinder.

“Are you always alone during
the week?” I say.

“Pretty much.”

“Are you—is
she…Sheryl?”

“Sherry.”

“Is Sherry
hiring?”

The girl presses the button
and the machine, loud, whirs and grinds. “I don’t think so, no,”
she almost shouts.

MAY 4, SUNDAY

“
Mia. Donny. Donaldson. I
got a—I got beer, and I got—uh—I got—what the…? Bourbon, brand new,
fresh in the bottle and never opened…Yet…But we don’t got to drink.
You can have soda or water…whatever…It’s a bad day…I’m out…Outta
the house…a week, now? Naw, two weeks…No chance. No chance, she
says…I got a place.” Laughter. “A real fine place on Riverside.
Rooms. A front desk. Bellhop and room service and a spa…This is
Doctor Donaldson speaking…Come over. Midtown Motel, room eight…Or
call. Four five oh eight.”

“Zero,” I say from the
couch. “Four five
zero
eight.”

______

Water drips from the kitchen
faucet. The television is green, night time at war, a few hours
from sunrise. Now full color, a shot of the sky where something was
before it wasn’t.

I’ve put the clock keeping
track of Jake’s time next to the computer. I don’t need it by the
TV, anymore, because their graphics people have designed one for
the corner, a cheerful banner that flips through the stateside time
zones and, now, war time. It’s green and blue and red and the
letters—the numbers—are big and white, like grammar-school numbers,
and they flip, flip, flip, in a happy soothing rhythm like a…like
something that would do that. Doesn’t matter, really, what it is,
because it’s just a happy silly graphic, and it’s my time and war
time and all the time is war time. A time on a clock. An exciting
time, this time in history, all other countries, the rest of the
whole wide world, forgotten by the media for this

very exciting
time

in history, this progress,
this momentous action on the part of the administration that has
burped the rest of the planet into oblivion, off the

sip

priority list, and if they
would just stop. Cut to a commercial. Cover Japan or Havana so I
could blink, sleep dreamless for a minute or two, relax distracted
by the world between me and Jake and the something that was there
before it wasn’t.

________

Not the TV.

I need that.

The wall.

It’s louder than I expected.
One of the chunks lands on the shelf and breaks the plate he bought
at the Grand Canyon.

Shit. Not
that
.

This!

And this!

________

Someone knocks at the
door,
knock knock knock
, has been for what seems like hours. I reach for my coffee,
but it’s cold, and when I get up to bring it to the kitchen my head
spins. I steady myself on the chair and feel strangely tall, the
kitchen is crowded, too small for me. I take a step and Chancey
runs underfoot and I kick out, catching his tail.
Knock knock knock.
I close
the mug in the microwave and set the time, watch the glass dish
spin around and around and—

“Mia.”

The microwave
dings.

“Let me in.”

I pull the mug from the
microwave and it is hot on my palm. I set it on the counter, pick
it up by the handle and walk to the door, open it. Denise shoves in
and closes the door and walks straight to the living room. Her
footfalls stop short.

The cup really is very hot.
I set it on the counter and open the refrigerator and stare at
white grated shelves, white walls, a wrapped slice of cheese,
orange against the stark brightness. I push at the door to the
butter bin. Empty.

She stands now in the
kitchen entry. I lean in to check the date on a half gallon of
milk. Bad.

Bile or something like it
floods my throat, fights against being swallowed down.

Denise takes my hand and
leads me to the living room. “…no word…,” they say through the
small holes on the side of the TV. Denise asks what this
is.

“It’s my living
room.”

“What did you do to it? The
shelves are bare.”

Yes.

The shelves are
bare.

Her nails are rough and
scrape into my palm. I pull my hand free and she grabs me again—my
wrist, this time—but more gently.

“Is this any way to treat
your things?” She smiles, tugs my arm. “Some of them were so
beautiful.”

Yes. Beautiful. But it can’t
be owned, beauty, can’t be trapped in my lungs and tasted on my
breath when I exhale. It’s fleeting, like a silk scarf lost to the
wind. An abstract, empty, satisfying indulgence, so I threw—hurled,
really—the geodes, but they wouldn’t break, or even chip. Edges
like painted glass, and inside, a cavern of dazzlingly perfect
crystals, so perfect I wanted to eat them, wanted to pluck out the
individual shards and push them into my eyes. I read somewhere that
people are doing that, having garnets of all colors embedded in the
whites of their eyes. Eye jewelry. But then, they can’t see it
unless they look in a mirror.

And the jade figurine, a
bird on a stump with carved flowers—pansies, I think—at its feet.
It was heavy. Solid. The petals folded delicately open and the
feathers, chiseled so smooth, promised to fan. But what
good
? I took pleasure in
all of it, in
decorating,
in placing the bird just so next to the old
dictionary. Jake enjoyed it, too, putting things here, putting
things there. His things, my things. The apartment was ours because
our
things
lived
here. The first night, all moved in, we made hot chocolate and sat
on the couch and looked at our arrangement of
things
.

Denise picks up the half of
the bird she finds partially hidden under the lowest shelf.
“Pretty,” she says. She drops it on the floor and it dents the
wood. I look at her feet. She’s standing in rubble. She nudges our
things with her toes. Pieces of a painted gourd Jake picked up at
an import store. Gray rocks from my Zen garden. Shards of baked
clay from the matching pottery jugs we bought at a street fair from
a man with red cheeks and blue wool mittens.

Stereo cords coil under the
mess and the speakers are on separate sides of the room, one of
them upside down, the other facing the wall. The stereo lies
face-own in the middle of the room with a split spreading across
the case.

She asks where my broom is.
My dustpan.

“Why?”

“I’ll find it,” she says,
and she does. What’s not broken, she sets on a shelf. What is
broken, she sweeps into a pile and dumps in a paper bag. She asks
where the cat food is and I tell her I fed him an hour ago—or
several hours? today, anyway—and that his water is fresh. “Just
checking,” she says, but she shakes the bag of food anyway,
calling, “C’mere, kitty.” He doesn’t, which is unusual, because
even when he’s not hungry, he usually does. I ask her if it’s
possible he sneaked out when she came in.

“I would have noticed,” she
says.

We search the apartment
until we find him behind my hamper in the bedroom
closet.

“Maybe you scared
him.”

I ask her how.

She picks up the bag of
broken things and puts it outside the front door. “I wonder,
Mia.”

________

Quarter after eight in the
evening, Jake’s. Denise has been here an hour and a
half.

We’ve done nothing. Watched
the news. News and more news. We turned our attention to the
machine when Olivia called and left a message—“I don’t think it’s
him, hon, but if it is, you’ll be okay. We’ll just have to help
each other through it.”—and then went back to waiting.

“Why haven’t you been
answering your phone?” she says. “I left messages. Didn’t you get
them?”

“I wanted to keep the line
open.”

“Not just today. It’s been
over a week.” She runs through the channels again, ending on the
original station. The screen has cut from night vision to the news
desk. No new information, they say. No names because they’re
“awaiting an investigation and family notification before revealing
specific details.”

“I’ve been out trying to
find a job.”

She says, “Your car is in
the same place it was the last time I left. Exactly.”

“It’s a good
spot.”

She sighs.

I ask her if she wouldn’t
rather be at home.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Now stop.”

The phone rings. We look at
it. On the machine, I suggest the caller leave a message at the
beep.
Beep
. Olivia
says, “Mia, are you there? Pick up if you are, hon.”

Denise looks at me,
whispers, “What if it’s something?”

I shake my head.

Olivia chews gum into the
phone. “I’m just so worried about you,” she says. “You know Jakey
would want you to be strong at a time like this.”

Denise says, “Are you sure
you don’t want to answer?”

I shake my head.

“Well, okay.” Olivia
exhales. “No one has called me yet, or come over, heaven forbid,
but as soon as they—oh, will you listen to me? Of course I
mean
if
—if anyone
does, I’ll call you right away… I’m so sorry you have to rely on me
to do it. Sometimes I wish you two were married, hon, because I
think I’d much rather hear the news from you…Anyway, call me when
you get this and we’ll muddle through together.”

Denise waits until Olivia
hangs up and says, “Encouraging.”

The news takes a commercial
break. A woman wearing a shapeless pink collar shirt and equally
shapeless khaki pants dances with a dust mop, her uninspired hair
swinging neatly against the base of her neck.

“Yeah,” Denise says.
“Dusting’s a blast.” She picks at the seam of her jeans. “I need a
drink.”

“So do I.”

“What do you
have?”

“It’s only noon,
though.”

“What do you
have?”

She pours two glasses and we
lean against opposite counters. The television is loud enough to
hear from the kitchen.

“Strong.” She coughs and
clears her throat.

Behind me, the faucet
drips.

“I really don’t think it was
them,” she says. She takes two cigarettes from the pack she set on
the counter and lights them both with that shiny lighter, hands me
one.

I hold it between my fingers
and watch the tip turn to gray ash. I want it, but my stomach is
unsettled. Jake would say that probably means I should put it
out.

Two days ago, I stopped
thinking about him while waiting in line at a drive-through window.
It was sunny, warm, and I was hungry and the chicken smelled good.
A minivan stuffed with children idled at the ordering box, their
small heads bouncing up and down, front seat and back again,
changing orders, adding sides. I turned the radio up loud and sang
with a song I hated. I thought only of the lines, wondered how I
somehow knew every word, and then I thought about the food I would
bring home, and how much longer it would take for that minivan to
pull out, and how loud and messy kids are.