I went in and took a seat in a booth, the one nearest the kitchen. A few other patrons were scattered around the room, but the place was mostly empty. My waitress this time was an older, irritable-looking woman who smelled not so faintly of cigarette smoke. I ordered a glass of ice water and another bagel with cream cheese. I hadn’t realized I was hungry, but when my order came, I ate it very quickly and still wanted more. I ordered a second, and took just a bite, determined to make this one last so that I could prolong my stay in the most comfortable place I’d been that whole day. I scooted over until I was up against the wall, crossed my arms on the table before me and, just for a moment, rested my head on them. I’m not sure how much time passed — ten minutes? twenty? — but an angry voice cut into my sleep. “Hey. You can’t do that here.” I sat bolt upright. “You’d better pay and get out.”
“But I haven’t finished my food,” I protested.
“You’d better not go to sleep again. Hurry up and eat.” She glared at me. Because I had committed the crime of nodding off in
a public place, in her eyes I had suddenly changed to a deadbeat. I was too tired to be outraged, too woozy with sleep to take another bite of my bagel. I sat there for a long while, trying to wake up all the way, to become alert enough to figure out what I should do when I’d finished the last crumb on my plate. Every so often, the waitress passed by again and eyed me with contempt.
“You gonna finish that?” she asked on her third trip past my table.
“Yes,” I said, “in a moment.”
“There’s a time limit on these booths.”
“There are plenty of empty tables,” I pointed out. “Nobody’s waiting for this one.”
“I don’t care. Eat, pay, and go.”
My next bite was sodden, almost unchewable. I spit it into a napkin and tucked the mess under my plate. I couldn’t help what happened next. Tears started slipping down my face, but I wouldn’t let that horrible waitress see my distress. I pulled napkin after napkin out of the metal dispenser, trying to wipe away my storm of self-pity and frustration. A sudden bout of sobbing must have given me away.
“Hey. What’s this about?” a familiar voice said. “Oh, it’s you.” It was my waitress from earlier, the only friendly person I had spoken to all day long. She plunked herself into the seat across from mine and put a finger to her lips. “Shhh. I can’t let my boss see me sitting here. So tell me fast: what’s wrong?” Her long, straight hair, tied back in a ponytail, was the color of honey; her name tag read
DIANA.
“I don’t have any place to sleep tonight,” I told her, all pride and reticence gone. “I hardly have any money, and I don’t know how I’ll find a job if I don’t even have an address to put on the applica
tion, and my cell phone…” But I couldn’t trust myself to say another word.
Diana looked around, checking to see who was watching. Then she ducked her head and whispered, “Don’t cry. I’ll help you. Can you come on over to my station and sit there until my shift’s over? I get off at midnight — about forty-five minutes.”
“I can sit here all night and pretty much the rest of my life.”
“Good. Do you like coffee? I’ll bring you some.” She looked around to make sure nobody was listening. “On the house.”
After her shift, Diana swooped by my table to spirit me away. She still wore her blue uniform and smelled slightly of fried things. “C’mon,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”
“The check?” I asked.
“No problem. It’s taken care of.” When I tried to object, she waved me off. “Listen, I live with my sister and brother. You can stay on our couch tonight. It’s old and a little smelly, and we have a cat. Are you okay with that?”
Was I okay with that? It took all my restraint not to throw my arms around her neck and weep with relief. “You’re saving my life.”
“Well, it’s not the Ritz. We live off campus… way off.”
“It sounds perfect,” I said.
I followed her out the door and up the street to a small blue Hyundai parked at an expired meter. “Look at that: no ticket. This must be my lucky day.” She got in and leaned over to unlock my door. “What’s your name? And what’s your story?”
“Jane Martin.” The made-up last name slipped off my tongue. “And I’d rather not tell my story.”
“Oh, really?” She shrugged. “We’ll get it out of you.”
She drove out of the lush green area around the university, past streets of redbrick row houses, and before long we were in an area with fewer trees, the darkened storefronts shielded by metal grates. As she drove, Diana cheerfully filled me in on her own background, so there was no need for me to talk about myself. She had recently graduated from UConn and was living with her sister Maria, also a UConn graduate, and their brother River, a seminary student at Yale Divinity School. They had family back in Greenwich, but none of them particularly wanted to move back to the suburbs. “Too smug,” Diana said. “Too safe. We wound up out here with River because he needs us. He’s socially hopeless and can’t cook or keep house to save his life — you’ll see — but he’s kind of an idiot savant, and we love him to pieces.”
She pulled up in front of a white house that pitched slightly to one side. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was one of the better-kept houses on the fairly bedraggled street. “We’ve got the second floor,” she said. “Above the illegal aliens and below the junkies.” I followed her up the dark, narrow staircase, and she unlatched three locks before opening the door. “Maria!” she shouted. “We’ve got a visitor.”
From a lit-up room beyond the darkened kitchen in which we stood, a woman, clearly Diana’s sister, swept in. “Well, turn the light on,” Maria said, and flicked a switch to reveal a clean, old-fashioned kitchen, with harvest-gold appliances that must have predated both women who lived there. Maria was thinner and taller than her sister, but she had the same round, clear-skinned face and wide brown eyes. “Who’s this?” She took my suitcase from me and stowed it in the hallway.
“Jane Martin,” Diana said. “She needs a couch to crash on. You mind?”
“Why would I mind? Where are you from, Jane? Are you a student?”
“She’s a woman of mystery,” Diana answered for me. “Let’s ply her with beer and get her secrets out of her.” She opened the fridge. “We’ve got Rolling Rock. River doesn’t want us to buy anything fancier. He’s such a dweeb.”
“But he’s
our
dweeb,” Maria said fondly. Then she turned to her sister. “He’ll be late tonight. Of course.”
“Of course. Here, Jane. Sit down and drink up.” Diana set a sweating green bottle on the table in front of me.
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “I can’t.” I was conscious of an aching in my joints that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “I don’t feel right.”
Diana’s cool hand felt my forehead. “You’ve got a fever. Do we have a thermometer?”
“I dropped it,” Maria said. “Glass everywhere.”
“She’s like an oven.” Diana turned to her sister. “I’ll set up the couch for her. You run interference with River when he gets here. Do we have any ibuprofen left?”
Before long, I was stretched out on a slightly lumpy couch in the darkened living room. My head felt like a balloon filled with damp sand. I slept awhile, then woke shivering in what must have been the middle of the night, unsure where I was for a long time. The apartment was silent. I could feel a weight on my feet. When I tried to move them, it shifted; the disgruntled cat jumped down from the couch and ran off. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that a glass of water had been set on the coffee table beside me; I took a
sip. The events of the past forty-eight hours came back to me slowly. Despite the sheet and blankets Diana had spread over me, I couldn’t stop trembling with cold. I lay there a long time, utterly miserable, but then I must have fallen back asleep. The next thing I knew the room was filled with daylight; voices murmured from the kitchen. A bit later, Maria brought me more ibuprofen, a fresh glass of water, and a plate of toast I couldn’t bring myself to touch.
“Go back to sleep,” she said, spreading another blanket over me. “Sleep as long as you need to.” So I did, for what must have been hours. When I finally woke again, I felt well enough to sit up, but when I did, the room swam around me. The sky beyond the small square living room window was darkening. I lay back down, trying not to think too hard. Wondering where I would go when I was well enough to leave the couch made me nauseous, so I pushed all those worries away and let sleep come again.
It must have been another twenty-four hours before I was well enough to get up, brush my teeth, take a shower, and change into fresh clothes. I ventured into the kitchen and found Maria and Diana there.
“Look who’s up!” Diana exclaimed. “We were beginning to think we’d have to sling you over our shoulders and carry you off to the clinic. How do you feel?”
I assured them that I was starting to feel better. Maria offered to make me some tea, and I let her.
“You’ve been asleep for days,” Diana told me. “Seriously, we were starting to worry about you.”
“We’re trying to figure out what’s for dinner,” Maria told me. “Do you think you could eat?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’d like to try.”
Diana started pulling out produce from the crisper. “Carrots. Broccoli. Green pepper. What’s this?”
“Ew. Throw that out,” Maria directed. “We’ve got tofu. Chicken’s all gone; I didn’t make it to the food co-op today.”
“Looks like stir-fry,” Diana said. “Jane, put your feet up.” She pulled out one of the three wooden chairs around the small kitchen table.
I took a sip of the orange zinger tea Maria had set before me. “Please let me help,” I said. “I’m feeling well enough now.”
“Tonight you just sit there.” Diana pulled a chef’s knife out of a drawer and went to work at a thick chopping block on the Formica counter. Though they wouldn’t let me help, it felt good to sit near them while they bustled around, readying the garlic, broccoli, and scallions. It felt like a million years since I’d listened to easy, companionable conversation between friends. Maria put rice on to boil, and Diana manned the wok.
Just as the kitchen was starting to smell really good, a key rattled in the locks. A young man in a windbreaker came in carrying a bicycle. His blond hair was tousled, his cheeks flushed. He took instant note of me — the stranger at his kitchen table. “She’s still here?” he asked.
“Manners, nimrod.” Diana spoke without looking up from her stir-fry. “Put that bicycle away, and we’ll talk.”
He disappeared and soon returned. “We’ll need an extra chair,” he observed.
“Go get the one from your desk,” Diana told him. Then, to me, she said, “Don’t mind River. You’ll see. He’s worth the effort.”
He returned and held out his hand for me to shake. “I’m River St. John,” he said, a bit stiffly.
I introduced myself as Jane Martin.
“Diana likes to bring home strays,” River said.
Diana gave him a playful punch on the arm. “That’s not a very nice way to talk about our dinner guest,” she said. “Jane’s new in town, and she just needs a leg up.”
“Are you a student?” River asked. “Do you have a job?”
“No and no,” I told him, uncomfortable under his very direct blue gaze. River St. John was quite possibly the most handsome guy I’d ever seen in my life. His skin was perfectly clear, and with his chiseled features he resembled a marble statue of Apollo. When he took off his windbreaker, I could see he was thin but muscular. His faded T-shirt bore a photo of earth as seen from space.
“Do you have friends in the area?” he asked. “What brought you here?”
“I don’t have any friends.” I saw fit not to answer the second question.
“Where are you from? Don’t you have any family?”
“I’m from Pennsylvania,” I said, thinking that answer was vague enough and not untrue. “And no, my parents died almost a year ago.”
“And you have no place to live?”
“Stop interrogating the poor thing,” Diana said. “Can’t you see she’s still unwell?” She gave her brother a look that communicated something very directly, although I couldn’t say what. The two of them slipped out together to another room.
Maria set the table with mismatched plates, silverware, and glasses. She put a steaming bowl of brown rice on the table and the wok full of stir-fried vegetables on a broken trivet. “Let me go see where they went.”
I sat alone in the kitchen for what felt like a very long time. I knew the three of them must be talking about me and that River might be objecting to the presence of a strange person in his home. What if he wouldn’t let me spend another night? But I didn’t think Diana would let him toss me out on the street, especially now that it was getting dark. And they were locals; they could tell me where I might go to find a bed for tomorrow night.
When the three of them came back into the kitchen, they said nothing, but Diana had a small, satisfied smile on her face. River spread a paper napkin across his lap and folded his hands. Taking their cue from him, Maria and Diana did the same. A heartbeat later, so did I. “Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service,” River said, and then dug in.
The food smelled good; I spooned some rice onto my plate and ate a little to steady my stomach. The chipped and mismatched dishware and the creaky chairs we sat on somehow made the room feel more, not less, comfortable. Diana and Maria joked and talked about their day. From what I could gather, Maria worked in the law library at Yale and was taking a night class in German literature with a professor she called Herr Bachmeier. Diana was looking for some kind of work that was better paying and more satisfying than her waitressing job, but she’d been a philosophy major and couldn’t quite decide what direction her life should take. And River, who was studying to become a minister, put in long hours as
a volunteer at a soup kitchen. I was cheered by this last bit of news; certainly he would be able to point me in the direction of a shelter and maybe even put in a good word for me there, if such a thing would help me get a bed. I waited until River had all but finished his beer and seemed to have loosened up a bit.
“Tell me more about the soup kitchen,” I said. “Is it far from here? Can anyone eat there?”