Yvonne Navarro
It’s three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon and the funeral is over.
It is a spectacular day, unseasonably warm for November and much more suited to weddings, or birthdays, or even a spur-of-the-moment picnic. The sun is painfully bright, the breeze warm and full of birdsong and the far-off smell of burning leaves. It hasn’t snowed yet, so the grass is still a lush green below trees laden with the colors of autumn. Reds, yellows, oranges, and browns, all the colors of life on the downswing of recycling itself. There is a line of sculpted, pine-type trees, tall and thin, stretching along one side of the narrow road; Erin doesn’t know what they’re called but she’s always hated them because they remind her of skinny sentinels, more like the bars of a prison than trees. Leslie never cared for them either.
From where she’s parked at the back of the line of cars, Erin sits quietly in her black Lincoln Navigator and watches the rest of the mourners as they climb into limousines with darkened windows, fancy family cars, lots of Cadillacs and BMWs; no doubt they are all on their way to the grandparents’ big house in Barrington, the one Leslie hated because it always smelled like old lavender and mothballs. No one looks her way, no one comes to the window to offer a soothing word or a sympathetic glance. No, Leslie’s family will draw comfort from each other, and Erin has never been welcome within that chaotic, privileged circle. Now they—the father, the mother, the siblings and grandparents and cousins and God only knows who else—will all rebuild the deception that Leslie tore down three years after she graduated from college, the lie that said she was a general heterosexual someday-I’ll-give-you-grandchildren woman.
Through the window of the Lincoln, Erin can see the hole in the ground.
A blanket of pseudo-lawn tries unsuccessfully to hide it, but Erin knows that beneath the too-bright green, the grave gapes like a big brown mouth. It’s cold, and big, and no longer empty. A few feet down inside it lies Leslie’s body, an empty shell that was once her lover and best friend. Leslie would hate all this— the smell of freshly mown grass, the too-sweet twitter of a hundred birds, the nauseous scent of the funeral wreaths arranged around the grave like gossiping old ladies dressed in ribbon-festooned, gaudy print dresses. Leslie had always said that if anything happened to her, she wanted to be cremated, burned beyond the possibility of cold ground and decay. “Take my ashes out to Sedona and spread them down the side of Cathedral Rock,” she’d said. “That’s as close to a church as I ever want to be.”
But Leslie’s wishes had meant nothing in the hearts of her family, and her words had been worthless in their ears. On the morning after, Mom and Pop had swooped into the emergency room like parental vultures, taking charge, taking control, taking Leslie. But did it really matter? As far as Erin was concerned, she had already lost everything.
That was then, this is now. And now is where Erin is, parked in a cemetery in tree-choked suburban Lisle with the sun shining bright and warm through the windshield on an unseasonably warm November day. She has never felt so dark and alone in her life.
She stays until the last of the cars has gone, thinking she will get out and go sit by Leslie’s grave, talk to her as if she were still there with her. Before she can do this, a groundskeeper drives across the manicured lawn on one of those little yellow machines. What is it called? A backhoe, that’s it. The gears shift and the engine noise builds; then another groundskeeper strolls up and pulls away the piece of fake lawn. A moment later the bucket on the machine is swooping and scooping and dropping dirt onto the mahogany casket that contains everything that meant anything in the world to her, and Erin loses her courage and effectively runs.
She has nowhere to go but the café or home, and both are unthinkable. They are nothing but reminders of the picture-perfect life she shared with Leslie, the same life that disintegrated Saturday morning when she woke to find her mate dead of a brain aneurysm in bed beside her. Erin has slept on the couch ever since. Home is a three-bedroom bungalow in Elmhurst with a professionally outfitted bright yellow kitchen and brand-new Berber carpeting in the living room, a carefully decorated guest room in which no one has ever stayed and a messy office once shared by the two of them. It’s a basement they never got around to finishing and a yard with grass that is always a little too long and a bedroom where a ghost lay waiting on the unchanged sheets of the king-size four-poster bed.
Erin can’t go there. Not just yet.
The restaurant then, Erlie’s Café. Not a very imaginative name but they’d liked the combination of their names and the double meaning—Erlie, early—and had sunk savings and brains and sweat into making it the success it was. The breakfast crowd was fast and demanding, the light lunch flocks more thoughtful and slow, prone to reading a book or working on a laptop while they lingered over homemade moussaka, bowls of chili thick with meat and onions, or Hungarian goulash soup with ground veal and sliced potatoes. Their afternoon clientele was usually women, some business-minded, others more creative and dreamy-eyed; most of them are lesbians like Erin and Leslie, and they know that Erlie’s is a place they can relax and be themselves. That was one of the biggest reasons Erin and Leslie had opened the café to begin with—to offer a place of solitude and peace to women living alternate lifestyles.
The café has been closed since she and Leslie went home Friday afternoon at four. If she goes there, Erin will have to unlock it and step inside a place built by two and never meant to be run by one. No, not today—tomorrow she will do this, reopen the business and learn to do all the parts that Leslie had always taken care of, think about hiring someone to wait tables while Erin does the cooking. Erin doesn’t want to, but she has no choice. Hadn’t Leslie always told her that whatever didn’t kill her would make her stronger?
Right now Erin wishes she could be weak enough to die.
But she doesn’t. Instead she starts the Lincoln and drives out of the cemetery, as if she were leaving most of her soul behind. She gets on I-355 and heads north, numbly putting distance between her and the ground that has wrapped its soil fingers around Leslie’s corpse. Instead of getting off at her exit, Erin decides to keep going for a while. She goes and goes and goes, and then there is a hotel off Route 53, a high-end Wyndham Suites where she once attended a culinary seminar. She remembers the lounge in it, recalls lots of glass and growing things, muted music. It will be a good place to stop for a drink to soothe her nerves and give her alcoholic courage to face the empty house.
The bar is just as Erin remembers it, almost like an oversize greenhouse but with smoke-tinted windows that block out the sunshine that, for today anyway, she has come to despise. She finds a table in the back, one shrouded in big-leafed philodendrons and by one of the windows where she can look out at the sky while she nurses her drink, a straight-up glass of mandarin-flavored Smirnoff’s. The sky is a brilliant, painful blue even through the colored glass, and it is only at times like these, when someone she knows or especially someone she cares about has just died, that the sky . . . expands in her vision every time she looks at it. It seems to be suddenly endless, stretching as far as she can see in every direction as though it must grow to envelope the spirit that Mother Earth just rejected.
And it is only at times like these that Erin looks up at the sky and thinks about the concept of heaven, and God, and about where people’s souls go when they die.
Leslie is up there somewhere.
“Damn you, Leslie,” Erin whispers, still very careful to keep her voice inaudible. “Damn you for dying and leaving me here all alone.”
“Good evening,” a male voice says.
Erin glances up, feeling her professional face slide over her features, that mask of pleasantness that she uses day in and day out at the café. Leslie used to laugh at how Erin had honed it to perfection over the years, how she could make anyone seem as if they were the most interesting person in the universe no matter what was really going on inside her. “Hello,” she says automatically.
“May I join you?” he asks. “I don’t mean to be a bother, but I’m just in town for the evening. I had a wedding to attend this afternoon and I don’t know anyone in the area.”
Ironic, Erin thinks. This stranger goes to a wedding where two people start their lives, while I go to a funeral as part of mine comes to an end. “Please,” she says, and nods at the empty spot across the table.
He settles across from her, draping himself onto the leather-backed chair with unconscious comfort. He is tall and athletic, slightly younger than Erin, with longish dark hair speckled with premature silver and eyes the color of a clear, green ocean. Expensive suit and tasteful tie, and Erin can tell by the way he’s moving that he’s in good shape; the whole package seems very carefully put together and is what Leslie would have called Men’s Fitness in a GQ Box.
“This is a nice area,” he says after the waiter comes and he orders an extra-dry martini with two olives. “It’s the first time I’ve been out here.”
“Oh, really?” Erin says. “Where are you from?” She rotates her glass and gets a whiff of her own vodka’s citrus. It reminds her of the orange crepes that Leslie would sometimes make her on the mornings that the café was closed.
“Oh, downtown. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was some out-of-state salesman or something. I just meant I’d never been out in this part of the suburbs.”
Erin’s mouth turns up a bit. “Because of the traffic, sometimes it might as well be another state.”
He nods. “I feel the same way about living downtown. Coming out here—it’s almost refreshing. In spite of the traffic, there’s so much space and air. Lower buildings and less concrete, more places for the sun to touch. My name is Trevor, by the way.”
“Erin.” She thinks about his comment for a moment but her thoughts invariably turn to the much-too-recent memory of a sun-soaked cemetery. “So you went to a wedding,” she says. Anything to get her thoughts away from the way her lover lies quietly rotting in a grave thirty miles south. “Friends or relatives?”
He laughs and it is a nice sound that goes well with the rest of him, again that perfectly balanced package. “Neither. Business associates. I was asked to escort one of their female clients, someone they wanted treated particularly well.” He looks to the side for a moment and there is a genuinely puzzled expression on his face. “I’m afraid she and I didn’t quite hit it off and she declined to spend the rest of the evening with me.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Erin says. It is a strange way of describing a failed date, but she doesn’t care enough to think any more about it.
“I thought so.” He takes a discreet sip from his martini. “And you? What did you spend today doing?”
Erin hesitates, not sure she wants to share this part of herself with a total stranger. “I went to a funeral,” she finally says.
A shadow of sympathy passes over his handsome face. “I’m sorry. Someone close?”
“Very.” Erin stares at her drink and wills herself not to cry, not to allow the slightest glint of moisture to seep from beneath her carefully maintained mask.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he sounds very much like he means it. “It must have been difficult.”
Erin doesn’t answer—to say that it was seems somehow trite. There is nothing in this world, no word or gesture or emotion, that can describe the abyss that Leslie’s death has opened inside her. She takes a long drink—nothing discreet about it—of her vodka and asks instead, “So what do you do? Most of the people I know who live downtown are lawyers or politicians.”
Trevor chuckles. “No, thank you. I suppose you could call my career a form of public relations. That way I can be up front about my intentions without having to be oily.”
Now it’s Erin’s turn to smile, although the gesture comes reluctantly, the pulling of a splinter from beneath the skin, the guilty enjoyment of its sting—yes, you will find something funny again in the world no matter how much you resist.
“And you?” he asks. “You seem very outgoing and confident —you must be familiar with dealing with strangers.”
“Yes,” Erin replies. “Every day.” She goes on to tell him about the café, allowing, no, willing her passion for her work to take first place where before it had always been usurped by Leslie’s electric presence. She talks of the way the business was started, finding herself carefully avoiding any mention of Leslie; she can’t forget, she will never forget, but for a few hours, maybe she can forestall the agony. It is only later, much later, that it will come back to her how skillfully Trevor kept the conversation turned away from himself and anything too personal, how he manipulated her into revealing everything—or at least what he thought was everything—while giving next to nothing in return.
But in the meantime, the talk is good, the company is better, and the vodka is the best they can buy, all good, solid emotional anesthesia; Erin is on her third martini and feeling tingly when decorum and common sense make her refuse another. The pain is there, ever present, but temporarily melting at the edges, like a frozen puddle in the noon-high sun of a late winter day. Somewhere along the line she realizes he has begun touching her; not much—a fingertip brush on her forearm, a squeeze on her elbow, the gentle brush of his hand across her shoulder. Perhaps it is the alcohol, perhaps it is his picture-perfect maleness . . . but more likely it is the loss that makes her respond, makes Erin lean toward him to take in his scent, to feel the heat that his body gives off, to see the play of his muscles beneath the expensive Pierre Cardin shirt that doesn’t seem so much tailored for him as grown to fit his form. When he makes his move, he doesn’t ask her to his room or anything so crude—
“Will you join me for dinner?”
Company, just for the duration of a meal, Erin thinks, will be a good thing, a blessed thing. A harmless thing, even, to spend another hour or so with this man, to let him place a temporary wall between her and the bleakness of her empty home and bed—for God’s sake, she’s eaten next to nothing since the awful morning she pressed her mouth against Leslie’s death-cold lips in a clumsy and futile attempt at CPR.
“Yes,” she says. “That would be great.” The words, her words, echo a bit at the edges, as if she were standing on the edge of a great cliff and shouting her pain into a blackness that has no end. That, of course, is the alcohol; it gives her distance in sight, sound, and sensation, lets her step back and watch the ordeal that her life has become from the point of view of an onlooker. And really, when a woman is singled out to bear this much agony, how bad can that be?
There is a restaurant in the hotel, some four-star steak house with a name she doesn’t catch. The food is excellent and Erin purposely orders a Sicilian dish called quaglie alla melagrana— quail with pomegranate—only because it is something she has never tasted before. She does not want to eat anything familiar tonight, she cannot bear to put anything in her mouth that will somehow find a way to tie itself to a memory of Leslie. Thanks to the alcohol and the food and the company, she has gone from drowning herself in despair to smothering herself with the unfamiliar, using it as a sort of soft, spongy trampoline onto which she can bounce each time she hits bottom . . . at least for the next few hours.
Erin knows she is going to sleep with Trevor long before the waiter shows them the dessert tray.
It is not so much that she wants him, but that she wants . . . different. She has desire, yes, but he is only the smallest part of that. Her lust has more to do with the need to smother memories both good and bad, to erase, even just for a few hours, the last ten years. Once upon a time she had been a heterosexual college girl; she had dreamed of marriage and babies and a career in business that would give her an office overlooking Michigan Avenue that came with a secretary and a six-figure salary. All she had left of those dreams today was the money, and God knows there was precious little comfort to be found in the successful business of the café and the half-million-dollar insurance policy Leslie left her. Could it be anything but therapeutic, a fleeting balm, to back-step in time and pretend that she is once again that carefree young woman?
She wonders if Trevor knows what she has decided and thinks that he does, also knows in some distant and still brutally sober part of her mind that he’s probably planned the entire escapade. He’s too smooth at everything—the words, the moves, the way he reaches out and gives her comforting touches at all the right times, sending his sexual I’m available message but never going too far. Fifteen years ago she would have been infuriated, but tonight . . .
He is a man, as unfamiliar as the food she just ate, as foreign to her as the room into which she will step in a very short time. Tonight, he is just what Erin needs.
When the check comes, Trevor reaches for it. “I’ll take care of this for now.”
As he pays, Erin watches and thinks of when she and Leslie met. They had been friends first, both straight, and then just sort of naturally discovered each other. There had been nothing fast and furious about it, nothing dirty or perverted. It had been simply that they enjoyed each other’s company and had spent more and more time together; the touching that had progressed between them had been nothing like Trevor’s tonight, with his subtle undertones of desire. A helping hand, a friendly hug, more and more often, the passage of weeks and months until it was a year and both realized that their hearts and minds were one and, really, the only thing they hadn’t yet shared with each other was their bodies. It had all been so smooth and instinctive and, supposedly, forever.
After he’s paid, Trevor comes around and pulls out her chair. As Erin stands he brushes her cheek and meets her gaze; she sees the question there and she smiles as best she can. “Would you like to spend some time with me tonight?” he asks, very softly so that no one else can hear.
Erin finds his question oddly touching—most men, she believes, would simply assume, but it’s as if he wants to make very sure that this is want she wants. “Yes,” she answers. “I would.” Her heart is beating rapidly, fueled by excitement, alcohol, and a guilt that she knows she will be able to brush away without too much effort. Before Leslie, Erin had had the requisite number of ill-fated relationships with men, and she had thought the pain of those failures was over with the melding of herself with Leslie. So wrong—where was the kindness in Leslie’s leaving her behind, and alone, and floundering? Tonight then, she needs comfort, a contentment that only the kindness of a temporary stranger can provide. She and Leslie had been soul mates and mind mates; Leslie would have perfectly understood Erin’s choices tonight.
Trevor’s room is nice but nothing remarkable, a better-than-average hotel suite. He opens the little bar and Erin chooses a tiny bottle of Smirnoff’s Vodka, cold and plain after her earlier citrus-scented martinis. He pours the liquor over ice and they sip; then he sets his drink on the table and takes her glass from her hand. Erin turns to face him and Trevor puts his hands on her shoulders carefully, as if he’s testing her; he lowers his mouth to hers, more testing, and when he tastes her response he moves in like a hungry tiger.
Trevor is almost too perfect, the dream evening date. He seems to know just where to touch first, how hard or soft, where to lick and nibble and bite down just a bit harder. Everything about him screams maleness and sexual desire, but he isn’t pushy; he undresses her slowly, as if he relishes the expanding sight of her skin as each button slides open, each piece of clothing slips off. She does the same to him, matching him piece for piece; when he unhooks her bra and frees her breasts, she gasps as his hands encircle each and his lips close firmly on her left nipple. The liquor has dulled her inhibitions and Erin arches against his mouth and throws her head back; in response, Trevor touches her for the first time through her clothes, slipping one hand beneath her skirt and stroking between her legs, fingers sliding exquisitely over the nylon-covered satin underwear there.
Her fingers dig into his back and he probes a bit harder, then propels her backward with his body. When the edge of the bed stops her movement, he keeps pushing until her knees bend and she goes down. He kneels in front of her but his one hand never leaves her breast, the fingers massaging and sending swirls of enjoyment all the way down her belly; the other reaches up and catches the waistband of her panty hose and underwear, tugs them down to her ankles.
Then his mouth is on her and Erin nearly screams at the heat and pleasure that razors through her nerves. His tongue moves and circles, and somewhere out of sight her shoes and the hose and underwear are gone; she is lying there with her skirt hiked up to her hips and Trevor’s teeth and lips are on the center of her while she cries out as an orgasm ripples fiercely through her body. Her insides are still pulsing when she realizes he’s freed himself and discreetly donned a condom. He slides up and into her, repositioning her on the bed as he does so.
The sensation of penetration is . . . strange. Fulfilling but uncomfortably invasive—in just over a decade Erin has forgotten what it feels like to have the warmth and mass of a man’s flesh inside her. He rocks against her hips, delicious friction in all the right spots as he nuzzles her neck, her ears, her lips, and she comes again just before he does, perfect timing just like everything else.
Afterward Trevor seems inclined to stay joined with her on top of the bedspread, but he feels heavy and Erin gets antsy almost immediately; he picks up the body language and pulls out, rolling next to her and stroking her belly lightly. After a couple of minutes, he reaches over and hands Erin her drink, sipping his own and watching her. There is something unnerving in his gaze, but Erin can’t put her finger on it; whatever it is disappears when he smiles. “Did I make you feel good?”
“Definitely.” There doesn’t seem to be any reason to elaborate, and she knows from his appraising expression that he is trying to determine if she wants to go again. Erin doesn’t; to stay would mean more intimacy, this time on a more extended level. He will want her to give more than she has this first time, will likely want to feel her mouth on him, perhaps be more experimental. She can’t give any more and has no wish to reexperience levels of male/female interaction she left behind years before. For her this sex has been good, mind-numbing and physically exhausting; she has had her release, and while it may not have been as extensive for him, she doesn’t think he has anything to complain about.
“I need to leave,” Erin says and sits up. “I’m sorry.”
Trevor pulls back, but there is nothing hurt in his expression —rather, it seems oddly empty and accepting. “No need to apologize. I hope you enjoyed our time together as much as I did.”
“Yes,” she says honestly. “I did.” He watches as she pulls on her blouse first, then her underwear, nylons, and high heels. Erin is not stupid enough to expect him to ask for her telephone number, would tell him no if he did. She is shrugging on her jacket, part of the black suit she bought to wear to Leslie’s funeral and will never wear again, when Trevor drops his bomb.
“Then I guess it’s time to settle up.”
At first Erin thinks she’s heard him incorrectly, although her mind can’t provide what else it is that he might have said. “I’m sorry?”
Trevor swings his lean legs over the side of the bed and stands, pulling his slacks up in a single smooth motion. “I thought we were clear on this.”
Erin stares at him, hands frozen on the lapels of her jacket. “Clear on what?”
The look he gives her is vaguely reproachful. “That my time isn’t free. I have to make a living, you know. Just like you or anyone else.”
“What?” she asks faintly. She feels like she needs to find something behind her to hold on to, but she’ll be damned if she will show that kind of weakness.
“I guess we have a misunderstanding here.” Now he sounds slightly apologetic. “I was sure I laid it out without being too crass.”
“Crass?” She suddenly wants to laugh, although what there is that’s funny about this situation she simply can’t fathom. “You don’t think this is crass?”
Trevor shakes his head. “No. This is just business.” He slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper—his charge slip for dinner. “The cost for dinner was seventy-five. That means the total comes to five hundred twenty-five dollars.”
Erin stares at him, so surprised it actually goes beyond shock. “You’re charging me for dinner?” Some vague part of her mind reminds her that in all this, she should, perhaps, be grateful that he didn’t charge her for the vodka he took out of the room’s minibar; perhaps he simply chalks that up to a business expense.
His eyes widen. “You didn’t think I was going to pay for that, did you?”
Erin’s jaw works, but for a moment nothing comes out. She feels very calm and very . . . detached. Cold inside, not as if this were happening to someone else, but as if it couldn’t be happening, because simply too much has happened to her over these last few days. After all, how much was one person expected to bear? “I don’t pay for sex,” she says, ignoring the statement about the dinner tab. “Any more than I pay for dinner when a man asks me out.” She picks up her purse and turns toward the door.
“You will this time.”
Something about the tone of his voice makes her stop and glance back. He is still standing there, hands casually in his pockets as though they were having no more complicated a conversation than deciding where to meet for lunch; his eyes, however, hold that same odd light that she’d found so disconcerting a bit earlier. No, not disconcerting. Threatening.
“It’s very simple,” he continues. “I gave you all the appropriate clues. That you chose to disregard them was your doing, not mine. I think I’ve learned enough about you from our conversation this evening to make things quite awkward for you should you maintain your decision not to pay. The first thing I’ll do when you walk out that door is call hotel security and tell them you came up to my room with me, we had sex; then you tried to extort money in return for your favors. This is a topnotch hotel and I know they won’t view this favorably. They’ll no doubt stop you before you exit the building, then detain you while they call the police.” His eyes glitter in his handsome face. “Imagine your embarrassment, not only tonight but tomorrow when news of this reaches the local paper in Wooddale—as I’ll make sure it does—and all your loyal restaurant customers read about what you’ve done.” His smile is predatory. “You’re really not a very good lesbian, you know.”
The insult burns but Erin has no time to dwell on it. Had she told him that much about herself, about her lifestyle and her work? She can’t recall—too much fog and liquor and pain, too much of a desire to escape—but she must have. He has not only a weapon but ammunition, and while Erin may have been a fool to put herself in this situation, she is not so stupid that she doesn’t realize she is trapped. She is the outsider here, the lesbian caught with a stranger who could be the businessman or the lawyer from out of town. How clever he has been— she knows precious little about what he really does beyond prostitute himself and find diabolical ways to ensure that he gets his fee. The police and embarrassment will be bad enough, the exposure to her customers at the café worse . . . but the humiliation she will endure when Leslie’s family finds out—and, because they live in Wooddale, they will—will be unspeakable.
“I don’t have that kind of money with me,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, defeated. She already knows how he will respond, and he doesn’t disappoint.
“Then I’ll go with you while you get it.” He walks over and picks up his shirt. “I assume you’ll need to go to an ATM machine. I believe there’s one in the lobby.”
“You assume wrong,” she says, taking a minute bit of pleasure at the look of irritation that passes over his face. “My bank is closed, and I can’t withdraw that much cash in one day.”
“Then you’ll need to find another way to raise the money,” Trevor says. His voice is flat, with an undercurrent of venom. “I don’t extend credit, and I have no intention of not getting paid tonight without causing you severe repercussions.”
His vicious tone of voice takes the joy away from her small victory, even though Erin knew it was coming to this. “If you want your money, you’ll need to come back to the café with me. I’ll have to get it from the safe.”
“Fine. You’re driving.”
She says nothing, waiting as he shrugs on his suit jacket and fussily combs his hair. Still acting the gentleman, he holds open the door for her as they walk out of the room and then again at the elevator. The inside of the elevator is mirrored and Erin stares at herself during the ride down. She supposes she is pretty but then lots of women are; what had attracted Trevor to her to begin with? Had she given off some sort of Use me—I’m vulnerable! signal that only feral people like him could sense? At the last second, she smoothes the mussed reddish curls of her hair with her hand, not wanting to be noticed as they walk through the lobby.
The silent drive is long and, for her, awkward. Perhaps tonight is routine for Trevor, a move-in-and-victimize procedure that he’s perfected. For Erin, however, it has been a day filled with horrors. After searching for the unfamiliar behind which to hide, now the only thing that is helping her hold it together is the familiar, a phrase running through her mind that Leslie used to repeat when things became difficult. . . .
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Leslie had always been the one with strength and will when things got rough; she had a ferocity and creativity of spirit other people could only wish for. She had always insisted it didn’t come from herself but from everyone, that in the worst of times, “You take in the pain and then you dissipate it, take it in and give it back, share it with others so that they, too, can be stronger.” It sounded so simple, that sharing of feeling and heartbreak—in fact, it was exactly what people did at wakes and funerals. But how in God’s name could Erin share tonight’s insanity with anyone?
The café is dark when they arrive, of course, the sign notifying the customers of Leslie’s passing like a blight on the clean window of the front door. The office is in the back, on the other side of the kitchen, and Erin is glad that in the dimness Trevor can’t see the cheerful way the walls have been hand-painted, the lovingly chosen country-style bowls and pitchers that are arranged on the carved wooden shelves above the windows and booths, the hundreds of other meticulous details that went into this dream she had once shared with her dead lover. This is a sacred place and Trevor’s presence here, his very existence, is almost blasphemous to Leslie’s beautiful memory.
Erin doesn’t speak as she leads him through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY without turning on the lights—she can maneuver in here with her eyes closed. When he stumbles against one of the metal racks in the nearly dark kitchen, she turns back and reaches out to steady him. In her hand is an exquisitely sharp Henckels carving knife.
It is over quickly, so much so that Trevor does not have the time or breath to cry out. She stares down at his still form, watching the blood spread below his body like a pool of oil against the gray and black tones of the kitchen’s cold tile floor, and realizes that her decision to perform this deed came not from his deception or attempt to blackmail her. No, she did what she did because he used her and her own darkest hour for monetary gain—she can think of nothing more despicable. The problem had been in the lack of sharing—she had shared her body with him, and her grief, but Trevor had given nothing in return. He could have, should have, shared of himself, taken in her pain and helped dilute it. Instead, he had chosen to rob her of what little comfort she would have drawn from their encounter, then cause her more grief.
Leslie’s credo runs through Erin’s mind again, the way her beloved had dealt with pain. It is quite late, and the small strip mall outside had been quiet and dark; no one had seen Erin bring this man inside. In the cool shadows of the still-dark café, Erin kneels beside Trevor’s body and lets her chef’s training take control of her hand and the knife.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. You take in the pain and then you dissipate it, take it in and give it back, share it with others so that they, too, can be stronger.”
The café, hers alone now, still serves its simple meals of homemade chili and Leslie’s moussaka recipe, special breakfast casseroles of egg, café-made sausage, and potatoes.
And as Leslie had always tried to teach her, Erin would break down her pain and share it with others.