Lars’s first thought when he got back to his place was that there was no food in it, and that he hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours. He left the apartment again with relief, and with the ample justification of a necessary errand, one that any civilized person had to make. Groceries. This made great sense.
On the way to Safeway, he pedaled past a fraternity house. The brothers were standing around outside, stiff and bulky in their matching T-shirts, barbecuing steaks. For a moment he forgot his distaste for fraternities and their calculated squalor and found himself salivating uncontrollably. He thought this a good sign; it was the first time he’d felt any urgency since Friday. A car honked behind him, and he realized he was standing in the middle of the road. He moved aside and received the middle finger from the driver, a teenager with a tiny mustache.
He pedaled to the supermarket, feeling the hunger drifting like a virus through his blood, settling in his bones. He locked his bike to a pole and beelined for the electronic sliding doors. Then he noticed a banner, out of the corner of his eye:
ADT Bake Sale
to Benefit Christine Stull
It was set up at the near end of the parking lot, next to what seemed to be a trailer house. Beneath it stretched a long buffet table where a lot of blond-haired girls were sitting. The table was covered with neat piles of baked things: brownies stacked into pyramids, blueberry muffins wrapped in cellophane, glass jars stuffed with cookies. He recognized ADT as a campus sorority, perhaps one of the very ones he and Megan had taken such joy in mocking. These girls evoked in him a jumble of conflicting impulses—to approach, to run, to retreat into Safeway, to cry—and he realized he no longer knew what to say to girls or how to act around them. Panic slithered on the ground near his feet and began to climb up his legs by the hairs.
Someone at the table—the girl behind the cookies—motioned to him: Come on over here. He did.
“Saw you looking,” the girl said. “How about a cookie? Good cause.” The girl wore big sunglasses and—oddly, for the heat—a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her hair was held back with a giant yellow clip.
“Uh,” Lars said. The cookies were huge. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” He fished a dollar out of his wallet.
She handed him a cookie wrapped in a small sheet of waxed paper. He closed his eyes and bit into it, and the chocolate dissolved on his tongue like a drug. He only looked again when he lost his balance and stumbled, and he found the girl leaning forward, offering him another cookie.
“You look like you need another.”
“Oh,” he said, patting his pockets. “No, I’m cash-poor.”
“On me.”
Lars took the cookie. “You sure? What about…” He looked up at the banner. “Christine Stull?”
“No problem. She doesn’t mind.”
The girl was grinning. “You?” he said.
She extended her hand, and Lars had to switch the cookie to his other hand to shake it. “Me,” she said. “I baked these. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody eat a cookie like that. You can have as many as you want.”
He felt himself redden. “Sorry.”
“Oh, no! I’m flattered.”
He took a bite of the new cookie. “So, how are you…benefiting?”
“Kidney transplant.”
“Oh.”
“Insurance’ll only cover so much. The sisters here are helping out. They’ve been real pals.”
“You’re in the sorority too?”
“Yup.”
“You’re lucky to have such good friends.”
She shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Well,” he said. The second cookie was already gone. He crumpled the waxed paper and shoved it into his pocket. “I hope you’re feeling…you know, better.”
“You need another one?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Thanks. I’m going to go get groceries.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
Lars smiled at her. “Nice meeting you. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
But however the cookies outside had improved his mood, he realized how hopeless the larger fight was, once he’d set foot in the store. First, it was the red and blue plastic hand baskets with their twin metal handles: he would always hold one handle, Megan the other. And the bread display, which stood just inside the door, to the right of the bakery; they’d always get the sourdough loaf and smother it with butter and garlic and cheese at home, sometimes making an entire meal out of garlic bread. The shelf upon shelf of brightly colored boxes: food packaged to attract children or processed into unappetizing shapes. They laughed over these, and the kind of people who bought them. They had been smug in love. His throat burned and he steadied himself against the rows of grocery carts, the metal supercooled in the air conditioning and electric on his hot skin.
* * *
Her brother Frank had called him Sunday with directions to their parents’ house in Seattle, where he said they should meet to go to the funeral. “I’m sorry I won’t have much time,” he said, “but I want to see you.”
“I want to bring a friend,” Lars said.
“Of course, sure.”
“Listen,” Lars said. “I have her car.”
“She had a car?”
“A small one. I guess we’ll drive it out there.”
“All right.” He sounded distracted, unwilling to think about these things, but Lars had wanted them settled and out of the way.
“Do you want me to bring her stuff?”
“No, no. We’ll worry about that later. Just…just bring the keys to her apartment. Do you have those?”
“I have a set.”
“Okay then.”
He and Toth would have to leave around four in the morning to make it; Seattle was eight or nine hours, barring any problems with the car. He called Toth that night to tell him to get some sleep. Toth was in the tub with the portable phone, crying. Lars could hear his voice echoing off the tiles and water.
“I’ve been in here all day, man,” he said. “I’m completely fucking wrinkled.” He sniffed deeply.
“Don’t drop the phone,” Lars said. He gave Toth the details. “Bring a few bucks for gas.”
“How are you doing, man?”
Lars had not been doing well. “Didn’t sleep much. Megan’s dad said ‘Fuck you’ to me on the phone.”
“I’m doing terrible,” Toth said.
“At least you’re clean.” And miraculously, they both laughed.
That night long shadows from the neighbors’ trees crept across his sheets. He ate half a bowl of cereal in bed, and massaged his mind to sleep by tracing the road to Seattle, every landmark and stretch of highway he could remember. He woke to his alarm at three-fifteen and found he had kicked his half-filled cereal bowl over in the night, and Hodge sat placidly on the floor beside it, licking the puddle. Lars got up and tossed a towel onto it. He dressed—khaki pants, white shirt, blue blazer was the best he could do—and stuffed what clothing of hers he could find into a plastic bag.
He got some cash at the drive-up bank and went to her apartment. She had lived in a tiny carpeted studio downtown and owned nearly nothing. He let himself in with his key. The place was a mild but particular mess; there were no books or papers on the floor but both were stacked precariously on her desk, and though all her clothes were in the closet, they were stuffed there haphazardly. He tossed the plastic bag onto her futon, which was spread sheetless on the floor. He went to the bathroom and pissed, then rubbed his hands under the tap. In the medicine cabinet he found a tube of toothpaste and a barrette. He put the barrette in his pocket. As he did all this, the dull pain in his throat was constant and debilitating; it felt like someone had lodged a gigantic rubber ball there, around which he could breathe only the barest essentials of air. When he left the apartment he did so forever.
Toth was waiting on the porch when he pulled up. To Lars’s surprise, he was wearing a black funeral suit, and under the streetlight, his hair tied into a tasteful ponytail, he looked nerdily elegant. Lars commented on the suit when Toth got in. Toth didn’t look up. He seemed paler than usual and his eyes were red. “Yeah,” he said. “I got it at the Goodwill. This is the first time I’ve worn it.” He pushed his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Lars pulled into the street.
“It’s funny,” Toth said, finally looking at him, “I feel like we’re going fishing or something. I mean, it feels like some kind of fun trip thing. Getting up early and all that. Except I feel like jumping in the river.”
“It just feels lousy to me,” Lars said.
They drove in silence for an hour and a half, into Idaho and across the panhandle. Occasionally Lars heard Toth crying but didn’t say anything. What could he say? When they crossed over into Washington he suggested some music.
Toth nodded and opened the glove compartment. He pushed the tapes around for a minute, then shoved one into the cassette deck. It warbled out of the speakers, a song Megan had liked. Toth left it for a minute, then said “Fuck” very quietly and popped it back out. He tossed it into the back of the car, where it clattered against the rear window. From then on they listened to AM radio, farm reports and news, and the sun came up behind them.
They stopped in Spokane for coffee and a box of Fig Newtons, which they ate sporadically on the road. At one point Lars said, “A bag of these costs three twenty-nine.”
“So?”
“These boxes are half the size, and they only cost one twenty-nine.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Toth said.
“People are dumb.”
It was the only thing they said all the way across Washington. Toth slept for the rest of the trip, and Lars stared out at the bleak hilliness of the state, wishing it would never end, would just go on and on being empty and boring. He wouldn’t have minded if he had to drive this road forever, listening to the news. Not at all. When they came close to the city, Lars took the folded envelope with the directions on it from his pants pocket. He exited the highway and tooled through town, stymied briefly by a series of one-way streets, and ended up in a shady neighborhood, where giant stone houses loomed behind cast-iron fences and rows of shrubbery. The house that matched the address on his envelope seemed to have nothing to do with Megan at all. It was huge, like the others; its fence was the tallest in the neighborhood, and the front walkway led through a ten-foot wrought-iron arch over which ivy grew. The house spoke, Lars thought, of concealment, of embarrassment, and seeing it reminded him just how little he knew about Megan’s family. She had rarely mentioned them. It was a bright day without direct sun; the light was diffused through a layer of gray cloud. Lars found the driveway and pulled in, and the change of speed seemed to jar Toth awake.
“We’re here, buddy,” Lars said. He parked behind a blue Datsun station wagon and a green BMW.
“What?”
“We’re here.”
Toth sat up straight, blinking. He had a red seat-belt mark across his face, and as he took in the yard his eyes clouded over. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I fell asleep and forgot everything.”
“Sorry.”
They stepped out and stretched, then walked to the door. It was giant and wooden with a huge iron knocker that Lars was certain never got used. He rang the bell.
When the door opened, and he saw Megan’s brother for the first time, something heavy and cold came unbalanced inside him, and he had to steady himself against the doorframe. His face was hers, round and open, several years older. His hair stuck up on his head and he stood at about six feet.
“Are you Lars?” he asked them.
“I am,” Lars said.
He offered his hand to shake, and Lars took it. “I’m Frank.”
“This is Toth. He was a good friend.”
“I’m glad you could make it,” Frank told Toth, and Toth nodded wearily.
Frank looked tired—his limbs hung off his body like broken tree branches after a storm—and Lars could hear voices behind him, in the house, a man grumbling and a woman yelling at him. Nobody said anything for a few moments, and the yelling continued. Frank slumped, holding himself up with the doorknob. “Maybe we ought to sit out here,” he said. “Just for a little while.”
The only thing Lars could remember Megan saying about Frank was that he spent a lot of time in the sandbox in the Hellenbecks’ backyard when he was a kid. He would build things—houses and their yards—and decorate them with bits of styrofoam cups and rocks and sticks. Now he walked between Lars and Toth, shutting the big door behind him, and sat down on the porch step. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt. Lars and Toth sat down on either side.
Frank pulled a single cigarette from his pocket and lit it with a yellow lighter. He turned to Lars and said, “She loved you, you know.”
“I loved her too,” he said. He had a picture in his head of Megan, sweating in her shorts and T-shirt and cap in the summer sun, laying sod next to Frank, telling him that she loved her boyfriend back in Montana. Did Frank even work outdoors? Or did he just go around assigning grunt work from his office? It didn’t matter. Lars rubbed his eyes.
“She told me about you, too,” Frank told Toth. “She loved you guys. I’m glad you could come out here. It was kind of short notice.” He was silent for a second, then turned bright red, embarrassed at saying something so stupid.
“Was it a good summer?” Lars said.
“It was a great summer.”
Behind them the door swung open and smacked against the wall. Lars felt the house tremble. Somebody stormed past them, off to the right, and he looked up to see a thick-bodied man in gray slacks stomping through a bed of flowers. He heard the jingling of keys. Frank stood up. “Dad!” he called out. He stood, tossing his unfinished cigarette onto the walk. “Dad!”
“Shit,” Toth whispered. He wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his face.
Frank caught up to Mr. Hellenbeck in the driveway. Lars couldn’t make out the words, but Frank’s voice was edged with exasperation, as if this was the sort of thing that happened frequently. His father twirled the keys on his finger but didn’t speak. Lars had never seen a man who looked so physically dense. He could easily have been made of lead, his features painted on. After a minute, Frank’s hands fell to his sides, and the two men stood unmoving for some time. Then Mr. Hellenbeck turned and disappeared behind the corner of the house. Frank stayed put. Lars heard a garage door rolling up creakily, then a car engine and the squeal of tires. Another BMW, this one red, shot into view, careening down the driveway. It angled into the road, leaving deep gouges in the grass, and fishtailed loudly in the street.
Frank came back to the porch. “Sorry,” he said.
Lars and Toth said nothing.
“He’ll be at the funeral,” Frank said. He leaned forward and picked his cigarette off the sidewalk. “I don’t think he’d go off and miss that.” He took a long drag and stubbed the cigarette out, then swiveled his head, looking for a trash can. When he found none he wiped off the ashes and stuck the butt in his pocket. Then he got up. “I should see if Mom’s all right. Why don’t you come in for now?”
* * *
Lars and Toth sat opposite each other in powder-blue wing-back armchairs. The room they sat in was spacious and lavishly—perhaps professionally—decorated; long opaque drapes hung over long windows and the floor was covered with Oriental rugs. Frank had gone down the hall.
“Come on, Ma,” they heard him say. “You have to get yourself together.”
“That man!” she cried, her voice dissolving in tears.
“You have to get dressed, Ma.”
Toth leaned forward. “This is weird,” he whispered. “Where are all the relatives?”
“I don’t know.” Lars was looking at a portrait above the fireplace of a man with white hair, wearing an ascot. Something in the forehead reminded him of Megan, though that could have been his imagination. He could not picture her even standing in this house, let alone growing up in it.
“Is this the dress you’re going to wear?” he heard Frank say.
“I can’t do it!”
“C’mon, Ma. This is for Megan.”
“Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you say that to me!”
Somewhere, a door opened and shut. Footsteps, some fussing in what sounded like a kitchen. Then the footsteps again.
“Take these, Ma.”
“Get those things away from me.”
“You have to face these people, Ma, okay? Just this afternoon, and then it’ll be over and nobody’ll bother you anymore.”
A long pause, then: “Give them to me.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “That’s good. Now get yourself dressed, all right?”
“Get away from me.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’m going.”
Frank walked wearily into the room, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe we ought to go back outside,” he said.
* * *
The blue wagon turned out to be Frank’s. He helped his mother into the passenger seat. She was puffy and rumpled in a black dress, like a poisonous mushroom. Her pupils were very, very small. Lars and Toth took Megan’s car, and Lars’s heart sank as he slid back into the seat. He hadn’t wanted to drive it ever again.
Frank’s car led them to a small Presbyterian church a few miles away. They followed Frank and Mrs. Hellenbeck up a narrow sidewalk that had some odd glittery substance embedded in it. Lars found this curiously inappropriate and felt himself actually getting angry about it, hoping a priest or somebody would walk by so that he could complain. Ahead, Frank held the door open for Mrs. Hellenbeck, who staggered through it as if pulled in by ropes.
There were only thirty or so people in the church, though a hundred and fifty could easily have fit. Lars scanned the crowd anxiously, seeing if there was anyone he knew. Every face was empty and unfamiliar. Then he looked toward the altar and saw the casket. What was in it? How had they found her? His first impulse, sudden and palpable as a knife at the throat, was to turn and run, and this is what he did, pushing Toth out of the way and plunging back into the gray light, back into the awful, flower-sweet air that surrounded the church like a fog. He dodged a middle-aged couple on the sidewalk and sat down hard in the grass, his palms against his forehead.
“Lars.” It was Toth, standing in his light, reaching out to touch him. “Lars?” Were they kidding about all this, the casket, the flowers? Surely they had to be kidding.
“I can’t go in there,” he said. “Are you insane?”
“Come on, man, you have to.”
“Who are those people? I don’t know any of those people.”
“Don’t worry about them.” Toth knelt before him. Lars let him pull his hands away from his face. “It’s just you and me and Megan, man. This last time, all right?”
No, he thought, this isn’t the last time. The last time was at the airport, dropping her off for her trip to Seattle. His last kiss had been on her neck, just under her left ear, her hair smelling of shampoo and her T-shirt of detergent. As she walked away he saw that the back of the shirt was half-tucked into her shorts, like she’d pulled the shorts on in a hurry, not noticing how they looked. And the last time he’d heard her? On the telephone, I’ll see you Friday, she’d said, and he said, Okay. What else had they talked about? Had they joked about a summer without sex, without conversation that didn’t entail a ring of sticky sweat around the ear? Had they given their I-love-yous? He would have thought this would all come back to him unadulterated by the flaws of memory, but it didn’t. He barely recalled a thing. He lay back in the grass. It had been cut, and the scent of chlorophyll was sharp in his nostrils, and the dirt musty and fertilized beneath it.
“Come on, buddy,” Toth was saying.
Forget it, he thought, forget it.
“Come on. If you don’t want to do it for her, man, do it for me.”
So he did. He got to his knees, wiped the grass off his pants. He stood up and went in.
* * *
He paid little attention during the funeral. At the ends of the pews were stacked thick stapled booklets full of hymns, and he flipped through one of these, hoping nobody would begin singing. Nobody did. There were some prayers, and a few people spoke. At one point he looked up and saw Mr. Hellenbeck standing in the doorway, panting, his face shiny with perspiration. He had come late and was staring at Lars. Lars stared back. It was Hellenbeck who turned away first, then sat down alone in front, his wide gray coat heaving as he breathed.
What if? Lars thought.
What if he had driven to Seattle to pick her up, as they both wanted but couldn’t fit into their schedules?
What if he’d asked her to marry him?
They walked to the cemetery for the graveside service, mercifully un-eventful and brief. They lowered the box. When it was over, he and Toth stood in the grass outside the church. Nobody approached them. It then occurred to Lars for the first time that they couldn’t drive back if they were planning to leave Megan’s car in Seattle. They had made no other plans. He told Toth this.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Lars pulled out his wallet. He had four dollars. And something else, hard and sharp, in his pocket. He curled his hand around it: the barrette he’d taken back in Marshall. “How much have you got?”
Toth emptied his pockets. “Seven and change. I got plastic, though.” Twenty feet beyond him, in the church parking lot, an old woman was talking to Mr. Hellenbeck. He was looking over her shoulder, at the cemetery.
“Where’s Frank?”
Frank was in the parking lot with his mother, walking her in small, crooked circles. She seemed to want to leave, and for whatever reason, Frank kept pulling her away from their car. Finally she seemed to give in, and he led her over to a small group of middle-aged women, who surrounded her, touching her on the shoulders and back. Lars’s hand was sweating around the barrette, and he took it out of his pocket. Without looking at it, he dropped it into a nearby bush. It was a relief to be free of it. He waited until Frank was looking their way, and raised his hand to him.
Frank came over. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said, his face indicating exactly the opposite. “Are you guys okay?”
“We’re not sure how to get back,” Lars said. “We came here in her car.”
“I’m thinking bus,” Toth said.
Frank nodded with a stricken, sugary gaze. “Right.”
“Can we walk there?” Lars said.
“No.” He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. “No. Look, why not just take the car to the station? You can leave the keys under the mat.” He gave them directions. “If you get lost you can ask.”
“I really appreciate it.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’d ask you to stay, but there isn’t going to be much in the way of a wake. A lot of drinking and moaning.” Something seemed to come to him then and he snapped his head up. “I’m glad we met,” he said. “Both of you guys.” They shook hands. “I’ll probably never see you again.”
“I guess not,” Lars said.
“We would have, maybe. Maybe on holidays.”
Lars winced, and he watched tears appear in Frank’s eyes. Then they were gone, wiped away with a pass of his hand. “You’re a good kid, Lars,” he said. “So was she. She was a really good kid.”
“Yeah.” He wanted to look into the bush—could he still see the barrette? could he pick it up again?—but he held himself back.
“I gotta think about that more, when I get time.”
“So,” Lars said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He looked hard at Lars, then at Toth. “Okay, then,” he said, and walked away.
* * *
On the bus, Lars could feel the pain pulling away from him, as if it were a series of small, hot beads on a long string, and one end of the string was attached to Megan’s car back at the bus station, and the rest coiled inside him. With every mile, more of the pain unspooled and stung as it left him, and then was gone. He slept for most of the trip, an entire night’s worth in an afternoon and evening, and they pulled into the Marshall station in the middle of the night. He understood that the worst was not over, but the keenest part was. What remained would be duller and blunter, and he would have to stuff the burned-out hollows that sharp pain left with something new and different, something that didn’t quite fit. When they stepped off the bus and into the cool night air, Toth said, “We’ll have to walk.”
“I know.”
“How are you doing?” he said.
“Better, some.”
Toth stared out over the trees and houses to the North Side Bridge rising bright in the distance. “Me too,” he said. “Still bad, though.” He turned back to Lars. “Can we talk about her sometimes? Would that be too weird for you?”
Lars shook his head. “No, I figure we’ll have to do that.”
“It’s good we were together for it.”
“I guess so.”
And then they hugged clumsily and went off in opposite directions toward home, afraid to say anything more and suffer from scrutiny in one an other’s light. Lars kept his head up as he walked, so that he could catch the moment when the streetlights started winking out.
* * *
He gathered his groceries in a sort of fog, breaking the rules he and Megan had always so carefully followed together: never shop hungry, never shop without a list. Anything that looked good, he put into his cart. The shopping was dull, each item offering a modest lump of heartbreak as he remembered eating it with her. His hunger, held at bay by the two cookies, was dull. Everything with Megan, on the other hand, had crackled, her energy so great that it buzzed like a force field around her; the best of times had been like touching a nine-volt battery to the tongue: a little uncomfortable, very exciting. But all Lars wanted now was this: the comfort of predictable hurt, eating and sleeping and breathing. Time passed, and when he got to the cashier he had four sacks’ worth of groceries, far more than he could carry. He paid, then loaded two onto his bike, leaving the others behind with the cashier for the second trip. But when he returned from home the cashier was gone, his groceries with her.
“Excuse me,” Lars asked the new cashier from behind the plastic bag rack. A considerable line had formed.
“What,” the cashier said. He was a corpulent man with tinted glasses. He didn’t turn his head, but continued to swipe items over the UPC reader.
“I left my groceries here? With the lady who was here before you?”
The man stopped and spun on him. “What?”
“Two sacks of groceries. I left them right here.” He pointed at the bagging area, now cluttered with a lot of health food—vegetables, vitamins. He felt himself sweating from the bike rides.
The man scowled behind his glasses and grabbed a nearby PA phone. His voice boomed throughout the store. “Assistance at seven. Assistance at seven.”
Lars noticed that the girl whose groceries were being rung was staring at him. She had a funny quality about the eyes, kind of tired and sick.
“Two-cookie guy,” she said.
It was the sorority sister from the bake sale. “Hey.”
“What was your name again?”
“Lars Cowgill.” Somebody was trying to get past him in the exit aisle, an old woman, and she sighed loudly several times. Lars pressed himself up against the bag rack.
“Koggle?”
“Cow gill.” He spelled it.
“Right. Christine Stull, remember?”
“Some trouble?” a man said behind him. Lars turned and met a plastic nameplate: Frank Banner, Floor Manager. The accompanying face towered above Lars by eighteen inches at least, and sat on a neck as thick as a pile of sandbags.
“Uh…I…
“Two sacks of groceries? Got ‘em in back.”
“Oh. Good. I mean, thanks.”
“Step aside there, son,” Banner said. “Make way for Claude. He doesn’t wanna be cramped.”
The checker’s lips thinned. “Ten forty,” he said to Christine.
Banner brought the bags, and as Lars stood outside, fastening them to his basket with a pair of bungee cords, Christine came through the sliding doors and set her sack at his feet.
“You got out of there in a hurry,” she said.
“Oh! Sorry.”
“Oh, hey, I just gave you a couple of free cookies. No reason to chat.”
“One free cookie,” he reminded her.
“Okay, geez.” She smiled. “You look like you haven’t eaten in a week.”
He looked down at his bicycle, teetering under the weight of the sacks. “This is only half of it.”
“Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“Nice meeting you, Lars.”
“Good luck with the, you know. The kidneys.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yup.”
* * *
That night he was sautéing vegetables when the phone rang. He carried his wooden spoon with him into the living room and picked it up.
“Lars Cowgill,” said a female voice. “Here you are, right in the phone book.” In the background, he could hear a low mechanical whooshing.
“Hello?”
“It’s Christine.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Don’t sound too excited.”
“Sorry,” he said. He picked up the phone and brought it into the kitchen, and the trailing cord reminded him of his call from the airline days before. He took a deep breath. “I just wasn’t expecting anybody to call tonight.”
“Ah.”
“So what’s up?”
“Dialysis,” she said. “I have to do this every couple of days. They hook me up to this machine and all my blood goes through it.”
He reached over the burners and turned the heat down. “Does that hurt?”
“I get tired. The day after, I’m okay, but then I start feeling shitty again fast.”
“Where are you?” he said. “The hospital?”
“That’s why our trailer’s at Safeway. It’s near the hospital. Gotta be close by if they find a kidney and all.”
“You’re living there?”
“Yeah. They let me call people while this thing’s going. It gets boring.”
There was a long silence, during which he moved his vegetables around in the butter and oil.
“So what’s up with you?” she said.
“Cooking dinner.”
“I mean in general. What’s your story?” He heard her shifting, and she grunted and let out a long breath. “You sound like a sad fella.”
“Not generally,” he said.
“But specifically…”
He slid the pan off the burner and scraped the vegetables onto a plate, then rummaged in a drawer for a fork.
“Okay, don’t answer.”
“Specifically, my girlfriend’s dead.” How many times would he have to tell people? He decided that was it, that nobody else should know.
Another pause. “Oh…”
“So I’m sad.” It didn’t feel so bad to say this. It almost felt good. “I’m sad,” he said again.
“Maybe I’m not the person to be talking to.”
“I don’t mind.” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “Do you mind?”
“No.”
“I’m going to eat while we’re talking.” He crunched into a piece of broccoli. It tasted great. “Oh, God,” he said.
“What?”
“This broccoli. It’s really good.”
“Ugh. Don’t talk to me about food. I feel like blowing hash.”
“Sorry.”
They talked until he was finished eating, and when he hung up, Lars felt like he had never slept before, like an infinite chorus of rock bands had been keeping him awake since the dawn of time. Still, he didn’t sleep for a long time. “Just you and me,” he said to the cat when he walked by. “Goodnight, darling,” he said to the blocks of street light that arced across the ceiling. “Goodnight.”