OHIO, 1986
The sign on the freeway for the restaurant, an Irish pub, white curling text on a brown backdrop, showed up sooner than he thought it would, but there it was, O’Malley’s, two miles, Ye Olde Spot.
Right off the highway, Vincent Kahn had said. Most convenient for you.
His temperature had ranged about wildly, near shiver to near fever. In his rearview Wright ran a comb through his hair, an act so unfamiliar to him that he thought he looked like a cartoon doing it, a dog trying to pass as human. He walked the parking lot of the strip mall with the sort of panic that is quick and bright, all silvery angles of movement. Carrying a plastic bag from the pharmacy, a woman leashed by four children emerged from a chain drugstore, looking like the kind of person who has never cried in her life. A teenage couple, sitting on the released tailgate of a truck, blew smoke in the direction of anyone who passed, the sleeves of their hooded sweatshirts warped from always being pulled over their hands. The smells coming from the restaurant were almost identical to the smells coming from others in the franchise, a town over, a state, and his plastic watch, a find from a quarter machine, something Braden had called Mr. Little Clock, told him he was two minutes early. When he passed through the automatic doors of the restaurant there was a sign that said WAIT TO BE SEATED and he walked right past.
Vincent Kahn was not in the restaurant and he waited ten minutes in a booth. Above the bar hung photos with the same sepia wear, a dirty child pushing another in a wheelbarrow, a one-room house at the edge of a cliff. In a frame in front of the cash register, a sallow piece of fabric was embroidered ERIN GO BRAGH. After the second time he asked the waitress to recite the specials but did not order she rolled her eyes and smeared a hand through the bangs she had sprayed so they arched up.
“I’m sorry, Kelly,” he had said, reading her tag, but somehow speaking her name was a breach of contract, another loophole in American etiquette he would never understand.
On the table the evidence of Vincent’s not coming mounted, four straws whose wrappers he’d removed, a children’s color-by-number he’d completed quickly with the provided crayons in only greens and blues, the yellow-brown plastic pint glass empty of water.
“Policy,” Kelly was saying, standing above him. “Federal, or whatever. Half hour with no order, and I have to ask. Waiting for someone, or what?”
It was his humiliation that spoke for him, wanting him to hear how stupid it sounded in the world of other people so that he could make the necessary correction, choose a life that made sense.
“I’m waiting for Vincent Kahn.” His hands lying faceup on the table, he heard the radio fill the silence, a DJ saying the name of the song that had just played like it was the ultimate painful coincidence. That’s Bob Seger, with “Still the Same.”
“The space guy?” She was waving a hand over her turned shoulder, already on her way out of their interaction. “He goes to the other one.”
“Where,” he said, shadowing her across the carpet, three steps unfolding in the time he’d usually take one, and she said something he couldn’t understand, named the same interstate he could hear now over the sound of the baseball game. “Four miles,” she said, both hands running from the base of her scalp to the hairline, trying to give further volume to her flammable cloud of hair.
In the foyer where more framed photos covered the walls, he hoisted the brick of the phone book, attached by cord to the booth, and found the number he needed. The voice was as bored as Kelly had been with the mention of the name, Vincent Kahn.
“We don’t take messages from fans,” it said.
“Could you just tell me if—”
“Not at liberty to say.”
“Could you just tell him I’m on my way?”