He knows my name.
Thursday comes and he doesn’t show. I think I have lost him. But then, a delightful surprise: on Friday evening, when I’m not expecting him, he materializes at the bar.
“Emily,” he calls out, and it’s my name in his mouth, a stream of familiarity linking him to me.
I tell him hi and—before I can stop myself—that I didn’t see him yesterday. He smiles. Tells me sorry. A work emergency out of town, he says. But he’s back now.
And all is right in the world, I tell myself. Silently this time.
I keep it with me. His surprise visit, the sound of my name on his breath. I allow it to carry me through the night, through the next day, all the way into Saturday evening.
At the restaurant, Saturdays are a battlefield. Folks drive up from the city, compete with the locals for reservations. They’re happy until they’re not. Food flies out of the kitchen—hot, cold, it doesn’t matter. What we need is plates on tables, plates on tables. Behind the bar, I grow a second pair of arms. Everyone wants mixed drinks on a Saturday. It’s one martini after the other, an endless streak of twists and olives. I peel the back of my thumb along with the skin of a lemon. My wrists protest each time I raise the shaker, carpal tunnel settling in my joints with each clatter of ice cubes.
A rare good thing about the restaurant: when it’s that busy, it numbs me. There is no time to think, no time to care that Nick ignores most of my orders, that he’s a dick to everyone, including me, that I should have fired him a long time ago but worry a different chef would be even worse. It’s just me and the bar until the last customers leave and Cora locks the door behind them.
When it’s all over, we go out. It doesn’t make sense, but it must be done, even if we’ve all had enough of one another for the evening. Because if Saturday nights are a battlefield, then we are soldiers, and we must be able to exist together. And the way to do that is to drink.
By the time I show up, everyone is already sitting at our usual table. I wave to Ryan, the owner—not a bad guy, just someone who thinks naming a dive the Hairy Spider is a good idea—and pull up a chair between Eric and Yuwanda.
“They say it was an accident, but I don’t buy it,” Cora’s saying. “Have you seen the trails over there? It would be really hard to fall.”
Ryan brings me his beer of the week, a pumpkin sour. I take a sip and give him what I hope passes for an appreciative nod.
“What are we talking about?”
Yuwanda fills me in. “That woman who went missing last week.”
I read about her in the local weekly: mid-thirties, no history of mental illness or drug use. A painter with a little workshop about forty miles north of here. Disappeared overnight and hasn’t been seen since. No activity on her phone or credit cards.
“One of the cops told my sister they think she went for a hike and fell down a ravine,” Sophie says. “Apparently she liked the trails.”
Yuwanda cuts in: “But don’t they have surveillance video of her at some convenience store around seven that night?”
Sophie nods.
“So, what,” Yuwanda continues, “she stopped at the store and then went for a hike? Who goes hiking that late?”
Eric takes a sip of his beer. “Maybe she wanted to watch the sunset?”
Cora shakes her head. “Nah. First of all, the sun sets earlier than that now. At seven, she would’ve had nothing left to watch. And why bother going to the trails? I know that town. You can see the sunset from just about anywhere.”
I go to take another sip of Ryan’s pumpkin sour, then settle for a whiff and set my glass down. There’s something I can’t make sense of. “Why are they even focusing on the trails?”
Cora looks down, a slight admission of defeat. “They found her shoe in the brush,” she concedes. “But I don’t know. It’s just a shoe. It doesn’t explain why she’d go on a hike that late in the day, and by herself, too.”
Eric pats her arm. “People do weird stuff all the time,” he tells her softly. “It happens.”
“Eric’s not wrong,” I say. “Accidents do happen.”
No one challenges me. People look down at their drinks, at the rings of condensation they’ve left on Ryan’s table. You don’t argue with an orphan who tells you accidents happen. My father: a heart attack on a sunny Saturday morning two years ago; my mother: a car crash in the haze that followed.
“Anyway,” Nick says after a few beats. “I heard some chef from the city bought the building where Mulligan’s used to be. He’s turning it into a steakhouse, apparently.” He turns to me with what could pass for an air of gentle ribbing: “Maybe he’ll tell you where he gets his sirloin, if you ask nicely.”
I sigh. “You know, Nick, I think it’s really healthy how you don’t sweat the small stuff. When people ask me what I love most about my head chef, I always tell them he’s a real big-picture guy.”
The line gets smiles from Eric and Yuwanda. Everyone else chooses to sit this one out. I would, too, if I had to spend fifty hours a week in a kitchen with Nick and a wide array of butcher knives.
A couple of hours later, Eric drives us back to the house that used to be my parents’, which I now share with him and Yuwanda. It was one of those arrangements that fell into place because it had to. They both showed up the day after the car crash and took care of me the way only childhood friends can. They kept the fridge full, made sure I ate and slept, at least a little. They helped me plan two funerals at once. They kept me company when I couldn’t be alone and gave me space when I needed it. Somewhere along the way, we agreed it would be better if they never left. The house was too big for just me. Selling it would have required some remodeling, which was out of the question. So we moved my parents’ stuff into storage one weekend and collapsed on the couch at the end of the day, our new equilibrium sealed. Imperfect and slightly unusual. The only thing that made sense.
Tonight, I toss and turn, exhausted but unable to fall asleep. I think about the missing woman. Melissa. All that’s left of her: a first name, a job, the name of a town, a shoe found near a trail. Like the eulogies people gave for my parents, accurate but desperately lacking. My father’s life pared down to a few words: he was a chef, he was a dad, he worked hard. The pieces of my mother’s existence, like the other half of a puzzle: she ran the business, she was the hostess, she was the bookkeeper, she was the glue that kept it all together. All true, but nothing that captured them as people. Nothing about my father’s smile, my mother’s perfume. Nothing about what it felt like to live with them, to be raised by them, to be loved and abandoned by them in equal measures.
I go back to the missing woman, try filling in the gaps in her narrative. It feels treacherous, using her as a blank canvas to make her up the way I want to, but something about her story has a hold on my brain.
Maybe she was a bit like me. Was—look at me, thinking of her in the past when we don’t know yet. Maybe she, too, grew up at once captivated and terrified by the world. Maybe she was made to wear dresses when she preferred pants. Maybe she was made to say hi to the grown-ups when she wanted to be alone. Maybe she learned to always feel a little uncomfortable, always a little sorry. Maybe she grew up and waited for a teenage rebellion that never came, and maybe when she reached her mid-twenties she regretted never getting the angst out of her system.
This is the story I tell myself. No one’s around to tell me it doesn’t make sense. It starts out as a tribute and ends in selfishness. It isn’t about her. Not really. It’s about me and the parts of my life that find me in the dark. It’s about me and my younger self and the way she looks at me, the way she keeps calling out to me, demanding answers I don’t have.