At Losers, Little took a stool between two men he knew and bought them beers. He hadn’t really expected Alice to show, he told himself, only hoped she would so he could prove that he had other business with her than what she must think. But what she thought was obviously enough to keep her away, and he couldn’t blame her—since she didn’t know what he had in mind, or maybe she did, better than he knew himself. Now, though, he couldn’t fool himself about Alice’s grudging interest: grudging had gotten the upper hand. And with this certainty, he didn’t have to worry any longer about what to do, since there couldn’t be any question about his motives anymore.
However many beers he’d had, they put him on the queasy side of elation, a state he could almost believe was atmospheric as he walked through the warm, heavy air dense with the brewery’s yeasty smell. Passing his own house, he paused just long enough to consider cleaning up, but when a maudlin inner voice asked, “Why bother?” he went on. His neighbors, welding something in the spotlight, looked up through a fountain of blue sparks and waved.
Alice was slow answering his knock. He scanned the windows, sure she was peeking from one, but there was no movement. When she came to the door, she had a cat tucked awkwardly under her arm. She stopped and it struggled, squirmed out of her grasp, and fled down the walk. “Kitty,” Alice called softly after it, “Here, kitty.” Finally she looked at Little. “Sorry I didn’t meet you,” she said. “That call I got, it was for an appointment, I forgot to tell you.”
“There’s appointments, and there’s appointments,” he said. “This’ll just take a minute.”
She hesitated. A wave of irritation almost overwhelmed him, but his wish to disabuse her wouldn’t let him walk away—a good thing too, because once she’d stepped aside he saw that this might not’ve been another slight. Her house was a wreck, tipped boxes everywhere, with all her belongings tumbled out and strewn across the floor, all shadowy except for one small clearing in the middle of the mess, a floor lamp casting a yellow cone of light on an armchair where Alice must’ve been sitting. If he needed any more encouragement, this was it. He took the crumpled pieces of paper out of his pocket, rubbed them smooth as best he could between his thumb and fingers, and held them out to her.
She looked at them but didn’t take them from him. He stood there waiting, watching her face as her eyes wandered off the page in his hand and came to rest on nothing he could see. “How did you …,” she said. “I thought …” At last she raised her eyes to meet his and sighed, “Oh, Little.”
“It was on your locker,” he said.
She was still staring at him, an eerie, almost sad look on her face, not at all what he’d expected. “I told you that wasn’t me,” she said.
Now he was starting to become impatient, because there was only so much help a man could offer where he wasn’t wanted. “I know that,” he said. “It might be evidence.” He reached for her hand to try to make her take the torn pictures, but she snatched it away from his touch with such force that she fell back a step.
“Evidence?” she said, sounding shaken. “How did you know where it was?”
“Wasn’t it here? What, you mean the locker? I was the first one there at lunch, and there it was, stuck in the door, so I took it down. Only Chuck saw it. But I told him it wasn’t you.” Still stung by the way she’d retracted her hand, he was talking as he might to a wild creature he’d frightened, and it was only when his own voice caught up with him and he heard that note in it, almost a plea, and saw how her expression, instead of softening, was closing up—only then did he start to understand. Still, it was slow coming to him, because it was so difficult to imagine someone thinking the worst of him when he was trying to help, trying to do her a good turn when she couldn’t even remember to meet him. It was so difficult, in fact, that he didn’t want to ask her about it for fear of merely admitting the thought. But he had to say something, because it was becoming clearer by the second that she wasn’t going to. “I see what you’re thinking,” he said. “You think I did this.” Again he waved the torn paper at her, and again she stepped back. “What, do you think I broke into your house and tore a page out of your magazine—that I gave you in the first place—and stuck it up on your locker, just so I could take it down and tell you? Because if that’s what you think then you’re crazier than I am for trying to help you. You need help all right—and I just hope there’s someone as stupid as I am around when you see it.”
His anger had risen in him like a wind, and now it whisked him out the door before he even thought to leave; so he was somewhat surprised to find himself standing on the sidewalk, with Alice at the door saying his name. “Little,” she called again, just as she’d called her cat. When he glanced back, she said, “I didn’t say anything.” Then he walked away.