I love to watch Diane assemble and decorate cakes, especially the wedding cakes, because they’re the most elaborate and some of them are pretty different from your average white wedding cake with flowers. Like the one she did for this couple who both work for Greenpeace. They wanted a cake that represented (their words) “the oneness of life and the harmony of sea, earth, and sky.” Other than giving her the theme, they said she was (their words) “free to unleash her creativity.”
She spent weeks leafing through photo and nature magazines, art books, doing sketches. In the end, the cake was three layers—chocolate, lemon, and hazelnut—stacked asymmetrically. White-chocolate buttercream frosting was colored greenish blue on the bottom to represent the ocean, chocolate in the middle for earth, then sort of a marbleized pale blue on top for the sky, with wispy white clouds. It sounds weird, but it was beautiful. Diane fashioned exotic sea creatures and animals and flowers and birds to populate the three layers. The bride and groom were represented by a little mermaid and merman—I guess that’s what you’d call a guy mermaid—porcelain figures that the bride had found somewhere.
Anyway, the couple had a friend who worked for the Post-Intelligencer, and a color photo of the cake ended up on the front page of the “Style” section and now the phone never seems to stop ringing.
It’s so busy that I don’t get to sit and watch anymore. Diane drafts me for making buttercream or doing the crumb coat, which is the first layer of icing that you put on to cover the crumbs and make a smooth base for the finish frosting. She does it so quickly that it looks easy. Just glob some icing on and smooth it like glass with that offset spatula. But I found out immediately that it requires more hand-eye coordination and patience than I possess.
One dark afternoon, when it’s just the two of us, she enlists my help with a new recipe for orange frosting to go on a chocolate fiftieth-anniversary cake. Standing in front of the stove watching sugar melt and turn brown is normally about as fascinating as watching paint dry, but the risk of experimenting with a cake that’s due to be picked up at ten tomorrow morning intrigues me.
“What if it doesn’t work?” I brush sugar crystals off the side of the pan with a wet pastry brush.
“Then I’m here till midnight redoing it. So let’s proceed bravely but carefully.” She turns on the burner under a pan of milk.
“If you majored in art, how on earth did you get into this?” I ask her. “Was your mother a baker?”
Her laugh is sharp. “My mother is the real estate queen of Baltimore. Or was till she retired. She was never home long enough to bake. Or do much else. Be careful with that. Nothing burns quite like hot caramel.”
The sugar is a deep golden brown now, and the mercury in the candy thermometer is nudging 360 degrees, so I turn off the flame. It boils up like a cauldron as the milk goes in.
“To answer your question, my gram was a fabulous baker. She raised my two sisters and me. Till she died—then I inherited the job.”
“What did your father do?”
“Drank himself into liver failure.” Her voice is flat and free of emotion. She peers over my shoulder into the pot. “This looks ready. Why don’t you start on the Italian meringue.”
I separate the eggs by letting the whites slide through my fingers the way she showed me weeks ago—a slimy but efficient method.
“I think that might be why I loved art and sewing and cooking,” she muses. “All the things my mother didn’t seem to care about. To spite her for not being room mother or baking us birthday cakes or taking us to buy Easter dresses or even putting Band-Aids on our goddamned skinned knees.”
With the egg whites whipping in the small mixer, I put the sugar and water on a burner to make a simple syrup. “It’s funny. My mother drove me nuts because she was there all the time doing all that stuff. Trying to teach me piano and sewing. Maybe there’s no way they can win.”
Diane stops beating the crème anglaise and stares into the middle distance. “Who knows.”
For a second, I think she might cry. Instead, she sniffs a little bit and sets the bowl of crème anglaise into a larger bowl filled with ice.
“Where are your sisters?”
“In Baltimore. Married, with children, the image of domesticity.” She laughs ruefully. “They made their peace with my mother a long time ago and just did what they wanted to do. Now they take her casseroles and she baby-sits the grandkids and it’s all very huggy/cozy. Me, I had to run off to West Timbuktu to make it on my own. And not just any business would do. It had to involve all the things she either couldn’t or wouldn’t do.” Her laugh is tight. “Guess I showed her, huh?”
I squeeze some oranges and boil their juice down to a concentrate while she beats three pounds of butter to white satin in the Hobart.
“Do you get back there very often?”
“I’ve never been back. It’s almost six years now.” She pushes her bangs off her face with her forearm. “Okay, here goes.” Her determined smile is almost a grimace. She adds first the crème, then the meringue, then the vanilla and the orange syrup to the butter as the paddle turns steadily in its prescribed arc. At the end, she tosses in a dab of orange-paste food coloring and the grated orange zest.
She has a funny way of tasting things, putting a dab on the center of her tongue and pressing it against the roof of her mouth a few times to spread it around. “Mmmm. Try some.”
I spoon out a little. It’s one of those flavors that explodes in your mouth. “I love it—the burnt sugar taste with the orange and the silkiness … I want to rub it all over me.”
“A waste of good buttercream.” She laughs. “Unless you’ve got someone in mind to lick it off.”
On the first Friday morning in February, Tyler calls in sick with the flu.
Ellen looks pained. “Wyn, I hate to even ask you, but is there any way you can stay till about nine-thirty, ten? Just to get us through the morning rush.”
“I don’t have a problem with staying, but I don’t know anything about using that machine.”
“Misha can sling the espresso. You can go back and do muffins and scones with Jen. By the way”—she gives me a knowing smile—”I’ve got some tools for you out in the car.”
I take my mocha back to the work area, where Jen’s wearing the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on her face. Short and chubby, with fair skin and dark hair, she looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s sister.
“What’s up?”
“Nothin’. I’m happy because Misha has to work out front and I don’t.” “Is it that bad?”
She shrugs. “I guess it all depends on whether you like dealing with customers. Personally, I’d rather shovel shit with a teaspoon.” Her blue eyes spark wickedly.
She pulls the bucket of bran-muffin batter out of the Traulsen, hands me an ice cream scoop. “We do three dozen of these. When you’re done, the dry ingredients for the cranberry muffins are over there.” She points to the other end of the huge worktable. “Mix in the wet and then you can scoop those, too.”
In a few minutes, Ellen comes back, dabbing at her forehead with a tissue. She picks up a tray of cooling blueberry muffins. “It’s crazy this morning. What muffins have we got for tomorrow?”
“Cranberry, bran, and I’ll make some pumpkin when I get through with the cinnamon rolls,” Jen says.
“I can do the pumpkin.”
“That would be a big help.” Ellen jerks her head in the direction of her old brown desk. “The recipe’s in that red notebook.”
I wash my hands and riffle through the pages till I find it.
Misha’s Pumpkin-Millet Muffins
1¼ cups unbleached white flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ cup sugar
2½ teaspoons pumpkin spice mix (see below)
½ cup millet
2 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup pumpkin
⅓ cup water
2 tablespoons maple syrup
½ cup raisins or currants
Mix together dry ingredients and millet. In a separate bowl, beat eggs, oil, pumpkin, water, syrup, and raisins or currants. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix just until combined. Scoop into muffin tins that have been greased or lined with paper liners. Bake at 375°F for 25 to 30 minutes. Makes 1 dozen.
PUMPKIN SPICE MIX
¼ cup ground ginger
¼ cup ground cinnamon
3 tablespoons ground cardamom
3 tablespoons ground cloves
Mix spices thoroughly and store in a jar.
Jen laughs when she notices me frowning. “We make six dozen at a time,” she says. “The proportions are on the back. And the spice mix is in the storeroom, first shelf on the left. I think you’ll have to open a new can of pumpkin.”
She works with her back to the café, but I keep looking up from my muffins to watch the first assault—yuppies in their power suits, parking their BMWs at the curb, pickups full of blue-collar guys who work across the bridge in Ballard, local merchants up and down Queen. Between eight-thirty and nine, the second wave hits—left-over hippies, punkers, and students, and, finally, about ten, the neighborhood moms with their strollers and toddlers, and the blue-hair set.
The hum of voices is punctuated at intervals by the bang of the door, the scalding hiss of the espresso machine, the coffee grinder whirring, the cash register dinging, and the traffic noises. It’s sensory overload compared to the stillness and the rhythms of making bread at night.
Jen sticks a pan of cinnamon rolls in the oven about the time I finish the muffins. I wipe my hands on my apron. “Can I watch you make the scones? I love them, but mine never turn out like these.”
“There’s two schools of thought about scones.” She smirks a little. “At least around here. There’s fluffy scones—they’ve got more cream and eggs. Kind of like biscuits. And there’s short scones, which I prefer. They’ve got more sugar and a lot more butter. They’re denser, almost like shortcake.” She depresses the button on the food processor, cutting the butter into the dry ingredients in about five long pulses. She dumps the crumbly mass onto the worktable and flips it gently twice, patting it into a long rectangle. “What we make here is sort of a compromise.”
She holds up two floury fingers. “Two things. The butter’s gotta be really cold, even frozen’s okay. And don’t handle the dough any more than absolutely necessary. That makes them tough. You can use a knife or a biscuit cutter or whatever you want, just make sure it’s sharp. The sharper it is, the higher they’ll rise.” She uses a Chinese cleaver, swinging it back and forth, separating the dough into triangles. We load them onto half-sheet pans and stash them in the freezer to bake off tomorrow.
Ellen insists on driving me home at eleven and helping me carry the five-gallon bucketful of tools that Lloyd has selected as my learner’s set. The bucket has a blue canvas liner—Ellen says it’s called a “tool apron”—with pockets for different hand tools. A drill and a heavy orange extension cord are in the middle. There’s also a circular saw that would make a formidable weapon should you happen to be attacked while it’s plugged in.
I sigh. “Never in my wildest dreams did I envision myself with power tools.”
Her eyes close when she laughs. “Never in my wildest dreams did I picture myself with someone like Lloyd. I hope he wasn’t too pushy.”
“I’d call him persistent. And he’s right, I guess. It’s probably a good idea for everyone to know how to use a screwdriver.” I drop my backpack on the chair. “He told me how you guys met.”
She waves her hand dismissively. “He tells everyone that story. It’s his evangelical Lutheran upbringing. Every time he tells it, my shoulders start itching, like I’m going to grow wings. Well, I better get back to work and let you go to bed. Thanks for sticking around this morning.”
After she leaves, I stash the tools in my office, curl up in my down comforter without bothering to open the futon frame, and fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
“Missed you last night,” Mac greets me as I scoot onto my stool at the bar.
“One of the women at work has the flu, so I worked an extra five hours yesterday. I didn’t even roll out of bed till eight.”
I’ve become a barfly. Sort of. I’ve taken to spending three or four evenings a week perched on this stool, reading and nursing my one glass of wine. Two, if I don’t have to work that night. I always felt sorry for people who hung out in bars, and slightly condescending toward them—like, if you had a life, you wouldn’t be there—but I’ve decided there’s a lot to recommend it. Of course, you have to choose your saloon carefully.
I’d be willing to bet that everyone who comes to Bailey’s lives within a three-mile radius of upper Queen Anne. If you didn’t, you’d probably never venture in. It’s not the sort of place where enthusiasts congregate to taste the latest boutique pinot noirs from Oregon. I always take a book, but a lot of times I find myself staring at one page while I listen to the guys debate obscure sports trivia or brag about their kids’ free-throw averages.
Girlfriends gather at the big tables by the fireplace to gossip and complain about their boyfriends while a group of older women calling themselves the “Thursday Night Grannies” shoot pool and exchange recipes for things like Mississippi Mud Cake and Baked Artichoke Dip.
I don’t get involved in a lot of conversation, except sometimes with Mac and the other bartender. Kenny’s older, maybe around fifty, short and husky, with thinning dark hair, watery blue eyes, and a nose that looks like it’s been broken at least twice. He used to box, but now he just coaches kids at the community center on Capitol Hill.
These two work well together in the small space behind the bar, probably because they work on different planes. Kenny’s motions are direct, short and jerky, but efficient, just what you’d expect from a fighter. Mac is tall—over six feet—with an odd, lanky grace. They’re both in constant motion, never getting in each other’s way, never forgetting what they’re about, never reaching for something to find it’s not there. I like to watch them.
Okay, I like to watch him. Mac. I like the way he works, as if there were nothing in the world he’d rather be doing at the moment than getting some old codger his Ballard Bitter. I like it that he gives his full attention to anyone who talks to him, even if the person is obnoxious. The way he gets so caught up in the music that he doesn’t even know he’s mouthing the words.
He told me one afternoon that he’s from New York, that he dropped out of NYU his sophomore year to wander around. He came through Seattle on his way to Alaska and he was low on money, so he took a job tending bar at some place down in Pioneer Square and just stayed.
I’ve heard about his ex-girlfriend Laura, who owns an art gallery in Bellevue. They broke up six months ago after two years of hot-and-cold-running romance. She told him that he was financially challenged and always would be, and she needed someone with a little more ambition.
He’s not racehorse gorgeous like David, but then, who is? Mac has more the look of a hawk, with his long nose and high cheekbones, deep-set gray eyes—a certain fierceness that’s not unattractive.
But Mrs. Morrison didn’t raise any daughters dumb enough to sit around staring at some bartender and wondering how he’d look in those nice faded low-rise jeans if he just took his shirt off.
I’ve told him a little about David. Okay, I’ve told him a lot. It wasn’t intentional, but he’s so easy to talk to, it just slipped out. Anyway, he said he knew I was married the first time he saw me. When I asked him how he could know that, he said, “You looked sad. I see a lot of it going around.”
On Saturdays, I can stay till last call if I want, since I don’t have to rush home and eat dinner and go to work. The music’s every bit as good as Mac promised. I like the way he puts the tapes together.
Sometimes he starts wild, like Billy Idol, and then drops back into the Platters, then punches it up with the Stones, sliding back into mellow with Joni Mitchell. Other times he’ll kick off with something sad and slow like “That’s How Strong My Love Is” by Otis Redding, and gradually work up to Chuck Berry or Eric Clapton. If he gets on a roll, there might be a solid hour of Motown, or the British Invasion, or surf music, but usually it’s an interesting mix.
And every so often he’ll come down to my end of the bar and say, “You like this one?” I’ll have to stop and listen and figure out that The Drifters are singing “There Goes My Baby.” Then I’ll say, yes, I do like it, and he’ll point out to me that the lyric is actually in blank verse.
Or he’ll say, “Wyn. Check out the kick-ass horn section on this Otis Redding. See how they echo the lyrics? The way they pull you right into the next line?”
Usually, Saturday night the place is packed, but tonight’s the finals of the high school district basketball tournament, so a lot of people are at the game. He’s playing early Dylan from Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. I’m in the middle of a P. D. James mystery, Superintendent Dalgliesh explaining to Sergeant Martin why the blackmailer had killed the head of the clinic, when Mac raps his knuckles on the bar in front of me.
“Hungry?”
“I’m getting around to it. But don’t bring me any more peanuts. I’ll just eat them.”
“You want to go get Italian with Kenny and me?” “Where?”
“Lofurno’s. Down on Fifteenth. You can either go with us after we close up or we’ll stop by your place about one-thirty.”
It doesn’t occur to me to wonder how he knows where I live until he’s at the front door. He’s lounging against the porch rail, and when he reaches for the visor of his baseball cap, the picture stops rolling and comes into perfect focus. I stare at him.
“Oh my God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You delivered my firewood. That’s why you didn’t have to ask where I lived.”
The corners of his eyes crinkle with amusement. “Took you long enough.”
“Your hair. It was really long.”
“That was the day before my annual shearing.”
“Why didn’t you say something before?”
“Well …” He sticks his hands down into his jeans pockets. “I had the distinct impression that you were pretty grossed out that day.”
“Grossed out? I thought you were the psycho-killer handyman.”
His knees bend when he laughs. Then I’m laughing, too, and shortly we’re both bent double, wiping tears away. I recover myself, pull the door shut, turning the key in the dead bolt. “Come on, Kenny probably thinks you got lost.”
We step off the porch and crunch about halfway down the gravel drive before he says, “Kenny bailed on us. His wife wanted him home tonight.” He brushes a hemlock branch aside for me to pass by.
“I didn’t realize he was married.”
“Is this okay?”
“As long as they’re happy.”
A battered, white pickup truck noses up to the curb. It looks held together with barbed wire and chewing gum, and the left-rear fender is gray with primer.
“My God, it’s the Millennium Falcon.”
“Sorry, the Beamer’s in the shop this week.”
I climb in. “What is this thing?”
“An Elky.” When he slams the door, I half expect the window to fall out.
I sit running my index finger over the tuck-and-roll vinyl upholstery while he walks around to the driver’s side and gets in. “What’s an Elky?”
“El Camino 454 SS. Nineteen seventy-one,” he says proudly. The engine hacks and strains and dies. Three times.
“Do you realize what the emissions on this thing must be like?”
“This truck and I have been through a lot together.”
“There’s probably a hole in the ozone layer with your name on it.” On the fourth try, it kicks in. He puts it in drive and we pull away from the curb. “In seventy-one, nobody was thinking about hydrocarbons and nitrous oxides and particulate—And what kind of gas mileage do you get?”
We stop at the corner and he looks over at me. “I think of it as recycling. If I wasn’t driving it, it’d be rusting in somebody’s front yard.”
Lofurno’s is another place that you’d never find by accident. Just driving by on Fifteenth, you wouldn’t notice the peeling, gray clapboard building huddled at the foot of a bluff. And if you did notice, you’d probably think it was vacant. There’s no sign, no visible window lights, only a few cars in the muddy parking lot. In a linoleum-floored hall just inside the front door, a bare lightbulb hangs from a black cord. On the left is a plain wooden door, to the right a flight of stairs.
Mac opens the door into what could be a movie set for a speakeasy. The air is heavy with garlic and cigarette smoke, warmly lit by amber lamps. A black woman in purple chiffon sits at a baby grand piano, sipping a clear liquid that’s too viscous to be water. Her hair is silver, but her face is smooth and ageless. She winks at Mac, brings her cigarette to her mouth with a jeweled hand and takes a drag, exhaling a slow stream. Two couples sit at the dark-wood bar that runs the length of the room, and one of the guys looks up when we come in.
“Hey, Mac. How’s it goin’?” He slides off his stool and lumbers over, hitching up his pants. He looks like Victor Mature, with those sculpted lips and a large, handsome nose, black eyes, and a wave of steel-gray hair breaking over his forehead. They do this shoulder-clasping thing that I’ve never seen anywhere except in movies about the Mafia. His name is Tony—what else?—and when Mac introduces me, Tony gives me this kind of macho nod that reminds me of an old joke about Italian foreplay. Then he picks up two menus and leads us to one of the high-back booths opposite the bar. In a few minutes, a waiter in a black vest and a long white apron brings a bottle of Chianti and two glasses.
“Is red okay?” Mac asks me. “Or would you rather have something else?”
“Red’s fine.”
The waiter pours the wine and says, “We’re out of the scallopine, and we’ve only got one lasagne left.”
When he leaves, I lean forward and whisper, “Where’s the guy in the dark suit and white tie with a tommy gun in the violin case?”
He laughs. “This place is sort of a throwback. The food’s great, though. And so’s Arlene. The singer.”
“She looks like she’s through for tonight.”
He shakes his head. “She’s just taking a break. She’ll sing till everybody’s gone. Her voice reminds me of Lauren Bacall. Was it To Have and Have Not where she sang?”
“ ‘Am I Blue.’ And Hoagy Carmichael played the piano.” I look at the open menu. “What’s good?”
“Everything. But I hope you like garlic.”
“I love it.”
“Good. Then let’s get a Caesar.”
After we order, Mac gives the waiter a five to put in Arlene’s overflowing goldfish bowl. She’s lighting another cigarette with the tail end of her last one, but she smiles and pulls the voice mike around. “You got it, babe.”
Then she flounces her skirt, flicks ashes off her dress, and plays the intro to “Every Time We Say Goodbye.” Suddenly I hear Ella Fitzgerald’s throaty purr, see my father in his chair, eyes closed, gently tapping his thumbs on the book that sits in his lap.
Now that we’re sitting here across from each other, I suddenly feel the nakedness of my third finger, left hand. Lately I’ve realized how a wedding ring works like a talisman, granting protection to the wearer. You can talk to a man, laugh, even do a little judicious flirting and no one automatically assumes that you’re looking to get laid. Without the ring, you’re on your own.
“So do you still work at Norwegian Woods?”
“I just help Rick out during busy times.”
The waiter makes the salad at our table in a huge wooden bowl that he’s smeared with a smushed garlic clove, the way it’s supposed to be done. It’s one of the best I’ve ever had—lemon, anchovy, and garlic in perfect tension with each other, the coddled egg and olive oil smoothing it out, freshly grated Parmesan, just enough Tabasco for a slight after-burn. There’s sourdough bread with a quarter-inch-thick crust that I use to mop up the last of the dressing. I could quit right now and be perfectly happy, but then the waiter brings my tagliatelle Bolognese and I’m glad I didn’t quit. I’ve never tasted meat sauce like this, sweet and creamy. I chew it slowly, practically sucking it, trying to figure out how it’s done.
I look up at some point to find Mac smiling at me—almost laughing—and I realize he’s been sitting there, keeping my glass filled, and I haven’t said a word to him in the last ten minutes.
“I’m sorry I’m being no company at all, but this is so … incredibly, unbelievably good.”
“Are you always this intense?”
“Only about food. How do they do this?”
He shrugs. “Ask the waiter. I don’t think about it, I just eat it.” “This place seems very New York. Or New Jersey maybe. Is that why you like it?”
“I like it because it’s a great place. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the East Coast.”
“It occurs to me that you know an awful lot about me and I know very little about you.”
He twirls spaghetti around his fork like a pro. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“It makes me curious.”
“You’re free to ask questions.”
“Okay. Where have you been? For about the last ten years.”
“After I left school”—he looks thoughtful, as if he’s sifting out what to tell and what to leave unsaid—”I drove west. Spent three years in Colorado and Utah.”
“What did you do there?”
“A lot of skiing and a little waiting tables.”
“You can’t ski in the summer.”
“Then it was rock climbing and construction.”
“Rock climbing? You have a death wish, then.”
“Not really. It’s based on learning a set of skills, just like any other sport.”
“Yeah, it’s just like other sports. Except your butt’s hanging over the abyss.”
He laughs, leans his head back against the booth. “It’s a matter of engrams.”
“Of what?”
“Do you know how to drive stick shift?” I nod.
“It’s like that. Or like a golf swing or a tennis serve. It’s just a series of movements that sets up a sequence of nerve impulses in your brain. Every repetition reinforces the pattern. That’s an engram. Once it’s established, you can perform that series of movements almost automatically, so your brain’s free to concentrate on other things.”
“Like the fact that your butt’s hanging over the abyss. Okay. Then what? After the rock climbing.”
“Then I hitchhiked around New Zealand for a year. Then Italy and Switzerland for another year.”
“That’s five.”
“Then I came home. That lasted for about six months, and then I started working my way west again. Then, like I told you before, I came here and stayed.”
I rest my elbows on the table. “You do that very well. Cover a lot of ground and a lot of time without revealing anything substantive.”
“Good word, ‘substantive.’ “ He grins. “There’s just nothing very interesting to tell.”
“No brushes with the law? No duels?”
“Nope.”
“Ever been married?”
He hesitates for barely a nanosecond. “One close call.”
“What was her name?”
“Gillian. She lived on a sheep station in New Zealand.” “Can you tell me?” “Some other time.”
After I’ve stuffed as much tagliatelle as possible into myself and the rest into a take-home container, I do ask the waiter how they make it. He smiles and pours the last of the wine into our glasses.
“It’s the milk,” he says. “You cook the meat in milk before you add any tomatoes. And then, of course, you simmer it for a long time—four, five hours. Would you like coffee?”
“In a few minutes,” Mac says. Then he looks at me. “I guess this means you like the place.”
“It’s wonderful. Thanks for bringing me here. I never would have found it.”
Now Arlene’s playing “Blues in the Night.” Mac smiles. “She’s angling for another tip. By the way, Jimmy Turner’s coming to Bailey’s next Friday.”
“Who’s he?”
“A local blues artist. He usually plays at some pretty down-and-dirty places, but every once in a while, he comes up on the hill. You’ll like him.”
“I’ll have to find out some other time. I’m going to L.A. Friday morning.”
“Too bad.” He waits a second before asking, “Is this the big day?” “I’m afraid so.” The glow of the evening seems to have taken on a coat of tarnish.
He sets his glass down, twirls the stem around. “Why is this so hard for you?”
“I’m not sure. There’s this knot in my stomach every time I think about it.”
“You don’t seem like the kind of person who’d begrudge her mother a chance to be happy. Not after ten years or whatever it is.”
“Fifteen.” I shrug. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’ll get through it. My best friend’s going with me.”
“It matters if it makes knots in your stomach.” He drinks the last of his wine, sets the empty glass near the edge of the table. “You think you’ll see—”
“David? No. He doesn’t even know I’m coming.”
The waiter brings thick, inky coffee in white cups and hot milk in a pitcher. I know I should have asked for decaf, but it doesn’t seem right after a dinner where every single thing was so uncompromisingly real to drink fake coffee.
Mac dumps in a whole packet of sugar and carefully blends in a few drops of milk. He has a funny cowlick directly above his left eye, at the scalp line where a little tuft of hair grows backward, in opposition to all its brethren. As if to emphasize the difference, the hair in that one spot is shot through with gray.
“Why did you drop out of school?” I ask. He doesn’t look up from his coffee. “Don’t you want a degree?”
A tolerant smile. “It’s just a piece of paper that says you did what’s expected.”
“It’s too easy to trivialize things like education—or marriage—by saying it’s just a piece of paper.”
“Those things have already been trivialized. The purpose of going to college isn’t to learn, it’s to get the paper. The purpose of the paper is to get you the job so you can keep on doing what’s expected.”
“Are you really that cynical?” I blow on my coffee to cool it, take a tentative sip.
“I’m not cynical. I’m realistic. I like my life. I don’t need any more than what I have.”
“That’s fine for now. You’re young and strong. What about the future?”
“The future is something dreamed up by insurance companies and high school guidance counselors to keep you from enjoying the present.”
“You’re going to get old, Peter Pan. What if you get sick? What if—”
He laughs. “I prefer to burn my bridges as I come to them.”
The second we finish our coffee, the waiter is there with a refill. When we decline, he presents the check. It’s 4 A.M. I reach for my wallet.
“I’ve got it,” Mac says easily.
“No.” My voice is too loud in the nearly empty room. “This isn’t a date. We’ll split it down the middle.”
He holds up both hands in surrender. “Okay, give me fifteen bucks.”
We don’t talk much on the way home, and when he pulls up at the curb, he says dryly, “Since this isn’t a date, I won’t walk you to your door. Just blink the light when you get inside.”