They sat there in the booth, the three of them, picking at burgers and nursing ice water in red plastic glasses. Hattie and Vinnie took up one side of the table, their backs to the window, Hattie just helping herself to his French fries like they were her own.
“I always wanted to ask you something,” Hattie said to Louis. “But I don’t want you to get all knotted up over it.”
Louis shifted in his seat.
Vinnie said, “Here we go.”
“Vinnie says you never got married,” she said. “From where I’m sitting, I’d say that’s a damn shame.”
He was a lifelong bachelor, and he knew the kinds of stories that might kick up. There had been women he had loved in his life and, if he was honest with himself, a few men he’d grown awfully fond of, but not in the way folks might raise eyebrows over. There were plenty of things he understood about men and women, though few he’d ever experienced full on. He always thought it would happen unexpected, but here he was, almost seventy.
“I have a hard enough time sharing space with him,” Louis said, nodding to Vinnie. “I think I realized a long time ago that I don’t always make the best company.”
“In other words,” Vinnie said, “he don’t like people.”
At the far end of the parking lot, as a lone woman had set up a tent and was sitting in a big rocker underneath, fiddling with something in her lap. Around the tent was a perimeter of colorful, gaudy blankets hanging from strung lines like laundry, the kind of things you’d see covering windows in the welfare rentals in town: horses rearing up on hind legs, Elvis in profile, three different kinds of Jesus. A breeze was picking up, the blankets rippling on their lines like caught fish.
“I had two wives, the first in Detroit and the second in Tacoma,” Vinnie said.
Hattie straightened up. “I thought you said you was only married once.”
“I said I had two wives. I never said they was both mine.” He gave a belly laugh and elbowed Hattie good-naturedly, but she said nothing. Still, he kept at her and nudged her again, and she finally gave up a laugh of her own, elbowing him right back. The two of them looked over at Louis then, like they were up to something sneaky right there in front of him.
Just then, a little car pulled up to the tent in the parking lot, and Louis watched as a woman got out. She walked right over to a queen-sized blanket with a picture of a buck drinking from a pool that was as blue as a robin’s egg, and grabbed hold of the blanket’s corner, like she was examining a pelt.
“So,” Hattie said, side-eyed to Vinnie. “You gonna bring it up or do I got to?”
“Jesus,” he said. “I was on my way there.” He took a drink of water, the ice bunching against his lips.
“Bring what up?” Louis asked. The possibilities could stretch from here to Canada.
Hattie would not take her eyes from Vinnie, and the old man kept his chin down, looking up at Louis, a dog waiting for permission to move.
Hattie finally spoke up. “He wants to shack up,” she said, helping herself to another French fry. “We both do, I guess.”
Vinnie leaned back in his seat as if Hattie had put out a fire at his feet. Cool relief ran down his face.
“Your place, I’m assuming?” Louis said to her.
Vinnie nodded, putting his hand on Hattie’s leg. “No reflection on you, Lou.”
The woman outside now had three blankets draped over her arms, and the trunk of that little car popped open, a trunk that looked so small it couldn’t hold one of those things, much less three. She folded the blankets up into a bunch and shoved them into that space. Louis could see she was having a hard time, bending down and crawling partway in to move things around.
He reached over and took one of the fries himself. “You still work with Tip over at U-Pick?”
Vinnie blew smoke across the table and tapped a clump of ash into the tray. “Who are you talking to?” he asked. “What’s Tip got to do with this?”
“Now and then,” Hattie said. “He ain’t fired me yet.”
Louis stirred the fry into the pool of ketchup, slowly, less interested in eating it than the movement. “No hard feelings, then,” he said. “Between you and Tip, I mean.”
Hattie rolled her eyes. “My days of romance with that man are but the snows of yesteryear,” she said. “Tip couldn’t care less if I move one man or twenty into my place.”
“That’s not”—Louis looked over at Vinnie, at those eyes of his, half empty and roaming from his own knotted hands to Hattie’s, fingers entwined.
“You can check up on me if you want,” Vinnie said, not looking up from the table. “Send one of your lookouts if it’ll make you feel better.”
“Hattie,” Louis said. “Think you could meet me at the U-Pick tomorrow?
Vinnie said, “Why do you want to go to the U-Pick?”
“I can meet you,” she said, ignorning Vinnie. “I’m there anyway.”
At last the woman outside got into her car and pulled away, stopping at the edge of the lot. She moved her head from side to side, waiting for the half-dozen or so cars to pass by before finally pulling onto the highway, no turn signal to be bothered with.