The next afternoon, he is on a bus headed south to St. Louis. Since leaving home, he and Kait have found nothing exciting to do, have made no friends or learned anything useful. The fantasy of traveling did not look like this. In the fantasy, it looked like luxury hotels with hot tubs and decadent feasts and romantic strolls in the countryside and rolling hills with castles looming in the distance. It did not include a rattling bus and morbid gray skies. It did not account for the possibility that tourism could be more limiting than staying at home, or that even after spending nearly three weeks on the road, after visiting famous landmarks, both natural and manmade, one can feel like they’ve still seen nothing worth seeing. Remarkable backdrops don’t lend gravity to one’s life, he thinks, don’t magically transform the meanings of things; they’re just backgrounds. Bad conversations are still bad conversations. Spinach is still spinach. West is west. Moving from place to place doesn’t change that.
How many nights had he and Kait spent together planning, traveler’s handbooks spread out on the coffee table, Kait listing tips on a legal pad while Hunter dog-eared important pages? How many weekends had been dedicated to swapping stories about things that would happen, someday? Together, they invented scenarios in which they met helpful Chilean strangers, spent the nights in their homes eating native food and conversing with the locals, immersing themselves fully in the culture and returning with a thousand pictures and a new appreciation for the depth and breadth of human experience. They imagined six-week trips through Australia, and she laughed at his dumb jokes about boomerangs and kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee. They developed emergency plans in case they encountered a tiger in India or a chupacabra in Mexico. Over countless hours and days of strategizing, they’d visualized themselves as travelers in almost every country they could name, and one night while she lay on the couch with her legs draped over his lap, she said, “I really don’t care where we go, as long as you’re with me.”
“What do you think about North Korea?”
“I hear it’s lovely in the fall,” she said.
“Maybe Siberia after that?”
“If it was good enough for Genghis Khan, it’s good enough for me.”
“South Pole?”
“We could see penguins!” she said. She sat up, leaned in close to whisper like a coconspirator: “Maybe we could steal one and take it home with us.”
“We’d have to buy so much fish then. The house would stink.”
“Maybe we could train it to eat chicken fingers?”
That conversation led to the creation of one of Hunter’s favorite running gags: any time he saw chicken fingers on a restaurant’s menu, he would say something like, “This must be a big penguin hangout.” Even on the hundredth repetition of the joke, she still laughed, sometimes smiled in anticipation of it when she scanned the menu.
Before arriving in St. Louis, he receives a terse e-mail from Jack: “Got a bill from Illinois State Police for hauling your car. Fun time’s over. Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you.” Jack will eventually find him, will obsess over Hunter’s whereabouts until he can track him down, which, briefly, makes Hunter feel like an international spy on the run. He is tempted by the opportunity to cut the trip short, to have an excuse to give up before he even reaches his destination. But—fun time? If that’s what Jack thinks this is, if that’s what Jack thinks Hunter is doing, then there is no reason to even talk to him.
Upon arrival in St. Louis, Hunter hails a cab, tells the driver to take him somewhere fun. If other people think he’s out here goofing off, then he might as well have some actual fun.
They end up at a sports bar called ThrowDowns. He doesn’t like bars, has never enjoyed drinking, and only had the occasional glass of wine for Kait’s sake, because she worried about the implications of having a drink by herself, feared it was step one on the inevitable road to alcoholism, to turning into her father. Most of his nights at bars have consisted of nursing a soda while dodging stumbling coeds and waiting to drive his drunken friends home.
Inside the bar, there are forty-seven TVs lining the walls, half of them tuned to the Golf Channel, which strikes Hunter as the most boring network possible, but he’s not particularly interested in sports. He played baseball growing up, was a pretty good second baseman through eighth grade, thanks in part to the evenings Willow spent with him in the backyard teaching him the nuances of the game. By high school, he’d lost interest and started skipping practices, got kicked off the team for insubordination. He isn’t an antisports zealot, like some of his Chomskyan college professors were, has faked fandom before, has gotten caught up in the local teams’ various playoff runs because it’s almost impossible not to be swept up in the frenzy. He once tried explaining his disinterest in sports to Brutus and Max and Billy and Uncle Bobby when he and Kait were forced to host a Sunday football party. He and Kait had spent the morning scrambling to clean the house while cooking sloppy joes and slicing blocks of cheddar and otherwise devising ways to clog everyone’s arteries, and once her family arrived, all wearing their Sunday uniforms, Brutus hurled a football at Hunter hard enough that Hunter caught it out of self-defense, and Brutus said, “Where the hell’s your jersey at?” Hunter said he didn’t have one and Brutus interrupted: “Don’t worry, we brought a spare,” and tossed a green Philadelphia Eagles jersey toward him. “Gotta wear one. House rules.”
Once the game started, everyone hunkered into their positions and gathered their beer and chips and cheese and focused intently on the TV, conversing only sometimes during commercials, and Hunter sat silently in the corner of his own living room. At halftime, Uncle Bobby invited Hunter into the backyard to have a catch, but Hunter said he wanted to stay inside and work on the fondue, a pronouncement that incited approximately fifteen minutes worth of limp-wristed mincing and gay jokes, the only remedies to which would have been Hunter chugging a beer or punching somebody.
Focused on melting gruyere and swiss over low heat, he missed the first five minutes of the second half. When he returned to the living room, Brutus’s girlfriend occupied his seat. Because the Eagles had started playing well while he was absent, he learned that he was banned from the living room. “House rules,” Billy said, apparently unaware of whose house he was in. Kait shrugged, said, “He’s right,” and so Hunter retreated to the kitchen, where he listened to their violent reactions to the game, tried to determine whether he even wanted to be invited back into the room.
After the game, Brutus cornered him in the kitchen and said, “You’re not real big on football, huh?” and Hunter explained that Jack had never cared about football; Sundays growing up meant yard work and gutter cleaning and other chores that kept him from ever watching or investing in the games, and he came from a place that had no major pro or college football teams so he’d never formed an allegiance to anyone. Brutus shoved the football into Hunter’s gut, knocking the wind out of him, and said, “You better learn to love football if you’re going to be one of us.”
That night, lying in bed next to Kait, he said, “Hopefully they won’t make us do that again.”
Her back turned to him, she said, “You know, sometimes I wish you could be more of a man.”
“Oh, I’m all man, baby,” he said, curling up against her from behind, cupping a hand over her breast.
“I mean, I know you’re different. It’s just, maybe it wouldn’t kill you to meet them halfway now and then.”
HE STEPS TO THE bar and orders two glasses of Chardonnay, sets one in front of Kait and takes a photo of the cube and the glass. Caption: She’s a cheap date! Receives near-immediate feedback, more thumbs being upped, others saying, “Wish I was on vacation! LOL!” The people who write LOL most often are the ones least aware of what a joke actually is, who seem to think the acronym qualifies as punctuation, but at least it’s positive feedback, as opposed to the growing number of folks who feel compelled to respond to his digital postcards with pitying comments such as “Please feel better. We all love you!” or, lately, with actual outrage, as in this just-posted comment from Billy Dixon: “This ain’t funny, bro. A real man wud come home and deal with his problems!” He places the phone facedown on the bar, takes a sip of his chardonnay; it tastes like well-water two days old. He pushes it away, summons the bartender. Says, “Give me the manliest drink you’ve got,” and so the bartender offers him a double Old Granddad, neat. Hunter drank straight liquor once, in college, tequila from a plastic gallon bottle, passing it around a crowded dorm room. The tequila was warm and nobody seemed to like it, so they all stared grimly down the barrel of the bottle, imbibing so that they could, at some point later in the night, feel drunk, because that’s what they were supposed to do in college, get drunk and accumulate hundreds of nearly identical anecdotes of drunken escapades to share with one another when they became responsible adults. Hunter had joined the chase, and pretended not to be disgusted by the taste, barely suppressed his gagging, didn’t tell anyone he was worried about drinking something that burned so much inside his chest, and at some point he probably did feel drunk, and probably danced and laughed and shouted with everyone else, but all he remembers is the aftermath, when he awoke facedown in his own vomit, bits of tequila-glazed chicken fingers encircling his mouth, and he felt sure that he had died overnight. In fact, he soon began wishing he’d died overnight, because then he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day on the floor of a communal bathroom, vomiting and experiencing muscle pains in his shoulders and back and generally feeling like he’d been thrown from an airplane without a chute. He’d been smoking pot since he was fifteen, soon after discovering classic rock and Jim Morrison’s poetry, and preferred everything about being high to being drunk, which was all around more painful and aggressive and sloppy and didn’t even offer the possibility of profound thought or self-discovery. By the time he’d met Kait, he felt like he’d exhausted the possibilities of expanding his mind via marijuana, although they had smoked a few joints together over the years, usually at the end of particularly stressful work weeks when nothing else could help her relax. His college friends thought his first hangover was hysterically funny; there is no less empathetic audience in the world than a group of teenage boys. They told him he just had to get used to it, and the next time he’d feel better. Two nights later, they passed him a new bottle of tequila and he retched at the sight of it, pushed it away, tucked himself under the comforter on his bunk bed while they all talked about getting wasted and how awesome it would be to be wasted when they finally did get wasted and how wasted they’d been on previous nights in comparison to their current levels of wastedness, and eventually they were wasted, at which point he slipped out of the room and spent the remainder of the night watching TV in a student lounge, passing time until he could hear tomorrow’s stories about the new frontiers of wastedness his friends had explored.
He swirls his Old Granddad, occasionally lifting it to his lips and pretending to sip, splashing it back down when the odor becomes too aggressive.
The place is fairly crowded for a Thursday evening; the patrons are wearing business clothes and they’re charging through the doors as if the only thing that helped them survive the day was the knowledge that eventually they could drink alcohol. Many of them enter solo. They all stare beyond the bar, at the TVs, or into the mirror behind the liquor, watching themselves drink, pressing their glasses to their lips forcefully, and they sometimes check their watches or tap messages into their phones. They swallow hard and their glasses are refilled and they slide more money forward without speaking a word.
There is a band called the Hungry Hippos setting up in the corner. This is the kind of inoffensive live band Kait liked to see. She would clap and ask him if he wanted to dance, and he would try to hide his anxiety about dancing in public by ironically doing hokey dance moves like the robot or Vanilla Ice’s high-stepping.
Six months ago, Kait brought him to a bar for what was originally supposed to have been a ladies’ night with some of her college friends. She needed him to go because she couldn’t stand half her friends anymore, and she didn’t want to waste a perfectly good Saturday not seeing him, even though he was the one husband among a group of single ladies. Kait told her friends he had come along to be the designated driver. The girls got drunk and danced on stage while the band played Bon Jovi covers and people spilled beer on Hunter, and Hunter shuffled on the dance floor and tried his best to look like he belonged there. Kait spent the first half of the drive home recapping the night. She said, “That band wasn’t bad, right? They were pretty good even.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
“What, you don’t think they were good?” she said. “They were good. Just admit they were good.” In the backseat, her friend Abby agreed and said the band was really, really good. Like, really good.
“I guess they were fine,” he said. “It’s just—every time I see one of these bands, I keep thinking about what they really wanted to do. Like, how did they end up here instead of playing in big arenas and going on tour? And are they okay with it now, or do they still wish they could be doing something better?”
“That’s really deep,” Abby said.
“No it’s not—he’s just being miserable again,” Kait said. “They’re getting paid to do what they love to do. What’s wrong with that?”
“Do you think their wives and girlfriends like it? Late nights, constant practice, always acting like their big break is on the way.”
“Well, at least they’re trying,” Kait said. She stopped talking then, rode in silence for the remainder of the ride.
A TRIO OF GIRLS bustles toward the bar, crushing into him, barely aware of his presence. They’re wearing identical pink T-shirts that say BACHELORETTE across the chest, and bad bitches bar crawl on the back. Each girl is adorned with a variety of penis-shaped accessories: earrings, flashing necklaces, bracelets, hats. They’re drinking from penis-shaped straws, and every time one takes a sip, they make a sultry face, and the others take a picture. By the end of the night, there will be in existence, and surely uploaded to the Internet, hundreds of photos of these girls with plastic penises in their mouths. They stumble and slur and smell like they’ve all bathed in strawberry daiquiris. One of the girls sits in Kait’s seat and shouts for the bartender’s attention.
“I was saving that,” Hunter says, and the girl ignores him. “Hey, seat’s saved,” he repeats.
She says, “I’ll just be a minute, okay.”
“No, that’s not okay,” he says, “It’s not okay at all. I’m saving that seat for my wife.”
“We’ve been here a half hour,” she says, waving the penis straw in his face like a dagger, “and this seat’s been empty the whole time.” The bartender arrives, and the girl orders another round of something called Watermelon Throwdowns, which glow like isotopes and arrive in glasses roughly the diameter of salad plates.
“You don’t believe I’m married?” he says, displaying his wedding ring. The other girls slurp on their drinks, strike sultry poses, cackle.
“Why should I care?”
He shoves Kait’s cube toward the girl. Tells her his wife is in there, because she’s dead and he’s carrying her across the country to give her a proper goodbye and maybe spread her ashes in the Pacific Ocean. The line about the ocean, he didn’t expect to say that, but it sounds good enough. It seems like the sort of thing one is supposed to do. The girl eyes the urn, checks his face to see if he’s serious, and then she says, “Oh. My. God. That is the cutest thing ever!” Grabbing his arm, she pulls him off the stool and leads him into the thicket of the Bad Bitches Bar Crawl.
None of the self-proclaimed Bad Bitches is married. They’re all a year past college, mostly in long-term relationships, and mostly enamored with the idea of having a wedding, and they’re all deeply, openly resentful of the bride-to-be, a girl named Jessa, who laughs every time someone in her group calls her a slut, and who will probably eventually realize that they mean it to be hurtful, but they know they can get away with saying anything to her while she’s this drunk. The first thing Jessa says to Hunter, leaning in close and whispering, is, “Everyone thinks I’m drunk just because I fell off the bar stool.” She holds on to his arm to stabilize herself. Her cheeks are puffy, nose red, hair disheveled and mascara streaked, but still she looks like she is probably pretty when she’s not pumped full of enough toxins to require hospitalization. The rest of the girls keep feeding her drinks, and Hunter takes a few sips of her Watermelon Throwdown, ostensibly to protect her, at which point he learns that WTs are delicious. Kait did not drink what she called girly drinks, said daiquiris and piña coladas were nothing but sugar, too many calories, so Hunter has never tasted anything like this, did not realize alcohol could taste so much like not-alcohol, that something so sweet and fruity could even be in the same genus as beer. Within an hour of meeting the bachelorettes he has consumed three cocktails, and he finds himself following the girls to another bar, which they say has even better drinks than ThrowDowns does. They all think it’s very sweet that he still loves his wife even after she’s dead. “It’s like something from a movie,” according to the girl who stole Kait’s seat. Her name is almost certainly Lindsay. It’s possible they’re all named Lindsay.
“I hope when I’m dead, my husband carries me around forever,” another Lindsay says. “And if he doesn’t, I’ll haunt his ass.” They have all been raised on Hollywood romantic comedies and seem to think the ideal representation of love is something like obsession or stalking. They think love means sex, still, and they are much more interested in weddings than they are in marriage, much more interested in naming babies than in raising them. They embrace every aspect of the mass commoditization of marriage, even the fact that the wedding day has now grown, through one-upmanship and clever marketing, from a single evening event to a full weekend affair. They want destination weddings and expensive brunches and white horses and the most expensive flowers in the world. They are only six years younger than he is, but they make him feel ancient. He surely had primitive views on love and sex when he was in college too, but he cannot remember himself then, and every effort he makes to do so feels like trying to access the memory of a stranger.
Another round of drinks. These places are all too loud for holding conversations, too loud sometimes for Hunter to hear himself speak, but the girls laugh at everything he says anyway. Probably they would be doing this for any guy who chose to follow them around for the night, but he has always wanted to be the Funny Guy in a group of people, often envisioned himself at the center of a circle spouting witticisms and eliciting rounds of head-tossing laughter, and for the first time in his life he thinks he gets the appeal of this lifestyle. The drinks keep coming. Hunter poses for his own set of penis-straw pictures. They’ll end up online, captioned Some guy we met . . . So random! He takes pictures too, of the girls holding Kait, Jessa’s lips firmly pressed against the cube. Uploads them. More drinks. The girls embark on a bachelorette scavenger hunt, which is how Hunter finds himself crafting a veil out of toilet paper, and also how he becomes the official Bad Bitches liaison to the other men, because the hunt entails the collection of items like condoms, men’s business cards, and a man’s boxers, in addition to the performance of a specific set of actions by Jessa. He recruits men to sample liquor off her neck, to remove her bra without removing her shirt, carry her on their shoulders while she shouts “I’m Getting Married!” The drinking continues. The scavenger hunt checklist tells Jessa to gives Hunter a lap dance. She sits him in a chair in the corner of the room beneath a strobe light. Her movements jerky and only semihuman. Grinding against his crotch as if she wants to hurt him. Hunter gripping her hips to keep her from falling off. Placing a shot glass between his legs and picking it up with her mouth. Then they’re outside, strangled by still summer air. A dozen pairs of stylish heels clacking on the sidewalk. Charging toward another bar. More drinks. Hunter paying. The girls toasting him and Kait. Feeling like a mascot, entertaining but disposable. Onslaught of dumb questions about his dead wife. Do you miss her? Do you think about her a lot? Are you still sad? Was the funeral hard? Was she pretty?—the question they all repeat. He shows them her Facebook page and the girls are relieved to see that she was, in fact, pretty. So many Lindsays rubbing his back, telling him how pretty she was. Michael Jackson music, rhythm familiar like a heartbeat, the girls shrieking and rushing to the dance floor, Hunter drunk enough to join them. The girls encircling him beneath flashing lights, the floor disappears and reappears at random. Group hugs and group photos. Jessa falling twice. Hunter’s ill-advised Jesus joke when she falls a third time, the looks of drunken disgust from the good Catholic girls. Ordering a pitcher of water. A round of energy drinks spiked with alcohol, the taste of purple. The room rocking, floor lifting up and then gently floating back down like a ship in temperate seas. Memories of the African cruise he and Kait never took. Constriction in his chest, a nearly immobilizing fullness. The girls are chewing gum, mouths flapping open so he can see all the way down their throats, down past their souls and into their overfull stomachs. He tells Jessa if he looks hard enough he can see into her soul. No response, no movement, eyelids sagging. It is entirely possible that she is already dead. Hunter’s touch, cursed. But then the James Brown songs, the speakers oozing sex and the voice demanding that they get up offa their things, Jessa resurrected by the funk, dragging him back to the dance floor, her ass against his groin, sweat against his sweat, her teeth scraping across his skin, telling her, “I want to kiss you on the mouth.” Telling her, “I bet you look better naked than I look naked.” Following her, or leading her, into the men’s room. Pressed against the stall door, fumbling with Jessa’s skirt. The air in the room sticky. Her pulling away. Him standing behind her as she vomits, she still grasping at his crotch as if reaching for a lever. Kissing her again, the taste like rotten apples, her tongue, rough. Hands crawling over him like spiders. Eyes closed, the room stands still. The sound of his belt unbuckling. Bouncers arriving. Disappearing into an alleyway.
IN THE MORNING, HE’S by himself in a hotel room, and the ashes are gone.
He will spend the remainder of his life canvassing the country in search of his wife’s remains. A mission of penance, of vengeance. He’ll be a drifter, just another nameless creep lurking on the edges of towns, insisting that someone has stolen his wife from him. A phantom, driven by a singular, maniacal focus on retrieving the ashes, harboring dreams of someday hunting down the person who stole them. Like something from a campfire horror story—The Forlorn Widower.
The pen at his bedside tells him he’s at the Days Inn in East St. Louis, but he has no idea what that means, or where he could be in relation to anything else in the world. Still half-drunk, his stomach upside-down, his vision backward, he tries to re-create the events of the previous evening, remembers noise and flashing lights and penis hats and Jessa. Sees no evidence of her in the room, assumes she left him here and then stumbled home to her fiancé to make a tearful confession of infidelity. The fiancée may be on the hunt for him now, seeking his own vengeance. If it comes to that, Hunter will not run.
The exhaustion of weeks on the road catching up with him; his joints ache and he feels a listlessness like he’s oxygen-deprived.
Somehow his duffel bag made it here with him. He tears it open and dumps the contents on the floor, finds only soiled clothes. He remembers bringing the ashes to ThrowDowns and is pretty sure he left there with Kait, but maybe not? Maybe he dropped her when he ran off with Jessa. Maybe he forgot about her the moment another woman called him cute.
His knees ache from dancing, head throbbing and swollen, mouth dry like British humor. Somewhere in St. Louis, someone else is holding on to Kait. He flips the mattress, just in case, searches the drawers and finds only the Bible. Kait’s mother was right not to trust him. Her brothers might actually murder him now, and who could blame them? He killed their sister then tossed the ashes aside for a drunken one-night stand. Kait insisted they were only hard on him because they were protecting her, and although that seemed a convenient excuse, he doubted it was true. A pair of chirping birds on the windowsill mocks him. The room smells like the inside of an old refrigerator, feels sealed shut. Jack would tell him this is why he shouldn’t have left home in the first place, this is what happens when you never take responsibility. Willow would defend him, and Jack would rattle the ice in his rocks glass, shake his head, say he has work to do, and lock himself in his office until midnight, thundering away at his keyboard, rhythm steady as a freight train. Underneath the bed, Hunter’s phone is buzzing and flashing, demanding attention. He has twenty e-mails to check, a dozen text messages, several missed phone calls. Out of the twenty, only a few will end up being worth checking. Ninety percent of all incoming communication is useless, but that doesn’t stop it from coming. Kait enjoyed opening the mailbox at home even though it was almost exclusively junk mail and bills; she said you never know when you might find a surprise in there, and so every couple months Hunter mailed her a letter to remind her that he loved her and that she was beautiful and smart and better than him. The missed calls are from Sherry, who has left him three increasingly hysterical voice mails, the first of which says: “I been talking to the news stations. One of them wants to do a story on how you took Kait from us. See how funny you think it is when the whole city sees what a scumbag you are.” The text messages are unintelligible, garbled messes sent by Jessa between four and five a.m. It’s possible she’s in some kind of trouble, but, taking inventory of his feelings, Hunter finds that he actually doesn’t care at all what happens to her. If not for her and the Bad Bitches, he wouldn’t have lost his wife. Her fiancée should kick her out of the house, cancel the wedding before he gets in too deep and she breaks his heart. Kait never cheated on Hunter, there is no doubt; if she ever had, she would have been so consumed by guilt that she would have told him immediately. He slipped once when they were dating, got high with hometown friends and found his high school crush sitting on his lap, his hand lifting up her shirt and kneading her bare breasts; their sloppy make-out ended abruptly when he felt his phone buzz in his pocket and knew it was Kait, took it as a sign from the universe, slid out from beneath the woman and then left the party without telling anyone. Later, he told Kait he didn’t know how it had happened and didn’t know how to stop it, but the truth is, he knew exactly how it had happened because as soon as he’d seen the crush he’d remembered how much he’d lusted after her, and found the ounce of pot to be the perfect excuse to fulfill a teenage fantasy. Did last night count as cheating on Kait? Did he actually stoop to using his dead wife as a pickup line? For all his condescension to Jessa’s attitudes toward love and marriage, wasn’t his own view just as simplistic and unsophisticated? In so many ways, his life has been a fantasy too; it’s all just a matter of degree. His e-mail delivers him comments on the latest additions to his photo album—photos whose existence he’d forgotten but which now offer the hope of solving the mystery of the missing wife. When he told Kait about the incident with the high school crush, Kait did not cry or shout. She said she appreciated his honesty, and said, “It’s okay this time, as long as it never, ever happens again.” Her forgiveness actually made him feel more guilty because he knew he deserved to be yelled at, to be banished to the couch for a week, to be periodically reminded that he was the one who had cheated and she wasn’t. He took five photos last night. In the first one, Lindsay is on her knees in front of Hunter, grasping his unbuckled belt, a faux-naughty expression on her face, the other girls laughing. Kait is on the table beside them. In another, he and Kait are onstage, performing karaoke. According to the caption, the song is “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green. Photo number three shows them all posing with a homeless man, smiling gap-toothed as he grabs on to Jessa’s hip with one hand and holds the ashes in another. Caption: Making new friends. Photo number four shows the group inside another bar, a pair of phosphorescent drinks resting on top of Kait midtable. She used to desert him at parties, have a few drinks and wander off—he called her the Mingler, a comic book character with the superpower of making small talk with any stranger. Hunter told her he’d rather do big talk, if only people would engage him, but she wanted to know how people were supposed to engage with him if he sat scowling in the corner with arms crossed. Where had she gone last night? Had someone stolen her? Only Hunter, Jessa, and one Lindsay remained in the last picture. They were slumped against the bar, eyes bloodshot and skin greenish in the light. After the Christmas party at her boss’s house, Kait said, “I wish you were a real artist so I could at least call you eccentric.” The name of the bar is visible on the glass Jessa is holding. He looks up their phone number, calls them, but no one answers. It is only eight a.m. He takes a cab there and waits, leaning with his back against the door.
The manager arrives at ten. A middle-aged woman, red hair pulled up in a ponytail, skin freckled and pale, a large coffee suggesting she worked late last night. Hunter intercepts her before she enters and tries to tell her the story. At first, she seems afraid, but then she takes his hand and tells him to stop crying, everything is okay. He didn’t even realize he was crying, but now he feels the heat in his cheeks, the streams of tears that have rolled down the creases beside his mouth and dripped onto his shirt. She sits him down and hands him a glass of water, offers a shot of whiskey on the house. The thought of more alcohol makes him want to die a violent death. He finishes the water before saying anything. The manager busies herself rearranging glasses behind the bar.
He begins telling the story, and the manager cuts him off. Plops the Lost and Found box in front of him. Kait is in there, alongside a mixture of cardigans and umbrellas and earrings. The cube is undamaged, mostly. A few more nicks and scratches. The manager says it was found on the floor of the bathroom. The staff spent the night searching obituaries online; they were going to call home the next day, return her to her family.
He lifts Kait and cradles her against his body. Climbs over the bar and hugs the manager, who holds on to him longer than could be reasonably expected from a stranger. She inhales deeply. “My husband died last year,” she says, and he feels a sudden perverse attraction to her, a surge through his poisoned blood telling him fate has arranged this moment and these two ought to be together. He pulls away, says he has to go right now, and exits before she can call him back, before he does something regrettable. He does not have enough breath to apologize to Kait in the way she deserves. But he tries, for the next two days, hiding in a hotel room and never looking away from her.