33
Deangelo is long gone. I nurse the last of my beer, still running backward through time. I’m one of the last remaining in Jimmy’s once again. Everyone’s gone. I take my glass and pour it down. I know I have to leave before I wander down into a real malaise of melancholy. I step out of the booth, give a slight nod to old Saul, and say goodnight to my bar. I’m out the door. The night is cloaked in a deep black coat and a kind rain falls down softly, the drops are so small I can barely see them tap against the sidewalk. I close my eyes and tilt my head back at the moon, the mist of the coming rain hits my face. All the spirits of my life are out here, climbing the embankments. They’ll arrive soon enough. My boots grip the saturated gravel as I turn toward my Saturn. I’m lost in these dreams when I hear wheels turning stone behind me.
A car door closes, and I look back to the sound. Through the calm haze, Rose steps out of a green rusted Jeep, and strides toward the entrance. She reaches for the door, looks to her left, and sees me in all of my wonder. I assume she’ll carry on and go on in, but she doesn’t. Instead, she releases her hold on the door and turns to me, pausing, as if to say, yes?
What a moment. She’s looking across the sidewalk, patient in the gentle rain. Is she really as unphased as she appears? I smile. I’m telling you, in the dark of the night and the falling water, painted with a few shades of neon from the bar signs above, she is the only story I’d follow.
“What?” I say, and she smirks while crossing her arms. I go for it again.
“What?”
And she shrugs.
“When are you gonna get it together?” The ambiguous question cuts me in half. Get it together?
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs again before disappearing into the bar.
And I’m lost on an island, drifting out to space then and there. Dumb and frozen, rain falling on my head. What the fuck was that? The irritation creeps up my spine. She’s reduced me to nothing on the growing wet sidewalk with weeds. I grab at the back of my neck and shake my head till it threatens to fall off my shoulders. Fuck it, that’s it. I can’t let it slide. I move forward, back to the entrance. Get it together? What the hell is that? The way she said it, above me somehow, a judgement. She doesn’t even know me. How on Earth could she feel so superior? I throw the door open and stride in. She’s standing in that familiar spot, propped on the edge of the bar, waiting. She makes no glance my way as I arrive by her side, hands on the bar. Saul is out of earshot. A million things crowd my mind. She meets my eyes.
“What do you want?”
And again, she’s disarmed me somehow. She’s gone straight to the source. What did I want? The simple nature of the question makes me pause.
“I want to take you out.”
She raises her right hand to her mouth, pinky-ringed and graceful, surprised. She actually smiles for a second before she covers it up. She wipes it off and that beautiful, one second window is closed just as fast as it opened. She turns to me and my God it is impossibly green in her eyes.
“Okay,” she says.
Okay. Okay. Has ever one word felt like lightning?