Chapter Three
Jenny
Thursday is the slowest shift of the week. Always has been. Wednesday people are catching their breath from Monday and Tuesday, Friday people are gearing up for the weekend, but Thursday people just want to go home. The food court is half-dead by six.
Tammy is off tonight. Marcus has a school thing — some kind of recital where the kindergartners sing about the alphabet — and she traded shifts with one of the morning girls to be there. So I'm working with Dale, which is its own special punishment.
Dale isn't a bad person. He's just the kind of man who took the assistant manager position at Mr. Burger ten years ago and never recovered from the disappointment.
He spends most of his shift in the back office with the door cracked, smoking the cigarettes he isn't supposed to smoke and listening to a Cornhuskers game on a transistor radio he keeps next to the safe.
Tonight he comes out exactly twice. Once at six to check the register.
Once at seven-thirty to tell me the milkshake machine is making a noise he doesn't like and to leave it off for the rest of the night.
Both times he speaks without quite looking at me.
I'm not sure if it's because I'm twenty-three and female or because I'm Korean and he doesn't know what to do with that. Probably some combination.
The other thing about working with Dale is that I get the food court mostly to myself, which means I see Craig more.
Craig is mall security. He works the second shift, four to midnight, and he spends most of it walking the same route through the mall over and over. The route brings him past the food court at least once an hour. On Thursdays, when Tammy isn't here, he walks it more.
He's a heavy man in his late thirties with a thin, mean mouth and a uniform that doesn't fit him right. He carries his flashlight like it's a weapon. He likes to lean on the counter at Mr. Burger and ask me questions.
Tonight he comes by at six-forty-five.
"Hey, Jenny."
"Hey, Craig."
"Slow night."
"Yeah."
He leans on the counter. His forearms are thick and pink with the cold of the mall corridors. He has a wedding ring on his left hand and a small scar above his right eyebrow.
"You by yourself tonight?"
"Dale's here."
He glances toward the back office. The radio is just barely audible from where we're standing. The Cornhuskers are losing. Dale is, in any meaningful sense, not here.
"Right." Craig smiles. His teeth are very white and very small. "You should come down to the security office sometime. We have a coffee maker in there. It's better than the swill they serve at the food court."
"I don't drink coffee."
"What do you drink?"
"Water."
"You should branch out."
I look at the grill. The prep counter. The ceiling. Every surface in the kitchen except him.
"I'm pretty boring," I say.
"I doubt that."
The way he says it makes the back of my neck go hot.
I want him to leave. I want to tell him to leave.
I do neither of these things. I'm twenty-three and he's a security guard and the food court manager who'd deal with a complaint is currently smoking in his office and pretending the world doesn't exist.
"Anyway." Craig pushes off the counter. "Just thought I'd say hi. Have a good night, Jenny."
"You too."
I watch him walk away. The way his uniform shirt pulls across his back. The slow, swinging stride of a man who knows no one's going to tell him he's taking too long.
I scrape down the prep area again even though it doesn't need it.
The rest of the shift passes. Dale emerges at nine and counts the drawer and tells me to lock up.
He leaves before I do, which he isn't supposed to do, but I don't care.
I prefer it. I do the last of the cleaning alone.
The food court is quiet. The Muzak loops.
The fluorescent lights buzz. I pull the metal grate down across the front of Mr. Burger and the wheels squeal against the track.
I let myself out the back. The cold is sharper tonight. The snow from yesterday has crusted over the lot and crunches under my shoes. My car sits under the working light, the rust on the hood catching the pale glow.
There's something on the hood near the driver's side.
I slow down. At first I think it's debris that blew over from the loading dock — a piece of trash, something the wind carried — but as I get closer I can see that it's been placed. Not dropped. Set.
It's a stone.
I stop a few feet from the car. The stone is small. Maybe an inch and a half across. It's dark, almost black, and even from where I'm standing I can see that it's been polished to a smooth shine. It catches the light from the lot lamp.
I look around the parking lot. The lot is empty. The wind moves a piece of newspaper across the far edge by the dumpsters. Nothing else.
I step closer to the car. I pick up the stone.
It's cold in my fingers. Smoother than it should be. The kind of smooth that takes a long time in moving water to make. When I turn it over, the back is the same as the front, dark and shining and almost perfect. There's no note. No paper. Nothing else on the hood.
I stay in the cold lot with the stone in my palm, and I don't know what to think.
Someone left this for me. Someone who knew which car was mine. Someone who knew I'd come out at this hour. The thought should frighten me. It doesn't, exactly. It sits in my chest, a question I don't have the energy to answer.
I close my hand around the stone and put it in my coat pocket.
I get in the car. The Granada starts, and the stone in my pocket presses against my hip through the fabric.
The drive home is the same drive it always is. Route 6, Maple, the neighborhood, the apartment complex. I sit in my parking spot with the engine off and my hand pressed against the outside of my coat pocket where the stone is. The shape of it is solid through the fabric.
The apartment is quiet when I let myself in. Lisa's door is closed. A lamp is on in the living room. Dee isn't here.
I don't turn on the kitchen light. I cross to my room in the dim wash from the lamp and shut the door behind me.
I take the stone out of my pocket and set it on the nightstand beside the lamp.
I shower, eat next to nothing in the dark, and come back to my room.
The stone is still there on the nightstand. Black and smooth and shining in the dim light from under the door.
I get into bed. I look at the stone until my eyes start to close. I don't know who left it, or why, or whether I should tell someone, or who I'd tell.
I sleep.
In my sleep, I'm aware of something. Not a dream. Not a thought. A presence at the edge of my mind, watching from a great distance. It doesn't feel dangerous. It feels like the soft attention of a person who's been waiting for me to fall asleep so they can finally sit down.
I sleep harder than I have in months.
* * *
Farkas
The stone takes me three hours to find.
I walk the creek bed two miles south of the farmhouse with my eyes on the bottom of the water.
The creek is half-frozen at the edges and slow in the center.
I move through it with my coat pulled close, looking.
The stones I want are dark and smooth and shaped by the water.
There are a thousand of them. I'm particular.
I find the one at the third bend, where the creek runs over a flat shelf of rock and slows.
The stone is the size of a robin's egg, dark gray that goes nearly black when it's wet, smooth on every face.
I pick it up and turn it in my hand. The water runs over my fingers.
I've spent a long time being indifferent to cold. The cold of the creek finds me anyway.
Back at the farmhouse, I polish it. I don't have many things.
One is a soft cloth I've kept for centuries — the kind of thing a man doesn't throw away, because it's been with him so long it has stopped being a possession and become a piece of his own continuity.
At the kitchen table I work the stone with the cloth for an hour.
There's no need. The water has already done the work.
But the motion of my hands on it is its own thing, and I want to give her something I have touched.
She drives a 1976 Ford Granada the color of rust. I know this. I've watched her drive it five nights now. I know the angle she takes coming out of the lot. I know the spot she parks in. I know the way her headlights sweep across the lot when she pulls away.
I drive a van. The London firm acquired it for me along with the farmhouse.
It's a dark, ordinary thing, the kind of vehicle no one looks at twice, with windows that have been blacked out from the inside.
I park it half a mile from the mall in a turn-out by the highway and I walk in across the field.
The lot is empty in the late afternoon. The wind has scoured most of the snow off the asphalt and left it banked in low ridges along the curb.
I cross to her car and stand beside the driver's side.
The hood is dusted with old salt. I take the stone from my pocket and set it carefully on the metal, just behind the windshield wiper, where she'll see it the moment she comes around the front of the car.
I look at the stone on the hood. It's small. It's almost nothing. But it's the first thing I've given to anyone in over a millennium and the weight of that isn't in the stone.
I walk back across the field.
I wait through the rest of the daylight in the back of the van. The sun is no friend to me. It doesn't burn but it weighs. I lie on the floor in the dark of the cargo space and let the hours pass. When the light fades through the windshield, I rise and walk back to the mall on foot.
The lot is busier in the evening. Cars come and go. I wait at the edge of the trees beyond the dumpsters and watch.
At nine forty-five, she walks out the back door.