Summer Fridays

Chapter 1

When her eyes catch on the little clock on the far wall beyond her desk, she realizes it’s already ten past noon.

She gets a sudden urge: she wants to take her bag lunch outside and eat it in the park. This seems wrong, to a certain extent—but then, everything seems wrong lately. Every time she scans the newspaper headlines or opens her email, she reads of another event canceled. It seems that no one feels right doing anything but staying home and feeling not right.

She glances at the clock again, and makes up her mind. She wants to be reminded of things that are simple: Trees. Sky. Birds. Squirrels. Bench. The way the park path bends around a big brownish-gray boulder. Things that haven’t changed, in a time when it feels like everything will never be the same.

From her office, it is a short walk to the southwest corner of Central Park. There are fewer people out than there would normally be in mid-September. No drummer guy merrily tapping away on his plastic buckets, no flower guy with the blue roses, ink stains on his fingers. But there are still a couple of snack vendors hunched over the stainless steel carts that are their livelihood, looking guilty for selling hot dogs. A handful of people dressed in office attire, clutching giant pretzels and cans of diet soda. Even a few joggers intent on a return to normalcy.

She walks a little bit of the way into the park—just to the bend in the path she was longing to see—and finds a bench in the shade.

People pass by. A middle-aged woman pushing a stroller. A man walking a golden retriever with reddish-tinged fur. An off-duty doorman smoking a cigarette, sweating under his heavy uniform.

After a while, two girls come along and settle into the opposite end of the bench, a polite distance away from her. She takes out a book and pretends to read it, between bites of her lunch. Potato salad that she made herself—extra dill. She eats the salad out of a Tupperware bowl with a plastic spork from the office kitchen.

She listens to the girls talk. They are young. She is young, too—probably only a few years older than them—but somehow they are youthful in a way that makes her feel already slightly invisible.

So, just like that, he’s back in touch?one of them asks the other.

Yes, the first girl replies. He wrote a long email. I got it that night. It was really sincere, actually.

He said the attacks made him think of you?

Well, yeah, I mean—in a roundabout way. He said it just put things in perspective. Made him think about what’s important.

Ah. So: you, the friend says in an approving voice.

I guess so, the girl replies.

Will you get back together?

I don’t know, the girl says. We might.

Hmm, the friend says.

After a pause, the girl adds, The thing is…I was thinking of him, too, when it happened. I know his office isn’t downtown and there shouldn’t be any reason he would have been in the area, but I still just…found myself thinking of him. Wanting to know he was OK. And wanting to talk to him again, I guess.

I guess it says something if you were both thinking of each other, the friend says.

Yeah, the girl agrees. We’ll see. I’m meeting him tonight for a drink.

The friend giggles.

The girl doesn’t laugh. She gives a furtive, self-conscious glance across the bench. I kinda feel like a jerk, talking about my love life right now, she confesses to her friend. You know…with everything else going on in the city…in the world.

Nah. What the hell else are we going to talk about?her friend points out. The rest is too depressing.

? ? ?

Eventually, the girls get up and walk on, leaving her alone on the bench again. The potato salad is all gone and she isn’t pretending to read a book anymore. A glance at her watch tells her she ought to be heading back to her office.

On her walk back, she gets to thinking. She’s overheard the same thing a few times now—it’s in the air. People getting back in touch with old friends, old acquaintances, and old flames. Are you OK? they ask each other. I was thinking of you. I hope you’re OK. I wanted to hear your voice.

At her desk, she replies to a few work emails, forwarding an early review of a novel to the book’s author and cc’ing her boss, then responding to the marketing department, mostly to agree with the marketing director about which bits from the review make for the best pull quotes.

Then she sits for a moment, staring vacantly into the even, bluish-white glow of the computer screen, lost in thought again.

After a moment, she clicks on Internet Explorer and brings up the web portal for her personal email. She logs in, and clicks on the envelope icon to start a new email message. She doesn’t type in the address, not yet. She clicks on the body of the email. Start there, she thinks.

The blank message glows brilliantly white and empty, its cursor blinking like a character tapping their foot in a cartoon.

She stares for a long time. Minutes pass. She isn’t sure how many. The message remains empty. The cursor blinks in place, having never moved.

Finally, she closes the blank message, then the browser window altogether.