CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER
FIVE
What He Takes
Jensen
I did not entirely understand what I was doing, in those first weeks at Mae's Diner.
I know what I told myself I was doing, which was that I needed somewhere to go on the evenings I left the cemetery, somewhere that was not my house, which had begun to feel, in the second year, less like a monument and more like a tomb I was choosing to live inside.
The diner was warm and lit and uncomplicated. That was all I wanted from it.
That was what I told myself.
The girl with the unpronounceable name was not part of the plan.
I noticed her the first night because she brought me coffee without being asked and because when I looked up and thanked her she smiled at me and looked away almost immediately, without the performance of warmth that I had learned to identify as professional rather than genuine.
She had a genuine smile, the kind that reaches the eyes before the mouth and retreats a half-second before it has fully arrived, as if it belongs to a person who is not entirely sure it is welcome.
I went back the following Tuesday because the diner was warm and the coffee was good.
By the fourth Tuesday I was aware, with a clarity I found unwelcome, that the diner was warm and the coffee was good at a number of establishments between my office and the cemetery, and that I was not choosing any of them. I was choosing this one.
I did not examine this too closely. It's just a pleasant way to spend a Tuesday evening, I told myself. That is all it is.
I asked for her number because I was tired of pretending I was going to the diner only for the coffee.
?
I texted her on a Friday. Practical, brief.
I asked if she was working the weekend shift.
She said she was working Saturday. I said I might come by.
I did not come by Saturday, because something came up with a deal that Marcus had made a mess of, but I thought about it, which was enough to tell me that I had already made a decision even if I had not yet admitted it to myself.
On a Wednesday two weeks later, at eleven at night, I texted and asked if she was awake.
She said yes. I went to her apartment on Carver Street and she buzzed me up without any of the hesitation that would have been reasonable under the circumstances, and when she opened the door she was in a cardigan two sizes too large and her hair was loose and she looked, standing in the warm light of her small apartment, like someone who had been expecting me and was not going to say so.
She had made the studio into something. Yellow curtains at the window, herbs on the sill, a secondhand couch with a knitted throw on the arm, books arranged in a row where a shelf should have been.
It was the apartment of a person who had walked into four walls and decided, with no ceremony and no apparent resentment, to make them mean something.
I knew what I was doing. I want to be honest about that.
What I was, if I am being precise, was a man who had been without the warmth of another person for two years and had found someone gentle and present, and who had decided, with the particular selfishness of someone who has been in pain long enough that self-preservation begins to override other considerations, that he was going to take the warmth being offered without examining what it would cost the person offering it.
This is not a justification. It is the truth, and the truth of it sits in me now with a weight I have earned.
She did not know what she was agreeing to that night.
She was twenty-four years old and new to the city and new to being wanted, and I knew both of these things within the first month of our Tuesday conversations and I made my decisions anyway.
I tell myself that I believed she understood the terms. I know now that is the story a man tells himself when the truth is harder to live with.
The truth is that she was kind to me, and I needed kindness, and I took it without asking what it was costing her to give it.
?
The months that followed had a rhythm that I established and she accommodated.
I came when I wanted to. I left before morning, always, because staying meant something I was not willing to mean.
I did not ask about her life with any seriousness, not because I was not curious, but because genuine curiosity would have required me to care, and caring was a door I was keeping shut.
I did not tell her my last name. The real reason was that my last name in this city connected me to things I did not want her to be connected to.
I never took her anywhere that mattered to me. Restaurants on the far side of the city, places I had never been and had no ties to, places where I was certain I would not run into anyone who knew my face. I told myself this was discretion. It was concealment, and the distinction matters.
She never complained about any of this. She never pushed for more than I offered, never asked the questions whose answers she deserved.
In month five I went to the graves on a Thursday and I stayed for three days, not contacting her.
When I finally texted she replied within a minute.
The speed of it made something in my chest feel complicated in a way I did not investigate.
On the drive to her apartment I thought about Nadia.
I thought about the way she had been able to read me at thirty feet, the way she always knew whether it was going to be a good day or one of the other kind.
I thought about the gesture she had, putting her hand on the back of my neck without saying anything, in the kitchen or at a party or in the middle of an argument, as if to say: I know.
I see you. I am still here. I thought about that gesture with a longing so specific and so undiminished that it surprised me, even then, even after two and a half years.
I was on my way to another woman's apartment.
She is just someone who is around, I told myself. That is all she is.
I believed that, until the night I stopped believing it, which came later and arrived with more damage than I had any right to be surprised by.