Fall Back (5)

The phone rang at ten after nine on Monday morning and she let it ring.

"Joanna, it's Pat. It's nine-ten, and you're not here, and you're never not here, so. Call me. If you're sick you're sick, just call me so I can get somebody to cover the drive-through." A pause, and the sound of the branch behind Pat's voice, the coin counter, a drawer. "Call me, hon."

She lay on the mattress in the linen closet and listened to the machine wind back. Then she got up, because she had already decided in the night that she would get up when the phone rang and do something with the day, whatever she could do in a house with every window covered.

It was cold in the closet. She took her gray sweater off the stack of towels in the hall and pulled it on over her T-shirt. It was an old one of her father's, too big for her, and the sleeves came down past her hands. She stood in the hall in the dark pushing them back, and they slid down again, and she stood there looking at her own fist inside the end of a sleeve that was too long for it.

A cuff. A man's hand on a flashlight, and the cuff of his jacket hanging down over his knuckles.

She stood very still in the hall with her arm out in front of her.

It was at her door. The light over the door was on him, the new bulb, and he was holding a flashlight low, and the sleeve came down past his knuckles. She could see the hand and the cuff and the flashlight, and nothing above them. She tried to lift her eyes in the memory to his face and there was nothing there. The jacket was dark. There was something written on it.

Security. The night man had come after all.

She went down the stairs with one hand on the wall.

The number for the office was on a magnet on the refrigerator, under a coupon for the pizza place. She dialed it standing in the dark kitchen, and a woman answered, the day woman, bright, with a radio playing somewhere near her.

"This is fourteen. The end unit." She held the phone with both hands. "I called Saturday night. Late. About a car in the lot. Did somebody come out?"

"Saturday night." Paper moved. "Hang on. Saturday, Saturday. Okay, I've got a note here from the service, they had a call from fourteen at twelve thirty-eight. Lyle would have taken that." A pause. "Ma'am, did Lyle come by your place?"

Joanna looked at the black bag taped over the window. "I don't know."

"Well, nobody knows. That's the thing." The woman lowered her voice, the way people do with news that isn't theirs. "He never radioed back in. The service called and called. His car's sitting right out there where he left it, keys and all, and he hasn't been home, his mother's been calling here. They figure he just walked off. It happens. It's not much of a job." She stopped. "You're sure he didn't come by?"

"I don't know," Joanna said again, and hung up.

She stood with her hand on the receiver in its cradle.

The car in the lot, at half past twelve, with the engine off. She had called the office, and the night man had walked over, and the night man had come to her door. She had the cuff and the flashlight and the light on them. Then nothing. Then the couch, and the open door, and the marks under her ear. And Lyle had not radioed back in, and his car was sitting where he left it, and his mother was calling.

Graham had been in the lot. Lyle had walked across the lot.

She took her hand off the phone.

She had met Graham in June, at the Kroger on Hurstbourne, in front of the coffee. He had reached past her for a can and said excuse me and then stood there talking to her about coffee for twenty minutes as if it were the most interesting thing anyone had ever brought up. He was tall and he wore his good shirts to the grocery, and he remembered everything she said. That was the first thing she had liked about him. He remembered the name of her sister, and the city in Ohio her sister lived in, and that her sister had two boys, and when he asked about the boys he used their names.

He never stayed past ten. He had an early job, he said. He took his calls outside, on the little phone that folded, out on her step with the door pulled to behind him, and when he came back in he would be smiling, and he would put the phone face down on the counter. One night in July he dropped it on the concrete, and she heard him swear out there, and when he came in he was still rubbing his thumb across the little window. On weekends he couldn't get away. He was helping his brother with a house.

In July he told her where she had eaten lunch on a Tuesday. She hadn't told him. He said it the way you mention the weather, between one thing and another, that he'd liked that place too, the one with the booths, where she'd had the soup. Then he looked at her to see what she would do.

In August she lent him her keys so he could take her car in to have a tire fixed, because he knew a man. He brought the car back with the new tire on and gave her the keys and kissed her at the door. Two weeks after she told him on the phone that she didn't want to see him anymore, she came home from work and the lamp was off and he was sitting on her couch in the dark with his hands on his knees. He had a key. He'd had it made the day of the tire. He told her that himself, as if she would want to know how clever it had been.

He never touched her that night. He never raised his voice. When she turned on the lamp he stood up and said he only wanted to talk, and he left. He left the key on the coffee table, square in the middle, where she would see it.

That was what the patrolman wrote down. A man left a key on a coffee table.

She had thought, standing in the kitchen in August with the hardware man drilling the new hole for the deadbolt, that the key on the table had been the worst of it. That he was showing her he could have kept it and was choosing not to. She knew now it had been a courtesy. He had not needed the key.

The other thing came back to her in the afternoon, without her asking for it.

She was sitting on the bottom stair in the dark with her knees up, and she was thinking about the bank machine on Shelbyville Road, the one set in the wall of her own branch, where she got her cash because it didn't charge her. He knew she used it. He knew everything she used. So every time she went there at night she turned around before she put in her numbers and looked at the lot behind her for his car.

One night a couple of weeks ago she had turned and there had been a man. Not in the lot. Across the road, all four lanes of Shelbyville Road away, under a streetlight that was out. Just standing there in the dark the way nobody stands on Shelbyville Road at night, with no car near him and no bus stop and nothing behind him but a dark storefront.

She had looked at him. He was too short to be Graham. He stood wrong for Graham, too still, and there was no car. She had looked at him and decided that he wasn't anything, and turned back around and covered her numbers from the lot with her shoulder, and got her money, and driven home with her eyes on the mirror the whole way for a pair of headlights she knew.

She sat on the stair and tried to see his face. There was nothing there either.

At dusk she went up and peeled back the corner of the bag on the bedroom window.

The car was back.

It sat in the same space by the entrance, two in from the mouth of the lot, nose in toward the buildings. Toward her. The lamp at the entrance had come on and the permit hung from the mirror on its white hook and turned slowly, the way it turned when the car had just stopped, and caught the light and went blue. She couldn't see who was behind the wheel. There was a shape, and the shape didn't move.

She let the corner of the bag fall.

Downstairs she took the books out of the bookcase in the front room, all of them, and stacked them on the floor in the dark by feel. She walked the empty bookcase across the carpet one corner at a time, the left foot and then the right, until it stood against the front door with its back to the wood and its shelves facing her. Then she put the books back, every one, to make it heavy. Then she took the chair out from under the knob and set it in front of the bookcase and sat down in it, facing the door.

She sat there a long time. She was not tired. Before Saturday, by this hour, her eyes would have been closing.

The furnace came on under the floor. In the quiet after it, through the door and the bookcase and the books, she could hear the lot. She could hear it as if she were standing out in it. A dog two buildings over, on a chain, turning in its dry leaves. The tick of an engine somewhere near the entrance, cooling, a little slower each time.

She sat with her hands in her lap inside the too-long sleeves and counted the ticks until there weren't any more.

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Fall Back (6) | ABCtales