Don't You Cry(53)

In time, Priddy tells me to get to work. I pass by, moving a foul dishrag in haphazard circles upon the dirty tables, moving closer and closer to where Pearl sits. Red brings her the check, and there, from two tables away, I watch as Pearl roots fruitlessly around in the canvas bag for money to pay the check. When her hand comes up empty, I dip into my wallet and produce a five-dollar bill.

“It’s on me,” I say before she has a chance to say that she can’t cover the fare, laying the money on the countertop and stepping back.

“Oh, no,” she says, “I couldn’t,” but still, her hand leaves the bag without a single bill. It makes me feel warm all over, knowing I’ve helped her in some small, insignificant way. Her face reddens, and she’s ashamed to admit she has no money to her name, nothing save for three quarters she finally digs up at the bottom of that bag. Three measly quarters, seventy-five cents.

I shrug my shoulders. “It’s nothing,” I say.

But it’s not nothing. I’ve done something good.

“You’re a good friend,” she says to me then, her hand grazing the margins of mine. And then, when I say nothing—because I’m too staggered to speak, because I’m stricken with a sudden onset of aphasia and I’ve lost the ability to speak—she goes on. “We’re friends, right?” she asks of me then, and this time, it’s me who blushes. “You and I. We’re friends.”

I’m not sure if this last part is a question or not. Is she asking me, or telling me? Is she telling me that we’re friends?

I nod my head. I say that we are. Or maybe I don’t say it; maybe I only think it. I don’t know. Either way, we’re friends. I feel the need to write it down, to take a picture, to seal the deal with blood—something to prove that this is real. Pearl and I are friends.

And then Priddy ruins it all by calling my name, pointing to a round table that needs to be cleaned. I look away for ten seconds at best, and when I turn back, Pearl is gone, just like that, my five-dollar bill left behind beside the check. On the countertop I find an empty pink packet of Sweet’n Low, assuring me that she was really here. Pearl. She isn’t a dream as all common sense would have me believe. She’s real.

We’re friends, right? You and I. We’re friends.

And then later in the day, when Priddy finally gives me the A-okay to go home, I don’t go home. I stick around outside the café, killing time on a plastic-coated steel bench—hands and ears turning red from the cold, my nose beginning to drip, waiting and hoping for Pearl to return, hoping she’ll pass by en route to an appointment with Dr. Giles, or maybe stop by the café again to see me.

But she doesn’t stop by the café. She doesn’t go to see Dr. Giles.

I’m not ready to go home. And so instead I hover on the bench and watch as the mailman meanders down the road in his unwashed truck, collecting and delivering the mail. He’s in no hurry. It’s late for the mailman to be out, nearly dusk. But this is the time of year that everyone moves more slowly. There’s no rush to get things done. People walk slower, they eat slower, they talk slower. Life becomes just one big waste of time until spring arrives and then suddenly everyone is in a rush.

I watch as a stray calico cat prances down the sidewalk, past an overflowing garbage bin about to spill over with trash. A storeowner plucks dead mums from a ceramic pot outdoors and fills it instead with evergreen picks and plastic holly berries for the holiday season to come. Ms. Hayes, who owns the novelty and greeting card shop, is getting ready for Christmas already when Thanksgiving hasn’t yet come.

As the sky starts to darken and night slowly creeps in, I give up. Pearl isn’t coming, not tonight, anyway. But still, I’m not ready to go home. I don’t want to go home.

And so I rise from the bench instead and plod across the street, gathering Ingrid’s mail from the copper mailbox and into my hands. I knock on the door of the Cape Cod home. “Ingrid,” I call, my voice elevated so that she can hear me through the thick wooden pane. I rap my hand on the door again, for a second and then third time in a row, and call out again, “Ingrid, it’s me. Alex Gallo.”

Inside, through the door, I hear the TV, volume turned loudly so that she can hardly hear a thing. I press the doorbell and listen as the chimes announce my arrival, the fact that I’ve been standing on her front stoop now for a whole four minutes, freezing my hindquarters off. I bobble up and down in place, trying to keep warm. It’s not working. I’m cold. I peer down at the stack of mail in my hand while I wait: the Clipper Magazine, bills, a monthly home decor mag, some misaddressed envelope from the Department of State, not meant for Ingrid but rather a lady named Nancy. Nancy Riese. I groan; the mailman is getting lax these days. Just last week, Pops and I got the Ibsens’ mail, and the week before that, the Sorensons’.

When Ingrid finally does open the door, peering first through the side glass to make sure it’s me, she’s pleased by the sight of the mail in my hands. “You dear,” she says to me, seizing the stack of papers from my hands. She stands before me in a striped azure blue apron, holding a pair of kitchen shears. She’s been making dinner. I smell something warm and delicious and homemade coming from inside the home, where the TV blares, loud and livid, the voice of Emeril Lagasse, that distinct New Orleans timbre and the well-known catchphrases (Bam!) telling us how to cook.