She was relieved when Colleen asked Keith to start her on paperwork. A chance to sit down at a desk, drink a soda. The office was just past the last bar stool—the bar stool where she’d sat waiting for Denny. Denny. Denny looked like a bartender, JJ thought now, as Keith pulled forms from a file cabinet and told her some helpful hints—Denny looked exactly how she’d always imagined a bartender to be, with deep-set eyes and the kind of dark hair gray could slip into with some degree of character. That’s how her mother would put it, JJ realized, some degree of character. She stared at the forms and tapped out a sonata on her thigh. It was hard to concentrate. The office was small and hot and the desk was strewn with papers and overfull ashtrays. On the wall, hanging straight in front of JJ, was a calendar open to a topless woman drinking a bottle of beer. The woman’s nipples were like huge pink eyes.
“Always use the long spoons for iced tea,” Keith was saying.
JJ filled in form after form, feeling more permanent with every line. It occurred to her that she didn’t need to write anything down she didn’t want to. She could leave stuff out. It wasn’t as though the Almost Home Bar and Grill in Denver was going to dig up info on the Cincinnati dog-wash job she’d quit after one week. Or the record-store job, which had required a lot more knowledge than you’d think. Or the nanny job—the nanny job, that too, gone. Easy. Clean slate. JJ pressed the ink into words and numbers. The paper was fresh and smooth with slight waves—you could almost see it coming out of the factory machine, being sliced off.
By the time JJ was down to college work-study and a fictitious stint at an inner-city library, Colleen reappeared and sent her into the kitchen to check on an order of garlic bread.
Lena was there, yelling at the cooks, “Where are my fucking orders? Is every single one of you on crack?” They didn’t even look up, just continued burger-flipping and pouring oil and pulling things out of a see-through refrigerator. Their aprons were dirty, their faces wet. A tinny polka from a radio rose and fell beneath the crackle of the grill and the churn of washing dishes. It made JJ want to dance, almost. “It’s my ass on the line out there,” Lena spat. “My culó.” She grabbed a few plates of food from a silver counter full of them and was off. Roll of eye, swish of hair.
JJ stared at the counter. Its surface was hot, lit by yellow lights, and it was scattered with stray french fries and onion rings and wilted bits of lettuce.
“Hey,” one of the guys called. He waved a spatula. “¿Como estas?”
“Je parle français,” she said, in a daze, though she didn’t, not since high school. Then came to. “Garlic bread? Colleen’s?”
He pointed to a plate straight in front of her. Melted butter, slivers of basil. Her stomach gave a pull.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You like?” he asked, almost shyly.
“Garlic bread? Sure.”
He waved her off. “Half hour,” he said. “Just for you.”
“Oh no, but you’re busy, and besides, this is my first day—”
“Yeah, yeah. Just don’t show the—” and he said something in Spanish that didn’t sound very nice, and they both laughed.
JJ hurried off with the plate. She concentrated on the hot not hurting, pretended she was one of those people who walked on lit coals. She tried to remember if she’d fed Norman before she left for work. A guy she’d known in college had given Norman to her. Thank you so much, she’d said and wet her lips in case the guy was about to kiss her. They were alone in his room. She had liked him for a whole semester and thought, Isn’t that how it goes, that he would decide to like me back right before I leave? But he didn’t like her, as it turned out—not like that—and the frog hadn’t been meant as a gift either. He’d gotten it as a gift and didn’t want it anymore.
Right now, Norman’s plastic cube was sitting on her dresser, the only piece of furniture that had come with her boardinghouse room other than the bed. Every morning, she dropped a pellet of food through a tiny hole at the top of the cube. For a while she was giving him two, since it was clearly the highlight of his day—the only time he swam up from the bottom—but the instruction booklet said just one, was very clear about the matter. It also said not to worry about having only one frog per cube. It said, These frogs do not get lonely.
College guys, JJ thought. And just college. If only she could delete that too. Changing majors, all that indecision. And before, even—no, especially before. Everything leading up. Years of piano lessons and music camp and music theory. Certainly that one day, at the end of her junior year, when a professor finally bothered to take her aside and tell her that—oh by the way—she didn’t have the tiniest chance at a future as a concert pianist.
(Not even in the smaller halls? JJ had asked. Not even with some extra work? You try real hard, the professor had said, touching JJ’s arm, leaving a few fingertip dots of chalk dust on her sweater.)
The garlic bread was up and JJ slipped away and ate it in the bathroom. She hid in a stall. Wet toilet paper all over, that sweet dead-flower smell. She sat fully clothed on the closed toilet seat, the plate on her knees. The bread was warm and oily. The best garlic bread she’d ever had. She imagined that any second someone, Lena probably, would slam open the flimsy stall and let her have it. How dare you. Or worse, laughter: You pig. JJ ate faster, licking the grease off her fingers. And then, still a little high maybe, she imagined Marna walking in, the one who’d disappeared. With her own garlic bread. Surprised at first. JJ had only caught a glimpse of her before—mass of wavy hair, rumpled shirt—so she filled in the blanks. She gave her dark eyes and a beauty mark. A long delicate nose. Maybe a piercing or a small tattoo. A daisy just below her collarbone. No, not a daisy, something more original—a daffodil or snapdragon. Suddenly, she seemed so clear.
4.
If Colleen believed in ghosts, it was only from the corners of her eyes. More and more lately, usually here and usually on game days, when people were packed in so close the air was wet and you could smell much more than you wanted to, she saw him. Just for a second. Not long enough to actually prove anything and always when she was focused on something else—her tickets or her tray or taking an order. But it was him. Unmistakable him. He’d be squashed in at a corner table, too close to the big screen, his hair leeched back in strips over the thinning spots. Both hands on a beer. Even crazier: she sometimes saw herself. And Lily too. It was like a home movie. Lily, a little girl again, scribbling on the back of a paper kids’ menu. Her crayon making loops.
Rick had died two years ago, hit by a car. At first it didn’t seem possible, and then it didn’t seem real. A bad joke. He was crossing the street on his lunch break, paying too much attention to the sandwich he was unwrapping. He stepped right into the line of traffic.
He was there and then he was gone.
It happened the week Lily turned twelve. That afternoon, in fact, when the news had come, Lily’d been planning her party theme, the Garden of Eden, and was on the kitchen floor making flowers out of colored Kleenex. Colleen was in the back yard painting at her easel—or trying to paint. There were two versions in Colleen’s memory. In one, the colors weren’t right, too thick and bright, and she kept mashing them brown. In the other, though, the picture was working. She captured the back yard not as it was but as it would be when the landscaping was finished. She was filling in the shrubs, giving just enough suggestion of cloud and bird and light.
