drawer closed as if Meredith’s finger is inside.
Then, for some reason, most likely because Kate Ulrich is embellishing, revising even as she reimagines it, the parking lot goes dark. Days are shorter now, Kate thinks. Winter closing in. The girls’ summery arms and sunshine feet growing paler. Soon everyone in line will rush off to day-care pickup, soccer practice, dinner, or dates. Kate knows many of them, knows they weren’t really gathered here on this day, at this early-evening hour, but it seems right somehow. Meredith’s father, who owns a horse ranch west of town and a real estate agency that Kate will later work for, waves at Meredith from the front. He holds up the sandra’s shirt she left behind on the kitchen table at home. Beside him, Rosa Heller, a newspaper reporter, hunches her shoulders to hide her six-foot height. Nearby, twirling her hair with her fingers, Margo Farbrother, who has discovered — against all odds — a child hidden in the folds of her fibroid-filled uterus. Jack Dewey, a firefighter who lives in Kate’s neighborhood, whose daughter, Sam, has gone missing. Jack will soon be tethered to Kate by an invisible cord and anchored to this very spot.
There is a young man in line Kate doesn’t know. Smooth-shaven, his face pale and round, hands jammed in the pockets of an elegant gray wool overcoat. Something vintage. Later, he’ll be described as secretive and nervous, but this won’t be right. The young man insists that others go ahead of him, says that he’s undecided. The wool overcoat is too big in the shoulders, oversize in the cuffs, so the young man seems smaller than he is. Maybe even younger than he is. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have an age. His skin is creaseless but you can see the adult in his eyes. Who’s in there? Kate wonders. I’m undecided, he says again, and gestures toward the counter as if he were an usher showing them to seats at a performance. There is something gallant about the coat and gesture, Kate thinks. Something ageless and chivalrous that pleases her, but also leaves her cold. Maybe his eyes.
I’m undecided.
Aren’t we all, she thinks.
Then waffle cone batter is burning on the griddle. Black smoke billows where the vegetable oil has spilled. The customer in the wool overcoat, now sipping a shake, asks in his gallant, undecided way if something is burning. Jack Dewey, our firefighter, leaps over the counter and grabs wet rags, smothers the smoldering acrid sweetness. The girls use spatulas to toss the blackened mass into the sink, but burn their fingertips anyway. Zadie, who’s worked here the longest, has several small crescent-shaped burn scars on the heel of her palm and wrist.
Now, because of the smoke, it’s dark inside and out. The young man in the wool overcoat throws open the receiving doors in back; another customer props open the front. Smoke dissipates. Everyone laughs nervously. Someone claps Jack on the back. The girls fidget behind the counter, as if they’ve been caught at a failed imitation of adults, as if they’d gotten drunk on the fumes, being so close. They imagine being spoken about in the crowd. Shame washes over them momentarily. Something surges in Kate. She longs for the girls to steal kisses, to drink just a little to quiet their nerves, to seize whatever they can of this life, to feel they are bound for something bigger, something beyond what everyone imagines they’re bound for.
Then the girls reenter their bodies, those unpredictable inventions, and with still-summery arms they wipe down the front counters and ask who is next.
WHAT IS JACK Dewey thinking before he goes into the fire?
1. Of his nylon search rope, which is five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and two hundred feet long and attached to a snap hook on his belt. How Neftali Rodriguez and Henry Soto will expect him to deploy it, given the ice cream shop’s mazelike conditions and intense smoke.
2. That they will not need the rope because he knows this is likely an arson fire to collect the insurance money — like so many others lately — and there will be no one in the building to search for.
3. That he’s forgotten to tie the knots in the nylon search rope at fifteen-foot intervals, which tell you how far you have to go to exit the building. How much shit he will catch for this will depend on Neftali’s and Henry’s moods. But there will be significant shit to catch.
4. He thinks — even as he and Henry Soto pull open the blackened double front doors of the ice cream shop and the smoke and heat hit them like a blow to the chest and then coils upward — of his failure as a father. Thinks of his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sam, running away three weeks ago and how he hasn’t been able to find her, despite the missing persons report, despite his several friends on the police force. He sees Sam barefoot in her capris in some strange kitchen, frying catfish in a pan, like they sometimes did on Fridays. One of the traditions he’d carried on after his wife died. He tries not to think of the prick of a boyfriend she’s likely with, who smells pungently moist like bong smoke and carries around a little metal tackle box of harmonicas in different keys and can’t play a lick.
5. Heading into the fire, the safety rope trailing behind, he thinks instead: Friday night. If Sam were back, she might even have come by here for an ice cream cone, then out with friends to a movie or the improv comedy club downtown. She’d call him from the lobby and say in a deflated voice that plans had changed, that she really needed a ride home. Please? He’d know that she was near tears. A tightness would rise up in his chest and he’d say, without exasperation or fear, I’m on my way.
HOLLIS FINGER, SITTING at a back table in the ice cream shop, can tell before he looks up from his crossword that the man is hideous.
But that’s a little later.
At the moment, Hollis is watching one of the dropout boys out in the parking lot pry loose a medium-size conch shell — a Strombus gigas he prizes for its depth of color — from the hood of his art car. Hollis wants to twist off a table leg and beat the boy. Around him, at the other tables, heads swivel. He suspects he’s yelled an obscenity, maybe even a threat. He removes his hand from the table leg. Tries to smile to put everyone at ease, but he can taste the bile at the back of his throat. He focuses on his chocolate-dipped cone. Licks it tentatively. The whole shop smells of his anxiety. He closes his eyes a moment to calm himself. Sees the boy’s limp body on the pavement, his splayed, upturned palm. The conch. Its rosy insides like last light. But one of its horns is broken off. There’s a roaring in Hollis’s ears.
Sir? Someone touches his shoulder. He flinches, fumbles his dipped cone to the floor. It’s a hideous ruin on the tile. Separated into three parts. Incompatible. A fringed spatter of chocolate outlines the body.
Sir? It’s one of the counter girls. He’s noticed her before. She wears a flesh-colored hearing aid in her right ear, though you can barely see it. He wonders if she hears the same roaring he does. She has a large nose. Healthy nostrils. Elastic skin. She smells of high school hallways.
Are you okay? She asks this softly. She looks him over. Some of the people around him are still glancing his way, interested. Maybe protective.
He looks down at the ruin of his cone. Out to the parking lot, his car, the boy, the conch. Shadows falling. I’m just dandy, he says, near tears.
The girl, after some discussions with her associates, replaces his cone with a double. When she comes by and presents it to him — Voila, monsieur, she says — he notices a series of curved shapes, raised hieroglyphics along the inside of her wrist. He gently touches her there, the smooth elasticity of her skin. I will not forget you, he thinks. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.
