again, he’d put off going to the A&P until there was nothing in the house to eat. He glanced at his watch, and sighed. The A&P was already closed, so it was either the Yellow Bird or one of the fast-food joints out at the highway junction. The Yellow Bird, Perry decided.
The town was quiet as he headed over to the café—which he pretty much expected. Lebanon was a quiet town, not much excitement. Lights were on in the houses he drove past; sometimes all he saw was the blue glow of a television set. The worst Perry ever had to deal with since joining the force nine years earlier was the occasional drunk driver, or a bunch of teenagers who thought it would be funny to knock down mailboxes with a baseball bat on Saturday nights. Violent crime was pretty much nonexistent in Lebanon, other than an occasional fistfight over at Earl’s Tavern, which was usually over before he pulled into their parking lot. No, if Perry wanted something to break the routine of his life, he had to head up the highway to Senandaga—or the hundred miles or so to Albany.
A bell rang when he pushed through the door. Marjorie wasn’t sitting at the counter anymore, and Perry sat down on one of the round seats, placing his elbows on the counter. The swinging doors from the kitchen bounced open and Marjorie Pequod came out, a Parliament dangling from her lips. She looked tired and grumpy. Her lipstick was an orange smear, and her face was heavily powdered and rouged like always. She wore her graying dark hair pulled back into a bun, and bobby pins glinted in the overhead lights. She was thick in the waist, and varicose veins showed through her stockings. She was wearing a pair of white leather flat shoes that were splattered with ketchup. Her yellow uniform was spotted with grease and God knows what else. Shuffling over to where Perry was seated, she whipped out her order pad and pencil from a pocket in her graying white apron.
“The usual?” she mumbled around the cigarette, not even dropping an ash.
Marjorie had worked at the Yellow Bird ever since the day her husband had run out on her, leaving her to raise their three kids on her own. She knew what everyone ordered. Perry wondered why she even kept that order pad.
For Perry, “the usual” was a well-done cheeseburger and fries swimming in chili with a Coke. He nodded. Marjorie scribbled it down, then tore the page off the pad and shoved it through the small order window, hitting the little bell sitting there.
Perry had been eating at the Yellow Bird since he was a child and his father brought him in for the first time. How he’d looked up to his dad, sitting there so strong and noble in his sheriff’s uniform. Perry had wanted to be just like his father—and he was, going to the police academy and then joining him on the force. Now he was deputy to his father’s sheriff—though he couldn’t help but cringe a little when people would say, “Here comes Andy and Opie.”
Ever since those days when he’d come in with his father, Perry had always ordered the same thing. With dutiful regularity, Marjorie poured his Coke from the fountain and set the red plastic cup in front of him. Stubbing out the cigarette in a dirty ashtray—Perry wasn’t about to get her for smoking in a public place, as there was no one else in the place—Marjorie leaned her elbows on the counter so that she was nearly nose-to-nose with the young officer.
“How you doing, Marjorie?” he asked.
“Tired, that’s how.” She pushed a wisp of gray hair off of her shiny forehead, giving him a weak smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “What you doing out so late on an off night, Perry?”
“No food in the house.” He smiled back at her. “And this way I get to see you, Marj.”
She rolled her eyes. “If things have got to the point where you look forward to flirting with a tired old bag like me, you’re doing something wrong.”
Doing something wrong. He bit his lower lip. He sometimes wondered about that himself. He was getting a lot closer to thirty than he cared to think about, and he was still single. He didn’t have a steady girl, and rarely even dated anymore since Jennifer had gone back to Boston three years earlier. He looked younger than his age—he got carded whenever he went over to Albany to hit the bars—and he kept himself in good shape by going to the YMCA three times a week. But he was beginning to wonder if time wasn’t running out on him somehow. All of his friends from high school were long married, raising kids, making mortgage payments, and settling into middle age.
Like she was reading his mind, Marjorie asked, “You still hear from Jennifer? You should of married that girl, Perry.”
“I haven’t heard from her in a while.” He replied with a shrug. Jennifer. “I don’t know, Marj. Maybe I should have.”
The thought had plagued him ever since Jennifer Donnelly had gone back to Boston. Maybe she brought up taking the job back there to get me to ask her to marry her, Perry thought again. She’d come to Lebanon straight out of college, teaching home economics at the local high school. She was a South Boston Irish girl, and he’d loved the way she said caah for car. Jennifer had worked her way through college, getting student loans and scrimping and saving. She’d come to Lebanon determined to pay off her student debt as quickly as she could. She told him that the cheap rents in Lebanon had been a major part of her decision to take the job at the high school.
They’d met right here, at this very counter. He’d been sitting here when she pulled up in a battered ten-year-old gray Honda Civic, and he’d almost gasped out loud when she got out of the car. Jennifer had thick dark hair worn short, a round face with an upturned nose, and the deepest emerald green eyes Perry had ever seen. She was short, not much past five feet, weighed one hundred pounds soaking wet, with a curvy body she liked to show off in tight jeans and tight sweaters. That day, she’d walked into the Yellow Bird with a broad smile on her face, sat down on the seat right beside him, and asked, “So, what’s good here?”
I should have asked her to marry me. Perry let out a sigh as he watched Marjorie wipe down the counter with a dirty sponge.
He and Jennifer had been together for three years from that first night at the Yellow Bird, when she’d ordered the chili cheeseburger and fries he’d recommended, and it was a good three years. Perry had stayed at her place a few nights a week; she’d come over to his once or twice as well. They’d rent movies or watch television. He’d read while she graded papers. Sometimes, they drove up to Senandaga to go out for a nice dinner at the Outback or the Olive Garden before heading to a movie. After the first year, they’d settled into a nice routine, and before long the question was popping up from everyone—his family, his coworkers, people he’d known his whole life: So, when you gonna do right by that girl and marry her?
But whenever Perry would start to hint about marriage, even tentatively, Jennifer would always change the subject. Then one day, over a dinner of lasagna and some red wine, she gave him a big smile. “It’s done, Perry,” she said. “I paid off the last of my student loans today. What a relief to have that off my back.”
“Well, that’s great, honey!” He reached over with his glass and tapped his to hers. “Congratulations.”
She cleared her throat. “And now that I’m done with that, Perry, I’m going back to Boston.”
He’d replayed that dinner conversation in his head at least a thousand times in the last four years. What did I do wrong? What did she want from me? She’d insisted that she wasn’t trying to force him into anything—but why hadn’t she brought it up any time before that night? He loved her, he loved being with her, and he knew she loved him, but her decision was final. “I’m going back to Boston,” she stubbornly said. “I’m not staying here.”
Why didn’t I offer to go with her? he asked himself again. I could have found work there—there are plenty of jobs there. I could have
