Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,52
Breathing hazard. You name it. I start handing out keys because people want to get in and get stuff, next thing you know, the rest of the roof’s collapsing or people are squatting in their old apartments, and then the city’s shutting down everything else I own.”
“Phil,” William said, “that’s nonsense. You know I’m not moving in. What I just paid for the deposit on my new place, they’ll have to bury me there. I just want my stuff. Just the little stuff. I’m late for lunch with my daughter.
“I forgot you had a daughter,” said Phil. “I remember her now. Pretty girl.”
Eva had not been running late for lunch, so much as running away from Cheese. She knew her father would be at least twenty minutes late, but her arrival at the restaurant fifteen minutes early gave her time to order a gin and tonic. The waiter was young and aggressively charming. Eva asked for extra lemon for her water; he brought her a dish of lemons, and a fresh mint leaf, along with her drink. He hovered. Eva envied his eyelashes. It was not quite lunchtime, and the restaurant was quiet and near empty. It had been a favorite of her father’s when he worked nearby, before he’d left his job at the downtown EEOC office for work with a private firm. It would have been easier to meet in midtown, but even after winning several big cases her father didn’t seem quite comfortable in his new office, with its smooth burgundy leather and gold-plated doors. He’d liked it better downtown. He used to bring her to this restaurant on visiting days. Eva remembered tapping her Mary Janes against the hardwood floor, getting free Shirley Temples from the old owner. The name of the place was the same now, but the menu had changed from solidly Greek to vaguely Mediterranean, and when Eva asked the waiter how the old owner was doing, he seemed apologetically confused by the fact that the restaurant had ever been anything different.
As he walked away, Eva emptied the contents of a sugar packet onto her teaspoon and swallowed. She assumed this was only rude when someone was watching. Her father was not watching, because he was, according to her intuition and the metallic clock on the wall, still a good fifteen minutes away. She sipped her drink and studied the salad page. A woman in heels walked into the restaurant. Click, click, click. The sound of her reminded Eva of Maya, who thought herself short and wore heels even in her own apartment. Maya, whose steps had a perfectly measured rhythm to them. That was what Eva had first noticed when they’d met in the bookstore: the sound of her walking. Maya was brilliant, had a dot-shaped birthmark in the center of her forehead, and was one of the few people Eva knew who still believed in anything, but Eva would have loved her on the basis of sound alone. She instinctively looked up from her table when the woman entered, but only the sound of her was familiar. This woman was skinny and mousy, where Maya was all curve and bravado. The woman sat at the bar and whispered something to the bartender, who seemed to know her. There was a television at the bar, tuned to CNN. A man in a lab coat stood over a kitten, who chased the string he dangled. The kitten was calico and unnaturally small. Eva squinted at the caption.
“Pretty soon they’ll be cloning us,” the waiter said, while refilling Eva’s water glass.
“Well, that’s a shame,” said Eva. “It’s dying.”
She did not know this to be true. She remembered reading something about sheep dying. Cloned cells were as old as the parent cells they’d come from. But she had read this in college, some years ago, and it was possible that things had changed since then. Progressed. She watched the kitten swatting at its toy, and bit into a piece of warm bread. Run, damn you, Eva thought. The kitten kept swatting at the string. The newsmen pretended to be awed. Eva winked at the waiter and asked for another drink. He nodded, taking the opportunity to glance down her dress.
The blender is not just a blender. It cuts and dices and purees. Eva liked to cook, William had thought when he bought it. When she visited him, which she hadn’t recently, she opened his refrigerator and looked disappointed to find it full of take-out cartons.