the barstool and my purse fell out of my lap, spilling its contents—keys, mace, some change, a tube of lipstick I didn’t remember buying, an enameled pill box, my cell phone. It was a fantastic mess and Jeremy Gorecki stood over it, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said, picking up my things from the floor. “I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”
“It’s okay.” I took the purse from him and zipped it up. “What are you doing here?”
“I was about to get some dinner. Want to get a table?”
“I was only getting a drink. Or hoping to anyway.” I glanced at the bartender, who was refilling a beer for one of the old men and paid me no notice. “All right.”
I slid off the stool and followed Jeremy to a table by the window. In a T-shirt and jeans, he looked younger than he had in the button-down shirt and pants he wore when he came to the house. As a matter of fact, he was a year younger, I realized; I’d been held back that one year in kindergarten. When he motioned to the waitress, she came over right away, pulling out her notepad from her apron. She was a blonde, busty woman in a tank top and black jeans, and spoke with a smoker’s gravelly voice. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked him sweetly. He opened his palm toward me.
“Could I have a gin and tonic, please?” I asked.
“Sure thing. Anything to eat?”
“No, just the drink. Thank you.”
“I’ll have the burger, medium, with fries,” he said. “And a glass of water.”
“Coming right up, hon.”
The waitress left. I slipped my purse off my shoulder and hung it on the arm of my chair.
“How are you holding up?”
A question I had been asked by my roommate and friends a few times already, and for which I still had no answer. Since my father’s death, it was as if my life had stopped and I remained stuck in the same moment, the same place. “I’m not,” I said with a shrug.
“I’m so sorry, Nora. I know how devastating this is.”
There was so much kindness in his voice. For a moment, my eyes pricked and it seemed as though tears were finally coming, but somehow the feeling passed. I rested my chin on the heel of my hand and looked out of the window for a while. The sky was the color of peach. Cars passed now and then on the highway. A delivery truck pulled up in the middle lane and the driver climbed out to deliver a package. How odd, at this late hour. “He left me all this money,” I said, turning to look at Jeremy. “Can you believe it? Me, the fuck-up.”
“You’re not a fuck-up.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know fuck-ups. Trust me.”
The waitress came back. “Here’s your gin and tonic. And here’s your hamburger, hon. Ketchup and mustard are right there. Can I get you two anything else?”
“No, I think we’re good,” he said.
“You didn’t want a beer with your burger?” I asked.
He squeezed ketchup on the side of his plate. “I don’t drink.”
“At all?”
“No.” After a moment of hesitation, he said, “I get really bad insomnia. It was taking five or six drinks to get me to sleep, and after a while even that many weren’t enough. I didn’t like where I was headed, so I stopped.”
“And the insomnia is gone?”
“Well, no. It comes and goes.”
I stirred the ice with the little black straw and took a big sip, all the while watching him. He sat with his back straight and ate quickly, though nothing about his composure suggested he was in a rush. It was so strange running into him at McLean’s. I hadn’t thought of him in ten years, and now I’d seen him twice in a week. It struck me that this was yet another consequence of death, that it disturbed long-established patterns, even something as insignificant as this. Outside, the delivery truck was gone, leaving