LITMIR.BIZ

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reply at dawn, nor by mid-morning, nor four-thirty, when I changed into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly celebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to have been anyhow, and Ted wouldn't be staying open on Sunday evenings much longer. The season was done.

      As I walked, I talked myself down. The email was likely just the work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you've sent an email like that, and it's real? You expect a reply, and then you get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don't give them the chance to wriggle off again.

      So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the first place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it stick, and move on.

      Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It's also enough to work out that you're not in the best of moods. I was one of the first to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up. Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him and two of the other cooks – which was pleasant enough but also kind of weird to do after all this time, as if I'd slipped into a parallel but not-very-different existence. Eduardo's English was decent but the others' wasn't, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.

      As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised, to see Becki's car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival a good forty minutes ahead of service. I watched him head into the restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver's seat of the car.

      She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay with her after all. Also that I'd probably seen the end of my nascent pizza-making career, at least for now.

      We got a reasonable sitting for the early bird slot, but after that it went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed to drown out the music playing in the background. John sent Mazy home after an hour. The rest of the staff floated like abandoned sailboats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower and heavier and more purple outside.

      ‘Gonna be a big one,’ said a voice. ‘Like, kaboom.’

      I turned to see Kyle standing behind me. He had strong opinions on the weather, evidently. We looked out at the clouds together for a while.

      ‘You okay?’ I asked, eventually.

      He nodded. Could be my imagination, but he actually looked a little older than he had the day before, albeit somewhat wired. He glanced around, and spoke more quietly.

      ‘Working on closing out the … you know,’ he said. ‘And then, well, I heard what you said. And Becki has sure as hell told me the same thing.’ He looked down. ‘Thanks, by the way. I didn't say that last night, and I should of.’

      ‘You'd had a bad day,’ I said.

      It was quiet for a while, but I knew he had something else to say. Eventually he got to it.

      ‘So how come you know how to do … that stuff?’

      ‘Didn't do anything. Just talked to a couple guys.’

      ‘Yeah, right. “Talked” to them.’

      ‘That's how I remember it.’

      ‘But you didn't even know what they were going to be like. You just walked right in and let rip.’

      ‘I'd asked what your impression of them was.’

      ‘But I could have fucked up. Got it wrong. It's been known to happen, right?’

      ‘It all turned out fine, Kyle.’

      ‘But—’

      ‘What does Becki think about this?’

      ‘She thinks you helped us out, and we should leave it at that and go on like it never happened.’

      ‘You could do worse than listen to Becki, on this and pretty much everything else. She's a good person to have in your life. You're a lucky guy.’

      ‘Yeah,’ he said, wearily. ‘I know that.’

      ‘Of course, being lucky can sometimes be a total pain in the ass. It's one of life's major trade-offs.’

      He thought about this, smiled, and drifted back toward the oven. Half an hour later a cheerful English couple rolled up, got bounced by Ted on account of being falling-down drunk, and that was pretty much it for the night. We shut up early, a little after nine o'clock.

      I shared a joint with Kyle on deck as he waited for Becki, and then I started for home.

      I got home bare minutes before all the water in creation started dropping out of the sky. I rolled the canopy down over the deck and took a beer and a cigarette out to watch it coming down, listening to wood and canvas taking it like a barrage of incoming small-arms fire. But I knew I was just killing time.

      I went indoors when I finished the beer. As I opened the laptop I realized it was possible this might be the night when I would be glad to only receive messages from shysters and pill-pushers, leavened with the revolving after-effects of viruses unleashed on the world by kids who didn't realize how frustrated they were at not being able to make genuine contact with the world, in the shape of a proper kiss with a real live girl.

      I hit the key combination, and waited.

      They were there, these email shadows of the void, with their usual empty offers and demands.

      But that wasn't all.

       Chapter 7

      The message was short.

      If I don't answer please leave a message. We need

      to talk. Ellen Robertson.

      And there was a phone number.

      I was thrown by this, and stared at the digits as if they were a door marked ‘Danger’. An email address says that if you type something to this person, they will (barring server crash, over-zealous spam filters or random strangeness) get it pretty soon. At some undetermined point in the future they will read it, and at a time subsequent to that, they may reply. It is time-and chance-buffered communication. A phone number is different. It's old school. If you call a phone number there's a real chance you're suddenly going to be talking to a real person, in real time.

      The email had been sent at 7.12. The clock on the laptop said it was now 10.24. Was that too late to call? Did I care? If this person was determined to throw a hand grenade into my life, did she have the right to choose the terms of my reaction? The digits changed to 25, and then 26. The longer I thought about it, the later it was going to get. I picked up my phone and dialled.

      It rang five or six times, and then picked up.

      ‘Hello?’ A woman's voice.

      ‘This is John Henderson,’ I said.

      There was silence for three, maybe four seconds. ‘I'll call you back,’ the woman muttered, the words running into one. Then the line went dead.

      I grabbed my cigarettes and went out onto the deck. I couldn't sit, so I stood, watching the rain.

      And waited.

      I don't smoke inside any more, or drink

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