Helen Cox - Sunrise in New York

‘What’s he doing here?’ Jack growled out the question I’d been pondering. I jumped in surprise at the shift in his voice. When he had spoken before, his register had been nothing short of mellow.

‘Long as I’m standing right here you can address any questions to me direct,’ said Jimmy, his voice of equal roughness to Jack’s. ‘I won’t be here long, just came to return this.’ Jimmy held up my brown leather notebook, which I used for writing down my song lyrics.

‘Oh,’ I said, frowning. ‘I’m sorry, I was in such a rush this morning because I overslept. Probably through sheer exhaustion. I must not have picked it up or maybe I dropped it, I don’t know, but thank you so much for bringing it back to me. It…’ I trailed off. Jimmy had a smug look on his face and on seeing it I snatched the book out of his hands. ‘You didn’t… read this, did you?’

The self-satisfied leer on Jimmy’s face melted away and he clenched his jaw.

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said. ‘If that’s the thanks I get for coming out of my way after a long day at the office, next time I won’t bother.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… It’s just, it’s very private.’ I’d written one or two half-baked lines down this morning about the kiss I’d shared with Jimmy and the thought that he might have read them was mortifying.

‘Hold on a minute, you two know each other?’ Esther asked, looking between me and Jimmy.

That felt like a bit of a complicated question to answer after what’d happened the night before. Just for an instant, I once more felt Jimmy’s arms tight around mine and the force of our lips pressed together.

Pull it together, Bonnie, this is not the time.

‘We met here,’ I said, and then did what I always did when I got nervous. I started to jabber on like a total lamebrain. ‘Late last night I was lookin’ for you but you weren’t here and I had nowhere else to go because I spent my money on the Greyhound from Philly and somehow Jimmy knew I didn’t have no place to go and he let me stay at his for the night so I wouldn’t be shut out in the cold.’

‘Weren’t you on shift last night?’ Esther turned on Mona. Esther’s skin was usually ghostly white but it had reddened and I could see she was working herself up by the way she was breathing, all deep and huffy.

‘Now, honey, come on. You know it’s our job to serve customers, even him.’ Mona put a hand on her hip.

‘Why’d you even come here in the first place Boyle? You know you’re not wanted,’ Esther said, turning back to Jimmy.

‘Well,’ Jimmy said, scratching his left temple. ‘I’d read in Jessie Marble’s showbiz column a week back that Jack Faber and his new girlfriend were spending the holidays in England, so I reckoned it wouldn’t do no harm.’

‘Fact is, buddy, you caused my waitresses a whole lotta grief last summer,’ Bernie chipped in. ‘And when the waitresses suffer, I suffer. It’s inevitable. And I don’t like sufferin’. I’ve never had to outright bar a customer from the Starlight Diner, but if you’re here to make more trouble you can beat it.’

‘Come on,’ said Jimmy. ‘You ain’t trying to say I’m to blame for everything that happened last summer?’ He looked from Esther to Jack, to Angela, to Ryan and rested his eyes on Mona.

‘You didn’t help. Like when you physically assaulted me on our first meeting and then wrote several poisonous articles about me,’ said Esther.

‘Or reunited me with my murderous ex live on TV,’ said Jack.

‘Or phoned me saying you were Esther’s shrink to manipulate me into divulging things I otherwise wouldn’t have divulged,’ Ryan said.

‘You didn’t do anything to me outright. But hurting three of the people I care about is reason enough for me to take against you,’ Angela finished.

I turned to Jimmy and stared at him, shaking my head. He looked from Angela to me and started at the look on my face. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t in a position to judge anybody, but I didn’t walk around like I was either. Jimmy, however, had been nothing short of snide about Jack and Esther. If everything Esther and her friends said was true, why did he feel entitled to be cruel about them?

‘You didn’t really do all those things, did you, Jimmy?’ I asked, feeling real hot all of a sudden. He opened his mouth to say something, before closing it again. There was an ache in his eyes I couldn’t make sense of, and bit by bit his stare lowered to the floor. I looked over to Esther; she’d crossed her arms and her face was cemented in a frown that matched her lover’s.

‘You know what, that’s just fine,’ Jimmy said. I turned to see him with his arms part raised in surrender. ‘Believe what you want to believe about me, everyone else does.’ He started winding his scarf back around his neck and as I watched him my heart started beating faster. The thought of him leaving on these terms after all he’d done for me the night before was nothing short of sickening. He’d not only taken me in from the cold, he’d soothed me after my nightmare and had even offered to help me, even though he had no idea what he could be getting into. I had to find some way of showing him that, whatever he’d done before we met, I was still grateful for the kindness he’d shown me.

‘I want to believe you’re a good person,’ I said, in the gentlest voice I could, trying to draw out some of the tenderness I’d seen in him the night before. Whatever he’d done to Esther, this guy had a heart. I’d seen it, and was willing him to remember it.

‘Well it looks like you’re the only one,’ he said, looking back up at me. ‘Good luck, Blue.’ Without another word he turned and strode towards the doorway.

‘Jimmy!’ I called after him, but he didn’t even glance back. He pushed out into the snow, while I watched on, helpless to stop him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bernie looking at me, his forehead puckered, like he was trying to figure something out. I was trying to figure something out too: why the hell I felt so empty over Jimmy leaving like that. So I’d never see the guy again, so what? I’d kissed him once and had known him for less than twenty-four hours. I needed to get a grip. To say I had bigger problems was putting it mildly.

‘Well,’ said Esther from somewhere behind me. ‘If you resorted to sleeping on Boyle’s sofa last night you must really be desperate.’

I turned back to face her, teary-eyed in spite of myself.

‘I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t need your help,’ I managed to say.

‘Alright. You can stay with us. Until New Year,’ Esther said, her features softening again now that Jimmy was out of the mix.

‘Until New Year,’ I said, a smile flickering at the corners of my mouth as relief flooded through my veins.

About a half hour later, we bundled through the door of Jack and Esther’s apartment. It was on Ludlow Street, just a few blocks down from the diner, and was a lot more swish than Jimmy’s place, that much I noticed right away. Jack said he’d moved in over the summer but six months later there wasn’t much sign it’d been lived in. The place had laminate floors, a faux fireplace in the centre of the sitting room, and bookshelves, heaving with paperbacks, lined the surrounding walls, which had been painted a shade of off-white. It was bright without feeling too much like a showroom, and the whole place had a warmth to it.