Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“I’m going to Dallas tomorrow to get him. We’ll have to do some things with lawyers, I guess; I don’t know how these things work in Texas. I don’t know how any of this will work. We’ll get someone to pack up his things, and then I’m coming back. We’re coming back. Jesus.” She imagined that he was only now beginning to understand the duties that fell to him, not just the boy, but dealing with practical things, his sister’s apartment, her clothes, her bills. Jesus.

She held his hand, ran her fingers over it. He kept on.

“Before Gabriel was born, I read those baby books, and I stayed with Mary Beth for two weeks. This one pamphlet they had at the hospital talked about all the things that needed to be secured, removed from your home, in preparation for the birth of a child. I just can’t remember what things. I keep thinking that if I’d read each of those pamphlets, actually studied them, I’d be better prepared. My dad always said that you need to be prepared for every eventuality. But really, how can you be prepared for something like this? Something random. Who is his pediatrician? What does he like to eat? What is he afraid of? And then I look at my apartment and I wonder where he’s even going to sleep. Shit, I don’t even know what school district I live in. And suddenly that seems like something I need to know.”

It was a daunting prospect, enough to merit a long silence punctuated by swigs of beer and one or both of them again mumbling Jesus.

Richard talked for nearly twenty minutes without interruption, a few highlights about his sister, the occasional story of a particular visit. “Sometimes it feels like all we ever did was go to restaurants and fight. There ought to be more to tell,” Richard said.

He wasn’t thinking about anything other than how he could muster the strength to say what he needed to say to Cadence; when her hands found his under the table, he realized she was content to wait until he discovered some way to say it, and she wouldn’t permit an interruption. She dismissed the waitress by showing the palm of her hand.

“When my mother died,” Cadence said, “I was in the middle of moving here. I’d just bought my first place, and it was supposed to be a celebration. I had friends waiting with champagne and pizza, and I was at my old apartment, on the phone with my father. He’s telling me how I have to come home to Pennsylvania, and there are three men in my apartment tapping their feet and waiting for me to hang up so they can take the chair I was sitting in.” Eons ago.

The waitress brought the check, and Cadence paid cash. “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked Richard. “At the very least get out of here? Have you eaten? It’s always good to eat something.” He answered each thing she said with an affirmative nod, and she pulled him toward the door.

Out on the avenue, traffic was stopped by a minor accident, a bus having broadsided a taxicab, apparently after sliding through the traffic light at very low speed. There did not seem to be much damage to the cab, and nothing was visibly wrong with the bus. The passengers milled around the sidewalk like they were in a church social hall on Sunday morning, preformed groups of two or three closing ranks to keep out strangers. But they seemed in good spirits, as if dancing in the falling snow.

Cadence and Richard stopped in front of a diner where they had eaten together often, ordinary dinners, late-night cravings for milk shakes, and morning-after breakfasts. At their first breakfast together, Cadence had slid the remainder of her hash browns onto Richard’s plate without asking, and he was thinking of that moment, how effortlessly beautiful she looked with her hair balled up under a baseball hat, wearing his white T-shirt, everything about her perfect, down to the playful way she licked ketchup off the blade of her knife, and he knew at that moment he would keep that memory forever. Maybe that was his first inkling of falling for her, of falling in love, wanting the night to hurry up and be over so that he could watch her again, even just her usual, yogurt and fruit and one cup of coffee, black. That morning had smelled of spring, the fragrant blush of fruit blossoms that somehow settled on the city on a Saturday morning in late March.

“Here?” Richard asked, and moved to the door.

Cadence reached across her body to take him by the arm and pull him back into the flow of pedestrian traffic. “No, not here.”

The crowd on the sidewalk forced them to walk single file, and before Richard realized where they were going, they were standing in the circular driveway of Cadence’s building. She took out her keys, handed them to Richard, and fumbled in her purse for something else, saying, “Let’s order in. We can talk upstairs. Spring rolls and chicken with lemongrass, maybe?”

“Garden rolls,” Richard said.

“I never remember the difference.”

The first time Richard set foot in Cadence’s apartment was the day she moved in, when the weather had not yet fully committed to summer and a surprising thunderstorm brought bone-cold rains, as if it were still March. The night before the move, they had fought over something inconsequential, and Cadence had released Richard from his role in the day, told him not to bother, then enlisted an army of her friends to help with the rental van, the carrying of furniture. Richard decided to help anyway, but the heavy lifting was finished by the time he arrived. The shower in her bathroom was broken, the water pressure just a trickle; he bought a new diverter valve and whittled the afternoon away installing that and a new showerhead. After he finished, Cadence slipped into the shower and then leaned out of the bathroom, carefully hiding herself behind the door, to wave an invitation. Richard joined her, washed her hair, inscribing circles on her back with one of those nylon puffs that came with the body scrub she liked to use. They ordered pizza, watched a rerun of Saturday Night Live, and slept. The second time was seven months later, the night after Cadence had explained how things were not working out. She’d left Richard a telephone message, a short list of all the items she could remember leaving at his apartment (a pair of gloves, a hairbrush, and a blow-dryer, no mention of the Polaroids) that she wished returned. He’d shown up at her door with a small paper bag filled with her sundries and had been allowed inside long enough to accept the return of a handful of CDs, two books, and a neon-green fleece scarf; she handed the items over without even a perfunctory comment, as if they were artifacts from an era of agony.

This was the third time.

It occurred to him how strange it was that they’d spent most of their relationship at his apartment or in bars and restaurants.

Inside her apartment, Cadence turned on the hall light and excused herself to the bathroom. When she returned, she undid her ponytail, using her fingers to rake through her hair. She lit a pair of stocky candles on her glass-top coffee table and turned on the stereo, a classical piece Richard didn’t recognize. She patted the couch, and Richard dutifully sat next to her.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

Richard said, “Maybe later. Nothing right now.” He picked up a disposable lighter from the coffee table and flicked it maybe a dozen times before she took it out of his hand and put it on the corner table farthest from his reach.

She turned so that they were facing each other. Her legs were folded beneath her, and their knees grazed each other. “It’s okay, it’s just me,” she said. “When are you leaving?”

“I’ve got a ticket for the morning. 9:40 a.m.”

She searched for something consoling to say. “I’m just sorry you have to go through this by yourself.”