Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

And Tiphany had admired not just her honesty but the confidence with which Mrs. Freeman had voiced her convictions and her condemnations. Even before the fifteen minutes were up, Tiphany had decided that, if she was lucky enough to be offered the job, she would take it.

But she knew if she’d told Sasha any of this, he would’ve said she was a sellout. So she kept it to herself.

§

All throughout the next day, Tiphany found it impossible to concentrate. She couldn’t get out of her head the thought that tomorrow she and Mrs. Freeman would return to Detroit and she’d find herself out of a job. Then she’d have to start all over again.

Toward the end of the afternoon, she gave up on her work altogether. Desperately needing to get out of the hotel, she changed into her grungiest clothes, a pair of jeans and the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. For the first time since her encounter with the mime, she returned to the square. Standing beneath a café awning, she scanned the kids on the long steps of the courthouse. She was looking for the girl with red-veined eyes. But what would she have done if she’d found her?

Neither did Tiphany see any sign of the landscape painter. His peers were in their usual spots, with their displays hanging from the wrought-iron fence. But his space was empty.

Coming upon the park entrance, Tiphany thought she spotted the mime, but it was a different one, tall and lean. She guessed the odds weren’t good that he’d be a talker, too.

As she walked away from the square, she found herself wondering what Mrs. Freeman would have made of all this. The old woman had seemed so determined for Tiphany to get out of the hotel and experience it. Was it possible her boss would’ve found it fun, enjoying the place for the spectacle it was?

Back at the hotel, the desk clerk was holding a note for her.

Dinner at 8 , it said. Well, Tiphany thought, death row inmates get a final meal — why not me?

The waiter who greeted them wore a black T-shirt and black jeans and a yellow pencil behind his ear. The interior of the restaurant was almost as dark as his clothes. The place was decorated with dead, brittle flowers. Tiphany recognized almost nothing on the menu.

“I come here whenever I’m in town,” Mrs. Freeman said. “It’s the one place I know I won’t run into anyone.”

Tiphany made it to the last page of the menu and then started over. Perhaps she’d simply order whatever Mrs. Freeman was having.

“Are there interesting sessions tomorrow?” she said.

Mrs. Freeman barely glanced at the wine list, and then she was done, ready to order. “Every year I promise myself I’ll skip the last day,” she said. “Of course, I never do. I don’t know what it is — some weakness of character, I suppose. Everyone else plays golf.”

“Do you play?”

“If I were Supreme Dictator,” Mrs. Freeman said, taking up her martini, “I’d outlaw that hideous addiction. My husband’s a fanatic. Does your boyfriend play?”

“He doesn’t really play sports.”

Mrs. Freeman seemed relieved. “Personally, I don’t consider golf a sport,” she said, “but that’s another matter. What does he do? I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned.”

Tiphany chose that moment to take a long, slow sip of water. It wasn’t that she was exactly ashamed — she just wanted to avoid any more uncomfortable conversations. “Plumbing. He’s a plumber. Actually an apprentice. But he’s really a sculptor …”

Either she wasn’t listening or she was busy thinking of something else, but Mrs. Freeman suddenly fell silent. Tiphany fully expected her to change the subject — hoped, in fact, that she would.

“Nothing wrong with being a plumber,” Mrs. Freeman said. “It’s far more noble than doing nothing, which is my husband’s sole profession. He’s quite good at it, though. Don’t ever get married,” Mrs. Freeman said, sipping again, “At least make sure you know what you’re getting into. Your generation has broken many of my generation’s bad habits. You test each other first. You have trial runs. You sleep around. I don’t mean you in particular, of course. For us — some of us, anyway — marriage was something that just happened, like menstruation. You learned to accept it. I don’t even remember how we met, my husband and I. My second husband, anyway. My first I prefer not to think about. With my second it was never love. We knew each other through others, mutual friends. It’s hard to remember how it began. I guess these things seem less exciting when you’re older, these opening volleys of a relationship. When I think about it now, I think of it as being at a party — one of those god-awful parties where you get stuck talking to someone for hours on end. Not necessarily someone you hate. Maybe it’s just that you don’t know him very well, but because you’ve met him before — probably at some other god-awful party — it’s easy to fall into conversation. There are things you both know that you can talk about. It may not be the most stimulating conversation in the world, but it’s better than sitting by yourself in the corner. And of course he’s a little attractive. All right, more than a little. So there’s that. But then what happens is you get stuck. No one comes over to say hello. And the conversation isn’t so painful that you want to go out of your way to come up with an excuse to escape. You don’t want to offend him. It’s just that you don’t particularly want to spend the entire evening with him. But that’s exactly what happens. At a certain point you look around and discover that you and this man are the only people left. You can hear voices coming from the patio. People are laughing. You know there’s something interesting going on out there. Maybe the host is showing off his new outdoor theater. Or his professional-grade grill that runs on briquettes of ancient sequoia trees. Whatever it is. The point being that you like this man, more or less, but really you’d rather be outside with everyone else. At the same time, though, the two of you being alone together has already begun to feel natural and inevitable. Next thing you know, you’re married, and you realize you’ll never again have a chance to go out to the patio to see what all the hubbub was about.”

Mrs. Freeman raised her glass to her mouth, and then she seemed to smirk — or was it a smile? Tiphany couldn’t tell. She’d long ago lost track of what Mrs. Freeman was saying, and she’d been sitting in terror for several minutes, dreading the moment when she’d have to respond. Uncertain what to do, she raised her salad fork to the light of the candle between them on the table and rubbed her thumb over some imaginary watermark.

When she looked again at Mrs. Freeman, Tiphany saw it was a smile on the old woman’s face, and she understood the moment had come, the final reckoning. But she also realized the moment brought with it one final chance. If she could just figure out the right thing to say, Mrs. Freeman might perhaps forgive her. Maybe they could, after all, put everything else behind them.

But nothing came. Not the right thing. Not even the wrong thing. Tiphany kept rubbing the fork, as if a magic genie might pop out to save her. She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Freeman having floundered like this when she was her age — when she was any age, for that matter. The old woman must have thought her a complete imbecile.

And so it was with great relief that Tiphany looked up just then and saw the waiter approaching. She took that opportunity to glance once more at her menu, and she settled at last on the coq au vin. She didn’t know what the coq was, but she was certain she needed as much vin as she could get.

Mrs. Freeman ordered the same thing, but the words rolled off her tongue as if she’d been saying them all her life. When the waiter left, Mrs. Freeman also seemed to have forgotten what they’d been talking about. In retrospect, Tiphany didn’t remember much else about the meal, perhaps because she’d worked so hard to repress the many ways in which she’d embarrassed herself. Unnecessarily, entirely out of kindness, Mrs. Freeman had given her a second chance. Tiphany had blown that one too.