James Hynes - Next

“Excuse me?” trills a voice with a rising, singsong inflection. Kevin turns; the businesswoman is smiling at him. At this distance her makeup is just right, and his heart fibrillates with unexpected pleasure that this yellow rose of Texas is beaming at him over the screen of her silvery laptop.

“Do you know another word for ‘regret’?” she says.

Wow, thinks Kevin, that’s a little on the nose. Can former Texas cheerleaders read minds? Do they teach telepathy at Baylor? Outside the window, a school of colorful fish enters the crosswalk from each direction, sifting neatly through each other. Another couple of girls in tank tops stride away from him — do they travel only in pairs? — and Kevin turns back to the beaming woman.

“Regret, huh?” he says. “Sounds serious.”

“That’s just it,” says the Yellow Rose of Starbucks. “It sounds too serious.” She tilts her head. “I want to say, ‘I regret the misunderstanding,’ but on the other hand”—she tilts her head the other way—“I don’t really think it was my fault.”

“Huh.” Kevin looks down at his muffin, sneaks a glance at the sunlit girls, but someone carrying a big green duffel bag is blocking his view. Move, he thinks.

“Business or personal?” He takes a nip of his muffin. Cranberry, that’s what it is.

“Wellll,” drawls the Yellow Rose, “ mostly business.” She really does have a rather fetching, crooked smile.

This should be easy, thinks Kevin, I’m an editor. A professional. This is my job, helping folks find the right word. He furrows his brow to show he’s mulling it over, but what flashes across his eyeballs is big green duffel bag.

“I mean, I’m sorry he misunderstood?” says the woman, crinkling her nose, which is going a little too far. “But I’m not really sorry? ”

The big green duffel bag is balanced on the shoulder of a tall, swaying Asian girl threading her unsmiling way through the knot of homeless and day laborers on the corner, neatly sidestepping the woozy stagger of Mr. Mary Tyler Moore. She sails by Kevin’s window, just beyond the glass, and all the pagan priestesses on the stereo sing alleluia! Kevin nearly chokes on his muffin. O frabjous day! Callooh, callay! It’s Joy Luck!

Kevin chases the chunk of muffin with a gulp of tea. The Yellow Rose is still talking but he’s not listening; instead he’s rising from his chair and shuffling like a zombie to the window.

“Uh huh,” he says, splaying a hand against the warm glass and peering sideways up Sixth Street after Joy Luck. Her arm curls around the duffel, her head is neatly obscured, so that she looks like a hybrid creature, a land-bound hammerhead shark with a very sexy walk. But she keeps close to the building and after a moment all he can see is the butt end of the duffel before it too disappears. “Sorry,” he says, pushing back from the window, leaving his palm print on the glass. “What was the question?”

The businesswoman has stopped talking, her bright red nails hooked over the upright screen of her laptop. Kevin’s heart sinks at the sight: a frost has touched the Yellow Rose. She’s seen what he was looking at; she’s watched him levitate from his chair and stumble to the window, all the blood rushing from his head. Her bright mouth has crumpled, her eyes have hardened, and all at once she looks ten years older. It breaks his heart to see, and inwardly he lacerates himself even as his tongue stumbles uselessly in every direction at once.

“She’s, uh…” He gestures at the window. “I know her from…”

The Yellow Rose’s petals turn brittle in the chill. She spreads her fingers as if to say, whatever, none of my damn business.

“I know her father.” Kevin’s face burns as he sidles toward the door. But the businesswoman has withdrawn within her suit as if behind a rampart, so Kevin snatches his iced tea. Then turns back and grabs the muffin — at these prices, he’s not leaving it behind.

“I’m sorry you misunderstood,” Kevin says as he slips past the Yellow Rose, and she snaps her head back as if he’s slapped her. “Just say that,” he adds, gesturing at the laptop before he plunges out the door into the heat.

He hustles around the corner onto Sixth Street. Half a block ahead, without breaking stride, Joy Luck swivels the duffel from her left shoulder to her right, jogging a little like a sailor to hike the load up higher. The muscles in her arm, the glide of her shoulder blades, the little apple in the dimple of her back — all are nicely picked out by the sunlight pouring down Sixth from behind. Kevin feels a little surge of, well, joy.

“Nice,” someone says next to him. Kevin pulls up short and instantly dances away from the wavelet of tea sloshing from his cup. He’s still standing outside Starbucks, and from the window above the chunky barista glowers at him and rubs away the palm print he’s left on the glass. It’s not her speaking, but another shaggy homeless guy hunkered against the building, smoking a cigarette. No, not a cigarette — Kevin recognizes the sweet, resinous smell. The homeless man — cadaverous in T-shirt and jeans and an ancient tweed sport coat — watches Joy Luck walk away. He draws deep on the joint, then turns his dilated gaze to Kevin.

“Friend of yours?” he rasps.

“I know her father.” He has no idea why he keeps repeating this lie, especially to strangers.

The guy cocks a bird-bright eye at Kevin and says, “ O -kay. What’s her name?”

Kevin laughs. In cannabis veritas. He weighs the cup in one hand and the half-eaten muffin in the other, and impulsively, as if propitiating some local deity, he offers them to the homeless man, who peers at them warily, then slowly takes the muffin and stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket. He waves away the cup. Up ahead, Joy Luck pauses at the next cross street, stoops to look right under her duffel, then sways into the intersection. Meanwhile, with grave hippie generosity, the homeless man offers the joint to Kevin with a smooth, palm-down gesture, the smoke pooling under his hand and rising through his fingers. He lifts his scraggy eyebrows and holds his own toke as he waits. For the tiniest increment of time Kevin considers it — in Ann Arbor, under the right circumstances, he wouldn’t hesitate — and then a train of considerations rumbles by — strange city, Texas drug laws, job interview in a few hours — and he shakes his head subtly, as cool as the homeless guy making the offer. The international brotherhood of dopers. No thanks, bro. The homeless guy shrugs and gasps out a puff of smoke. Kevin starts up the street after Joy Luck.

“Go get her, dude,” rasps the homeless guy.

What am I doing? thinks Kevin, treading on his own shadow. Who am I kidding? What am I going to do, strike up a conversation with her like some drunken Shriner? Hey honey, I’m only in town for the day, what’s a fella do for fun in this burg, har har har? The very thought shrivels him, but he keeps walking. Cars pour west down Sixth toward the bright, hazy hills in the distance, but there’s no other foot traffic, only Joy Luck and him. Get a grip, he thinks, she’s twenty-five years younger, maybe even thirty. But so what? The first day he met Stella, in Expresso Royale, she told him she was twenty-nine. The fact that she lied about her age — he knows because after she moved into his rental apartment downstairs and started spending most of her nights upstairs with him, he snuck a peek at her driver’s license and found out she was actually thirty-five — is sort of beside the point. Fact is, the look on Beth’s face when he told her how old his new lover was — it was worth all the grief he knew she’d give him. Who cares if Stella’s actually five, six years older? Whatever the actual difference, the gap in their ages is the running gag of their relationship, it’s the grain around which their relationship formed.