Before she leaves, Mrs. Richardson instructs Mike in no uncertain terms that he’s to wear the button-down shirt and dress trousers she made him purchase last year for the festival that he didn’t wear. Her voice is so full of reproach that he can’t help but feel a little bit guilty. That guilt is assuaged partially when she opens her purse and pulls out a pair of red suspenders, saying that he’ll wear these or face her wrath. He wonders just what else she keeps in her purse and decides it’s probably better if he doesn’t know. “The black dress shoes, Mike,” she says. “You shine them and you shine them good.”
They leave as furiously as they came, a storm of perfume and perfectly manicured nails, and he thinks, I’m conflicted. I’m conflicted because if you’re not real, it means you’re made up. And if you’re made up, how did they make someone like you? Or how did I make up someone like you? You are so much bigger than this world and I don’t know how someone like you can exist.
IT’S AFTERNOON when he sees Doc passing by on the sidewalk. He looks in and waves at Mike. Mike waves right back, a big smile on his face.
He thinks, Don’t come in here. Don’t come in here.
Doc doesn’t. He just keeps walking right on by.
Must be all those sick people keeping him busy, Mike thinks with a laugh.
HE DOES brisk business that day, and it keeps him busy. It’s still not enough to keep him from watching the clock, counting down the hours. There’s a thrum of excitement under his skin, and he catches himself remembering how Sean looked pressed up against the diner, lips slick with Mike’s spit, face a little raw from Mike’s beard. Mike is a gentleman most times, but even gentlemen like things best not spoken of in public. He’s recommending The Grapes of Wrath to Mary Joyce, but he’s thinking about Sean spread out in his bed, skin slick with sweat, muscles straining as Mike takes him apart piece by piece. Surely Mrs. Joyce would be scandalized by such thoughts, which is why he’s relieved she’s not a mind reader.
Or maybe she is, maybe all of them are, but he finds he just doesn’t care.
(There is a part of him, a rational part—a part slowly suffocating under the weight of everything—that says that if Mrs. Joyce isn’t real and if Mrs. Richardson isn’t real, if none of them are real, then Sean can’t be real either. He kills that voice before it can speak further, because of course Sean is real. Mike knows it. Mike feels it.)
(He thinks, Please, please, please, please.)
It’s a quarter past four and the shop is empty for the first time since that morning, and Mike allows himself to take a breath. He thinks he’ll probably have a straggler or two in the shop, but for the most part, it’s over. People will be either at home getting ready for tomorrow or at the park helping set up for the events. Most of the businesses close early the day before Harvest Festival. Mike thinks he might too, but Sean won’t be done until right at six, given that Walter’s prepping food for tomorrow. It’s the same thing every year. Walter—
(Oscar)
—will begin the day before and will be up with the chickens the next morning, cooking up a storm. The diner won’t be open for breakfast, and Walter will kick everyone out, saying he needs complete and utter solitude in order to create his culinary masterpieces.
He thinks, Maybe we could sleep in tomorrow. We’ll need it. I’ll make sure we’ll need it. I can’t wait to see the way—
He reacts. It’s fight or flight. He does the only thing he can.
Because she’s right there with a goddamn knife.
He kicks his foot out. Hits her right underneath her breasts with his expensive Italian loafer, one of a pair that she made fun of him for buying. You really need six-hundred-dollar shoes? she said. Jesus Christ, Greg, there are children starving in Alabama. Or Zimbabwe. I don’t know which. He laughed at that, even though it was an awful thing for someone to say. And it’s weird, because he can hear her talking about starving children, but he can also hear another voice saying, The black dress shoes, Mike. You shine them and you shine them good.
Something cracks in her chest and her eyes go wide,
and she just flies backward, much farther than he expects. Her back hits the railing and there’s another shriek of metal, of bolts ripping from their moorings. It’s not as loud as he’d have thought it’d be, something this catastrophic, this monumental. The knife falls to the floor of the balcony, and there’s a brief moment when their eyes meet, hers wide, his panicked, and then the railing gives way nine stories above the streets of Washington, DC. One moment she’s there, and then she’s gone.
She doesn’t scream on the way down. He doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s too fast, maybe she’s too shocked. Or maybe, just maybe, she mercifully blacked out in sheer horror and was unconscious before she hit the—
He breathes. And breathes. And breathes.
He says, “Jenny.”
He can’t pick himself up. Oh, he tries, sure. He pushes himself up to his knees, wincing at the glass digging into his palms, and tries to stand, but his legs have decided not to work, that they just can’t possibly support his weight at the moment. He’s on his hands and knees and he’s fucking crawling toward the edge of the balcony, part of the railing still hanging off, squeaking obnoxiously in the breeze, back and forth, back and forth. He can hear the traffic below him, the usual horns honking, trucks and taxis idling. But there’s more to it, there’s shouting and screams, and he thinks, I did that. I do believe I caused that.
He makes it to the edge of the railing and tells himself to just take a quick peek, just a little look. He’s not afraid of heights. He’s just afraid of what he’ll see.
He lies flat on his stomach, hands gripping the edge of the balcony. He pulls himself forward, stomach scraping against the ground. There’s glass there too, but he ignores it. He looks over the balcony to the scene below.
He sees people moving, people running toward his building. There’s the restaurant across the street, that annoying place that has live bands playing after midnight on the weekends. There’s a crowd gathering out the front of it, people with their hands over their mouths, talking to each other, pointing. Some have their phones out, recording, because that’s what people do in this day and age. They’re shocked and horrified, but they were there, and they have to show the world that they were there. He doesn’t like people like that, not very much.
He looks away from them.
Looks straight down.
She landed on top of a parked late-model SUV. The roof is dented in where she landed, the windshield shattered. She’s lying on her back, legs hanging off toward the passenger side of the SUV, one arm curled under at an angle so odd that it can’t be natural. He can see her face, but it’s too far away to make out the expression, but he’s certain her eyes are open, maybe even bulging from her head, because he can see the whites of them, like she’s just shocked something like this could happen, shocked that Mike could ever do such a thing. He almost expects her to get up, to shake her head in that way she does when she’s disappointed in him. She’ll say, I can’t believe you, Mike, I really can’t, and he’ll say, Yeah, I don’t even know what that was.
He waits.