Page 64 of On His Mind

It’s fine. I have a semester, a job, and a portfolio, and I have never once needed anyone at the other end of a phone. I’m irritated. Irritation is clean, portable, and easy to hold.

On Friday, I sit down at my drafting table and get nothing done for two and a half hours. I sharpen the pencil. The apartment is empty and silent. I sit with my hand over my drawing and understand that I am angry the way a person is angry when they’re frightened of losing something. I get my keys and leave. I know where to find him.

The Camerie is dark except for the bar. Two chairs are still down. A man is counting the till.

Percy comes out of the kitchen with a bus tub against his hip and stops dead when he sees me standing inside the door in my coat.

“Penelope.”

He looks exhausted. He looks like someone who’s been on his feet for eleven hours and will do it again tomorrow. And something happens in his face — something opening, and then something closing it down fast, before it gets anywhere.

The bartender looks at the two of us, puts his jacket on, and says he’ll lock the front. Then it’s just us in the beautiful, empty restaurant.

“You stopped answering,” I say.

That’s all I have. I drove here at half past ten at night to say three words. It sounds ridiculous, so obviously insufficient, and my face is hot. I have never done anything like this. I have never once in my life confronted someone like this.

He sets the tub down on a table. “I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Doubles.”

“Percy.”

That stops him. He goes still with both hands flat on the back of a chair, and he looks at the floor for a long moment.

“You went to Chicago,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You told me there was nothing there for you.”

“There isn’t.”

“But you went.” It isn’t an accusation. He says it the way he says everything, flat. “And you’re going back in two years.”

There are two offers sitting in my inbox that nobody in the world knows about. I don’t tell him either. The tips of my fingers go cold in my coat pockets.

“You never asked me,” I say. “In all the time I’ve known you, you have never asked me one question.”

“Maybe,” he says, and I don’t know if that’s an argument or an agreement.

“Why not?”

He looks up. Whatever’s in his face, I can’t read it.

“Because I didn’t want to know,” he says.

He flips two chairs down off a table by the high windows, and we sit. I don’t take my coat off. The bar lights are out. One lamp burns over the service station, and the whole beautiful room stands in shadow around us.

He doesn’t speak for a long time. I don’t fill it. I’ve learned that much about him.

“The house is empty,” he says eventually. “Everybody left for the break.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Working.”