Page 69 of On His Mind

Then I skate off and turn the lights out behind me and go to work.

Chapter 18

Percy

Penelopetellsmeona Tuesday, in the diner on Franklin, over eggs.

“I fly out on the ninth,” she says, shaking hot sauce onto her plate. “My mother’s found a way to make three months look like a punishment and an opportunity at the same time. Chicago for six weeks. Then, Portugal with my aunt. Then Chicago again. Then I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be back the last week of August.” She takes the toast off my plate. “You’ll be here?”

“Yeah.”

That’s the whole conversation. Nineteen seconds. She says it the way you’d tell somebody you were getting your car serviced,because that’s what it is — a friend telling a friend about her summer.

I eat my eggs while she talks about her aunt’s home in Lisbon and the way the light comes off the courtyard at four in the afternoon.

The last real day I get with her is the Saturday before she flies.

She texts at nine in the morning. The fire escape, so I walk over.

It’s the alley off Tenth, behind the old dry goods building, where an iron fire escape climbs four floors up the brick. She’s been telling me about it since March. It’s the first real warm day — seventy degrees, and the whole town smells like wet dirt and cut grass.

We climb it, which I don’t think is exactly legal. She goes first, and she’s quick about it. I come up behind her and try not to look like I’m behind her. The landing at the top is wide enough to sit on. She takes a seat, so I sit next to her.

“There,” she says, and points across the alley at the building opposite, which is a wall.

“That’s a wall.”

“That’s a ghost sign.” She’s already gone somewhere I can’t follow. “Look at it. Under the paint. You can only read it in this light, when the sun comes across at this angle. RIDGEWAY MILLING CO. It’s been under there since the twenties. Somebody painted over it twice, and it’s still coming through.”

I look.

It takes me a while. And then I see the shape of letters under a hundred years of paint, ghosting up out of the brick where the sun hits it sideways.

“How’d you find it?”

“I look up.” She says it simply.

We stay for two hours.

She’s got a coffee. She tells me what the building was and what it is now, and how you can tell where a building’s been added onto by the color of the brick. She takes her shoes off and puts her feet on the rail. Somewhere below us, a truck backs up and beeps for a long time, and she waits it out with her eyes shut. I look at the side of her face, and then I look at the wall.

She says, “You have to see it in October. The light’s better. It’s lower.”

October.

She says it like it’s a thing that will simply arrive on the calendar with her in it, and me in it, and this alley still standing here with the sun coming in at the right angle.

“Yeah,” I say.

I don’t ask her to text me. I don’t ask what she’s doing in Lisbon, or how long she’ll be there, or whether things are okay with her mom.

She flies out on Wednesday, and I’m not there because I’m at work. And I don’t have a car. She never offered, and I’d never have said yes. But she comes by the house Tuesday night to drop off a book she says I should read over the summer, and I walk her out to her car at the curb. She’s parked under the streetlight in front of the Hawthorne House. The porch light’s on behind me. It’s the eighth of May.

“It’s just summer,” she says. “You’ll be okay. You’re the only person I know who’d be totally fine.”