Page 44 of Haunted

“She said we should get together. Girls night. She was going to call Deedee and Tamara.” I turn my fork over. “She said the names like I’d know them. I didn’t. I’ve never heard of either of them.”

“Of course you haven’t.” She says it gently. “Honey, she wasn’t reconnecting. There was nothing there to reconnect. She was collecting you.”

“That’s a bit much.”

“Girls night. In front of a room full of strangers, on the day she meets you, before you’d finished paying.” She picks the glass back up. “You’d make a very good story for her. Left town, came back, foreign, famous, gay. And the fire on top of it.”

“She was being friendly.”

“She was being friendly,” she agrees. “That’s what makes it impossible to object to. You can’t fight somebody who’s smiling at you. You only end up looking like the one with the problem.” She turns the stem of the glass. “She might not have thought she meant harm. But she did mean to diminish you.” She looks up. “And you were right to be pissed off about it.”

I don’t say anything for a moment.

“Oh.” I put my fork down. “I feel like I understand people so well when I’m in India and can’t speak their language. Then I come here and they’re a complete mystery to me.”

“It’s easy to understand strangers. The ones who think they have a claim on you, they’re always harder than you think to unravel.”

“And what about the ones who really do have a claim on you?”

“You don’t unravel them. You just let them stay messy. And you learn to love the mess anyway.” She raises her glass. “To messy people.”

“She called me Parker,” I say. “Twice. In front of everybody. Like it was hers to use.” My voice has gone thin. “I told her I go by Jonny now and she just carried on. Nine years, and one woman at a counter can put me right back.”

“You are Parker Bishop, honey,” she says, reading my face. “I know you don’t like to hear that, but you’re Parker Bishop deep inside, and he’s a good, sweet man. There was never anything wrong with Parker.” Her eyes twinkle. “But if you want to be tall, dark, and mysterious, nobody’s stopping you. But, let’s go back to the other thing. Lance Broussard.”

“At Captain Eddie’s. Yes. That went so badly. I might owe him an apology. Whether or not he would be willing to accept it is another story.”

“Well, you’ll probably get the opportunity to. He lives across the street.”

Involuntarily, I snap my attention to the bank of windows in the living room, like I expect Lance Broussard to be sitting down to dinner just across from us.

“He’s on the fifth floor.”

I can’t see that far up from this vantage point, so I look back at her. “Oh wow. Wait. How do you know where he lived?”

“He came here this afternoon,” she says.

“He what?”

“About three o’clock. You must have just missed him. In fact, when he knocked on the door, I thought that you might have come back because you forgot something.” She runs her finger over the crystal. It produces a high, clear note. “He asked after you, by the way. Asked me to remember him to you.”

“Did you tell him I’m here?”

“I wanted to. But we didn’t talk about that first. I didn’t expect to see him at my front door. So I didn’t.”

“Thank you.”

After dinner, I wash the Waterford by hand and she dries. When we’re done, she squeezes my arm and says goodnight. But at my door, she turns back.

“Jonny.”

“Yeah?”

She crosses back to me and takes my left hand in both of hers. She turns it over, gently, and her thumb finds the inside of my wrist. The thin, pale scars that run along the tendon. She doesn’t look at them. She doesn’t need to. She traces them once, very lightly, the way you’d touch something you were afraid of breaking.

“You have to love every second of it,” she says. “Even the unlovable parts.”

She lets go of my hand and walks to her room. The door clicks shut.