After fifteen minutes, Spencer stopped Rosie when she passed nearby with a tray of drinks. “Is Valerie working tonight?”
“Supposed to be,” she said.
He was relieved. Valerie hadn’t lied. He had thought perhaps she’d misled him, as a gentle way of brushing him off.
“I’m kinda worried about her,” Rosie said.
“Why’s that?”
“Well, the shift started an hour ago.” Her gaze kept straying to his scar. “She hasn’t called in.”
“She’s not often late?”
“Val? Not her. She’s
“How long has she worked here?”
“About two months. She…” The woman shifted her gaze from the scar to his eyes. “Are you a friend of hers or something?”
“I was here last night. This same stool. Things were slow, so Valerie and I talked awhile.”
“Yeah, I remember you,” Rosie said, and it was obvious that she couldn’t understand why Valerie had spent time with him.
He didn’t look like any woman’s dream man. He wore running shoes, jeans, a work shirt, and a denim jacket purchased at Kmart — essentially the same outfit that he’d worn on his first visit. No jewelry. His watch was a Timex. And the scar, of course. Always the scar.
“Called her place,” Rosie said. “No answer. I’m worried.”
“An hour late, that’s not so much. Could’ve had a flat tire.”
“In this city,” Rosie said, her face hardening with anger that aged her ten years in an instant, “she could’ve been gang-raped, stabbed by some twelve-year-old punk wrecked on crack, maybe even shot dead by a carjacker in her own driveway.”
“You’re a real optimist, huh?”
“I watch the news.”
She carried the drinks to a table at which sat two older couples whose expressions were more sour than celebratory. Having missed the new Puritanism that had captured many Californians, they were puffing furiously on cigarettes. They appeared to be afraid that the recent total ban on smoking in restaurants might be extended tonight to barrooms and homes, and that each cigarette might be their last.
While the piano player clinked through “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” Spencer took two small sips of beer.
Judging by the palpable melancholy of the patrons in the bar, it might actually have been June 1940, with German tanks rolling down the Champs-Elysees, and with omens of doom blazing in the night sky.
A few minutes later, the waitress approached Spencer again. “I guess I sounded a little paranoid,” she said.
“Not at all. I watch the news too.”
“It’s just that Valerie is so…”
“Special,” Spencer said, finishing her thought so accurately that she stared at him with a mixture of surprise and vague alarm, as if she suspected that he had actually read her mind.
“Yeah. Special. You can know her only a week, and…well, you want her to be happy. You want good things to happen to her.”
It doesn’t take a week, Spencer thought. One evening.
Rosie said, “Maybe because there’s this hurt in her. She’s been hurt a lot.”
“How?” he asked. “Who?”
She shrugged. “It’s nothing I know, nothing she ever said. You just feel it about her.”
He also had sensed a vulnerability in Valerie.
“But she’s tough too,” Rosie said. “Gee, I don’t know why I’m so jumpy about this. It’s not like I’m her big sister. Anyway, everyone’s got a right to be late now and then.”
The waitress turned away, and Spencer sipped his warm beer.
The piano player launched into “It Was a Very Good Year,” which Spencer disliked even when Sinatra sang it, though he was a Sinatra fan. He knew the song was intended to be reflective in tone, even mildly pensive; however, it seemed terribly sad to him, not the sweet wistfulness of an older man reminiscing about the women he had loved, but the grim ballad of someone at the bitter end of his days, looking back on a barren life devoid of deep relationships.
He supposed that his interpretation of the lyrics was an expression of his fear that decades hence, when his own life burned out, he would fade away in loneliness and remorse.
He checked his watch. Valerie was now an hour and a half late.
The waitress’s uneasiness had infected him. An insistent image rose in his mind’s eye: Valerie’s face, half concealed by a spill of dark hair and a delicate scrollwork of blood, one cheek pressed against the floor, eyes wide and unblinking. He knew his concern was irrational. She was merely late for work. There was nothing ominous about that. Yet, minute by minute, his apprehension deepened.
He put his unfinished beer on the bar, got off the stool, and walked through the blue light to the red door and into the chilly night, where the sound of marching armies was only the rain beating on the canvas awnings.
As he passed the art gallery doorway, he heard the shadow-wrapped vagrant weeping softly. He paused, affected.
Between strangled sounds of grief, the half-seen stranger whispered the last thing Spencer had said to him earlier:
Though Spencer knew that he was a fool for funding the wretch’s further self-destruction, he fished a crisp ten-dollar bill from his wallet. He leaned into the gloomy entryway, into the fetid stink that the hobo exuded, and held out the money. “Here, take this.”
The hand that rose to the offering was either clad in a dark glove or exceedingly filthy; it was barely discernible in the shadows. As the bill was plucked out of Spencer’s fingers, the vagrant keened thinly:
“You’ll be all right,” Spencer said sympathetically. “It’s only life. We all get through it.”
Plagued once more by the mental image of Valerie’s dead face, Spencer hurried to the corner, into the rain, to the Explorer.
Through the side window, Rocky watched him approaching. As Spencer opened the door, the dog retreated to the passenger seat.
Spencer got in the truck and pulled the door shut, bringing with him the smell of damp denim and the ozone odor of the storm. “You miss me, killer?”
Rocky shifted his weight from side to side a couple of times, and he tried to wag his tail even while sitting on it.
As he started the engine, Spencer said, “You’ll be pleased to hear that I didn’t make an ass of myself in there.”
The dog sneezed.
“But only because she didn’t show up.”
The dog cocked his head curiously.
Putting the car in gear, popping the hand brake, Spencer said, “So instead of quitting and going home while I’m ahead of the game, what do you think I’m going to do now? Hmmm?”
Apparently the dog didn’t have a clue.
“I’m going to poke in where it’s none of my business, give myself a second chance to screw up. Tell me straight, pal, do you think I’ve lost my mind?”
Rocky merely panted.
Pulling the truck away from the curb, Spencer said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m a basket case.”
He headed directly for Valerie’s house. She lived ten minutes from the bar.
