She nodded and I rose. She watched me as if I were a soaring redwood — a tree that lived on fog, a tree that could not thrive in a desert even if that desert was flooded and lined with the sweet rot of corruption.
23
The diner could have been designed by the same company that built the bank. Glass and chrome and red linoleum and vinyl were all it had to show. There was a counter with fourteen high stools and six booths along the glass wall. I sat in the corner stall farthest from the door. A red-eyed, red-faced, red-haired waitress of thirty and then some came up to me and said, “Sorry, honey, but the booths are for two or more.”
Her name tag read RILLA.
“My friend is coming over from the bank in just a minute,” I said. “She wants strawberry shortcake and coffee. I’ll have the same without the strawberry shortcake.”
This made the hard-living waitress smile. She showed me her stubby yellow teeth and said, “I had a boyfriend like you down in San Diego one time. The things he did with words kept me laughin’ so much that even when he stole my money and my car I still thought he was almost worth it.”
“You never saw it comin’,” I said, “and he don’t know what he left behind.”
Her grin widened, and she shook her head as a sort of agreement.
I looked at Rilla, thinking about the thousands of species of trees that proliferated under the Southern California sun. You couldn’t count them because new ones were coming in every day. There were more kinds of people than there were types of trees in LA. Rilla in her blue-and-white checkered uniform and I in my charcoal suit were kindred seeds blown in from far away. Just thinking that lightened my spirit.
The waitress would have stayed awhile to see what other gems I might put down, but Faith Morel came in then. I looked up and Rilla turned.
“Right here, miss,” the red-on-red-on-red woman said. “He’s a laugh a minute.”
Faith tried to smile but only managed an aspect of wan nausea. Rilla looked at her and shook her head again.
“You take care of her now, Groucho,” the waitress told me.
It seemed to me like an annunciation, a pronouncement from the deity I imagined who only appeared now and then to advise us and then watch us fail.
Rilla left, and Faith moved in across from me.
She was devastated. This wasn’t a state of mind that had just come upon her; I could see its history in the lines around her eyes and the slump of her shoulders.
“What happened?” I asked.
She tried to speak but could not bring out the words. I admired her ability to work so amiably while carrying this weight.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it must be bad news that brought you here. I mean, to get Christmas to let go of Easter Dawn is pretty serious all by itself.”
There was something ethereal about Morel. Her mind seemed to be pressing into mine as she stared at me, wondering if I could even understand her pain. I was drawn to her like a beast that smells water and is dimly reminded of its distant infancy, romping with snuffling brother and sister pups many seasons gone.
That diner was a defining moment for me. . . . Maybe not that, not a seminal event but a time when I got to see what I had become. While Faith examined me for strength and fealty, I watched her, thinking about Bonnie Shay. Faith had that aura about her, the same as Bonnie did. Sitting there feeling what had been gone from my life for so long, I understood that I could not live without Bonnie. It did not matter that she’d been with another man; it did not matter about my masculinity or my rage. Either I was going to be back with her or, one way or another, I was going to die.
“Here you go,” Rilla said, putting two coffees and an obscenely large portion of strawberry shortcake on the table.
“I didn’t order this,” Faith said.
“Funny man here did,” Rilla informed her.
Faith turned to me as Rilla went away. A barrier was removed from the bank officer’s blue eyes and she smiled. Something about me ordering her something sweet to make her feel better. It’s funny the way we make up the truth about people.
“Have you ever heard of the Sisters of Salvation?” she asked me.
“No sisters, just the army.”
“We were . . . we are a group of lapsed nuns of different denominations and religions that got together to help women all over the world. We have a mission in Vietnam. I worked there for three and a half years. I ran an orphanage on the outskirts of Saigon.”
“That’s more than a job,” I said.
“Christmas brought Easter to me after he’d massacred seventeen civilians near the DMZ. He came to visit her every chance he got and he confessed to me what he had become, what the military had turned him into.
“He was in pain, trying to figure out if he should join forces with Ho Chi Minh or kill himself to pay for his crimes. After a few months I convinced him to adopt Easter Dawn. I told him that they could save each other, and I guess they have . . . at least so far.”
Most beauty fades upon closer examination. Coarse features, unnoticed awkwardness, false teeth, scars, alcoholism, or just plain dumb; there is an abundance of possible flaws that we might miss on first sight. These blemishes are what we come to love in time. We are drawn to the illusion and stay for the reality that makes up the
