I put on clean underwear and my jeans, picked up my clean towel and green plastic bag with my soap, razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, and went out on the landing. The air was heavy and wet and I didn’t want to deal with it.
The rest room was empty. Digger had moved up in the world, at least for now. The mirror could have been cleaner, but it was clean enough to show me the thin, hairy-chested bald man with sad, brown eyes.
“Good morning,” I said to myself.
The guy in the mirror didn’t think so. Besides, he needed a shave. Washed, clean-shaven, and toothbrushed, I left the rest room with the towel around my neck and my green plastic bag under my arm.
I had left the door unlocked.
Digger sat in the chair across my desk. He looked relatively clean and very nervous.
“The door was open,” he said.
I nodded.
“I came in,” he said. “Can we talk?”
“I’m going down to Gwen’s for breakfast,” I said, moving toward the back room. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“That’d be nice,” he said. “Very nice.”
I put on a shirt, white socks, and sneakers, and motioned for Digger to follow me. When we were on the landing, I locked the door.
“I’m scared,” Digger said as we went down the stairs. “I gotta dance tonight. I don’t think I can do it.”
“You can do it,” Knute Fonesca said evenly.
“No, it’s too late. Life waltzed right by me while I was two-stepping in the desert of despair for all these years,” Digger said.
“Colorful talk for a frightened dance instructor. Talk like that to the old ladies and you’ll have your salary doubled in a month.”
We crossed the DQ parking lot and turned right, staying as far away as possible from the curb where cars were spraying rainwater as they passed. We passed the workout club, antique shop, and a storefront for rent before we got to the diner.
Gwen’s Diner is a holdover from a few years before the day Elvis supposedly came in and bought two cheeseburgers and a Coke sometime in the Fifties. A poster of Elvis, guitar in hand, mouth open, arm reaching up in midsong, hung on the wall with a little index card Scotch-taped to it with Elvis’s autograph.
If you sat in the right place at the counter, you could see both Elvis and any collisions that might take place where 301 met the curve at Tamiami Trail.
People who had been coming here regularly for a decade or two called the place Gwen’s II. No one remembers the original Gwen’s, if there ever was one. The place was owned and run now by a woman named Sheila and her two daughters, one of whom, Jesse, was eighteen and about to graduate a year late at Sarasota High School a block away. She was a year late because she had taken time out to have her second baby. The other daughter, Jean, had graduated a year ago. They were all natural blonds and all able to deflect a sharp or heavy innuendo with the skill of a seasoned and well-armed gladiator.
Digger and I took a booth in the no-smoking section. The no-smoking section was four booths against one wall with smokers surrounding it.
Gwen’s was busy, and the three women were scurrying around but making it look easy, taking care of the counter-sitters and going from a table of roofers, to a single car salesman reading his newspaper, to three women who looked as if they were just going to or coming from the fitness center Digger and I had passed on our way here.
“Coffee?” asked Sheila, looking down at us.
All three women wore whatever they felt like wearing, which was generally tight jeans, when they weren’t pregnant, and various brightly colored T-shirts.
“Yes. Waffles and an egg over easy with bacon for me,” I said.
“Fueling up for the day, Fonesca?” she asked with a smile. “And you?”
She looked at Digger with a businesslike smile.
“The same,” he said, looking at me to be sure it was all right.
I nodded to Sheila, who scribbled on her pad.
“How are the kids?” I asked.
“You mean my girls or their little ones?” she asked.
“Everyone.”
“Dancing through life,” Sheila said, turned, and moved toward the kitchen.
“That’s it. That’s it. It’s the dancing,” Digger said, leaning toward me across the table. “I don’t trust my knees. I stopped dancing through life ten years ago and started to walk slow and for maybe the last two, three years I’ve been, to tell you the truth, crawling.”
Sheila came back with two mugs of coffee.
“Big Cheese Omelet up,” a woman’s voice came from the kitchen out of sight from where we sat.
Help arrived in the form of Tim from Steubenville, who moved from the counter and sat next to me, facing Digger. Tim lived in an assisted-living home a short walk away at the end of Brother Geenen Way. He spent as much time as he could at Gwen’s, reading the newspaper and telling those who’d listen that drugs, which he had never used, should be legalized, that there should be no income tax, that gays should do whatever they wanted including getting married, that anyone who wanted a gun and wasn’t insane should have one. Since there was very little left of Tim, who was eighty-nine years old, the regulars at Gwen’s tolerated him, a few even agreeing with him from time to time, which he appreciated, or argued with him, which he appreciated even more.
Tim had brought his coffee and newspaper with him. He looked at Digger.
“Seen you around,” Tim said.
Digger nodded.
“You’re looking better than I seen you before.”
Digger nodded again.
“Off the bottle?” Tim asked.
“I don’t drink,” a melancholy Digger said. “No drinking. No drugs. Haven’t smoked in twenty years or more.”
“Nothing to give up,” said Tim, nodding in sympathy.
Sheila looked over at me from the table of the three women and made a nod, which I took to mean that she would ease Tim back to the counter if I wanted him gone. I shook my head once to let her know Tim’s presence was all right with me. I preferred Tim talking to Digger than my talking to either one of them.
I tuned them out, hearing only voices, not words, until Sheila came with our platters and a flip-top pitcher of syrup.
“I never thought of it that way,” Digger was saying when I came back to earth.
“Well, what the hell you have to lose?” said Tim. “What the hell?”
Having accomplished his mission, Tim folded his newspaper, picked up his mug of coffee, and went back to his place at the counter, where he immediately engaged a burly trucker in animated conversation.
Digger dug into his food and finished long before I did, a determined look on his face. I was about halfway through when Digger said, “You mind if I get going? I’ve got stuff to do to get ready for work tonight.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Thanks for your help,” Digger said, getting up.
“Sure,” I said again, wondering for only a beat what Tim had said to him that had brought Digger back to the first small step of self-confidence.
I left a tip on the table and paid Jesse at the cash register with Elvis in midgyration a few feet to my right.
Less than fifteen minutes later I pulled onto the driveway at Seventeenth Street Park. I passed a big open field on my left, where about a dozen people and the same number of dogs were running and barking. The parking lot a little farther down on the left was almost full, but there were spaces open if I was willing to step into shallow puddles left by the rain.
I could see ball games going on beyond the mesh fence, and I went through an open gate and down a concrete path. Voices were traveling in the heavy air. The sound of an aluminum bat hitting a ball clanked clearly,
