Stanley picks up some of the accounting paperwork and a notebook from the desk in their bedroom. He’ll need to inventory any exterior wind damage and inspect the inside of the market. The thought intrudes again: She’s gone. He instructs himself: Then I’m glad. Felice will always land on her feet. He lets the apartment door swing shut behind him and takes the wooden steps down to the landing behind the building. It occurs to him then to wonder where Nieves is. He considers that Felice could not have been a good influence on his girlfriend or future baby: like a free radical, unsettling the environment. He climbs over some bramble that had blown in at the foot of the landing and the chain-link fence encircling the sides and rear of the market. The air vibrates with a high-pitched whine; Stanley walks the perimeter, gathering the twigs and debris, then stops abruptly: Emerson is still there.
He’s out in front with Noah Tibold, who owns Zone Ten exotics nursery, and Nancy Pegrum — one of Stanley’s cashiers. Noah is using a small chain saw to take apart a bougainvillea that toppled over the lot’s north entrance. Emerson and Nancy rake piles of twigs and leaves. There’s such a settled, contented rhythm to their work that for a moment Stanley just stands there quietly, watching.
Stanley’s joints and muscles seem to loosen, relief coursing through his body. If Emerson is still here, Felice must be as well. But relief is immediately followed by stern annoyance. Stanley enters the front of the market. The generator is off and the air-conditioning seems to be functioning — he’d been braced for the pungent effluvia that had pervaded the store after Hurricane Charley. There’s some frost buildup on the dairy cases, the cut flowers have withered away, and the magazine covers of women in yoga poses or of gleaming plates of vegan stew (New Vegetarian) have all curled and buckled. But they appear to have come through the storm intact.
There’s a noise behind him and Stanley turns to see Marco Braithwaite, another regular, halfway through the door. “Stan? You guys open today?”
Stanley gestures him in. “We haven’t restocked yet, but if you see something you need…” He swings his arm open; he feels careless, expansive. “Go for it.”
Marco salutes, heading for the near-empty cereal aisle. “I’ll leave the money up front, how ’bout.”
Light-headed, Stanley strolls down Vinegars/Oils/Pastas toward the office. He can hear voices: the low current is Nieves and the nervous, lighter clip is, apparently, the voice his sister has grown into. Their voices slip together easily. He’s never seen Nieves warm to someone so quickly before. Felice is awkward, as if she’s out of practice with conversation, but she keeps going — making up for lost time. What happened to her? He’s employed enough people on various sorts of margins to recognize the bitten-away cuticles, the haunted eyes. He feels another surge of irritation: she should go. He doesn’t need this: he’s got enough to worry about without more turmoil, wondering about whatever ruins his sister is running from or the next time she’ll vanish. When Stanley reaches the doorway, both women look up, startled. Then Nieves smiles. “Hi, babe.” She reaches up for his kiss.
Felice seems instantly diffident. “Hiya, Stan.”
The air feels high and tight in his chest, his lungs cinched like a drawstring. Felice. Here. A velvety black gecko appears on the wall behind the girls — it’s trickled out of some corner and now rests mid-wall, its tiny throat beating, its body pointed like a dart. Stanley looks back at the women and he realizes that Felice is watching him with some anxiety, as if awaiting a decision. Arms crossed, her right hand absently circles her left elbow — a small tic he’d almost forgotten. He smiles weakly. Annoyed with himself, his lack of will, he sits beside Nieves and tips his nose to her hair. Not yet. He closes his eyes.
FELICE AND EMERSON spend that night and the next on Stanley’s floor, and still he fails to ask them to leave. Then they discover the couch in the living room pulls out into a bed — Stanley mimes smacking himself in the head — he’d completely forgotten (though it was, in fact, the place he used to sleep before meeting Nieves). Nieves gives him a narrow look and smooths fresh sheets onto the hide-a-bed.
Emerson spends the next few days clearing the parking lot, sawing tree limbs, sweeping the cement patio, and swabbing the store. Then he and Noah go out in Noah’s pickup and return with flats of wind-resistant coleus and aloe, and plant a decorative border along the front of the store. Nieves walks Felice through wines and cheeses. They officially reopen on the third day after the hurricane, and right away customers flash through the entrance. Still, Stanley can’t stop watching Felice, uneasy about the way his sister and girlfriend have adopted each other. He can’t understand how they can have so much to talk about so quickly. One day while he’s in his office, the girls are restocking the cheese cave. Through the office wall he overhears Nieves mention her big family. Their voices are barely muffled. Nieves is estranged from most of her relatives, and is coolly off-handed about it — Stanley has heard her tirades against her tyrannical stepfather and humorless siblings, as well as her disaffection for the notion of “family.” He’s opening cartons of crackers and stacking them against the wall when he hears Felice begin describing her life to Nieves — her runaway life. Stanley drifts to a stop, his hands still pressed to the large carton, as he hears: “It was like a kind of a halfway house, I guess. The Green House. Lots of kids. Yeah, Emerson, too, sometimes… No, I claimed this crappy mattress in a back room… A couple years. I guess… pretty safe. Compared to, you know, anyplace.”
There is the creak of a hand truck, a sound of movement, something tumbles, a flutter of laughter. Then, “We really can’t — exactly — go back. You know? I mean, I was done anyway. But we got into, like, some pretty heavy — some trouble?… Yeah… I did. Some guys… Yeah… I don’t know… I guess I probably shouldn’t say too much.”
Nieves’s questions are just soft dabs of sound.
“Modeling, sort of… Yeah… No… It was dumb… Tattoos… Yeah! Not permanent… I know… Actually it sucked… You can’t hardly eat… Not that I…”
Just like that, filling in the abysmal silence, the missing past, as if such a thing could be done. He stares at the carton in his hands: Finnish Flatbread: 48 count. The yellow walls of his office, the wet stain beside the coffeepot, a mug filled with pens, curling photographs of friends waving from canoes, rappelling up sheer cliffs. On his desk, an announcement for underwater birthing class, a flier for a tai chi workshop, stating: Only this moment, right now, to see the possibilities in it or not. Everything is so ordinary, yet he feels as if he’s been teleported to another solar system.
Stanley lies awake that night replaying old fragments, bits of memories of Felice: her tidy bedroom with the translucent shell chimes; the poster above her bed—Christina’s World—the back of a girl’s wind-stirred hair, her oddly twisted recline in the field. Stanley recycles their last conversations: the way he was always trying to apologize for whatever was making Felice run away, then trying to make himself angry enough not to care. But that was Stanley’s big problem — his anger was insubstantial — it wisped away between his fingers when he tried to grasp it. He even tried to provoke fights with her: once he snapped, “You need a shrink!”
She’d asked, “Would that make you happy?” What a thing for a thirteen-year-old to say! How could he be angry with her when so often she didn’t even seem to be there.