She bolted upright and spun around toward me.
Her blond hair was mussed and stuck out on the side, her brilliant green eyes soft and vulnerable, their sleepy quality only adding to the sublimity of her beauty. At just seventeen she had the old soul of a motherless daughter trapped in a small town with an alcoholic father.
“I tried to wait up for you,” she said. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”
“Can I have some coffee?” I asked as I made my way to my booth in the back.
“Sure,” she said, studying me for a moment before adding, “I’ll bring the pot.”
I made it to the booth and pitched into it.
The thick smell of old grease and stale cigarette smoke hung in the air.
“Anna’s called looking for you,” she said from behind the counter where she was preparing a fresh pot of coffee. “She told me what happened.”
As usual, Rudy’s was cold. According to Rudy, it caused people to eat more and had tripled his coffee sales. The way I figured it, the increased revenue might almost be enough to pay for his increased electric bill. The condensation covering the plate glass widows in front made them look like sheets of ice and blurred everything seen through them.
“What’d you tell her?”
“Just that I hadn’t seen you,” she said.
“If she calls again, tell her the same thing,” I said.
Carla turned toward me, her brow furrowed, eyes questioning.
My eyebrows shot up. Challenging.
She looked back down at the coffee pot. “Sure,” she said softly.
Since I’d moved back to Pottersville, I had spent many nights here in this booth in the back, reading, studying, making case notes and sermon outlines, and talking to Carla. Most of the time, it was just the two of us, which is why I came. The café sat on the highway and Rudy, Carla’s single father, insisted that it stay open twenty-four hours. And since Rudy was in the back passed out most nights, Carla was the one to keep it open, napping at the bar throughout the night before getting ready and going to school the next morning.
Like the Pinkertons, I didn’t sleep, not much anyway, so when I was here, Carla could. She often thanked me for keeping an eye on the place, never seeming to realize it was her I had come to watch over.
She brought over the coffee pot and two cups.
Wearing faded jeans and an Evanescence T-shirt, inexpensive white tennis shoes, no make-up or jewelry, she moved like she was on the runway-a carriage imbued with such elegance and dignity she made Dollar Store clothes look designer.
“You can go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be here.”
“But-”
“In fact,” I said, “you can go in the back and lie down. I can make a pot of coffee if someone comes in. And if something has to be cooked, I’ll come get you.”
Her sad sea-green eyes were full of compassion and I could tell she wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to be around anyone, not even her. All I wanted to do was drink my coffee and not sleep it off.
“You don’t want to talk?” she asked.
“I’ll gladly listen to anything you want to tell me,” I said. “But I have nothing to say.”
She hesitated before speaking and I added, “Do you have anything you need to talk about?”
She shook her head very slowly. “No,” she said softly, “not really.”
“Then get some sleep,” I said.
As she turned and began to walk away, I called after her. She turned quickly, a hopeful, even expectant look on her face. “Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said with a small smile. She then continued walking away another step or two before turning around and coming back, taking a seat in the booth across from me.
“I know you’re… well… anyway, I do need to talk-if you can,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
As far as I knew, I was the only adult she really had to talk to.
Looking at her so closely in the harsh light of the diner, I realized she was not nearly as pretty as I thought she was-not physically anyway. Her eyes were just slightly too close together and her nose was a little on the long side. Perhaps if I were seeing her for the first time-or looking at a photograph of her-I would say she was a little above average at best, but I wasn’t. I was seeing her after knowing her. I was seeing, if not nearly all of her, far more than a first glance or picture could ever reveal. And I still say she was beautiful in a profoundly subtle way.
She took a deep breath and let it out. “I know we’ve talked about a lot of stuff, but this is hard.”
I waited. I should have encouraged her to continue, reassured her in some way, but I was in no condition to do either.
“I’ve got a couple of friends whose boyfriends are pressuring them to…” she began, then hesitated a moment, before dropping her voice and adding, “have sex with them.”
I nodded. Nothing new there.
“But they want to be virgins when they get married-or at least when they really fall in love and think the guy’s the one. So they’re considering alternatives-”
“The girls?” I asked.
“Yeah, but only because the boys are begging them to,” she said. “Do you know what I mean by alternatives?”
“Well, unless your generation has come up with some new ones, I only know of three,” I said.
A small smile twitched on her lips, then she raised her eyebrows and nodded slightly, trying to get me to elaborate.
“You want me to say them?” I asked.
I felt myself getting frustrated, but remembered how much I could have used someone to talk to besides my friends when I was her age.
Wincing slightly, she asked, “Would you?”
“Well,” I said, finding it more difficult to say than I thought it would be, “there’s manual, oral, and anal.”
She nodded, a look of relief filling her face. “The third one,” she said. “They already do the first two. They think if they do it-the other thing-their boyfriends will be satisfied and they’ll still be virgins.”
I shook my head. “They might be virgins-depending on how you define it, I guess-but their boyfriends will never be satisfied. At least not for more than a few minutes at a time. And if the, ah, standard way becomes the thing they can’t do, it will become the thing they most want to.”
She nodded. “I told them that,” she said. “Well, something kind of like that.”
“Are we really talking about friends of yours?” I asked.
She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’ve thought about it some, too, but I don’t even have a very serious boyfriend.”
“Just be very, very careful,” I said. “You’re all making decisions that can affect the rest of your lives.”
“It really is about two of my friends,” she said. “I thought if I told them you said it, they’d listen.”
I laughed.
“You’re very influential,” she said with a wry, self-satisfied smile. She patted my hand and stood up.
“I’ll leave you alone now,” she said. “Thanks.”
When she had climbed back onto the bar chair and laid her head down on the counter next to her school books, I said, “Go get in bed. At least get a couple of good hours.”
She glanced toward the back and the small living quarters she refused to call home, then back at me. “I’d rather just stay here.”
I nodded and smiled at her.
Before I finished my first cup and just about the time Carla dozed off, the cowbell above the door clanged and Anna walked in.
It was the only time in my life I could recall not being happy to see her.
She spoke to Carla, then walked over and slid into the booth across from me.
We sat in silence for a long moment, staring at each other. Her huge brown eyes took me in, and though there was only acceptance and compassion in them, I didn’t like the reflection I saw.
My embarrassment at her seeing my weakness was compounded by how much I needed her, but the self-loathing I felt couldn’t compare to the pain her presence inflicted.