Bob nods and slips away.
Robert steps to the nearby checkout station.
A young man, with a jugular sunburst tattoo and a silver ring pierced into his lip, totals up the food, and Robert lets his reassessment register in his mind: From the clues of age in face and hair, Robert realizes Bob is no Vietnam veteran. As old as the man is — perhaps fifty or fifty-five — he is still too young to have been in Vietnam. He missed it by a decade or so.
Robert pays.
The clerk gives him a small, understanding nod.
“Do you know him?” Robert asks.
“He comes now and then,” the young man says.
Beans and rice and fizzy lemon water in hand, Robert turns away.
He steps into the dining area and sets the plate and the can before Bob. The man has carefully laid out his napkin and plastic utensils and has put his coins away.
He squares around to look up at Robert.
He is not the man Robert first thought him to be.
“Thank you,” Bob says.
Robert knows nothing about him.
“It’s a good meal,” Bob says.
“You bet,” Robert says, and he moves off, thinking: It would have made no difference. I would have done this anyway.
He sits down before Darla.
She leans toward him and says softly, “I’m glad you did that.”
To her credit, she does not ask what he’s bought the man. She sits back.
Her plate, once featuring the spicy Thai quinoa salad, is empty. He looks at his remaining tofu curry. He picks up his fork and begins pushing it around.
She says something he does not quite hear.
He stops pushing.
There are other voices in the dining area. Conversations.
He thinks: Can it have been that long ago?
But of course it can. Even consciously thinking about it, Vietnam yields up no clear, individual memory. Images are there — faces and fields and a headquarters compound courtyard and a bar and a bed and a river — but they are like thumbnails of forgotten snaps on a cellphone screen.
“More,” Darla says. As part of other things she’s been saying, no doubt.
Robert looks at her.
She narrows her eyes at him.
“It’s probably cold,” she says, nodding at his food.
“Probably,” he says.
“You can get some more,” she says.
“I don’t need anything,” he says.
She shrugs. “Shall we go?”
“Coffee,” he says. The word is a nanosecond or so ahead of the conscious thought.
She cocks her head. He went back to the stuff a few months ago after she’d wrangled a year of abstinence from him. She was reconciled to it but the one-word announcement sounds like a taunt, he realizes.
“Bob needs some coffee,” he says.
“Bob?” She twists at the word in her snorty voice, assuming he’s referring to his coffee-seeking self in the third person. She occasionally calls him Bob when she thinks he’s behaving badly.
He doesn’t explain. He rises. He approaches Bob. The man is hunched over his food, wolfing it in.
Robert is beside him before he looks up.
“You a coffee drinker, Bob?”
“I surely am,” he says.
“How do you take it?”
“With a splash of milk.”
“I’ll get you some.”
“I appreciate it, Bob,” Bob says.
Near the buffet, Robert begins to fill a cup from a percolator urn. Framed in the center of the urn is the bag art for today’s brew. An upsweep of mountains dense with tropical forest, the vista framed in coffee trees.
Somewhere along the highway to Dak To, they’d laid out the beans to dry. He is passing in a jeep, heading to an assignment that will quickly be changed, sending him upcountry. A pretty-faced girl in a conical hat, leaning on her coffee rake, lifts her face to him. And he sweeps on past.
The cup is nearly full.
He flips up the handle.
He splashes in some milk.
He returns to Bob.
The man thanks him again, briefly cupping both hands around the coffee, taking in its warmth before setting it down.
“You a Floridian, Bob?” Robert asks.
“I’m from Charleston, West Virginia,” he says.
“Good thing you’re not up there for the winter.”
Bob nods a single, firm nod and looks away. “I have to go back,” he says.
“Perhaps when things warm up.”
“No choice,” he says. “I’ve got responsibilities.” His face remains averted. He isn’t elaborating. His beans and rice are getting cold.
Robert still has the urge to make this encounter count for something beyond a minor act of charity. Learn a bit more about him. Offer some advice. Whatever. And this is all he can think to ask: “What sort of responsibilities, Bob?”
Bob doesn’t look at him.
He doesn’t eat.
He doesn’t drink.
Robert has made the man go absolutely still. But Robert sloughs off the niggle of guilt, thinking: He’s probably been asserting these responsibilities to himself for the whole, long slide to where he is now, knowing there’s nothing left where he came from, knowing he’ll never go back.
Robert puts his hand on Bob’s shoulder for a moment and then moves away.
He does not sit down at their table. Darla looks up. She glances at his empty hands. “No coffee?”
He shrugs.
She nods and smiles. “Finished with dinner?”
“Yes,” he says.
She gathers her things and they put on their coats. She leads the way across the floor. Darla may well glance at Bob as she passes, ready to offer him an encouraging smile. She would do that. But Bob looks up only after she’s gone by.
He fixes his eyes on Robert’s and upticks his chin. He says, “You know my old man, is that it?”
Robert takes the odd abruptness of the question in stride, answering a passing “No” as he follows Darla out of the dining area.
And that is that.
Darla and Robert are finished in town, and he drives toward home on the parkway. The two of them do not speak. This is not uncommon after dining out.
They live east and south of the Tallahassee city limits, on an acre of garden and hardwood and a dozen more of softwood, and the quickest way carries them first along a commercial scroll of strip malls and chain eateries, lube joints and furniture stores, pharmacies and gas stations. Robert finds himself acutely aware of all this. He turns south at his first opportunity, and then, shortly, he turns east again, onto Old Saint Augustine Road.
Darla humphs, though for all their years together she has alternately used this dismissive sound as a sign of approval. It is up to him to know which humph is which.
Old Saint Augustine is easy to interpret. Canopied in live oaks and hiding its residences and smattering of service commerce behind sweet gums and hickories and tulip poplars, this is a road from the state’s past, a subject he occasionally teaches at the university and Darla occasionally is happy to hear him discourse upon. Though their silence persists tonight.
She switches on the university radio station.
This same ostinato of orchestral strings presses his face to a window on a TWA 707. The Rocky Mountains crawl beneath him. He is flying to Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco. From there he will go to war. And this music is playing in his head through a pneumatic headset. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The first movement has tripped and stomped and danced, making things large, as Beethoven can do, but confidently so, almost lightly so. A little bit of the summer pastoral spilling over from the Sixth Symphony. And now, in the second movement, the largeness of things is rendered into reassuring repetitions. Can Robert believe this of what lies ahead of him, this grave contentment the music would have him feel?