“Seriously, Jason, you are not the one to apologize.”
He left the money on the counter when he went back to his table. She rang up his purchase and put the change in the tip jar. A year and a half ago she might have resented him for being cavalier about the money, but she was no longer that person. Somewhere she’d lost her capacity for resentment, and for hostility as well, and thus, to some extent, for being amusing. This was a real loss, but there was nothing she could do about it except be sad. She was pretty sure the loss predated the knowledge that her mother was a billionaire.
For a while the stream of customers was steady. Navi had to pull her out of the weeds more than once; accidental coffee and dairy wastages were running high. During another lull, Jason returned to the counter. “I’m taking off,” he said.
“It was nice to see you again. I mean, discounting my excruciating embarrassment.”
“I still come here every Sunday. But now you can think, ‘Oh, that’s just Jason.’ I can think, ‘Oh, that’s just Pip.’”
“Is that something I said?”
“It’s something you said. Will I see you next Sunday?”
“Probably. It’s not a popular shift.”
He started to leave and then turned back to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That sounded like something I didn’t mean. Asking if you’d be here next week.”
“It just sounded friendly.”
“Good. I mean — I’m kind of with someone else. I didn’t want to send the wrong message.”
She felt a small pang but no surprise. “Message of friendliness received.”
He was walking away when she found herself laughing. He turned back. “What?”
“Nothing. Sorry. Unrelated.”
When he was gone, more laughter escaped her. A stupid condom! Was anything funnier than a condom? If she hadn’t left Jason and gone downstairs to get one, a year and a half ago, she might never have taken Annagret’s questionnaire, and everything that had happened to her since then wouldn’t have happened. If she’d had a boyfriend, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave town. She would never have learned about the other condoms, the comedy of that. The comedy of her even existing. Navi was giving her a chiding look, but she couldn’t stop laughing.
In the afternoon, when her shift ended, she walked back down the hill. The sky was as clear as if there’d never been such a thing as fog. In theory, she was now supposed to work on a piece the Express had commissioned, a firsthand account of life as a Sunlight Project intern. But no matter how long or good the piece was, she wouldn’t get more than a couple of hundred dollars for it, and she still had her loan payments to make; hence the full-time job at Peet’s. She also didn’t know how to write about Andreas. It might be a year, or a decade, before she could sort out how she felt about his death, and she already had so much else to sort out, such a mountain of unsorted material, that all she’d been good for, after putting in her hours at Peet’s, was whacking dead tennis balls against the door of Dreyfuss’s garage.
Dreyfuss was supine on his living-room sofa, watching an A’s game. He was recovering from treatment of an intestinal parasite for which the freeganism of his housemates Garth and Erik was probably responsible. Garth and Erik themselves were temporarily in the Alameda County jail. Three days ago, they’d “assaulted” a real-estate agent attempting to show Dreyfuss’s house to prospective buyers, and crowdfunding by their anarchist friends had yet to raise enough bail for both of them.
“Someone smells like coffee,” Dreyfuss said.
“I brought you scones,” Pip said, unzipping her knapsack. “Do you want milk with them? I brought some milk home, too.”
“The challenge of stale scone and a perpetually dry mouth may be insurmountable without it.”
Dreyfuss put the bag of scones on his diminished but still convex belly and reached into it. Pip set the plastic bottle on the coffee table. “Yesterday was the use-by date, just so you know. Have you heard anything more from the bank?”
“Even Relentless Pursuit rests on the Sabbath.”
“It’s going to be fine. They can’t do anything until you’ve had your hearing.”
“Nothing I’ve learned about Judge Costa inclines me toward optimism. He appears to have an eighth-grade education and slavish respect for the rights of corporations. I’ve edited my presentation to the bone, but there are still a hundred twenty-two discrete narrative elements. I suspect that the judge’s attention will wander after three or four of them.”
Pip wasn’t so afraid of Dreyfuss anymore, and unfortunately his bank wasn’t either. She patted one of his heavy and nearly hairless hands. She didn’t expect him to respond in any way, and he didn’t.
Upstairs, in her old room, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Half the room was piled with Stephen’s belongings and scavenged crap, which she’d rearranged in more vertical form to make room for her mattress and suitcase. Two weeks ago, from her friend Samantha’s apartment, after emerging from the haze into which she’d put herself with Samantha’s Ativan, she’d called Dreyfuss to say hi and tell him he’d been right about those Germans. Dreyfuss told her that Stephen was adventuring in Central America with a twenty-year-old girl who had parental money. Currently Garth and Erik were Dreyfuss’s only housemates; she was welcome to her old room if she wanted it. The male filth of the house was even more disgusting than she’d imagined, but cleaning it had given her some direction for a while.
In Stephen’s pile of junk she’d found an old Pro Kennex tennis racquet. Dreyfuss’s garage door was loose in its frame and weakened by dry rot. Even the hardest-hit balls hopped back from it with a puppyish lack of aggression. Behind the garage was a wall of broadleaf evergreens that served as a backstop. Balls she bombed over it were easily replaced by searching the bushes in Mosswood Park. The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she’d ever done.
From some weeks of tennis in her high-school gym class, she knew she needed to keep her eye on the ball and address it sideways. Her backhand was still a flail, but the forehand — oh, the forehand. Her natural stroke was topspin, a ripping upswing. She could pound forehands for fifteen minutes, scurrying around the return caroms, repositioning herself like a cat with her mouseball, before she had to catch her breath. Each whack was another small bite taken out of a too-long late afternoon.
She’d still been in Denver, having crashed for some nights with her former share-mates in Lakewood, when the email headed le1°9n8a0rd came in. She’d sensed right away that the document attached to it was from Tom’s computer, which she’d promised never to violate. But later the same day, after a punishing bus ride to the Denver airport, there had followed two short emails from Tom himself.
Andreas dead. Suicide. I’m in physical shock but thought you should know.
PS: I’m in Bolivia, I saw him go. If he sent you something, please shred it without reading it. He was mentally ill.
More than shock, or dread, or pain, what punched her in the stomach and sickened her was guilt. And this was strange: why guilt? But she knew what she knew. The sick feeling was definitely guilt. Mechanically, because her group number had been called, she went ahead and boarded her cheap Frontier Airlines flight to San Francisco. There were soldiers on the plane. They’d been invited to board early, and her seat was next to one of them.
He was mentally ill. She’d both known this and not known it. Had seen it but also had done what he’d asked her not to do: had projected. Projected her own sanity onto him. If he really was dead now, she must have had it in her power to save him. This idea was obviously a form of self-flattery, but when she examined her memories of their times alone, it seemed to her that he’d been asking her to save him. She’d thought she was doing the morally right thing by rejecting him, but what if it had been morally the wrong thing? A failure of compassion? She scrunched herself down in her narrow airline seat and cried as inconspicuously as she could, keeping her eyes shut, as if this could make her invisible to the soldier in fatigues beside her.