She took it.
“Thanks.” Her cigarette dangled from her lips. She began to close the door.
“I knew your daughter,” I blurted, my words running together, before she could shut the door.
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” she said. “How did you know her?”
“High school.” I thought about Sir Walter Scott’s old quote about webs and deception.
“You went to school in New York?” she asked. “What are you doing out here, in Sterling Springs?”
The lies were building. “This is actually where I grew up. My parents just moved there for a few years, and that’s how I met Catherine.”
I had no clue where this was going.
“That so,” she said.
“The flowers are from me.” I tried a smile.
Candace Courington looked at the arrangement. “That’s nice of you.”
She stepped back to close the door. I knew this was my only chance. “Can I tell you a story about Catherine, Mrs. Courington? A story from our days in New York?”
Jesus.
She stared at me for a moment, thoughtfully.
“Sure,” she said at last. “Come in. You want a glass of water?”
“If you don’t mind.”
The mobile home was dark and piles of bills were stacked on end tables, alongside prescription pill bottles. The TV was on, and a woman on the screen was sobbing.
We sat in the living room, on a saggy sofa with the plaid cloth worn thin on the edges. A framed print of that Impressionist painting by Seurat, “Sunday in the Park” or whatever it’s called, hung slightly crooked over us. It’s weird that all the people in that painting, all the well-dressed women with their parasols, and the men with their top hats and the dogs and the kids, and even the monkey, are all facing the lake or away in another direction. But not the little girl. That kid with her white dress and bonnet, right in the middle of the painting, is looking right at you.
Candace Courington fetched me a glass of water from the kitchen. On a coffee table was a magazine, Modern Amputee. I picked it up and looked at the attractive blond woman posing on the cover. She wore a prosthetic leg.
I thumbed through some unopened envelopes next to the magazine. One was addressed to Catherine Courington, 210 E. 5th Street, New York, New York—a phone bill. I folded it and put it in my back pocket. I felt like a douche bag but kept it anyway.
“What’s your name?” asked Candace Courington, returning to the room and handing me the glass of water.
“I’m Josh. Josh Dieboldt.”
“What do you do, Josh? Besides deliver flowers, I mean?” She sat down next to me. We were both sunk so low, it felt like we were sitting on the floor.
“I’m studying English lit at Rock River College.”
“What do you want to do with that?”
“Be a writer, maybe.” I shrugged and picked up the water glass but didn’t drink it.
Candace Courington stared at the ragged brown carpeting. “Catherine was a reader. That girl always had a book in her hands. Ever since she was little.”
She looked up.
“So what story were you going to tell me? How did you two meet?”
Across the street, a car engine growled—an eight-cylinder Godzilla. The guy in the driveway had started his El Camino.
“We just met on the street one afternoon. May,” I said. “It smelled like flowers and garbage, because they stack the trash bags up into little mountains on the sidewalks in New York.”
God, what a bullshitter.
“Catherine loved the city.”
“I know. She did. And I loved that about her. But, anyway, I just saw her one afternoon on a street corner in Soho, and introduced myself. I’d never done that before, but there was something about her. Something familiar and, for me, predestined. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I know this is weird, Mrs. Courington, but it was like I knew your daughter the minute I saw her. It was déjà vu, fate, astral influence, two trains on opposite tracks passing each other in the night and two passengers peering out windows and spotting each other, just for a moment.”
As I said these words, I knew that in truth, two trains had indeed passed each other, but only one passenger was looking.
“You are a writer,” she said, almost smiling. “What did Catherine say about all this talk of fate?”
“I didn’t want to scare her or freak her out, so I never told her. I wish I had the chance now. God, how I wish I could tell her. I hope this doesn’t scare you, but every atom in my being believes we were soul mates.”
Mrs. Courington shook her head. “You should have told her. She believed in all of that, you know, fate. She loved stories where things worked out differently. Alternate realities, she called it. It’s funny. She always had the sense that she’d find her one true love right here in Sterling Springs.”
I was silent. I was that true love.
“I don’t mean to pry,” I said finally, “but can I ask what happened? I was just so shocked when I heard the news.”
She looked at me, startled. She put her hand over her mouth.
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
She looked devastated, and really old. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it right now. It’s just too much. I’m afraid you have to leave.”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to leave, but standing up anyway.
“Thanks for the flowers. That was very thoughtful. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I stepped out into the hot afternoon sunlight, and the door closed behind me. The guy across the street turned and looked at me again. I felt insanely frustrated.
Crossing the street, I approached him.
“Hi,” I said. He wore a muscle T-shirt with the words ALL WOUND UP on it. His goatee was uneven; he had shaved too close on the right side, and it had left a big gouge where the hair used to be. The unevenness was distracting.
“Yeah?”
“I was just wondering,” I said, “How well do you know Mrs. Courington across the street?”
“Well enough,” he said, wiping his greasy hands on his jeans.
“Do you know what happened to her daughter?”
“She’s dead.”
“I know. But how did she die?”
The guy’s eyes grew skinny.
“What business is it of yours, peckerwood?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why don’t you go askin’ her mother? What you askin’ me for?”
“Never mind,” I said, turning back to the van. I climbed in, started the engine, and turned it around. The whole time, the guy continued to glare. He was saying something, too, pointing at me, but I couldn’t hear him because the windows were up.
After work, I went home and straight downstairs. I pulled the phone bill out of my back pocket and unfolded it. I felt guilty for stealing the thing. I stared at the New York City address. I imagined some old gray-stone building along a tree-lined street. The building had a lobby with brass mailboxes set into the wall. The phone bill would have been delivered there, waiting for Catherine.
I tore open the envelope. The bill was several pages. It had an itemized list of the calls made in the last weeks of May. Many were to Illinois, probably to her mother. Dozens were to New York numbers, a few to Newark and Boston, one to Chicago. I thought about going to New York City, going to the apartment building and meeting her neighbors. Find out how she died.
But then I realized it didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter how she died. What mattered was that she was no longer alive, and I had no chance at all. I thought of the soft fabric of that sweater under my fingertips, her closed eyes and smooth skin, that slight scar and how she got it—and the dreams. I thought of those dreams and how she never spoke to me.