“We can hear you,” Linus called.
Maria pulled Bob a few steps farther away. “Well, what the fuck?”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you mad at me?”
“Can you not see that I’m mad at you?”
“You seem mad at me.”
“I am mad at you! The whole time I was in there giving that smug shit the details on Chip, I knew I should also tell him about you three being gone as well. But I just — I couldn’t do it.” She touched the side of her face and she went into a kind of swoon. Her phone rang and she shooed Bob away and shut herself into her office. Brighty stepped out of the elevator and walked up to join the others. “I napped the whole goddanged day away,” she said. “What’d I miss?” Linus was filling her in when Maria came out of her office and announced that Chip’s son was on his way to the center.
“Chip has a son?” asked Brighty.
“Yes,” Maria said, “and he sounds very angry.” She returned to her office and laid her head on her desk. The group discussed the mysteries of Chip’s biography. They pooled their information and found there was none; they knew not a single thing about her. “Not even her name,” said Brighty.
“It’s Chip Something,” said Jill helpfully.
Brighty was shaking her head. “I hung that on her when she first came in. Chip, like chipper, get it?”
Jill said, “But she’s not chipper at all.”
“Yes, Jill, I’m aware of that. The function of the nickname is ironical.” She looked to Bob and Linus. “Try to keep up, kids.”
Bob asked, “Is Brighty a nickname?”
Brighty said, “Who gave you the green light to get personal?”
The Chip saga continued into the night and Bob stayed on far later than he ever had before. His presence was not helpful in any real way, but there was a vigil sense to the evening which he couldn’t tear himself away from. The Great Room took on a new set of visual properties after dark; the sconce lights were set on a dimmer, and the woodwork was honey-colored, the center transformed to the stately home it once had been. Bob and Linus played cards, with Jill looking on and commenting on the plays like a cynical television announcer who believed the players couldn’t hear her. “That was foolish. He’s getting greedy.” They were playing for factual peanuts, but something in the raking in and pushing out of these awakened the gambling impulse in Linus, who brought up the idea that Bob should bundle up and make the trek to the market for a stack of scratchers.
“You mean we’ll go together?” Bob asked.
“Well, no.”
“And who’ll foot the bill for the scratchers?”
“I mean,” said Linus.
Actually, Bob didn’t mind going; he put his coat back on and left the center. Outside and the world was quiet; the snow was no longer falling but there was a full foot of it on the ground, and the moon was rising in the sky. A lone car passed in the distance and Bob was at peace as his boots punch-punched through the untouched snow. When he entered the 7-Eleven he recognized the cashier from his last visit, and the young man instantly recognized him, hopping up from his stool and pointing a two-foot meat stick like a cutlass toward the rear of the store, where Chip was standing at the glass doors, clinging to the handle for support and staring in at the refrigerated beverages. The cashier said she had arrived just as he came on shift, a full five hours prior; and whereas her presence had been alarming to him the first time around, now he was rooting for her, in the way one might root for a marathon dancer or flagpole sitter, humbled by her dedication to her arcane medium. Bob borrowed the cashier’s phone and called the center. He volunteered to walk Chip back, but Maria insisted he stay put and wait for the ambulance, and he did this, standing at Chip’s side and making observational comments about the weather, praising her tenacity, trying and failing to get her to drink from a bottle of water. Her legs were trembling from fatigue, and when the paramedics came they had to pry her hands from the glass door handle. She was groaning as they led her away on a gurney, her hands still gripping the air before her. After she’d gone, Bob bought several different kinds of scratchers, twenty in total, five for each of the four waiting together at the center — it didn’t occur to him to get any for Maria. “How’ve you been?” he asked the cashier, who made the half-and-half gesture. Bob admitted he’d forgotten to pay for his coffee all those months earlier, and volunteered to pay now; the cashier raised his meat stick up above Bob’s head, then gently tapped it over his right and left shoulder. “On behalf of the 7-Eleven corporation and all of her subsidies, I absolve you of your debt.” Bob thanked him and returned to the night. By the time he got back to the center the Great Room was dark, save the light bleeding in from Maria’s office, where she sat opposite a man in a worn canvas coat and blue jeans. The man was turned away, so Bob couldn’t see his face, but Maria’s face was drawn, and her body language read of remorse, apology, shame. Linus hissed from the rear of the Great Room and Bob moved to sit beside him.
“What are you doing in the dark?”
“Spying, what does it look like?”
“Where is everybody?”
“Gone to bed.”
“Where’s Chip?”
“They took her to the hospital.”
“Is she okay?”
“As okay as she ever was.”
“And that’s the son?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he mad?”
“He’s mad. Did you get the scratchers?” Linus had laid out two quarters in readiness; he wanted to scratch all the scratchers elbow to elbow with Bob. Bob counted out ten per each of them; Linus tidied his stack and took up his coin. “Ready?” he asked, and Bob said he was, and they began.
There had been evidence of an odd-shaped fate running through the day, and both Linus and Bob were taken by an unspoken potentiality. But neither of them won anything, not a solitary dollar, and they sat for a time in silence, feeling the feeling that was failure. Linus said, “When we gamble, we’re asking the universe what we’re worth, and the universe, terrifyingly, tells us.” He patted his hand on the table, pinched his big beret. “Good night, amigo,” he said.
“Good night,” said Bob.
Linus wheeled away and Bob sat alone in the dark, looking into Maria’s office. Chip’s son was standing now, pulling on his gloves and hat, shaking his head at Maria, who stared wanly, saying nothing. Bob considered Chip’s son as he left the center. He was in his middle forties, working-class, and his handsome face was tight and he was muttering to himself, still angry, and who could blame him. But Bob felt sorrier for Maria than Chip’s son, or Chip, even. He watched as she rose up and pulled on her coat. When she left her office, Bob scraped his chair to let her know he was there; she startled and squinted. “Bob? What are you doing?” It was past midnight. Bob told her he needed a ride home. “Well, why not?” Maria said, aloud, to herself.
It was odd being in Maria’s car; the cramped vehicle was filled with fast-food trash and smashed coffee cups. The roads were empty and Bob said, “Left here. Left again. Right here.” The car slipped around corners and slid past stop signs and Maria was quietly laughing; she was dead on her feet, she said. The car pulled up in front of Bob’s house; Maria said, “What a nice little place.” Bob felt her disappointment and frustration regarding the Chip situation, and he wanted her to know how much everyone at the center liked and appreciated her. Maria in turn intuited that something bulkily sincere was moving in her direction and she told Bob she was too tired to field anything of the sort. “One kind word and I’ll burst into tears, Bob, I’m serious.” Bob said that he understood and thanked her for the ride and exited the car and walked up the snow-covered path to the house. There was the sound of his footsteps and of Maria’s car driving away. There was the sound of his keys jingling, and the soft sound of his breathing. The house was completely silent. He went upstairs and drew a bath and bathed and put on his pajamas and lay down to sleep but couldn’t sleep. He put on his robe and came downstairs and sat on the couch to read but couldn’t do that, either. He moved to sit in the kitchen nook and look out the picture window. All was still, the snow glittering in the moonlight, untouched save for Maria’s car tracks and his own footsteps. Bob was thinking of the events of the day. Nobody had congratulated him on finding Chip, and he wondered if anybody ever would. No one will ever thank you, he remembered Maria telling him. It occurred to Bob that he would never have come to the center in the first place if it weren’t for Chip; and how curious a thing it was that their story had looped back onto itself at the 7-Eleven. Bob thought of Chip’s son, and the look of anger on his face, but also how handsome he was, and of the unlikeliness that Chip should sire such a specimen. He had looked familiar, Bob realized, like some famous bygone film actor, or politician. Or was it a face from the past, a library regular? It nagged at Bob, and he made to locate the answer. The furnace groaned in the basement and now the heat came on and Connie’s dress, which Bob had never put away, started its undulations, and something in this visual delivered Bob the answer to his question; and when the answer arrived, then did Bob shoot away from himself for one airborne moment, as if his tether had been cut. Chip’s son looked like Ethan. Bob covered his shut mouth with his hand. He worked out a problem of arithmetic in his mind. The data was sound and he crossed the kitchen to seek out Maria’s business card and found it pinned to the cork board beside the phone on the wall. The clock on the oven said it was almost two o’clock in the morning but Bob couldn’t not call, and he punched in the number and waited. It rang four times and went to voicemail. He called again and Maria picked up but didn’t speak. Bob said, “What’s Chip’s real name?” Maria wasn’t fully awake; she thought she’d entered another chamber of the multivenue persecution nightmare she’d been having relating to Chip’s disappearance. In a crouching voice she said, “Connie Augustine,” then hung up the phone.