“Would you like coffee?” she asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll make us a pot. I can do that.”
“I prefer tea,” she said. “Coffee makes my heart race.”
“I can make tea, then.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
But he couldn’t make tea, for he had none, and he’d run out of coffee as well. The cupboard was barren, save for a few sugar packets and take-out cups of jelly, a rusty tin of oatmeal. The oatmeal was the only thing he ever made for himself these days, and a sorry sight, but only because he wanted now to do something for her. Perhaps he’d not been exactly selfish all these years, but when was the last time he’d gone out of his well-rutted way for the sake of another? Hector knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was as unsociable as he, but the crabby fellow actually answered, and, though suspicious, eventually gave him two bags of Lipton, not waiting for Hector’s thank-you to slam shut his door. Hector put the water on and while it boiled he brought their chairs outside to the cracked patio, as the small apartment had become quite warmed from the cooking. It was balmy outside but still cooler than the kitchen, and he set a folding TV table between them and brought out their plates and tea. He opened the second bottle of wine for Dora and another beer for himself and they ate their slices of pie while watching some children playing hide-and-seek in the weedy courtyard of the complex.
A girl of five or six ran over and crouched behind the low brick wall that marked the border of the patio, theatrically shushing them with a finger to her lips. The seeker ran over to them immediately and found her out and the little girl must have believed herself betrayed because she made a sour face to Hector. He made one back, but with silliness, his eyes crossed, his front teeth bared. The two girls ran off, giggling.
“We’re like an old married couple,” Dora said, careful to mock the idea in case he took it wrongly. Hector didn’t reply but in fact he had thought it, too, recalling how his folks in their best times would enjoy sitting together on the porch of their house, wryly and good-naturedly commenting on the children’s games and pouring gin-spiked lemonade for each other into tall glasses of chipped ice. Among the children there was a competition to get a sip from Jackie’s glass, which he’d offer to the winner of whatever game they were playing, every now and then letting one of them down the rest of it, which inevitably turned into a competition unto itself. It was an age of such things, when they were all together during the war, his father 4-F, and at least in the private realm of the house at ease in his skin as he never was at the factory or in the pubs. His mother was in her prime beauty then, as lovely as any woman in town, but too young and naïve to know its measure, and she wore her splendor like an ill-fitting crown, half-embarrassed by the effect she’d have on perfect strangers on the street or at the green market.
“Dinner was real good,” he said to Dora.
“You’re being charitable. My mother certainly wouldn’t have thought it up to snuff. I bet you have women cooking for you all the time.”
“Yeah? How many have you seen hanging around here?”
“Well, you’ve just asked them to be scarce, I’m sure. At least for these couple weeks, right?”
“I suppose,” Hector said, going along with her. “And maybe next week, too.” And while this clearly pleased her plenty he also immediately wished to take the utterance back. He’d promised himself not to speak with her of anything outside a day in the future, even as he caught himself thinking more and more of times ahead, picturing some nice places they could escape to, some rustic fantasy, how they might drive in her car to a cold clear lake in the woods and hole up in a cabin like a pair of fugitives, eating whatever they could catch, drinking from a stream, feathering their bed with garlands of young ferns.
She clinked her wineglass to his beer and for a while they drank without talking as evening began to descend. It was an almost gracious feeling, as if they were taking the air in a park, as if he were a decent man and she a more than decent woman and the next day was a prospect they neither feared nor dreaded nor were already trying to forget. Perhaps they were even drinking for the sheer pleasure of it, for the easy communion and ritual, though they had little prior experience and were likely confusing the good feeling with the gentle weather and peachy light that was a world distant from the sorry pit that was Smitty’s.
In fact, Hector was thinking how they might not go back there for a while; they’d already skipped a couple of nights in the last week, which was noted by the fellows with mentions of how they’d gone AWOL, and also a few unmistakably pitying looks, and it had struck him on entering that being with Dora had reanimated his sense of shame. He could see the old picture of himself at his spot at the bar, vainly stuck in the hard amber of his gruffness, his solitude, his strangely sound physical being, these integuments only momentarily breached whenever he was called out to fight (or, more rarely, fuck). Conversely, it was no surprise that he was feeling a little vulnerable again, as though there were a rent in his chain-mail vest, a newly opened seam along the underbelly that neatly paired with a very real scar of Dora’s, a shiny inset line where she’d torn herself in youth, slipping through a deer fence. Whenever he brushed or touched her there she flinched and somehow he’d feel a nervy tickle of phantom pain and be renewed in his resolve that he would try his best not to bring her any heartache.
“I was thinking again about that woman,” she said, peering down into the wine in her glass. “You know, the one who sent that man to talk to you at Smitty’s?” She pretended to search her mind for the name. “Was it June? Yes, that’s right, isn’t it? June Singer. What was it that she wanted?”
He had already had to fib the day after the man first appeared and tell Dora that June was just someone he’d met in the war and later worked for, doing odd jobs and chores, which is what she had asked him to do again.
“She won’t come around,” he told her now. “I said I wasn’t i nterested.”
“Seems like she could get anybody to do odd jobs. Why should she ask you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, which he didn’t, though it was only because he had refused to let any part of his mind alight on her. There were entire worlds of reasons for her to have sought him out, the most immense of which was what finally happened at the orphanage, and with Sylvie Tanner. But there was nothing but blackness to go over again. Of course he had been with June even afterward, a very brief and strange period that led to his bringing her over, as his legal bride, though once landed they had just as quickly separated, neither in the least inclined during the past twenty-six years to do anything but wholly forget the other existed.
“You must have been important to her somehow,” Dora said. “A woman wouldn’t send somebody otherwise. She would have found somebody else. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
She finished what was left in her wineglass and then filled it up again. “It doesn’t matter to me. You don’t have to say any more. I don’t care how many women you’ve had in your life. Past or present.”