Maude made a stern face and shook her head.
“Whatever. I was just going to . . . never mind. Whatever. Someone wants to meet someone at Paper Cup in the afternoon on an unknown day. And their name starts with a B,” said Sunna.
“Or it’s a heart,” said Mackenzie.
“Or it’s an R,” said Maude.
“That”—Sunna folded the letter and set it in the middle of the table—“is all. I literally,” she looked straight at Maude, “can’t read another word.”
“You’ve forgotten the most important part,” said Mackenzie.
“Which is?”
“The person they want to meet up with is either me or Maude.”
“Or me,” said Sunna.
Maude frowned. “Since when?”
“It just could be,” said Sunna. “Why not me?”
“Because you said yourself it wasn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. I just never said it was. I said I was waiting to see.”
“You said you don’t know people who mail letters.”
“Yes, and then I actually read it. It says this person ‘swung by.’ So it was a hand-delivered note; that’s different.” Sunna was swinging wildly from one hope (that the letter was from Brett) to another (that it wasn’t) with no pause in the middle. Brett traveled a lot; it wasn’t a stretch to think she’d gotten Sunna’s address from a mutual friend and stopped by. Sorry I missed you. Would Brett be sorry to miss her? That was the part more likely to be a stretch. “Anyway,” she said, standing, “guess we’ll never know. Too bad.” Was it too bad?
“I guess we’re done here, then,” said Maude, though for all her subtlety she might as well have shooed them out of her house with a broom. Her cat jumped up onto her lap, and she gathered it into her arms and stood. The two stared at their unwelcome visitors, a unified front.
Mackenzie leaned over the table like she was ready to grab hold of it and hang on if someone tried to make her leave. “Okay,” she said. “The things we don’t know are the day, the exact time, and who is meeting who. So . . . let’s figure it out. We’ll go together.”
“What?” Sunna was confused. “Go where?”
“To Paper Cup. Starting tomorrow. From twelve until close, to cover all our bases. Every day until someone’s person shows.”
Maude sat back down, and her chair squeaked beneath her. She rested her hands on the cat’s back, but the cat didn’t relax under them. “Someone’s person? What do you mean?”
“We’re all thinking of at least one person, aren’t we?” Mackenzie looked from Maude to Sunna and back again. No one said they were not. “I can tell. Someone important, I think. Right?”
Maude conceded with a nod. “Why twelve until close?” She looked at Mackenzie suspiciously, as though she’d found something in the letter that she was keeping from them.
Mackenzie shrugged, still smiling at Maude, and if she felt irritated, she didn’t show it, even for a second. “It said afternoon. Which works out well for me—I have classes in the morning and work at night, but I spend my afternoons writing and studying anyway. Might as well be at Paper Cup.”
“Oh,” said Maude. “All right, then—and that will work for me as well—I’m retired.”
Sunna backed away from the table. She could go, too, if she wanted. She worked the coveted morning shift at Fire! Fitness and was always out of there before noon (one of the perks of seniority was getting first crack at the work schedule). She traded sleeping in for free afternoons, and for her it was a worthwhile swap. She wasn’t about to give up those afternoons for any number of consecutive coffee dates with Vulture Maude. “No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a massive waste of time.”
“No way! It’ll be . . . fun.” Mackenzie seemed to think this was a big adventure. “Besides, what if Maude and I go, but the letter’s for you, and then we don’t know when it’s safe to stop going?”
“I don’t know . . . I’m sorry? I just can’t. Don’t want to.” The kitchen, which had initially smelled so strongly of bleach and lemons, now also smelled like thinly masked cigarette smoke and vinegar. The combination of nicotine and cleaning supplies began to make her nauseated.
“Well, I’m going to, anyway,” said Mackenzie, her eyes big and serious. “I can think of people who might’ve written this letter to me, and I don’t want to miss them if they show up.”
Sunna tried to quell her irritation. “So call them or email them. It’s not 1997. Ask them if they left you a letter in your mailbox. And tell them it’s not 1997 while you’re at it.”
At this, Mackenzie’s eyes glazed, but she kept smiling. “Would if I could.”
Sunna knew she’d said something wrong but didn’t know how to fix it. She was being a hypocrite, anyway—she sure wasn’t going to call Brett and ask if she’d sent this letter. She looked down at her hands and then over at Maude, who was nodding so furiously that Sunna pictured her head rolling off her shoulders and under the table. “I’m going to come too. You’re a smart girl. I’m certainly not going to be the one to call—” Maude stopped herself and cleared her throat. “I’m coming too.”
Sunna considered this. Say Brett was in town for work, what then? Why wouldn’t she just call like a normal person? Or, better yet, stay gone? And who cared, anyway? This was part of growing up; she’d known it for a long time. Sometimes you got closure, but most of the time you didn’t. People who sat around pining for it were desperate. Her old friends in Toronto were like that, always wanting to discuss their feelings about incidents that had happened years before. Always wanting to rehash breakups, to get together with friends who weren’t friends anymore to see if anything could be salvaged. “Yeah, well,” she said. “You guys go do that. I have a life.”
This wasn’t true, but she looked at Maude when she said it and smiled.
EX-PUNK
Larry
The phone call woke Larry from a midafternoon nap.
He’d fallen asleep in front of his TV watching a homemade “documentary” about a local punk band from the ’90s. The video was objectively awful. The picture was grainy, the camerawork jerky and headache inducing; it had been shot by a couple of the band members’ girlfriends, years before quality recording equipment was available to people who didn’t make movies for a living. But the DIY nature of it reminded Larry of the good old days—listening to lo-fi recordings with a sense of nonironic superiority, of going to shows in buddies’ basements, where he thrashed and moshed and gave himself piercings and stick-and-poke tattoos without flinching. It reminded Larry of being young and feeling—not cool, but like he was something even better. He was better than the cool kids; he was an angry straight edge punk, a misunderstood misfit, and he belonged to a small, tight-knit group of other misunderstood misfits. They crashed together in time with their discordant, four-chord punk songs, took shoes to their faces, and generally danced like they were trying to beat the snot out of each other. They felt everything. It had been glorious.