He gave her a flat, unbelieving smile. “I could ask you the same.”
His car had been parked in front of the restaurant. Of course. His car. She had seen it, hadn’t she, a black-coal lump in the corner of the lot. And why hadn’t she driven? Why had she walked here? “I needed some fresh air.”
“It’s one o’clock,” he said. Then, tilting his head back with a jerk, “Can you believe these stooges? Singing to beat the band in there in the middle of the night.”
“It’s—” she said, looking over his shoulder, wishing for anything that he hadn’t shown up in her way. “It’s strange.”
Finally he turned back toward the church and let out a long noisy breath from his substantial nose. It was a signal of his that he was fed up with something. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I laid down next to Harriet and I knew that instant I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you came here?”
“It happens sometimes. I’ll do a little prep work. Drink some coffee. Have a slice of pie.” He did the noisy breath thing again. “Sometimes I sleep in a booth. Other times I just stay awake. Lately I’ve been listening to these stooges, like I said.”
“It’s pretty music,” she said.
He looked over his shoulder at her with his eyebrows tilted. “Sounds like somebody’s grandmother died.”
“Did you say you had coffee?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You want any?”
He led her the short walk back up the hill and unlocked the front door with a big set of keys. Inside, the place looked strange and blue with none of the lights on. “Don’t bother,” he said when she reached for the switch. “If you turn on the lights, we’ll get customers. Take it from me.”
Then he turned the lock again behind them.
“I’ll start coffee,” she said, but what she really wanted to do now was leave. Instinctually, without being able to see his face all that clearly, she knew that something was wrong about all this. Coming in here had been a mistake. Her heart had started pounding out the message, and her nerves made her talk. “So you say you do this all the time? And what’s Harriet do? Doesn’t she worry? Do you leave her a note or something?”
He was moving toward her, slow, a mass, a silhouette. “Harriet? She snores through anything.”
“But in the morning doesn’t she wonder?” she said.
“Claudette, you sound scared,” he said. “You want me to do that? You’re fumbling. Look at yourself.”
She was fumbling. She’d dropped the measuring spoon on the counter with a whole scoop of grounds spread black like a burst star. She thought again of those children on the beach, of all the undifferentiated grains if you look just right. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ll just—”
And then he was there, just behind her, breathing down her neck, his over-big hands touching the backs of her arms. “Claudette,” he said, “I always thought we could give it a try, you know?”
She moved and he didn’t grab her and for a second she thought it was over, just Phil being Phil, nothing special, but as she stepped away and rounded the counter, he moved for her again, her eyes now adjusted to the light, his face coming through with detail. It was a look she’d never wanted to see on anyone’s face, a look of disgust, a look of hate. In his upturned hand, her pink shawl draped like a wet rag. “Phil,” she said, her voice cracked into a million pieces. “Stop it, Phil, this isn’t funny.”
“Why’d you come down here?” he said. “Don’t bullshit with me.”
“Phil,” she said again, though it may have come out as a scream. She could hear nothing but the shuffle of blood in her ears.
A pair of headlights swung through the café. The bite of gravel on rubber. A car had turned around, bending their shadows into frightening abstractions along the ceiling.
Then he lurched at her again and this time she screamed and could hear it, but his fingers wrapped all the way around her arm like a hand wrapped around the stick of a broom and she screamed again. “Shut up!” he said. “Jesus Christ, woman.”
He was pushing her now, but not toward a booth, not toward the kitchen. He was pushing her toward the door. In his free hand jangled that big set of keys. “Phil, what are you doing?” she shouted, though her voice sounded to her ears like it was bottled. “Please.”
“I’m throwing you out,” he said. “Go home.”
She couldn’t breathe for the terror, couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Surely he wasn’t actually letting her out the door, but then he really was, he really had, and standing on the gravel lot, she said, “Phil, what are you doing?”
And again he said, looking at her with that hate in his face, flinging her shawl onto the checker-patterned floor, “Go home.”
She backed away as he relocked the door and disappeared into the shadows behind the counter, his form only a faint cloud now, near the percolators, making coffee. It took her a moment to gather her senses, to move from the terror of what Phil had just done, the immediacy of it, the miserable certainty that had hit her stomach in there like a boxer’s punch. And only then did she register the lights off at Eileen’s church, the singing halted. It was as if they had witnessed all of it and with a sudden mortification toward all humanity had shut down their exaltations, their prayers, their mournings. She stood in the gravel lot with her legs shaking under her and felt a betrayal and fear she couldn’t string into thoughts. She felt empty, a container spilled into the tide, an outline of chalk on a blackboard. A burning foolishness overtook her. She had brought this on. She must have.
But no. She’d done nothing wrong. She’d dropped her shawl and the old wet rag lay in a puddle on the diner floor, haloed in streetlamp light. She’d never been attached to it, just a thing to put over her shoulders at night, yet now it glowed with meaning. Like St. Bartholomew’s skin from the Michelangelo painting, like the old Claudette. She didn’t know what she was now. Didn’t know yet what she would become. But she was filled to the outer edges with another Claudette, who turned homeward, north on Ocean Avenue, her legs bounding like a gazelle, every shadow a reaching white hand to avoid.
In the morning, after only a brief nap, she washed her face in cold water and packed all she could in the small suitcase she’d bought last summer when she thought she was going to save for a trip to Los Angeles. Even the framed photographs of her mother and father she’d taken with her to St. Anne’s she now tucked between blouses, sure she would settle elsewhere, if not at Eileen’s church, then somewhere, anywhere else. She would travel the world, she thought, checking her makeup in the mirror. She would see all the seven wonders, just like Mrs. Garfield.
That had been her plan. That’s what she’d come up with overnight, wrapped in her bed with all her clothes still on, sweating from the warmth but unable to marshal the strength to throw off the covers. She would go to Eileen’s church, she would rap at the door, she would ask to be let inside. They all lived together in there. She knew that. It’s why Phil had said more than once they were communists. Surely they would take her in. She would live among them and learn their rituals and she would find a way to believe in enough of their ideas to make it okay. She had to do it, not only so that another day could begin and she could walk away from the restaurant for good, but so she could be with Eileen, so she and Eileen would stand a chance, so they could be together. She would be the new Claudette. She would mash down the lid of her suitcase and latch it shut and set it on the passenger seat next to her. She would start the car. The engine would lurch and wheeze and cough to life. Then she would drive the six blocks and never look back.