she exits the bathroom, the darkness of the bar steals her eyesight for a second. She feels her way along the wall, down the hallway, until she turns the corner into what a sign calls THE TAP ROOM, though that sounds too grand for this neighborhood dive, full of middle-aged men who live a block away. Maybe she knows a couple of them from her days frequenting Portland dives, back when bouncers and gobbledygook like legal drinking age were no match for a fake ID in the hand of a girl who knew how to smile. But a decade later, Kelly has put on weight, and… well, her appearance has changed in other ways she prefers not to talk about (skin blemishes, looser backside; just don’t talk about it, don’t). Forget whether she might recognize anyone; would anyone recognize her? Or care to?
Max sits at a table in the corner, his back, as he insisted, against the wall; he wants a view of everything. Kelly joins him at the table, which now wears two baskets of food. “Yum.” She tries to sound pleased, picking up a cold mozzarella stick and taking a bite; the cheese inside has already congealed. “You’re missing out.”
Max keeps his eyes on the table. He refused to order anything except ice water with lemon. Kelly was starving and badly in need of a drink, so she ordered a Shipyard (she already forgets which style), mozzarella sticks, and chicken fingers—a fairly standard meal. Hopefully Max will pay for this crap—his idea to come here, after all—although he’s likely as poor as she is. (She hasn’t yet dared bring up the subject of what, if anything, he does for a living.) She returns the mozzarella stick, half eaten, to the basket and works on her beer instead. She gulps it, nothing but warm fizz, then sets it down loudly, hoping to rouse her brother. But he doesn’t budge. So she snaps her fingers. “Earth to Max.”
He looks up and squints.
“What’s up with you?”
“With regard to what?”
“I dunno. Just, what’s up with whatever. What’s going on? Do you still have that job?”
“What job?”
“The movie theater job? Weren’t you working at the Nickelodeon?”
“No.”
“You sure? I think you told me that in an e-mail, maybe…” She turns her mouth on its side and narrows her eyes into a face that suggests she’s counting years in her head (how long ago was it?), but really, she has no goddamned clue whether anything she’s saying is true—nor can she even remember when last she spoke to Max, via e-mail or otherwise. “Maybe,” she decides, “four years ago?”
“You came all this way to see me and ask me whether I still have a job that I never had and never told you I had?”
Kelly shakes her head. “Like you know anything about me or what I’m doing.”
“So tell me something then. Tell me about your job. Do you have a job?”
Kelly stares at him for a moment. “Duh,” she says, unsure of how else to answer.
“Where do you work?”
She can’t tell him the truth: that she lost her job three months ago—followed by her apartment a few days ago—prompting this trip out here to Maine, because without work or housing, she had no real reason to stay in the Southwest, especially when Dad may be here, still in Maine, living in opulence. “I’m a manager,” she says. “At a Safeway.” A lie, yes, but also a sort of truth, since until a few months ago, this was the job she had—well, not a manager, a cashier, but still.
“You mean you run the whole Safeway?” Max asks.
“No, I manage the front. But it’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah?” Max stares at her; can he tell? “Well,” he says, “I work at Hugo’s. The tips are great. I’m doing very well for myself.”
Kelly has never eaten at Hugo’s—has never really known anyone who ate at Hugo’s, in fact. Six-course meals, servers in tuxedos, no check under, like, $500. She can’t even begin to imagine her brother working in a place like that, interacting with that clientele, squelching the more cantankerous aspects of his personality. Obviously it’s bullshit, even worse than her lie. Nevertheless, she grunts, “Hmm, well, great, great,” and clicks her tongue. Oh, such awkward politeness from both of them; at the very least, they’re even.
She tries to think of something else to talk to her brother about—something safe that won’t lead to a stalemate of dishonesty—but nothing other than movies has ever interested him. He was always so single-minded, certain he would become a famous director one day, never preparing for the eventuality that he would fail. Now look at him. Thirty, she supposes, hits the Enrights like a gunshot.
“So,” she says, trying, “did you see Dark Knight Returns?”
“Rises.” Max closes his eyes; he can’t bear to look. “He rises in this one. He returned in 1992.”
“Huh.” Kelly shrugs and drinks more beer. The liquid fills her. She might not need to bother with the chicken fingers. “Well, did you see it?”
“Of course I saw it.”
“It was cool. Kind of long, though. Awful, what happened in Colo—”
“Christopher Nolan exists only to make idiots think they have good taste.”
“Huh. Well, I thought it was good.” She fights to keep her voice friendly.
“I try to explain that to people,” Max mutters. “About Nolan.” At some point he’d grabbed on to his fork, and Kelly notices that he now squeezes the utensil. “People need to listen to me.”
“Oh. Sorry, I guess. If I could unsee it, I would.”
Max mutters something else, but she misses it. She keeps an eye on the fork squeezed in his fist. If he jutted it in her direction, could she dive out of the way in time? Not that he would do this, though; Max inflicts harm upon inanimate objects, not people. But her brother has always had a temperature. Whenever he got mad in the old days—someone around him not adequately appreciating his genius—he would lock his door and beat his bedroom to death. He’d reemerge into the world with splinters in his hair.
“So,” Kelly says, “do you want to tell me about Evelyn? Do you still hang out?”
“Every day,” he mutters.
“Have the cops asked you questions?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know what happened to her.”
“Not really what I asked, but okay.” Kelly eyes the book sitting between them on the table. “It’s awful anyway. Her, Dad: people around us just… disappear, I guess.”
“Dad didn’t disappear. Someone knows where he is.”
Kelly bites her lip. Not time to bring up Dad yet. She can’t guess how Max would react if she told him about the phone call she got a week ago.
“So,” she says, “your plan is just to walk around, trying to find Evelyn?” “I’m going to the places she went,” he says.
“You can get time off from Hugo’s to wander around?” A bit of a cruel poke, yes, and a violation of their liars’ détente. She must take greater care to avoid a fight.
“I just told you,” he says, eyes on his fork. “I’m not wandering. I know where she went. They have it right there in the paper. So that’s what I’m doing: going where she went, when she went there. According to the paper.”
“For how many days now?”
“This is my second day.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“I fell. On some ice. I hurt my ankle and couldn’t walk. I had to call a cab to take me home. But today my ankle felt better, so I went out to try again.”
“And that’s