even in the smaller halls? JJ had asked. Not even with some extra work? You try real hard, the professor had said, touching JJ’s arm, leaving a few fingertip dots of chalk dust on her sweater.)
The garlic bread was up and JJ slipped away and ate it in the bathroom. She hid in a stall. Wet toilet paper all over, that sweet dead-flower smell. She sat fully clothed on the closed toilet seat, the plate on her knees. The bread was warm and oily. The best garlic bread she’d ever had. She imagined that any second someone, Lena probably, would slam open the flimsy stall and let her have it. How dare you. Or worse, laughter: You pig. JJ ate faster, licking the grease off her fingers. And then, still a little high maybe, she imagined Marna walking in, the one who’d disappeared. With her own garlic bread. Surprised at first. JJ had only caught a glimpse of her before—mass of wavy hair, rumpled shirt—so she filled in the blanks. She gave her dark eyes and a beauty mark. A long delicate nose. Maybe a piercing or a small tattoo. A daisy just below her collarbone. No, not a daisy, something more original—a daffodil or snapdragon. Suddenly, she seemed so clear.
4.
If Colleen believed in ghosts, it was only from the corners of her eyes. More and more lately, usually here and usually on game days, when people were packed in so close the air was wet and you could smell much more than you wanted to, she saw him. Just for a second. Not long enough to actually prove anything and always when she was focused on something else—her tickets or her tray or taking an order. But it was him. Unmistakable him. He’d be squashed in at a corner table, too close to the big screen, his hair leeched back in strips over the thinning spots. Both hands on a beer. Even crazier: she sometimes saw herself. And Lily too. It was like a home movie. Lily, a little girl again, scribbling on the back of a paper kids’ menu. Her crayon making loops.
Rick had died two years ago, hit by a car. At first it didn’t seem possible, and then it didn’t seem real. A bad joke. He was crossing the street on his lunch break, paying too much attention to the sandwich he was unwrapping. He stepped right into the line of traffic.
He was there and then he was gone.
It happened the week Lily turned twelve. That afternoon, in fact, when the news had come, Lily’d been planning her party theme, the Garden of Eden, and was on the kitchen floor making flowers out of colored Kleenex. Colleen was in the back yard painting at her easel—or trying to paint. There were two versions in Colleen’s memory. In one, the colors weren’t right, too thick and bright, and she kept mashing them brown. In the other, though, the picture was working. She captured the back yard not as it was but as it would be when the landscaping was finished. She was filling in the shrubs, giving just enough suggestion of cloud and bird and light.
Afterward, after the funeral and the reception and those first few weeks when Lily stayed home from school and the two of them lay on the living room floor without talking, just watching TV, Colleen looked for that painting. She couldn’t imagine what she’d done with it. She checked the house and the back yard, even the bushes. But it was gone—the painting and that patch of time marked by one phone call, the space between event and after.
The driver of the car kept in touch with them for months, called them, Lily especially, until Lily’s school psychologist insisted that it was unhealthy, that the man had been seen on school grounds. Lily, she said, was having inappropriate feelings. The psychologist was a pretty woman, one of those soft Southern types, who seemed, with every sentence, exuberant, like she was up for a game of tennis. As Colleen watched her lips move around the words inappropriate feelings, she couldn’t help but wonder why, clearly given the choice, this woman would want to think about other people’s problems all day.
Rick used to take Colleen to the Almost Home all the time, especially during football season, and so once things were settled—and after she quit her job as a respiratory therapist—it seemed natural to get a job there. It seemed more natural than to stop going. Plus, after working in a hospital for ten-odd years, waiting tables seemed fun, a little romantic even. Tons of artists were waiters. Not just actors, but all kinds of artists. Theoretically, she’d have more time to paint.
Maybe, though, it’d been a mistake. He wouldn’t go away.
Colleen did her best with damage control. The kitchen was a mess—bus tubs and trash overflowing. Everything felt sticky. Someone had spilled ketchup and it was everywhere, on the bar, smeared on the sides of the garnish tray, on what was left of the clean silverware. Colleen made the effort to get things done and done right, but, even more, she tried not to think about it.
There was a beautiful girl in her section, over at one of the fraternity-sorority tables. She sat in an elegant slouch swirling a Jack and Coke. Her hair was long and dark red and loose and she wore what all the girls were wearing: black boots, low-waisted thrift-store jeans, and an eighty-dollar white t-shirt with a cashmere cardigan looped around the neck. Even though it was freezing outside and you could see the gooseflesh on their arms when they came in, they kept the sweaters there. Like artificial hugs. This girl was more beautiful that the rest. Her skin had a Mediterranean tint and her eyes were sloped and serious, but with a spark. The kind that couldn’t be faked. Colleen hated when beautiful girls sat in her section. It was distracting. She wanted to stare at them; she wanted to see how they moved, find out what it was that made them so. As it turned out, the beautiful ones weren’t always the prettiest—this girl’s chin was too long, her forehead too wide—and it went the other way too. Lena, for instance, was pretty, really pretty. But she wasn’t beautiful. When they’d first met and become friends, Colleen had spent a good deal of time wondering why Lena wasn’t beautiful, trying to catch her from different sides. And Marna? Maybe. It was hard to define. She was watchable, the way she would sit beside the cash register, one foot propped on the sink, the other on the bar itself. She’d laugh, completely at ease, chomping her blue gum, not caring if anyone was looking up her nose or down her blouse—which they probably were. Not caring if she made a scene. Which she did and didn’t at the same time. And the thing with watching Marna was, it was never a separate event. You actually felt it, even if she was talking to someone else, not even looking in your direction—it was like she reflected something back, automatically.
Now, Lily was beautiful. Her long-limbed ease. How she moved through space, cutting it at any angle, unafraid of taking up too much of it. And her quick-change expressions, each a surprise. Colleen didn’t know where she’d gotten that. One minute she’d be considering you, really looking hard, and the next, in just a twitch of the mouth or chin or eye, it was all different. She’d gathered light, softened or brightened, gone somewhere else and back again. It was like you could peel away layer after layer and still find more. Beauty under beauty. Of course, Colleen was biased. But still.
Colleen wasn’t allowed to have Lily at the bar during her shifts anymore—Bill said it was bad for business and probably illegal besides. But then he lightened up a bit, as he always did, and hinted that he wouldn’t really care if Lily came in late at night, around last call, when people were too far gone, either literally or figuratively, to complain.
Fourteen going on fifteen was way too old for a babysitter—many girls Lily’s age were babysitters themselves. But Lily was a different case. She’d recently discovered boys and recently decided to be aggressive about it. Colleen couldn’t leave her alone, not for hours at a time, so on nights Marna was working and couldn’t have Lily over her place, Colleen paid one of Lily’s twenty-something cousins to keep an eye.
Beth would drop Lily here later. One-thirty or two. It was something to look forward to, anyway. And not just because Colleen wouldn’t have to pay Beth any longer, and not just because Colleen plain missed Lily, but also because the visions didn’t appear when Lily was around—as if her presence in the present was so powerful it crowded out the past.
Colleen ran down to the break room. She didn’t have the time but she did it anyhow, clomped down the stairs carrying table 16’s drinks. It was pointless really: if Marna had gone home, she wouldn’t pick up. But Colleen dialed the number—what else was there to do? The voice mail came on and Marna’s voice played. Then:
Beep.