the sound of her voice. I don’t know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she’s scared. But I will.
I carry a beer but I don’t drink it. I can’t risk getting drunk. Not tonight. But I don’t want to draw attention to myself and so I order the beer so I’m not empty-handed. She’s fed up when the call comes in on her cell phone. She steps outside to take the call and when she comes back she’s frustrated. She thinks about leaving, but decides to finish her drink. She finds a pen in her purse and doodles on a bar napkin, listening to some asshole read poetry on stage.
I try not to think about it. I try not to think about the fact that she’s pretty. I remind myself of the money. I need the money. This can’t be that hard. In a couple hours it will all be through.
“It’s good,” I say, nodding at the napkin. It’s the best I can come up with. I know nothing about art.
She gives me the cold shoulder when I first approach. She doesn’t want a thing to do with me. That makes it easier. She barely lifts her eyes from the napkin, even when I praise the candle she’s drawn. She wants me to leave her alone.
“Thanks.” She doesn’t look at me.
“Kind of abstract.”
This is apparently the wrong thing to say. “You think it looks like shit?”
Another man would laugh. He’d say he was kidding and kill her with compliments. But not me. Not with her.
I slide into the booth. Any other girl, any other day, I’d walk away. Any other day I wouldn’t have approached her table in the first place, not the table of some bitchy-looking, pissed-off girl. I leave small talk and flirting and all that other crap to someone else. “I didn’t say it looked like shit.”
She sets her hand on her coat. “I was about to leave,” she says. She swallows the rest of her drink and sets the glass on the table. “The booth is all yours.”
“Like Monet,” I say. “Monet does that abstract stuff, doesn’t he?”
I say it on purpose.
She looks at me. I’m sure it’s the first time. I smile. I wonder if what she sees is enough to lift her hand from the coat. Her tone softens and she knows she’s been abrupt. Maybe not so bitchy after all. Maybe just pissed off. “Monet is an impressionist painter,” she says. “Picasso, that’s abstract art. Kandinsky. Jackson Pollock.” I’ve never heard of them. She still plans to leave. I’m not worried. If she decides to leave, I’ll follow her home. I know where she lives. And I have plenty of time.
But I try anyway.
I reach for the napkin that she’s crumpled and set in an ashtray. I dust off the ashes and unfold it. “It doesn’t look like shit,” I say to her as I fold it and slide it into the back pocket of my jeans.
This is enough to send her eyes roving the bar for the waitress; she thinks she’ll have another drink. “You’re keeping that?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She laughs. “In case I’m famous one day?”
People like to feel as if they’re important. She lets it get the best of her.
She tells me that her name is Mia. I say that mine is Owen. I pause long enough when she asks my name for her to say, “I didn’t realize it was a hard question.” I tell her that my parents live in Toledo and that I’m a bank teller. None of it is the truth. She doesn’t offer much about herself. We talk about things that aren’t personal: a car crash on the Dan Ryan, a freight train derailing, the upcoming World Series. She suggests we talk about something that isn’t depressing. It’s hard to do. She orders one drink and then another. The more she drinks, the more open she becomes. She admits that her boyfriend stood her up. She tells me about him, that they’ve been dating since the end of August and she could count the number of dates he’s actually kept on one hand. She’s fishing for sympathy I don’t offer. It’s not me.
At some point I scoot closer to her in the booth. At times we touch, our legs brushing against one another without intent beneath the table.
I try not to think about it. About later. I try not to think about forcing her into the car or handing her over to Dalmar. I listen to her go on and on, about what, I don’t really know, because what I’m thinking about is the money. About how far cash like that will go. This—sitting with some lady in a bar I bet my life I’d never step foot in, taking hostages for ransom—isn’t my thing. But I smile when she looks at me, and when her hand touches mine, I let it stay because I know one thing: this girl might just change my life.
Eve
After
I’m looking through Mia’s baby book when it hits me: in second grade she had an imaginary friend named Chloe.
It’s there in the yellowing pages of the album, written in my own cursive in blue ink somewhere along the margin, sandwiched between a first broken bone and a wicked case of the flu that landed her in the emergency room. Her third-grade picture covers part of the name Chloe, but I can make it out.
I gaze at the third-grade picture, this portrait of a happy-go-lucky girl still years away from braces and acne and Colin Thatcher. She flashes this toothless grin with a mop of flaxen hair engulfing her head like flames. She’s splattered with freckles, something that has disappeared over time, and her hair is shades lighter than it will eventually be. The collar of her blouse is unfolded and I’m certain her scrawny legs are cloaked in a pair of hot pink leggings, likely a hand-me-down from Grace.
There are snapshots lining the pages of the baby book: Christmas morning when Mia was two and Grace seven, sporting their matching pajamas while James’s greasy hair stood on end. First days of school. Birthday parties.
I’m seated at the breakfast nook with the baby book spread open before me, eyeing cloth diapers and baby bottles and wanting it all back. I put in a call to Dr. Rhodes. To my surprise, she answers.
When I tell her about the imaginary friend, Dr. Rhodes takes off in psychological analysis. “Oftentimes, Mrs. Dennett, children create imaginary friends to compensate for loneliness or a lack of real friends in their lives. They often give these imaginary friends characteristics that they long for in their own lives, making them outgoing if the child is shy, for example, or a great athlete if a child is clumsy. Having an imaginary friend isn’t necessarily a physiological problem, assuming the friend disappears as the child matures.”
“Dr. Rhodes,” I respond, “Mia named her imaginary friend Chloe.”
She grows quiet. “That is interesting,” she says and I go numb.
I become obsessed with the name Chloe. I spend the morning on the internet trying to learn everything there is to know about this name. It’s a Greek name that means blooming...or blossoming or verdant or growth, depending on what website I search, but regardless, the words are synonymous with one another. This year it’s one of the more popular names, but back in 1990 it ranked 212th among all American baby names, slipped in between Alejandra and Marie. There are approximately 10,500 people in the United States right now with the name Chloe. Sometimes you find the name with an umlaut over the e (nearly twenty minutes is lost trying to find the meaning of those two dots over the vowel, and when I do—its purpose simply to differentiate between the o and e sounds at the end of the name—I realize it’s been a waste of time), sometimes without. I wonder how Mia spells it, though I won’t dare ask. Where would Mia have come up with a name like Chloe? Perhaps it was on the birth certificate of one of Mia’s prized Cabbage Patch Kids, flown in from Babyland General Hospital. I go to the website. I’m astounded to find new skin tones for this year’s babies—mocha and cream and latte—but no reference to a doll named Chloe. Maybe another child in Mia’s second-grade class...
I research famous people named Chloe: both Candice Bergen and Olivia Newton-John named their daughters Chloe. It’s the real first name of author Toni Morrison, though I highly doubt Mia was reading Beloved in the second