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He rattled off his list as if he was used to reciting it daily. Except that he surprised himself by revising it to impress her.
“St. Petersburg. Dublin. Space. New York City. And, what the hell, Pencey Prep.”
He was sure she would judge him a snob. Or a fake. The fact that he’d never talked about any such list with Donna was not lost on him.
Candace was smiling at him indulgently. “So where does that get us again?”
He sighed theatrically. “For a fan of satire, you’re very literal.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m also predictable. And you’re odd. In a charming way.”
The word “charming” might have made his chest flutter, but the look in her eyes made it clear that she meant it very platonically, aunt-to-nephew. Everyone deserved the bald truth. You’re not who you think you are.
“Actually, no,” he said. And before he could even think to stop himself, he added, “The girl who was my girlfriend until this morning found me pretty dull, I think.”
The silent look she gave him lasted too long to pass off as anything but pity. He wondered if he could somehow retract the comment or play it off as a joke. Once again, though, he felt he had nothing to lose.
“Yes, it was pretty pitiful,” he continued. “But I’ll get over it.”
Candace said, “She didn’t know your top-five list?”
“No,” Ben said, absently because his mind had gone in a different direction. He found himself wanting to tell Candace, right here and now, about what he could do. Reaching. About how a few times he’d actually moved objects with his mind. Why did he think she might be receptive? Good question. Because he felt he could trust her? Maybe he could, but that wasn’t the reason. Because he wanted to impress her? Not exactly. Because he thought they could be friends? Hardly. Because she had already judged him as a weird but non-threatening nephew-type who needed calling out for his immaturity and arrogance?
His gaze had drifted away from her, but when he looked back, he found her staring at him as if at a dancing bear.
“Odd,” she said with finality. She leaned forward and put her warm palm against his forehead. Then she stood and said, “On your feet if you intend to stay.”
Shortly, a crowd of twenty-five people came in — turf-shoe-wearing boys and girls, their loud and friendly coach, and their soccer moms and dads. It was three-forty-five before the place was orderly and quiet again, and by then the two night-shift workers had come on the clock. When it was quitting time for Ben, he clocked out and went to find Candace to say goodbye. She was in Mr. Glaser’s office with her hands in a file cabinet.
When he said her name, she looked up distractedly.
“I’m leaving,” he said, and meant to add more but couldn’t come up with anything.
“Okay, yeah,” she said. “Go eat a big meal, Sam.”
Sam was one of the guys who’d come in to work the night shift.
Ben went to the supervisor’s desk and wrote out a note, explaining that, even though he’d been on the clock for seven hours, he’d worked only five and a half due to “circumstances beyond control that I can tell you about in person, if you like.” He folded the note, wrote Mr. Glaser’s name on it and pinned it to the board beside the time clock. He started to walk out but then came back. His note might put Candace in an awkward position. He took down the note, crumpled it, and shoved it in his pocket.
He glanced toward Mr. Glaser’s office door, still open just a crack. He heard two of his coworkers talking out front, and he heard the dull rumble of the city bus — the four-o-five — pass by. He sat in the supervisor’s chair and shut his eyes. The distance to Mr. Glaser’s office seemed to lengthen as reached toward it, as if he was dollying backward. Finally he arrived and the door shivered and fish-eyed around him, dwarfing him. His reaching had a conscience. Had always had. Still, he couldn’t help but try to put to rest his pathetic curiosity. He pushed into the office like an ooze through the door crack. There was Candace, her hands still in a drawer, her neck and shoulders calmly indifferent. He felt simultaneously full and empty. Donna’s face, her eyes wet with tears, flashed in his head, too. He pulled back until he was outside the door once more. He concentrated hard on the knob, closed his misty fingers loosely around it, and then squeezed.
“Candace,” a voice said to his right, and he jolted back into himself, eyes snapping open. Sam, his coworker, was walking toward Mr. Glaser’s office, having called Candace’s name. The office door was still open a crack. But Ben looked down at his hand, certain that he’d felt the cool metal of the knob just before Sam’s voice had interrupted his skulking.
The dining room was once again quiet as he exited into the heat of the late afternoon. He walked the two blocks to the bus stop and sat to wait for the four-twenty-five bus.
About Patrick Kelly Joyner
