Coronado - Dennis Lehane [18]
Daniel says, “I’ve worked here for—”
“Don’t, all right?” His boss hands a box of tissues across the desk.
“THEY CAME TO the house,” his ex-wife says.
“When?”
His ex-wife says, “I can’t let the boys go with you.”
He says, “What?”
His ex-wife says, “I just can’t. They asked all these questions.”
His ex-wife looks at him, love or pity trapped behind her skin, her bones, those eyes.
“They?”
Love, he thinks. Today, we’ll say it’s love.
She nods. “There were three of them.”
THE MAN APPROACHES Daniel in the express self-checkout aisle. Daniel runs a container of half-and-half over the red laser-light scanner and watches the price appear on the screen in front of him. He’s just realized that a sudden-impulse People buy tips the total of his items to thirteen, one over the limit, and he hopes that the scanner won’t sound an alarm, cancel the whole transaction, alert the management, the line of customers behind him. He looks over his shoulder and the man is standing next to him. Wool scarf over a suede jacket and a dark polo shirt. Lean. A sweep of brown hair hanging over his forehead, so perfectly sharp you could crease a sheet with it.
“How you doing?” the man says.
“Fine.” Daniel waves a box of Rice-A-Roni over the red beam.
“Hell of a news day,” the man says.
“Yeah?” Daniel tries to look distracted by his open plastic bag in its metal bin.
“Oh, sure.”
Daniel places a head of lettuce on the scanner. He faces the screen and selects “produce.” He enters “lettuce” on the screen that follows that one. The price appears in bold and is added to his subtotal.
“Seems a high price,” the man says.
Daniel scans a half gallon of skim milk.
“For lettuce,” the man says.
IN THE PARKING lot, the man right behind him, Daniel wonders if he should walk to his own car or loiter by someone else’s.
The guy says, “Daniel.”
Daniel stops, looks back at the man with his nice clothes, his L.A.-white teeth, his lack of groceries.
The man puts his hands in his pockets and leans back on his heels. Daniel can’t think of anything to say. The man’s eyes are the clear and the bright of skyscraper panes.
The man looks down at his shoes and gives them a small smile, as if surprised they still cover his feet, as if conferring with them about how they got there.
He looks back at Daniel, and the small smile holds.
The man says, “That’s your car, right?”
A woman pushes her shopping cart past them, wheels scraping the loose cement. A small boy walks a few steps behind her, talking to his action figure, tugging its head to see what will happen.
Daniel waits for the man’s eyes to change.
The man jingles the change in his pockets and raises his eyebrows up and down.
Daniel says, “I don’t know why you’re—”
The man takes a step toward him. Then one more. He looks into Daniel. He says, “You want it to be one way. I understand. I do. But it’s the other way.”
Daniel feels a small vibration below his Adam’s apple, as if a beetle, nestled in the hollow of his throat all winter, is waking up.
Daniel says, “I just want—”
The man shakes his head. “It’s the other way.”
He says, “I just want everything to go back to—”
“Ssshh,” the man says.
The man says, “Daniel.”
The man says, “Knock-knock.”
Daniel says, “Who’s there?”
The man gives him another smile, slightly broader, and leaves the parking lot.
HE DECIDES TO name the man Troy. He seems like a Troy. Logical, smooth-haired, stainless.
He sees Troy outside a bar one night. He’s across the street, leaning against a wall and eating what could be yogurt, using a plastic spoon. Another time, he’s at the mall, where Daniel has gone to wander, to feel other people, hear piped-in music no matter how bad, if only because he hasn’t programmed it himself. He finds something comforting in this, a freedom in the freedom from decision similar to when he comes across a movie on TV, mid-story, and it’s a movie he owns on DVD, one he could easily play on the