Fallen Angel (8 page)

She went over her options. She could lie and say she was meeting someone, but if he didn’t leave right away, he’d know she wasn’t telling the truth. Although what did it matter? She didn’t care what he thought . . . she couldn’t easily lie, though, and she didn’t have the nerve to just say she’d rather sit by herself. She could leave, but that would be cowardly, and she
was
hungry. She sighed. Oh well. The solitary dinner was not to be.

He stood as she approached the table. “It looks pretty crowded out there,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

“
Sure. Thank you.” She sat down at the chair he pulled out for her. “I hadn’t seen you around for awhile. I thought maybe you’d left town.”

“
No, still here.” He smiled. “I got the message that you didn’t want to see me, so I stayed away.”

She looked down at the table. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude . . .”

He rushed in: “No, no, it’s okay. It was my fault. I just wanted to make you feel better. I can’t stand it that you’re so sad, but I shouldn’t have butted in the way I did. I should have just . . . I don’t know.” He suddenly smiled up at her. “I have no idea what I should have done. I’ve been thinking and thinking about it, and I can’t think of a way I could have handled it that wouldn’t have scared you. So I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He didn’t seem nearly as crazy as he’d seemed that morning on the beach, and she found herself warming to him. Not so far that she believed a word of what he was saying, but he
did
seem nice.

A waiter came then, and asked if they wanted something to drink. Sarah asked for a glass of wine and, after a moment, so did Zach, saying, “I’ll have the same” when the waiter turned to him. They sat there smiling at each other, unsure of what to say, until the wine came. White Zinfandel in stemmed glasses—Sarah held hers out to him in a toast, and they touched glasses, then drank. Something was happening here. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she liked him. She’d worry about it tomorrow. She was sure she
would
worry about it tomorrow, but for now, she was going to relax and enjoy the evening.

He asked her about her work, about the shop and the people who worked there. She told a few stories about customers—the old man who believed he’d been in the Boer War, for one, and she told him about the quiet gay man who’d owned the store before her, who had sold the shop to her on a whim because he had fallen in love and the loved one was moving away. He couldn’t bear to lose him, and said even if it didn’t work out, he had to try. She got a little misty-eyed then, thinking about her own lost family, but hid it by drinking the last of her wine.

They ate fish, and mashed potatoes, and had several more glasses of wine, and somehow, through the long meal, what
he
did for a living never came up. He kept her talking about herself, kept asking her questions, and as unusual as it was to talk about herself, she enjoyed it. By the time the check came, and he had paid—over her objection—she was feeling quite close to this almost-stranger, and hated to have the evening end.

They stood on the sidewalk, smiling at each other, she in her usual flat sandals and long dress with a sweater around her shoulders, and he in
his
usual—all in black. “Well,” she said, holding out her hand. “Thank you for dinner. I really enjoyed it. Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”

He held out his hand as well, but rather than shaking hers, he held on to it. “Would you like to . . . go somewhere else? Listen to music or something? Have another drink? Anything?”

She laughed. “I’d love to,” she said, and as they moved on up the street looking for a quiet bar, she slipped her arm in his.

* * *

When she was seventeen, she’d gotten a tattoo. The Chinese ideogram for Grace, a small one, tattooed in black on the inside of her left wrist. She’d had it for so long now she seldom thought about it, but there had been a time when she’d been self-conscious about it. When she had worked in Chicago, she’d made a point to wear long sleeves and try not to let it show, but things were different here. A tattoo didn’t mean that you were counter-culture. Or maybe it did, but it mattered less.

Her hand was lying palm up on the table, and he reached across and gently traced the tattoo with a fingertip, making her shiver.

“
Grace?” he asked.

“
Yes.”

“
Did it hurt?”

“
Yes. Do you know they won’t let you get drunk anymore when you get a tattoo?”

“
Really?”

“
Yes. It’s true. They say it makes you bleed more.”

“
So . . . you probably shouldn’t get one tonight?”

“
One . . . ?”

“
Tattoo.”

“
Oh.” She laughed. “No, probably not. I’d probably bleed to death.”

She looked at him and cocked her head to the side. “How come
you’re
not drunk? You’ve had nearly as much as I have.”

“
It doesn’t really affect me that much,” he said. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”

* * *

The night was dark and moonless, like the night they’d first met, and only the streetlights lit their way home. They walked along the sidewalk in silence, and when their fingertips touched, he took her hand, and she let him. When they reached her porch, he cupped her face briefly in his palm, and she thought for a sudden, wild moment that he was going to kiss her. He just smiled, and stepped away, though, and said, “Goodnight, Sarah. Sleep well.” He turned and walked away, and she stood watching him until she couldn’t see him anymore.

Dinah was waiting impatiently in the kitchen by the time Sarah unlocked the door and came inside, so Sarah fed her, then walked back to the bedroom, kicking off her shoes and shedding clothes as she went. She dropped into bed without even looking at the computer, but her last thought before she fell into a deep sleep was, “Oh, James, what have I done!?”

12.

Sarah slept better than she had in
months
, and woke to see the sun streaming through the curtains in her bedroom. The room was filled with light, and Dinah was lying on the bed in the exact center of a ray of sunlight. Her ear twitched and she lifted one eye when Sarah stirred, checking to see whether food was imminent or not--if not, there was no real reason to get up. Being a cat, she had no problem with sleeping the entire day.

There was, of course, food. Canned cat food--a special treat--and tea and toast and a poached egg for Sarah, sunny-side-up, like the day. She found herself singing as she cooked the egg, and she picked Dinah up and swung her around the room in an impromptu dance, then set her down, laughing. She dressed in yellow, continuing the sun-drenched theme, even finding a string of yellow and blue glass beads at the bottom of her jewelry box. She slipped them over her head as she stepped out onto the porch.

She was slightly disappointed not to find Zach sleeping on the steps, but she shook it off as she walked to work, humming. As the day went on, though, she began to feel the old familiar panic overtaking her at the thought of getting involved with another man. She'd tried dating a few times, but while she had met men she'd liked well enough, it still felt like a betrayal to get close to anyone. She knew that was silly, but it was how her heart felt.

She had been so stunned by losing the baby, and then by James' sudden death that it had taken her months to regain any sort of composure at all. She wouldn't have said that she and James were soul mates, exactly, but they were good companions and partners, and she knew that they would have had a good life together. They had met in college, started dating, broke up, and then ended up getting married when they both wound up working in Chicago.

Having a baby was just the next step in the evolution from college kids to husband and wife to parents; she had always imagined herself with three or four children, ferrying them back and forth to school and soccer games and friends' houses. She'd never really thought of herself as the career type, although here she was, owning her own business, something she'd thought about idly through the years but never really believed would happen.

That the thing that enabled it
to
happen was getting James' life insurance money was something that caused her guilt every day of her life, practically, and kept her from truly enjoying it.

It was a job. She took comfort from the fact that she provided a necessary service--an independent bookstore that took an interest in its customers, unlike the large chain stores that were popping up everywhere--and that she provided needed jobs to a couple of likeable young people. Well, it wasn't like they would be
homeless
or anything without her, but it was something.

She had thought she might talk it over with Cate, but the store was busy, and by the time they were alone, in the early evening, she no longer felt like talking about it. Cate was in the front of the store, arranging a Christmas display in the window.

"Cate?" she called. "I'm going to go back in the office for awhile. Call me if it gets busy, okay?"

She sat down at her desk and booted up the computer, then went to the site that she had bookmarked, the one whose address was as familiar to her as her own name.

She typed:

She stopped typing. This wasn't going well at all. Usually she had no problem talking to James, strange though it might seem to other people, but she'd never before had the urge to talk to him about another man. Not that she had any feeling that he would mind, assuming, of course, that he had any awareness of what she was doing down here on Earth.

She deleted the letter. Silly. It was all so silly. And unnecessary. She could talk to them any time she wished in her mind. Typing out the words was surely unnecessary, and maybe--this was the first time she'd actually put this into words, even to herself--it was prolonging her grief, rather than helping her get over it.

Turning off the computer, she walked back out in the store, where Cate was sitting behind the counter knitting something in fuzzy red yarn. "What are you making?" Sarah asked.

Cate looked up. "Oh, a scarf for my sister. I'm still trying to make as many Christmas presents as I can. This one's going pretty fast, see?" She held up the end of the scarf on the knitting needle and let its length drop loose--it reached nearly to the floor.

"Very nice!" Sarah exclaimed. "Make me one?" Then: "Oh yeah. This is Florida. Well, never mind." She grinned at Cate. "I need to get out of here for a few minutes. I think I'll walk around the block and maybe get a soda or an ice cream or something. Can I bring you back anything?"

"Sure! Ice cream sounds wonderful, if that's what you get."

"Ice cream it is, then," said Sarah, and she walked out the door. She immediately turned around and pushed through the door again. "What flavor?" "Something exotic!" Shaking her head, Sarah went back outside again, and walked down the sidewalk in the direction
away
from the ice cream store. She'd walk the long way around the block and hit the ice cream shop on the way back.

She was walking with her head down, trying to sort out her feelings. What if something happened with Zach? Would that be okay? Could she handle it? She wasn't exactly sure that she could, although she supposed it would be fun to try. Fun. Now that was kind of a new concept. Sure, she enjoyed some things, but her pure enjoyment of life had gone out the window the night she lost the baby. But
she
hadn't died! Yet she had, in essence, killed herself, too . . .

Damn. What a mess. What should she do??? She turned the corner at the end of the block and nearly ran headlong into someone coming the opposite direction. Startled, she looked up to see, of course, Zach. Who else had she been running into for weeks? If he wasn't an angel, it surely was fate.

She smiled up at him. "Hello." And he smiled back, and they fell into step with one another, naturally. "Where were you going?" she asked, and he answered, "To see you," and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. When they reached the ice cream store, she ordered strawberry, and she bought him a chocolate cone, and together they picked out the funkiest, most exotic flavor they had for Cate, which turned out to be not terribly exotic at all--Rocky Road. It was the best they could do, though, and they laughed about it as they presented it to Cate with a flourish.

Cate hardly knew what to think about this new, laughing Sarah that came in the door with a man right behind her, with flushed cheeks and a sparkle in her eye. She couldn't help but smile at them as she accepted the ice cream, but her eyes asked Sarah who the heck this man was.