Last Night at the Lobster (8 page)

The first sixty feet of hallway is all wall. The first stores on both sides are closed, though not because of the snow— they’re vacant: dark, carpeted boxes fenced with barred grilles, a larger, more polite form of the corrugated garage doors used to protect storefronts in the city. The space on the right was a tux place called Finest Formals, the one on the left a travel agency, he thinks, maybe a Shawmut Bank before that. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long.

Far ahead, toward the heart of the mall, backlit by the bright atrium in front of Penney’s, a few shoppers glide like shades, one a mother with a stroller. So people are still open, a good sign. He zeroes in on the three-sided kiosk of a directory, striding fast—he only has half an hour for his lunch break—then stopping dead to search the floorplan of the mall, sectioned and color-coded like a child’s game board.

His mission is simple: Buy something she will love, and love him for buying. Nothing useful, like a new camera to take pictures of the baby (that’s on a different list), or a brake job for her Elantra (on no list but his, nagging as a jagged cavity or the sudden absence, now, of the rubber band). It has to be intimate yet unexpected, arrived at by magic, a consumer version of mind reading. Price isn’t an issue, within limits. Manny’s thinking a hundred, a hundred-fifty, leaning toward the extravagant on principle. He needs this to be good.

So, clothes? Right now she doesn’t have a size, and even when he’s buying for himself he doesn’t trust his taste.

Perfume? They all smell too strong to him, and the top of her dresser is solid bottles. The odds of getting something she doesn’t have and likes are slim.

Music? Too high school, not personal enough, the same with electronics.

Which leaves the fool’s last resort: jewelry.

Mansour Jewelers is D11, tucked into the wing right beside Penney’s, but that’s where he bought Jacquie’s necklace. He’ll have to go all the way down the second level past Kmart and try Zales. Earrings, pearls or diamonds, as big as he can afford—a simple plan, yet he can’t keep it in his head. On the escalator, angling above the cotton-wadded North Pole and its empty red-and-gold throne (a bad sign), a blankness comes over him, wiping his mind clean, a purposeful short circuit, like when he thinks of Jacquie laughing from her bathroom, or the branching crack in her ceiling, or how she looks when she’s asleep. He willfully releases the memory, and creeping into the vacuum is a feeling of surrender, as if it’s no use.

Everything’s open on the second floor, but traffic is unnaturally sparse. He passes a pregnant woman by Hickory Farms, and then a minute later spies another below, eating a giant cookie beside a fountain glittering with pennies. On the far side of Kmart there are two more, and more strollers, more toddlers. It shouldn’t surprise him—this is just who comes here, like the grandmothers lunching at the Lobster—but it forces him to question what he would have done if Jacquie had wanted the baby.

He said he wanted to marry her, and she laughed. He knows—he knew then—that that wasn’t realistic, and yet he was ready to follow through with the rest of his life, honestly pledging himself, maybe because she never took him seriously. He hasn’t asked Deena, and the way he feels now he doubts he ever will, and there’s something wrong with that. He can just hear what his abuelita would say.

It’s also the first Christmas he doesn’t have to buy a gift for his lita—other than a wreath for the visit he keeps putting off—another absence that has him distracted. He has the needling, bad-dream feeling that he’s supposed to get something else while he’s here, but can’t quite figure out what, or for whom. He wonders if Coach will be alone over Christmas, if maybe he should arrange to look in on him before he heads down to Deena’s. Yes, definitely, he can set it up Monday at the Olive Garden, and while Manny has no idea what to get him either, just having a plan to concentrate on—something to work toward and look forward to beyond tonight—helps.

Or helps some. A manager, he’s never free of his responsibilities. It may be his lunch break, a quiet halftime in the day, but even as he scans the display windows for something Coach might like, he’s aware that every step takes him farther away from Jacquie and the Lobster— away from the real world where his life waits—and that he’s wasting what little time he has left there.

He’s walked at least half a mile and is beginning to sweat lightly, but keeps his jacket on to hide his waistline. As he passes The Limited, lost in untangling these knots, a little girl in the doorway behind him laughs. She points at him, covering her mouth, and her mother has to grab her arm and lower it, flashing him an apologetic grimace, as if this happens all the time. He goes on, paranoid, sure that people are staring at him. It’s possible his hair is wet from the snow and curling like a bad perm, and he pretends to look in the window of Old Navy and slicks it back with both hands, just in time to catch a pair of shaggy string-bean teens behind him turning their heads toward him in unison like in a scary movie, and then, when Manny wheels around, walking on as if he’s invisible.

What the hell?

Since he’s already there at the window, he twists to see if there’s a KICK ME sign taped to his back and discovers that his jacket is ripped. No, not ripped, slashed, because when he pulls it off and holds it up to inspect the damage he can see someone’s taken an incredibly sharp knife to the leather and split it cleanly all the way from the collar down to the belt in one long slice.

Fredo. Probably thought it was Ty’s.

“Motherfucker,” Manny says. And there’s no way to fix it, it’s done.

Fucking Fredo, can’t even do this right. Now he can really forget about his check. Legally, Manny’s not sure how that’ll work, but right now he doesn’t care. And right now there’s nothing he can do about it, so he folds the jacket over his arm and keeps going. More than ever, he just wants to get this over with.

The Kmart isn’t busy, but it never is. It’s the second atrium that surprises him, the open space below set up for a choir—a makeshift stage with risers and music stands—but deserted, as if he’s early for the show. The place looks evacuated. Only a female security guard sits in the audience of folding chairs, in the very last row, on the aisle, eating something from a piece of foil. Up here on the second level he’s one of two shoppers, the other a white girl far across the opening, headed the other way as if fleeing him. When he enters the wing where Zales is, he has the hallway all to himself.

He expects it will be closed—his punishment for abandoning his post—and that he’ll have to walk back past Mansour’s and try again tomorrow, but a small blonde is standing behind the counter in a little black dress and lipstick, hair tucked behind her ears to show off a pair of simple diamond studs—exactly what Manny’s come here for.

Even though they’re the only two in the place, she lets him look around the glass counters for a minute before coming over.

“Ken I halp you vit samtink?”

Like anyone who grew up in New Britain, Manny can recognize a Polish accent. JADWEGA, her nametag says. She sounds new to America, but she’s beautiful—blue-eyed and delicately built—and supremely confident. “For a gehlfriend, is?”

She doesn’t need many words to steer Manny to a pair of diamonds like her own for $179 (“Dese mek her very heppy”), and before Manny realizes he’s been flirting with her, he asks her to model them. She does, turning in profile, holding a manicured hand with blood-red nails to her neck like on QVC, one way and then the other. On Deena they’ll look completely different, but that doesn’t matter. They’d look different on Jacquie too. Sometimes it’s not the thought that counts, just the present.

“I’ll take them,” Manny says, and waits as she gift wraps the fancy box.

“Tenk you,” she says, smiling, and sends him off, still slightly confused at what just happened, like someone waking from a spell. He can’t imagine having that kind of power—the kind Jacquie had over him, still has—and thinks he’ll always be helpless and stupid that way, uncool. But he has Deena’s present, has it wrapped and bagged, the telltale receipt hidden in his wallet, and that’s exactly what he came here to do, no matter how he got it done.

And done quickly—he still has another twelve minutes. Walking back, he sees a biker-looking dude on crutches outside the Gingerbread House and remembers Eddie wanted some lottery tickets. There’s no place upstairs that would sell them, so he takes the escalator down and cruises the main hallway. All he needs is a news-stand, but there’s only a useless Walden Books. Smoker’s World is closed. He can’t believe no one in this entire mall sells something as basic as lottery tickets, but the directory confirms it. The closest place is going to be one of the gas marts by the highway—the Mobil beside Friday’s, or the Citgo next to Daddy’s Junky Music, probably closer. If he backtracks and cuts through Kohl’s and goes out the side by Ruby Tuesday’s, he’ll only have to walk partway across the lot.

And like that he decides to do it, a knight errant accepting a quest. He turns on his heel and heads back past Weathervane and RadioShack and the empty stage. With no strolling crowd to navigate, he’s making great time. He turns in to Kohl’s and follows the maze of linoleum aisles to the rear of the store, where the doors give on the lot. It’s almost dark, though his watch says it’s just short of four. A car passes with its lights on and its wipers flipping, its wheels packed with snow. He pauses on the wet matting between the doors to zip his ruined jacket, wishing he had a hat, then mashes the crashbar and bounces out.

Whoever salted did a shitty job. There’s no line between the sidewalk and the lot, just a drop-off, the lip interrupted by the smooth dip of a handicapped ramp. The snow is easily a foot deep, and Manny churns for the middle of the road, his socks already logged. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. It’s early—he can still turn back—but once he’s in the lane it’s okay. The Citgo’s sign is lit, snow blowing through its halo. Trudging, waiting for a plow to come rumbling up behind him, he keeps it in sight like a mirage, afraid it will disappear. Flakes stream out of the darkness, making him blink, melting into his skin, and there’s something elemental and pleasing about the feeling. Humping up the ramp, shoes slipping, fingers freezing, he’s as happy as he’s been all day.

The one car on the highway is a news van from Channel 30 with a satellite dish on top, its chains rattling. The road is furrowed and white. The lights clunk and change for no one.

The uniformed cashier at the Citgo is alone on her cell phone and doesn’t seem surprised to see him shamble in out of the storm. Behind her on the wall are a dozen locked roll dispensers of flashy scratch-off tickets. He’s never played the lottery—his lita always said it was for idiots like his Uncle Rudy—and has to ask the woman for a Powerball form. She doesn’t stop talking, just points to a display with the current pot written in Magic Marker: $285 million.

9 Ways To Win
, the form promises, and lists the odds. He has to choose five numbers between 1 and 55, then one number between 1 and 42—the red Powerball number. Match them all and Eddie wins the grand prize. Match the five white numbers and he wins a hundred thousand dollars. Four white and the Powerball, five thousand. The other six ways pay a hundred bucks or less, not much of a thrill. Eddie said he had five, so Manny will buy him five more, doubling his odds, but what numbers should he pick? He knows the cashier can just have the machine choose them at random, but that’s like not even playing.

For the first ticket, he picks 03 and 05 for March 5th, the first time he kissed Jacquie, 08 and 11 for her birthday, 27 for her age, and for the Powerball 34, for David Ortiz, the real Big Papi, her favorite player on the Red Sox. The next one is Deena’s, then one for his lita, one for Eddie, one for Coach, each with its own secret code, births and anniversaries, addresses and heroes—numbers that are already lucky, being loved.

The clerk puts her phone down to take his slip and punch them in. The first ticket juts from a slot on the top of the machine like at the movies, and Manny thinks this is what must hook compulsive gamblers, because for an instant the dream seems real—the possibility that this freshly printed chit might hold a completely different future for all of them. The clerk hands him the ticket and he thinks she’s made a mistake. He wanted five. He’s about to say something when he realizes all of his numbers are on it, squished in the center in blocky dot matrix, looking about as official as a coupon printed off the internet. While the clerk resumes her conversation, he stands there double-checking the numbers, then fits the awkward stub into his wallet with Deena’s receipt, as if they’re of equal value.

The walk back seems longer, and colder, or maybe he’s just slower, ducking into the warm Kohl’s and shedding his jacket, then pulling it on again by Penney’s for the last bitter stretch to the Lobster, an outpost glowing in the distance. He’s right on time—even now trying to lead by example, when there’s no point. It’s ten after four, a dead spot before the dinner service, so he’s confused to see a van roll up to their stop sign, signal and then pull onto the access road, headed for the exit. In the gathering dusk and falling snow it’s hard to make out, but as it turns, the white brow of the aerodynamic fairing on top of the cab, big outrigger mirrors and long, boxy cabin of a short bus are unmistakable. The windows will be tall and tinted, and while he can’t see them this far away, he knows the stripes along the side are green and blue, twined with a snaking cartoon blacktop split by a dotted yellow line, and splashed over the rear quarter panel will be some funky
I Love the 70s
script urging him—too late, he thinks—to
TAKE A RIDE ON EASY STREET.

PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED

A foot in the door, Kendra stabs him with the bad news. She has her jacket on, as if she was about to go out and search for him. Eddie’s gone, and she’s leaving. Her mother called from Bristol, saying they’ve lost power, and she needs to get home.