Stay With Me (9 page)

"I can take the order," I say. "But I can't bring it to the table."

"Or clear it," he says.

That's new, I think, hoping I'll be able to keep a regular coffee cup straight from an Irish coffee one.

"Or clear it," I say.

"Greg loved you," Hal says. "When can you start?"

I leave his small office almost convinced that my sister is still alive and working to shape my life. It's silly, I know, because I clearly owe this job to Greg, but I owed working for him to Rebecca. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about feeling a hand touch them from beyond the grave.

Ben's not too happy with my sudden departure from the tech crew. He wants to know if it's because of him. More specifically, some other him.

"Are you dating somebody?"

I can't believe he's serious, but he is. The amount of time we spend together, which seems like a lot to me, seems like
hardly ever
to Ben.

"No, of course not," I say. "No."

My inability to work on this play feels private. While Ben used to be the first person who heard what was important and/or private, he isn't anymore. No matter how much I might wish otherwise. My living with Clare and Raphael, who are also consumed with Rebecca's memory, has made it impossible to even pretend that things are the same.

I miss Ben the way I miss my parents—as if I am the one who has gone on a trip. Not to an actual place, obviously, but to my version of what Clare calls
the new now.
She says it started for her when she landed at JFK, seventeen hours after Da's call to Budapest. She thinks it's the place you go to after the shock of Before and After wears off.

"You're my best friend," I say to Ben, wondering if that's still true.

If I've told a lie, I'll find a way to make it up to him. It's important to me that I never make him feel bad.

I
WRITE
D
A A LONG LETTER
telling him about Acca and how when I'm not working, I'm doing "lots and lots" of homework. This is not a lie, and in fact, the school part of school has improved dramatically since Raphael appointed himself my full-time homework assistant. This makes exactly the kind of difference that experience has taught me it will. Up until eighth grade (a stretch of time I think of as B.T., for Before Tutor), I dreaded every second of school, with its dark, confusing cloud of information. Now I tend to think of the information as falling into two categories: hard and impossible.

In spite of Raphael's best efforts, English (but not math) has morphed from hard to impossible. We've been reading books and short stories by E Scott Fitzgerald. Originally we were supposed to read Tolstoy and Chekhov, which I thought would be great because I've already read the Chekhov plays. But the teacher changed the entire plan after the city was attacked.

"I think we need to look at something purely beautiful," she told us. "There's despair here, make no mistake, but beauty is his main aim."

Ben thinks she's going to get fired because she didn't ask Mr. Nordman, our headmaster, for permission to change the books. I've heard other students complain that she overuses words like
beauty
and
despair.
I like her because I always know what she's talking about. And, I like Fitzgerald.

Before January, we'd read one novel and a ton of short stories. They're all kind of the same. People are rich. People are beautiful. They're frequently cruel. And they always lose the one thing that's most important to them. Often a blonde girl is the precious thing that gets lost. How could any blonde girl on the planet not like this kind of stuff?

My tutor says I'm needlessly simplifying Fitzgerald's work and not reading it properly. Maybe so, but I like it. The stories are, if unhappy, also yummy. So it's a shock to discover that I can't understand the second book, which we started reading at the end of January.

It's doubly humiliating because I am about a hundred pages in before I realize that I don't know what the book is about. Ben says not to worry, that the book is boring, who cares what it's about. The thing is, the book
isn't
boring. It's something else entirely. Something I don't get, which is misery inducing. My tutor, however, is happy to hear it.

"Now we're finally reading," she says, and comes up with a plan of action.

I'm to read the book twice. Once to have read it and then again to have understood it. I don't know that it's working other than to make me feel like I have two part-time jobs. One waiting on the small round tables at Caffe Acca, and one reading
Tender Is the Night.

When my shift at Acca is extra slow, Hal lets me stand in the back and read. I put my book up against the wall next to the pay phone and mark every passage that I think is important. My book is littered with pencil marks, which can't be right. Not everything can be important. I'm beginning to suspect that what matters is what happens
between
the events which are written down. Happens offstage, if you can say that about a book the way you do a play.

The story also goes backwards in time and then forwards again, which does not help my inept dyslexic self. I'm very close to deciding that people are like theater sets, some designed for certain things but not for others. It's as if I'm interested in stories more than I'm designed to
read
them. Perhaps they have to be attached to a real person in order for my brain to work.

For example.

There's a man who comes into Acca every Monday and Wednesday. He always orders chocolate raspberry cake and rarely eats any of it. He usually gets a coffee as well and drinks all of that. Black, one sugar. Like Raphael, but not Clare, who says putting sugar into coffee is a crime.

I've cleared away five practically untouched pieces of cake before I start paying close attention to him. As if other facts will explain what the deal is with the cake. Or, more specifically, what his story is. On his middle finger he wears a ring with raised hieroglyphic markings. Right hand, not left, which of course gives me fits to figure out. I can't decide how old he is—much younger than Gyula and who knows what in relation to Rebecca's T., who I'm still hoping will walk in one afternoon.

He sometimes reads the front section of the paper by folding the pages in half, lengthwise. Mostly though, he studies whatever is in a black binder he carries tucked up under his arm. He keeps a pen and small white pad in his jacket pocket and often makes notes about what he's reading.

It's a Monday when he sits at one of the tables in the window. Not the one Rebecca was at when I last saw her, but I still take it as a sign of some sort and bring his cake before he's asked for it. Up until then, I've always approached him as if I'm really wondering what he'll order.

I put the plate down, asking, "Do you want coffee today or iced tea?"

These are his two usual choices, and he looks up from his perfectly folded paper with a smile.

"Does this mean I'm predictable?" he asks.

"It means you know what you like," I say.

He leans back in his chair so that he doesn't have to look up at me so much. I tend to tower over everyone sitting down.

"You're right, I do," he says, and something about the way he's looking at me makes my blush start its spread up toward my scalp. What's wrong with me? I smile, hoping he won't notice the change in color.

"Coffee today?" I ask, firmly putting blushing and other unprofessional topics out of mind.

"That would be great," he says. "Thank you."

There are water glasses to be filled and orders to be placed and tables to be wiped and people who need things and very quickly, just as my tables are emptying into the lull between coffee and dinner, I'm bringing him his change. After giving me a smile that doesn't quite meet my eyes, he's gone.

I bring his cake again on Wednesday, determined to withstand however he looks at me. He puts his hand against his heart and says,

"You remembered."

I laugh because he looks at once sweet and silly with his head cocked to one side and his hand like that.

"It's not a job that requires much," I say.

"Just a certain charming intelligence," he says.

And there goes my face—up in flames—but this time I know why. He's flirting with me, which would be a lot nicer without the blushing. By the time I get his coffee, I've stopped being such a twelve-year-old.

"So," he says, when I put his cup on the table. "May I ask your name?"

"It's Leila," I say. "Leila Abranel."

I love my last name. It has an elegance that
Leila
by itself can never attain. He looks suitably impressed, and although it's pretty quiet today, I'm away from his table until I bring the check.

"Leila means 'dark as night,'" he says. "Right?"

"Yes," I say. "No one ever knows that."

"It doesn't really fit you."

I'm never telling him my middle name. Nothing sounds less fitting than Gwendolyn. But I always thought Leila was a good name. For me. And then I see myself as if in a photograph with the caption
Dark as night.

"Oh, you mean because of the blonde," I say. "But my personality is dark. Very dark."

"I'm not sure I'd believe that," he says.

"Don't let the smile fool you," I say, amazed at myself.

I'm just flirting away here. Dial it down, Leila. He's not that good-looking. And it's more the attention I like than him, which is rude of me. I pull myself into the how-do-you-do expression I use when meeting friends of my parents.

"My cheerfulness is a façade," I say, glad to have found a place for one of my SAT vocabulary words.

"No, it's not the smile," he says. "It's ... no, you're translucent."

He's in luck that this is a frequent adjective from
Tender Is the Night.
I've had to look it up and figure out that in the book, when a person or an event is described as translucent, it isn't a good or a bad thing. It's more that the someone or thing is important. Prized and rare. This is quite possibly the nicest compliment I've ever gotten, even if he doesn't mean exactly what the book does.

"Thank you," I say. "That's lovely."

He just looks at me.

"Anyway, my name's Leila," I add. "Even if it doesn't fit."

"Eamon," he says, standing up and holding out his hand. "Eamon Greyhalle. It's very nice to meet you, Leila."

I shake his hand and take my tray to the kitchen, ignoring the zing-zang-zoom which his skin sent shooting up and across my body. That I did not expect, as I've been shaking hands since forever. Until I was thirteen, I had to shake hands and curtsey with everyone I met. My sisters had had to do this too and always thought it was ridiculous.

I didn't mind it except for when people would look at Da and say,
Ob, my, can you make her do that again?
As hard as it is to meet strangers, I've always felt protected by my knowing how to do it. You look someone straight in the eye, hold their hand with a firmness that doesn't threaten to break it, and you smile.

There's no zing-zang-zooming involved. I'm pretty sure that's against the how-to-meet-someone rules.

When I tell Ben, Clare, and Raphael about Acca, I leave Eamon out entirely. Instead I focus on how the job is easy and fun. I am, as I knew I would be, really good at it. In more ways than I care to count, I tell them, I'm the perfect waitress.

"It's because you treat people well," Raphael says. "You've always been like that."

"You're perfect at a lot of things," Clare says, which is nice.

"You're lucky you haven't dropped anything yet," Ben says, which is funny because I once dropped a cup of soup in his lap and all he said, very quietly, was
Hey.
Ow.

A few days after we shake hands, Eamon asks about
Tender Is the Night.

"So you're always reading by the phone," he says. "What has such a hold on you?"

"You've seen me do that?" I ask. "I'm only allowed to do that when no one needs anything."

"Well, sometimes I look for you when I don't need anything."

And we're back to flirting. I like how conversations with Eamon veer around from the normal to the silly.

"It's a book I'm reading twice," I say.

"What book is that good?" he asks.

"I'm not sure it's good," I say.

"And so you're reading it twice because?"

He has a way of making me believe that everything I say, from
Coffee?
to
I'm reading,
is of great interest to him. When I worked for Rebecca last summer, she told me that the reason flirting was fun was that no one meant anything by it. So maybe Eamon is not really interested in what I say, but I go ahead and tell him how the book happens off the page. How I really liked that he called me
translucent
because of the book. How I wish the story made more sense to me.

"I read it in college too," Eamon says. "But I don't remember if it made sense. I'll have to go back and look."

I want to ask him what he's reading in that binder, what the notes are for. What's written on the ring and why he comes here. But I'm a waitress. And I'm not exactly sure how much one can ask a strange man about himself. About anything. No matter how polite he is or how nice his hands look holding his coffee cup.

W
HAT'S IMPORTANT IN ALL THIS,
what makes me attach Eamon to my story, happens the next week or the one right after. He isn't at Acca that Monday, which I don't realize until Wednesday when I see him sit down in the café's other section. I smile hello and then turn my attention to two women trying to decide between an éclair and a napoleon. I gather they're going to split it. They ask which I prefer and I say,

"Maybe I can ask the kitchen for a plate with half of each."

I feel a tap on my back. It's Drew, who works the shift with me.

"The guy at table nine wants you," he says.

"That's a perfect solution," one of the women says to me. "Do we have to pay for both?"

"I'll be right there," I tell Drew and say to the woman, "I'll ask."