Part 4:
I’ll pay you back. I can’t take it. Ryan. Take it. Get yourself breakfast. Get yourself a coffee. Get yourself a car back to wherever you need to go. This is $40. I can count. You just told me you lost your job. I did. And you have a 7-year-old daughter. I do. She looked at the money. She looked at him. Her eyes were doing something complicated that he couldn’t quite read.
“Why?” she said. Quietly. He shrugged. “Because you need it more than I do right now. I’m going home to a kid who loves me. You’re going to a diner alone in a town you don’t know. 40 bucks isn’t going to save my life. It might make yours a little less terrible for an hour. That’s a deal I can live with.
” She took the money. She took it slowly, the way you take a thing you don’t want to take, but don’t know how to refuse. “I will pay you back,” she said. “I promise.” “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to.” “Okay.” She got out. She pulled her suitcase out of the truck bed. She stood in the parking lot for a second, holding the suitcase and the folded bills, looking at him through the open passenger window.
“Ryan Hale.” “Yeah.” “You have a good face.” “I don’t know what that means.” “Neither do I.” “But you do.” She closed the door. He waited until she was inside the diner before he pulled out of the parking lot. He drove home the rest of the way with $2 in his wallet. Tat. The apartment was on the second floor of a three-story walk-up on Birch Street, above a laundromat that made the whole building smell faintly of dryer sheets.
The stairs were narrow, and the banister was loose, and Ryan had been meaning to fix it for a year. Emma was already up. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box because they were out of milk, and she wasn’t going to say anything about it. Her hair was a nest. She had a library book open in front of her.
She was 7 years old, and she read at a fifth-grade level, and sometimes Ryan caught himself being almost afraid of her. “Daddy?” “Hey, kiddo.” “You’re home early.” “Yeah.” “Did something happen?” Ryan set his keys on the counter. He took off his jacket. He hung it on the back of the chair. He sat down across from her.
“A couple of things, actually.” “Bad things?” “Some bad.” “Okay.” She waited. She was good at waiting. She had always been good at waiting. When her mother had been sick at the end, Emma had been 3 years old, and she had sat in the hospital room for hours without complaining, drawing pictures on the back of intake forms, and Ryan had thought at the time that it was just a phase, and she’d grow out of it.
She hadn’t grown out of it. He wasn’t sure she ever would. “I lost my job this morning.” he said. “Oh, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to find another one, but for a little while things might be kind of tight.” “Tighter than now?” “A little.” She nodded chewing a dry Cheerio. “Can we still get the boots?” He almost told her yes.
He almost lied. “Maybe not this weekend, kiddo.” “Okay.” “But soon.” “Okay, Daddy.” She closed the library book. She reached across the table and put her small hand on top of his big one. Her hand was sticky. He didn’t know what from. “Daddy?” “Yeah?” “Did you do anything bad?” “No.” “Okay.” “I promise, Emma, I didn’t do anything.
” “I know. I know you didn’t.” She said it so simply that it almost knocked him backwards. She didn’t say it like a question she was hoping would be answered the right way. She said it like a fact she’d already checked. He didn’t know what to say. He just squeezed her hand. “Daddy?” “Yeah, kiddo?” “Are we going to be okay?” He looked at her, at her nest of hair, at her library book, at the cereal box with the cartoon bee on it that was almost empty.
“Yeah, Emma. We’re going to be okay.” He didn’t know if he was telling the truth. He hoped he was. He was so tired. The rest of the day went the way days like that go. He made phone calls. He filled out an online application for unemployment that kept timing out. He drove to the gas station on the corner and put $4 of gas in the truck with money from the change jar.
He made Emma a grilled cheese for lunch and ate the crusts himself and called it his lunch. At 3:30 he walked Emma to school for her afternoon program, which was free. Thank God for the free afternoon program. And on the way back he stopped at the corner and looked up at the sky and said, mostly to himself, “All right.
All right, I just need a break.” He didn’t know who he was talking to. He had stopped believing in the kind of listener who answered back a long time ago. He walked home. He sat on his couch. He stared at the wall. At 4:47 in the afternoon, his phone rang. It was a number he didn’t recognize. He let it go to voicemail.
Nobody called him with good news. At 4:52 it rang again, same number. He let it go to voicemail. At 4:58 it rang a third time. He picked it up. Hello? There was a pause. Then a woman’s voice. Familiar. Ryan Hale? Speaking. This is Celeste from this morning. He sat up. Oh, hey. I wanted to thank you again. You don’t have to, it’s fine.
I’d like to pay you back. Really, it’s Ryan. Yeah. Will you be home tomorrow morning? I’ll be home every morning for a while. Can I come by? Around 9:00? He hesitated. He didn’t know what to make of this woman. He didn’t know how she’d gotten his number. He hadn’t given it to her. How’d you get this number? I have my ways. That’s not an answer.
