She put it in her apron, beside the card she had not yet used, and she carried the empty water pitcher back to the station. The paper warmed against her through the cloth. Glenn passed with a tub of dishes and said, “Your people again,” not unkindly, and she said, “Yes,” and the yes was simple. In the window their heads bent over the pie. The rain kept on. A bus went by and the cups trembled and settled, and nothing was empty that had been filled, and nothing was promised that could not still be refused in December, and the refusal, if it came, would not erase the column of checks or the boy’s voice saying remainder two as if he had built the two himself.
She worked until the door was locked. Ruth counted the till. Toni swore mildly at a ketchup bottle. Emily wiped the window booth last. On the chrome, where the number 214 had lain, there was a damp ring from a glass, and she wiped the ring until the metal was only metal, a long bright stroke, the reflection of the overhead lights running along it like a thought that did not need to be spoken. In her pocket the contest problem rested against her palm when she reached for the rag. She did not take it out to admire it. Admiration, she had told him, was how you dropped a sign. She finished the table. She set the salt where the salt belonged. She turned the chairs up, their legs a small forest in the dark window, and she stood for a moment in the aisle with her hand on the back of the red vinyl, feeling the day’s heat still in it, a heat that would be gone by morning and was not, for that reason, unreal.
Outside, the maple keys would be wet on Cedar Avenue, and her father would be asleep or pretending, and the brick outside her own window would be brick. She would go to one and then the other. She would wash the blue bowls if they had been used. She would sleep. In December she would make a call or she would not. The future did not lean on her tonight. It sat, as Denise had sat, on the other side of the table, amused and then not, waiting to see whether the pencil would come down.
Emily turned off the lights in the front of the diner. The chrome went from silver to a softer gray. She could still see, in the habit of her mind, a yellow pencil stopping a finger’s width above a wrong number, and she could still feel the later touch, the graphite meeting the page, the boy’s breath coming back into his body. Both moments were hers. Neither of them asked her to be anything but exact. She locked the door behind her. The rain had thinned to a mist that made the parking lot lights into halos, and she walked to her car without hurrying, a woman of thirty-two in black shoes, with a folded problem in her pocket and the ordinary courage of someone who would be back in the morning to pour the first cup, and who, for the length of the walk, did not find that fact any smaller than the rest.