“She was like you,” he said, incredulous.
The following day he couldn’t bear her to be so far from him and told her, at the risk of her finding more dates, that she didn’t have to spend more than an hour a day addressing flyers. He stayed at the counter with her, but they spoke very little. He pored through the boxes of books people lugged in from their cars, she took money from the customers, and in between they priced in silence. He wanted to ask her if she was planning to move back to San Francisco, or somewhere else, but every time he rehearsed it in his head, it sounded like a boss’s question and not a friend’s. Just before closing, a customer came up to the counter and asked if they were related. “You two have the exact same kind of eyes,” he told them. He was drunk and the comment was preposterous. Kate had warm thick-lidded brown eyes, and his were a narrow, suspicious green. The man didn’t have a coat and they watched him lurch away into the frozen air. They were careful not to look at each other’s eyes. It was only yesterday, the day of the mushroom soup, but it was already far away.
Mitchell comforted himself with the thought of Saturday, the day after next, when Paula would be there with them. But that night she told him she had play practice in the morning—she’d been cast as Rooster in Annie—and that her friend Holly had invited her over afterward.
Once he recovered from that blow, he saw on his calendar that the fourteenth of February fell on a Tuesday, the fifth Tuesday of Spanish lessons.
Saturday then Tuesday came and went, without change. On Wednesday and on Friday it snowed. He woke up in the middle of the night thinking about snow clinging to the ends of Kate’s hair and the slope of her back when she sat on the stool, then scolded himself until dawn. He tried to think of how to mention, offhand, to Paula that Kate’s birthday was approaching. But, as usual, she was three steps ahead of him. “I completely forgot to tell you,” she said at dinner. “I asked Kate to stay for dinner this Tuesday. It’s her cumplea?os.”
“Her birthday?” He feigned uncertainty.
“Have you been listening at the door, Dad?”
He wished he had the nerve.
“What should we get her?” Paula asked.
“How about a brooch?” he suggested.
“A brooch? What’s that?”
“You know a sparkly”—he put his fingers on his chest—“pin thing.”
“Oh my God. You are not serious.”
“Then make her something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A drawing. A necklace. Or, what about doing what you used to do to the gravel?”
“Dad!”
Mitchell, remembering the hours Paula had spent with her rock polisher, lamented the loss of the driveway as a primary source of entertainment and gifts. He knew he’d have to drive Paula to the mall.
They saw Kate there that Sunday in the food court. She was eating a burrito, alone. Both he and Paula had the same irrational impulse to conceal themselves, for fear that she would guess their purpose, and shadow her through the shops in order to discover her preferences. After lunch, she went to the perfume counters in Macy’s. A saleslady offered her some powder on a brush, but Kate shook her head and said something that made the woman laugh. Mitchell’s chest contracted slightly at being denied the words. Then they watched her weave through the smaller stores with their red streamers and glittering hearts and loud reminders like Sweetheart and Someone Special.
“She seems sad,” Paula said.
Mitchell was relieved she’d noticed. He thought it was just his own wishful thinking.
Kate didn’t buy anything. They watched her leave the mall, scan the parking lot for her car, then head toward it. There was nothing outside—not above or below or in the trees beyond the mall—that wasn’t some shade of gray. The cold had eased and everything that had been solid was now a thick, filthy sludge.
“It’s an awful time of year to have a birthday.”
Paula agreed. They stood at the door Kate had walked through. She unlocked her car, lifted her long coat in behind her, shut the door, and sat for at least a minute before starting the engine. She’d been born in Swanton, Ohio. She’d had her appendix removed when she was nine. She didn’t like cooked green peppers or people in costumes or anything by Henry James. She had a mole on her scalp, just where her part began. With only this handful of facts, he admitted to himself as Paula drew hearts in the clouds she breathed on the plate glass, he’d begun to truly care for her.