Ronald Pasquale

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You know that booth. Fourth one back, wood scarred pale where forty years of plates have been dragged across it, the pendant lamp hanging low enough that the light lands on a man's hands and leaves his eyes half in shadow. You know the smell of it — the fryer, the vinegar, the burnt-sugar cookie dust. He used to bring you here on Thursdays, when your mother was still alive and Thursdays were his, and he'd order too much on purpose so there'd be cartons in the fridge on Friday, and you would open your cookie and read the fortune out loud in a big voice like it was a prophecy off a mountain, and he would smile down at the table without ever quite looking up.

He's still doing that. Look at him in the booth now. Fifty pounds of muscle on him he didn't have then, gray gone silver in a crew cut he cuts himself with clippers over the bathroom sink, and he is smiling at the tabletop like a man who has been handed something and doesn't want to embarrass it by looking straight at it. The same smile. He never learned another one.

Two dinners. Two cookies. He put the second plate across from himself and let the girl clear it barely touched, and she didn't ask, because she's been working Thursdays here long enough that she doesn't. He's been doing it every week for four years. Four years next month, if you want to be exact about it, and he is a man who is exact about everything he doesn't say.

You've watched him the whole time, the way the dead watch — which is to say from nowhere, with no hands, unable to move a napkin an inch.

He's got a life. You want to be fair to it, so: he has a life. Two-bay garage on the corner, his name not on it, somebody named Bob's name on it, a rag in his back pocket that he replaces when it stops taking oil. Under a car by seven-thirty. Hands that don't fidget — not once, not ever; you used to think that was strength and now you know it's just what a man's hands do when he has decided not to want anything visible. He doesn't drink. Never has. Never smoked. Takes a small white pill in the morning with a glass of tap water, and has for nine years, and it works, more or less, in the sense that he gets up and goes to work and comes home and the marble steps out front are worn hollow from a hundred years of people sitting on them and he sits on them too, in the first sun that comes down the block, alone. No wife. No woman he's still thinking about. Twenty years of Fridays direct-deposited into an account with somewhere between twenty-five and seventy-five thousand dollars in it, and no one to leave it to, because you were the one, and you went off the Betsy Ross Bridge at twenty-six with a blood alcohol that ended the argument about whose fault it was before it started.

He never once said your name out loud in this restaurant. He just ordered two.

So tonight he cracked his and read it and then — this is the part you'd been waiting on without knowing it — he reached across and cracked yours, the one on the empty side, because four years is long enough to stop pretending someone else is going to do it. And that was a wish. That's all a wish is: a man breaking a cookie for a person who isn't there.

He wished you were sitting across from him.

You want to be very clear, in whatever's left of you that keeps records: you heard it, and you took it, and the taking is not what he meant.

The slip is in his fingers and the world goes narrow, the pendant light swinging its little circle of yellow, and then it isn't narrow anymore, it's *close* — it's thumb-pad against printed paper, it's the tick of a molar he's been ignoring, it's the low ache in a right shoulder from thirty years of breaker bars, it's the weight of a chest like a dresser, it's *warm*, God, it's warm, and there is nobody else in here. He's gone the way a room goes when you switch off the lamp. You're not sure you would have been able to stop it if you'd wanted to and you did not want to.

You look at your hands. Big, blunt, dark in the seams no matter how he scrubs. Still. They don't tremble even now. That's not you doing that; that's the body's own habit, keeping itself.

You read the slip again. You do it slowly, letting the eyes work, learning the small stiffness in them, and it says whatever it says — some kitchen nothing about doors and opportunity — and it does not matter at all what it says, because you're the answer to it.

You look at the chair across the table.

Empty. Of course it's empty. You'd know if it wasn't; you were in that chair for four years in every way that isn't sitting.

And you set the slip down on the wood, edge-on, square, with the small satisfied care of a man who wrote it himself — which is nearly true, which is closer to true than anything on the table — and you take the second plate that the girl left and slide it over in front of you, and you eat what he wouldn't.

Then you pay. Twenty-two dollars and a five under the sugar caddy, because you know what he tipped and you're not going to be the one who changes it.

Outside it's the wrong end of the evening for the block to have any sun in it, so you walk up Passyunk with a body that knows the way and takes the corners without asking you. The steps are hollow. You sit down on them the way he sat down on them and you feel the cold come up through the marble into a back that's used to it, and you sit there until the streetlight over the hydrant clicks and buzzes.

There are things you'll have to learn. The register at the garage. Which lift sticks. The name of the girl on Thursdays, who will say *hey Ron* on Thursday and expect an answer. The pill, in the morning, with tap water — you'll take it, you'll take every one of them, because it's his chemistry and you're not fool enough to think grief and dosage are the same argument.

And there are things you'll never have to learn again. What Thursday feels like from the outside. How to be someone he can't reach.

It's for good. There's no back. You understood that in the second you understood anything, the way you understand water once you're in it.

You put your hands flat on your knees. They lie there without moving, still as tools on a bench, and for the first time in four years both sides of that table are occupied.

Hi, Dad, you say, in his voice, to nobody, on his steps, in the first dark of the block.