Page 27 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“It’s a site called Velvet. You can guess what it’s for, and you’d be right. I’m not going to pretend I stumbled in there by accident looking for recipes.” That gets almost a smile out of her, which I needed. “I clicked on a page because the woman was beautiful. That’s the whole nobility of the origin story. I subscribed the way you buy anything at three a.m. — because it’s three a.m.”

“And?” Very quiet.

“And the first night, she asked me how my day was.” I have to stop and get the next part right, because it’s the part that matters. “I typed ‘fine.’ She asked a follow-up question. June — nobody had asked me a follow-up question in two years. People asked how I was doing the way you check a smoke alarm. Press the button, hear the beep, walk away satisfied. She asked what I’d had for dinner. I sat in that chair and cried like a pipe burst, over a chat window, because a stranger on the internet wanted to know about my dinner.”

June doesn’t say anything. Her thumb moves across the seam of the counter, back and forth, and stops.

“I paid month after month for over a year. And I know how that sounds, so let me say the rest. Inside of a month it had nothing to do with what the site is for. I’d have paid the same for the chat window alone, and toward the end I think that’s genuinely all I was paying for. She’d ask about my day. I’d ask about hers. She told me true things — I could tell they were true, the way you can — but never one detail that would find her. No city, no last name, nothing. And she didn’t know me either. I was a username and a jersey number I never explained. For all she knew I drove a forklift.” I turn the glass again. “For an hour a night, I was nobody. I can’t explain what that’s worth when your face is on a banner outside your own building.”

“You don’t have to,” June says.

“There was a week last winter when she went quiet. Days. Flu, it turned out.” Don’t ask me why this is the part I need her to have, but it is. “I didn’t ask where the content was. I asked if anyone was bringing her soup. She said a friend had it covered. I was relieved for a day and a half — about soup, for a stranger, in a city I didn’t know the name of. That’s where it had gotten to.”

June sets her wine down. Both hands, slow, the way you set down something full. She doesn’t say anything at all.

“She used to ask if I’d eaten.” I look at the stove, because it’s easier than looking at her. “Middle of the night, she’d ask about dinner like my mother used to. First person since my mother, if you want the truth.” And then, because we’re this far in and there’s no reason left to stop: “You asked me that once. Your first week here, standing right about where you’re sitting. It took me a second to answer you. Now you know why.”

She’s very still. The wine is very still. When she speaks, her voice comes out level, and I think about how she’d have made a good nurse, or a good bomb tech.

“Did it ever feel like you were doing something to Nora?”

“I waited for it to. It never did.” I’ve had a long time to check this answer, and it holds. “Nora and I got goodbyes. Real ones — we had months of warning, and we used them. She told me to keep the house loud — full of people, full of noise — and I’ve failed at that. She told me not to be noble about being alone, and I’ve failed at that too, mostly. This wasn’t stepping out on a dead woman. This was me learning how to be a person again, at three in the morning, with training wheels on. I think Nora would have signed off on it. After she finished laughing at me. There would have been a significant laughing period first.”

June laughs — one real one, low, into her glass — and wipes her eye with the heel of her hand.

“What was she like?” she asks then. “The woman in the window.” It comes out careful, like the question is heavier than she wants me to see, and I make myself not wonder why.

I think about it, because she deserves the real answer, not a polished one. “Funny in a dry way that snuck up on you — you’d be three lines past the joke before you caught it. Practical about everything. I’d hand her something that was eating me, and she’d hand it back smaller, and it wasn’t a trick. It was just how she saw things. She worked too hard. She was tired all the time and never once said so. And in fourteen months, she never asked me for a single thing. I used to try to get her to. Ask for something, I’d think. Just once.” I stop, because something crosses June’s face, there and gone too fast to read. “Mostly she was kind without making any noise about it. You know the type.”

June is quiet for a while. “You tried to get her to ask for something,” she says finally, like that’s the detail worth keeping out of all of it.

“Once a month, at least. It never worked. The closest I ever got — she asked me once to describe the breakfast buffet at my hotel in Winnipeg. So I typed the whole thing out for her. The little jams in the flat baskets, the waffle machine with the timer. She said it was the nicest thing anyone had given her all week.” I shake my head at the counter. “A description of a hotel breakfast. That’s the most she ever let me give her.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone? Mitch. Anyone.”

“Because it doesn’t survive the first sentence. People hear the website and the wallet and they know everything, and every single thing they know is wrong. You’d need somebody willing to sit for the whole hour to get to the part that mattered, and nobody gets the whole hour.” I look at her. “You’re the first person who ever got it.”

“What happened to her?” June asks, and there’s something in the question I can’t place, so I answer it straight.

“She vanished. April. I typed my message one night and the page was gone — deleted, all of it, like it never existed. No goodbye, no notice, nothing. Fourteen months, and it ended in a page-not-found.” I could stop there. But I don’t. “I typed that address by hand every night for months, checking. Never let the computer remember it for me — if I typed it myself, it was a choice instead of a habit, and I needed it to stay a choice. The page always said the same thing.” The last of the wine goes around the glass, a quarter at a time. “I still check, some nights. Fewer lately. I noticed the other day I hadn’t checked since the middle of October. I stood there working out what that means, and then I put it away and made dinner.”

June opens her mouth. For a second I’d swear something’s coming — her shoulders go square, braced, as if she’s about to say something big. Then she picks the wine back up instead, and I let it go. Whatever she almost said is hers to keep or not.

“Maybe she couldn’t do goodbyes,” June says, to her glass. “Maybe fast was the kindest way she had.”

“I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about every version. She’s somebody’s real life, somewhere — somebody with rent and a family and a reason, and the reason’s none of my business. I never once felt owed.” The clock over the stove says it’s tomorrow. Brenda grinds and gives us nothing. June is watching me, hands wrapped around a glass she stopped drinking a long time ago. And I get to the bottom of it — the thing I’ve never once admitted, even to myself.

“I don’t even know her name. I hope she’s okay. That’s all. I just hope she’s okay.”

June

I say the normal things. That’s the part I won’t get over — that I stood in that kitchen with my whole life on fire and said the normal things.

“I’m glad you told me.” True. “She’d be glad you told somebody too.” True, in the worst way, about a woman standing three feet from him. “Goodnight, Gus.” I rinse both glasses and set them in the rack. I do my last pass — stove, back door, one light over the sink — because as long as I’m working down a list, my hands stay steady.

They start shaking on the stairs.

By the time my door is shut I’m on the floor with my back against the bed, arms around my knees, shaking like I’ve been pulled out of cold water. Not crying. Crying is something you can finish.