Page 27 of The Quiet After The Fall

She looks out at the park across the street, messing with the zipper on her purse. And my gaze stays fixed on her.

I wait quietly.

I’m happy to just sit beside her while memories play through her mind.

“Owen really committed to that bit.” She says it so softly I almost don’t hear her.

Something loosens in my chest. I had a feeling she was thinking about that day. “He charged that family thirty dollars for the tour.”

Her head turns toward me. “Was it that much?”

“Yup. Thirty bucks cash. Told them it was a donation for the museum foundation.”

She stares at me for a second and then she laughs. Her real laugh this time. The one I haven’t heard in so long, it almost knocks me sideways. “That was a good day.”

“Yeah,” I say. It really was.

Me, Owen, and Sawyer wandering the museum for hours on my birthday before collapsing on a park bench eating pretzels and picking which bars we wanted to try to get into. I had just turned twenty, they were seniors. The day was almost perfect…would have been better if it were just me and Sawyer.

Then my buddies from my school took the train down, none of us managed to get into any bars, and we rode the last train home, exhausted in the best way.

Sawyer pulls her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “Owen was so proud of himself for keeping up the ruse.” She shakes her head, lost in thought. “Remember how happy that guy at the park was when he gave him the money?”

“Of course.”

Owen wasn’t a total shit…at least not then. He may have taken money from a family of tourists, but he gave it to an unhoused man who needed it.

“He was so much fun that day,” she says. “That’s the thing that gets me. He could be so genuinely good. I think he pulled it out of us too. I mean, look at us now.”

“Yeah.” I breathe out. “Maybe he did.”

She turns her head to look at me. “Did you have a good birthday? I always wondered since we kind of hijacked it. Then there were the bar fiascos and everything.”

The question catches me off guard. I don’t know why. “It was the best one I had in years.”

She holds my gaze for a second, then looks back out at the park. “I wish I could separate it…who he was from what he did. Keep the good parts and just make the rest stay hidden.” She exhales. “But it doesn’t work like that.”

I know she’s not only talking about Owen.

“No.” I think about all the things I wish I could forget. All the good parts I want to hold onto before saying. “It really doesn’t.”

She nods and adjusts her skirt, keeping her eyes straight ahead.

It’s a comfortable silence, but I already miss the sound of her voice.

“I’m starving,” she finally says.

“I know a diner.” I stand up before she can change her mind.

We head south for a few blocks while I hope the place I have in mind is still in business all these years later. It’s the perfect place for comfort food, just like the diner we always went to during our summers on the lake. Fluorescent lighting, rotating pie case, walls covered in framed photos of past patrons, and sticky vinyl booths.

“There it is,” I tell Sawyer, nodding my head toward the sign across the street. “Jean’s Place.”

“You sure we won’t leave clutching our stomachs and searching for the nearest open bathroom?”

“Is any diner ever a sure thing?”

She smirks but heads toward the crosswalk. A bell jingles when we push through the door. A waitress with a silver braid down her back and a waist apron smudged in ketchup barely looks up from the coffee she’s pouring. “Sit anywhere, hon.”