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“That sounds really neat.”
“It was. But after a while, I got a job at a restaurant in town, and my girlfriend and I broke up.”
“Did you see Bibiana anymore?”
His eyes skated over the top of her head, past her. Far away. “She wasn’t thrilled about the restaurant job. I think she must have been hurt, but I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She just cut me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“As if we were in the Old World. I came in the kitchen, she turned her back. Like I wasn’t even there.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“So what did you say to her?”
“What do you mean? I didn’t say anything. I left.”
May turned her face away so he wouldn’t see her surprise.
“The restaurant wasn’t even any good,” he continued. “So I started traveling again, and I got a job in Glasgow washing dishes in this gastro pub that was kind of up-and-coming. I spent four or five months there, then moved on to another restaurant. I did that for three years—Spain, France, Germany, then London, the Netherlands, and one spring with a butcher in Italy. I finally got a job in a French kitchen with three stars, and I stayed there the last year. I was the lowliest of the lowly guys, but I learned a ton. Stop here.”
There weren’t so many people near them now, and he spun her around and slung his arm over her shoulder. “Okay, now I play tour guide. Over there’s the Manhattan Bridge. That’s Manhattan.”
“I know that.”
“There might be a quiz later—just wanted to make sure you were listening.”
“Tell me something tour-guidey. When was this bridge built?”
“No idea.”
“How does a suspension bridge work?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m a beekeeper.”
“Well, what else do you know?”
“It goes from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It’s pretty on top. I like it.”
May smiled. “Good enough for me.”
“All right, then.” He turned, and they started walking again. He left his arm slung over her shoulder, his hip bumping familiarly against hers now and then.
After a while, they came down off the suspended part of the bridge onto what amounted to an ordinary concrete walkway between two sides of a four-lane divided road. The sun was more intense here, the landscape blandly urban and unappealing.
Ben didn’t continue his story, and she didn’t push him. She knew the gist of it. More restaurants, more responsibility. A wife found and lost. Enough pain to turn him bitter when he thought about it.
She didn’t want to sink their day into melancholy a second time if she could help it.
When they reached a crosswalk where a map of Brooklyn suggested various tourist destinations, she asked, “Where to next?”
He smiled. “You’ll see.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“This place looks like Wisconsin.”
