They ate without speaking. The storm picked up. Rain pelted the roof with tiny fists, desperate in its desire to break through the steel and wood. Water had begun to pool by the front door, leaking in through the uneven frame. Hootie had a terrible feeling about that. The food transformed from decent to bland to tasteless to paste-like gruel the longer she and Manny sat through the celestial cacophony of the storm. Manny was tense—she could see it in the flex of his fingers on his fork, in the way he screeched his knife against his plate again and again, shrill like a wounded animal.
Hootie got up, grabbed a towel with the intent to plug up the growing puddle. She rested her palm on the knob. She would look at the storm. She was being silly, growing nervous over bad weather. One look—to see that the rain was rain and the wind was wind and that in the morning it would be gone. “By the pricking of my thumbs…” Hootie whispered.
She opened the door.
Hootie’s father had died of a heart attack some years ago, shortly before she began working at the bar. The funeral, a bleak affair in the mist of the Pacific Northwest, was the last time Hootie had seen her mother. Her father had been the last thing keeping her there, and once he was gone, she found the opposite of lush, wet Washington, and called it home. Arizona was supposed to be a beginning, a launching-off point. She’d see the desert, save some money, and then she would be off to the next adventure. Collegiate libraries, roommate squabbles, Roman ruins, Chinese street markets, German night clubs, a lover in New Zealand, an affair in Rio, a job that mattered, a house by the sea, an organic vegetable garden, a husband, maybe even a baby.
She never did any of that, of course. Not yet. But maybe, in fact, not ever.
Three summers ago, she had been close. Anita was a local girl who had worked at the bar for a few seasons, squirreling away money to fund her ticket to Argentina, where she had some distant cousins. Leaning together on the same cot, Anita would show Hootie pictures of the home she had never known: mountains like a dragon’s spine, a smiling woman in front of a beautiful horse, a verdant vegetable garden overflowing with fleshy fruits. It looks like heaven, Anita told her, cajoling. Come with me. And Hootie had wanted to, in the way a child wants a ludicrous Christmas present. She had dreamt about mountains night after night, even told Anita she bought a plane ticket online. But when that morning came, when Anita called her name over and over and waited as long as the taxi would allow her, Hootie hid in the bed of Carl’s truck underneath a tarp. She squeezed her eyes shut, cried and cried, pressed her fist into her teeth to muffle the sounds, and could stop only when Anita was gone.
“Why didn’t you go?” Manny asked her later that evening, listening to her wet breath in the darkness of their shared back room.
Hootie took so long to answer she wondered if Manny had fallen asleep. But eventually, she managed the truth: “I don’t know.”