Two Hundred and Eleven

The chicken was $6.99 and the big can of Arizona was $3.49 and that came to ten forty-eight, tax and all, because food doesn’t get taxed here, which I checked once at the register, out loud. Split two ways that’s five twenty-four, and Noa never had the four cents, so for two years I paid five twenty-eight and she paid five twenty and neither of us ever said anything about it. That’s the kind of thing I’d call a marriage. That’s the kind of thing I’d say out loud, walking, and she’d say, that’s the kind of thing that makes people not want to walk with you, and I’d know she was kidding by her voice.

The walk was thirty-one minutes. I timed it once and then never timed it again because thirty-one is an ugly number and thirty is a beautiful one, so it was thirty. We left when the last bell stopped ringing and we got there when the deli guy was pulling the four o’clock birds, which were the good ones, the ones that hadn’t been sitting. Noa said the four o’clock birds were a myth. Noa said they pull them whenever and put whatever’s oldest in front, and I said then why do they taste better, and she said because you decided they did before you ate them, and I said that’s not a real argument, and she said neither is a bird.

We sat outside against the wall between the cart return and the propane cage. Not on the bench. The bench faced the parking lot and the wall faced the loading side, which had nothing to look at, which was the point. Nobody bothers you when you’re facing nothing.

We ate with our hands because there’s no other way to eat a rotisserie chicken and I want that on the record. You can bring a fork from home and be a person who brought a fork from home, or you can do it right.

She had a thing about the wet wipes. She kept them in the front pocket of her bag and she took out two, one for each hand, and went between every finger like a surgeon coming off a shift. I never used one. I wiped my hands on the wall.

Her mom came at 6:40. Not around 6:40. Six forty, the way the chicken was $6.99. Two years and I could feel it in my legs before the headlights got to the corner of the building. The car came around the far side and did the little double flash, and Noa would stand up and shake her legs out one at a time like she’d been sitting for a hundred years, and then she’d go. I’d stay against the wall another minute because my mom got off at seven and there was no reason to stand in the lot like a person waiting.

Friday I didn’t see her. Saturday, Sunday, Monday morning I didn’t see her, because Friday at four my dad picked me up on the corner by the Sunoco and I went to the city.

The city is a fourteenth floor and a doorman named Erasmo and a guest bathroom nobody’s ever used. My dad has a rule that I can’t have people over, which is a strange rule to have for a person with no people. The rule is about the party.

The party was at the old house, after he left and before my mom found the place on Ridge, when the house was empty in the way a house is empty when the furniture’s in a truck. No couch, no table, no curtains, a refrigerator with a light. I had forty people in it and it was the best night of my life until 11:40 when a cop stood in the living room and asked me whose house this was and I could not think of a single true answer.

He doesn’t bring it up. He just has the rule. And the rule means Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I am a girl on a fourteenth floor doing the math on how many hours until the last bell Monday.

Noa’s contribution to all of this was a voice.

She started it in the fall and never let it go. It was English, sort of, or her idea of English, and it was for narrating my weekends, and she’d start it out of nowhere, walking, without warning. The Lady of the Fourteenth Floor takes her supper alone. Erasmo has brought up the mail. There is no mail. Erasmo weeps. The Lady has counted the hours. There are so many hours, my God, there are so many.

I would be dying. I’d have to stop walking.

And she did it Mondays. Monday was the worst of it for me and Monday was when she’d start, first thing, in the hall before homeroom, before I’d said a word — And lo, the Lady returns to us from her tower — and I’d get through the day on it.

Nobody has ever done anything like that for me before or since. I want to be extremely clear about that.

Monday through Thursday. Four nights. Thirty-six weeks on the calendar and thirty-three you actually go, times two, minus the week her grandmother died, minus the two weeks I had mono, minus the four Thursdays she had SAT prep junior spring, minus the eight weeks of rehearsal senior fall when she was Hermia, minus the two early dismissals, minus the two snow days, minus the Monday the store lost power.

Two hundred and eleven.

I know because I counted. I want to be clear that I counted them while they were happening, not after. That’s different.

In October of junior year she told me about the baby.

Her dad had a new one, which everybody knew, and in October the new one was pregnant, which nobody knew, and Noa found out from a Facebook thing her aunt commented on. She told me sitting against the wall with the bird between us and she got about nine words in and then stopped being able to do it.

I had never seen her face do that. I’d known her since freshman year and I had a whole catalogue of her faces and this one wasn’t in it. She put her hand over her mouth — with the grease on it, without wiping, which I noticed even then — and she made a sound like a hiccup and then she just let it happen for about a minute and a half.

I didn’t say anything. That’s the one thing I did right in two years. I sat there and I let her, and when she was done she said okay and wiped her face with the back of her wrist and said, “Don’t tell anybody I did that,” and I said who would I tell, and she laughed, one honest laugh, wet and ugly, and said, “Yeah. Nobody. That’s why I told you.”

We split the bird. We got the bone. She won.

I have thought about that night maybe a thousand times. I kept it like a receipt. She had two hundred people who thought she was great and she had one person she could come apart in front of behind a propane cage, and that person was me, and I was going to be that person forever.

By the end of January I was doing the voice too.

That’s the thing I’d take back first if I got one.

I started it in the hall on a Tuesday, unprompted, because Monday had happened and I’d liked it and I wanted more of it — The Lady has returned. Erasmo has brought up the mail — and I did it badly, too loud, too many words, and Noa turned her head and said, “There is no mail,” about half a second late. Flat. The way you say a line you’ve already said.

And I thought: she’s tired. It’s Tuesday. Everybody’s tired on Tuesday.

I did it about four times a week after that.

A girl named Marisa Ocampo found us once. She was one of the two hundred. She’d parked on the loading side by accident and she came around the corner of the propane cage with her keys in her hand and said Noa’s name like a question, and then looked at the ground, at the bird on the plastic, at the wall.

She said, “What are you guys doing.”

And I said, “We sit here.”

I don’t know why I answered. Noa was four feet away with a thigh in her hand. I said it like a tour guide. I said we don’t do the bench, the bench faces the lot, and Marisa said huh, and looked at Noa, and Noa said hey.

Then Marisa said to me, “Sorry — I know who you are, I just don’t know you,” and I stood up, with grease to the second knuckle, and said, “Del. Just Del.”

And she said okay, and left, and I sat back down feeling like I’d handled something.

Noa didn’t say anything about it. She said the deli guy had shorted us, which he hadn’t.

I brought up the baby a lot. I brought it up the way you touch a bruise.

In February I said, so is it a boy or a girl, and she said a girl, and I said do you know the name yet, and she looked out at the parking lot and her jaw did something.

And I thought: there it is. She’s still in it. She still needs somewhere to put it.

I said, you can talk about it. With me you can.

She said, “I know.”

And I sat there feeling like the most necessary person in the world, and she pulled another strip off the bird, and twenty minutes later her mom flashed the lights.

The baby was born in June and she didn’t tell me. I found out in September from the same aunt’s Facebook.

The wishbone is up under the top of the cage and if you know where it is you can get it out clean in about four seconds. Noa never learned. Noa waited.

I’d hold it up and she’d take out two wipes even though we weren’t done, all ten fingers, and then she’d take her side.

Here’s a thing about wishbones nobody tells you. It’s not luck. It’s a bone with a grain, and the break goes where your thumb is. High thumb, close to the crown, and you’re pulling the short end off somebody. Low thumb and you’re giving it away.

Two hundred and eleven times I set my thumb down near the bottom of my side like I was being careful, like I was steadying it, and she pulled and the crown came off in her hand and she said ha — not yes, not I won, just the one dry syllable, like she’d proved a small point — and then she closed her eyes.

That’s the part. Eyes closed, lips moving, two seconds, and then she opened them and handed me back the short piece and went back to the bird.

I never asked. The one time I started to, the first week, she said if you say it out loud it doesn’t count, and I said that’s for birthday candles, and she said it’s for everything.

So I made a list instead. In my head, and then in the notes app.

Her mom’s back. Her mom did nights at the distribution center and stood the whole time and there was a thing with a disc.

Oregon. She had a folder, a paper one, since sophomore year, and she said the name of the school flat, like a place she was already from.

I asked about it a lot. I asked what a flight out there costs. I asked if you have to have a car or if there’s a bus. I asked how the housing works, whether it’s roommates or what, whether you get to pick, whether you can pick somebody you already know.

She said I don’t know. She said I don’t know. She said, “I don’t know, Del.”

And I thought: she hasn’t figured it out yet. She will.

The baby. Obviously the baby. For a year and a half I was certain a meaningful percentage of them were about the baby, because I knew her, because I was the one who was there for it.

I kept it on the list after September. After the aunt. I have no defense for that one and I’m not going to build one.

And then it got hopeful. That I’d say something first. That I’d say it at the wall and not walking, because walking you can pretend you didn’t hear. That it’s Monday.

I thought she wished it was Monday.

In March there was a night the bird was wrong. Dry, stringy, cold in the middle, and the can was the blue one because they were out of the green one, and it had rained at four so the wall was wet and we sat on her chem folder, which she said we could and then got quiet about.

She was pulling the meat off in strips instead of eating it, building a little pile on the plastic. And she said, out of nothing:

“Do you ever think about doing literally anything else.”

I said what do you mean.

And she said, “I mean anything. Ever. At all.”

And I sat there against a wet wall with grease to the second knuckle and my whole chest went hot, because I thought I knew what she was doing. I thought anything else meant this, but different. I thought she was standing at the edge of it and asking me to be brave so she wouldn’t have to be, and I was twelve seconds from saying something I’d been holding since October.

And then she wiped her hands, two wipes, all ten fingers, and she said, “Forget it. Get the bone.”

And I got the bone, and I held my thumb low, and she won, and she closed her eyes.

I have a version of that night where I said it. In the version she doesn’t say anything back and we just sit there and it’s fine, because it’s out.

She walked at graduation eleven people after me. We hugged in the parking lot with our families twenty feet away and she said okay into my shoulder, which I took home and worked on for a month.

She didn’t answer in June. She didn’t answer in July. In August her number stopped being her number, and the account went private, and then away, and Oregon has a directory but you have to have a login.

I went to the county school on Route 9 and stayed at my mom’s because it was closer and because somebody should be in the house on Ridge, which is a thing I said out loud to people, and which is a sentence with nothing in it.

I kept walking to the store.

Not every night. Enough. Thirty-one minutes, wall between the cart return and the propane cage, and a bird for six ninety-nine that I paid six ninety-nine for. A rotisserie chicken is a two-person meal. It is priced like one and sized like one, and when you buy it by yourself the girl at the register doesn’t say anything but she’s already thought it.

I ate about a third and threw the rest in the can by the propane cage.

The woman with the cart had been there other nights and I’d done what everybody does, which is decide in advance not to look.

That night I’d already stopped. I don’t know how else to say it. I’d walked over and bought the bird out of muscle and sat down out of muscle and I was eating something I didn’t want in a spot that had stopped meaning anything, and there was a flatness in me I’d never had before, and I remember thinking: oh, so this is what it’s like when it’s just food.

She said, “You gonna finish that?”

I looked at the bird, one side off it, cooling, on its way to the can.

I said, “Why not.”

She sat down four feet away against the same wall, facing the same nothing. She ate fast and didn’t talk while she did it, and I liked her enormously for that, and we got down to the frame in about ten minutes.

Somewhere in there she said the four o’clock ones are the good ones, and I said I know.

She said her son worked the deli at the one out on Route 9 for six years.

I got the bone out in four seconds because I always do.

I don’t know what I was doing. I held it up the way you hold it up. She took her side without wiping her hands, and I set my thumb down where I always set it, low, careful, giving it away —

and my hand did something else.

I felt it move. That’s the part I can’t explain and don’t want to. My thumb went up to the crown like it had been waiting two years for somebody who wasn’t her, and she pulled, and it came off long in my hand, the whole arch, clean.

She looked at the little stub in her fingers and then at me.

She said, “Well. Make a wish.”

And I had a hundred of them lined up like planes. I could have said let her call. I could have said let me stop.

I closed my eyes and my lips moved and it took two seconds.

I said, “I wish I knew what she wished for.”

Her mom got the surgery. She got Oregon.

The woman was chewing. She’d found something on the frame I’d missed, down by the back, and was working on it.

I don’t know what my face was doing.

She said, “So?”

I said, “I got it.”

She said, “Good?”

I said no.

She nodded like I’d said the temperature. She finished the piece and wiped her hands on the wall — on the cinderblock, two passes, like it was nothing, like everyone does that — and got her hands on the cart handle and stood up in stages.

She said, “It’s quarter of seven. Nobody’s coming.”

She got the front wheel over the crack in the concrete, which takes a lift.

And I said — and I don’t know why, it came out like a kid asking a question at a museum — I said, “What if I just stay here.”

She was already going. She didn’t turn around all the way. Just enough.

She said, “I sat down once.”

Then she went up past the propane cage and the loading side and out where the lot lights stop, and the cart made that noise carts make, and it got further away at exactly the speed of a person walking, which is thirty-one minutes to anywhere.

I stood up.

That’s all I did. I had the crown of the wishbone in my left hand, the long end, the whole arch of it, unbroken, and I stood there in a parking lot holding it.

The lights over the loading side buzzed and cut out and came back the way they do.

Same wall. Same nothing. Just higher up.