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  “Do you smoke?”

  Though she has, just in this moment, decided that she does smoke, or, more precisely, will smoke—because she can picture it so clearly, and because she somehow knows that as a woman on her own she is going to sooner or later crave its bitter heat—she shakes her head, for now, no.

  “Mind if I?” he asks, raising his amused dark eyebrows along with the pack.

  “Not at all,” she says, smiling back. “Please do.”

  PIE

  Portland and Los Angeles, 1947

  She is wiping the counter down for closing when he comes in and seats himself on a stool, asking for pie and coffee. There is nothing special about that, nothing special about him. He is in working clothes, a heavy cloth jacket, gray to begin with, but blackened now at the elbows and cuffs. He doesn’t look especially clean, but what man does after manual work? He smiles at her, asking what’s good.

  “Pretty much all,” she says. “The coconut cream is the freshest.”

  He takes coconut cream. She asks how he likes it, and he says wonderful, looking at her in such a way that she flushes. The pie and coffee come to a dollar. He leaves two.

  When he comes in again a few days later, he’s still dressed in work clothes, but his dark hair is neatly combed. There’s the slightest bit of accent in his voice but she can’t place it.

  “What’s good today?” he wants to know.

  “They’re all good, I told you that.”

  “Okay, what’s freshest?”

  She thinks; which had Helen brought out last? The lemon.

  “Lemon,” he agrees. “I’m going to come until I try them all.”

  Involuntarily, she glances at the pie case, counting. Six kinds, give or take. Sometimes Helen goes to town on it and there are more.

  “And then,” he adds, “I’ll have them again.”

  She laughs. “You like pie.”

  “I didn’t know I liked it so much.”

  He always comes toward the end of the day when she isn’t busy. He’ll take a second cup of coffee, black, and light a cigarette, smoking thoughtfully while she wipes the counters, tops up the salt and peppers, marries the ketchups. She gets used to his watching, so much so that one day when he doesn’t come she feels off-balance and unmoored behind the counter.

  Then he’s back, ordering custard. She doesn’t ask him where he was, because she thinks he might expect it. That particular day rain streaks the windows where Charlie and Helen’s is painted in yellow, the letters appearing backward as you look out.

  “Kay,” he says. She still feels a strange sensation when he calls her that. She told him her name was Kathryn when he asked, and he nodded gravely, though when he stood up to leave that night he said, “Good night, Kay.” And “Kay” is all he’s called her since. It amazes her, how someone thinks he can rename you, just like that, though after the shock of it, she secretly agreed: Kay.

  “I’d better give you a ride home tonight. Look at the rain.”

  “I have an umbrella. And it’s just a few steps to the bus stop.”

  “But when you get off the bus—you’ll have a walk then.”

  “Not a long one.” But it’s true that it’s longer than she likes most evenings, especially in weather like this.

  “I had better.”

  He’s older than she is; she can’t tell by how much. Helen noticed him one day and then the day after that and put two and two together. “He’s handsome,” she said. “But you’d better watch out.”

  Kathryn—Kay—who is she now?—was made uneasy by the remark. She’d been dating servicemen, so she knew lots of things to watch out for, but he wasn’t fast-talking like a soldier on a twenty-four-hour leave. She was minding her own business carrying plates. And now she had better take a ride.

  Kathryn goes back to the kitchen, where Charlie is wrapping the meat loaf in waxed paper.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Charlie peers at her through thick glasses. He was sorry to sit out the war but they wouldn’t take him.

  “Charlie, do you think I should take a ride from Carl?”

  “You mean the fellow who moons over you every night?”

  “It’s raining rivers out.”

  Charlie wipes his hands on his apron and goes out front. Kathryn follows, not knowing what she’s set in motion.

  “Name’s Charlie.” He extends his hand.

  “Carl.” They shake. “You have a fine place here.”

  “I see you’ve become a regular. Must have to do with something more than my wife’s pie.”

  Carl is smoking his after-pie cigarette, which he always stubs out in the ashtray, not the saucer, like some customers do. “I won’t deny it.”

  “You won’t mind showing me your driver’s license will you, Carl? If Kathryn here decides to take a ride with you?”

  Carl reaches for his wallet, worn curved and shiny from the back pocket. His attitude is neither insulted nor cowed. “That’s a good idea,” he tells Charlie.

  Charlie examines it like a cop. Helen will have a laugh over this tomorrow, Kathryn thinks.

  “It’s up to you, Kathryn,” Charlie tells her. “I don’t see the harm. It’s a terrible night for the bus and I won’t be out of here for another hour yet.”

  Kathryn unties her apron and hangs it up. She goes to the coat rack and gets her raincoat; she heard the forecast and left the mohair at home. She ties a kerchief around her hair, knotting it under her chin.

  “Give me a ring when you’re home, Kathryn.” Charlie turns back to the kitchen.

  “Nice to meet you,” Carl calls after him.

  She is used to him sitting down. He’s taller than she thought, but not tall. She knows what he does for a living now. His sheet-metal trade takes him high on the girders; he crawls though ducts, the inner workings. During the war it was all shipyards. He missed the war, too, but he didn’t say why.

  He holds her umbrella over her as the rain slants around them. She’s used to being steered by fellows now. Before coming to work at Charlie and Helen’s, she had a job selling cigarettes in the nightclub of the Benson Hotel. She wore a white blouse and black skirt and carried a tray from a strap around her neck, weaving around the tables while the all-girl orchestra played. When customers needed her, they raised a finger. She had a little flashlight, but she never used it, making change in the dark. Do your eyes bother you? a sailor asked her. Puzzled, she shook her head. Because they bother me, he said. After the first time, she waited patiently for the punch line. Whenever she had nights off, soldiers booked them solid with dinner dates, movie dates, dancing dates. She had an address book with so many names that sometimes she stared at one and had no idea whose it was. A lot of what they wrote to her on thin aerogram paper had been blacked out. But what remained was this: They all needed to know that she missed them. After so many, she didn’t, really. But she told them she did. It was the least she could do.

  Now they are all somewhere besides the war, disguised as civilians. They rushed home after V-J Day with their discharge papers and paired up with the girls who’d made promises. Even Kathryn had had one come back with a ring box but she shook him loose back to Pittsburgh; it had all seemed like make-believe and she hardly recognized him when he reappeared out of uniform. What seemed solid and strong in him before, now looked blocky and stubborn. He expected she’d turn Catholic, for one thing. She didn’t think she was a Mennonite anymore, but she knew she wasn’t a Catholic. And she knew she wasn’t supposed to move back east with him to live above the family filling station, no matter how nicely his hair fell in waves across the back of his head.

  Carl opens the door and keeps the umbrella over her until she’s all the way in the passenger seat. He drives smoothly up Burnside to Twenty-sixth, wipers beating out time, and she tells him the turns and gives him the house number. Living at the Johnsons’ is her other job, and all she has to do to earn her rent is a little morning babysitting between the time Mr. Joh
nson leaves for work and Mrs. Johnson gets home from her night shift as a nurse.

  He doesn’t say much as he drives, but she finds that restful. It takes only five minutes to arrive. The bus, when you count the waiting and the walking after, sometimes takes thirty.

  “Thank you,” she says. “It’s nice to be dry.”

  “Anytime,” he says. “I’ll walk you up to your door.”

  “No need. Really. Thank you again.”

  She likes that he doesn’t argue when she lets herself out with a little wave and walks herself up to the porch holding her umbrella. She likes that he stays put until she lets herself all the way inside.

  After that, Carl times his visits so that she’s always closing up, and she takes a ride nightly, even when it’s nice out. The daylight is lasting into the evening hours now, and the nights are balmy. Carl is always pleasant and relaxed, but doesn’t chat a lot, so she doesn’t feel she has to either when she’s tired after a day on her feet. She’ll accept one of his Parliaments and he’ll light it for her, and because they won’t be done with their cigarettes by the time they get to the house, they’ll sit a few minutes and finish, blowing smoke out the open windows. She gradually learns the particulars of his big Finnish family, most of them here in Oregon, an hour outside of Portland in a farming community called Mulino. He seems unfazed about things like Mennonites, and her minister father, and even the humdinger—her missionary upbringing in India. When she asks him about his church, he says he’s been in one only a few times. He doesn’t seem to have anything against religion, but he also doesn’t seem to have a built-in place in his brain for it, like everyone she grew up with.

  One Sunday afternoon in June he shows up at the Johnsons’ door with the Sunday paper, a basket of strawberries, the field dust still on them, and a jar of thick cream. He chats cordially with Mrs. Johnson as he presents her with the fruit. “From my sister’s farm,” he says.

  Kathryn slices the fruit in Mrs. Johnson’s nurse-tidy kitchen, where soapy water as hot as you can stand it is used to wipe the counters, and the dishrags must be unfolded to dry thoroughly on the rack between uses. Though Kathryn has been brought up with similarly orderly habits, there is a modern, scientific gleam to Mrs. Johnson’s housekeeping that Kathryn intends to emulate when she has her own home.

  Every Sunday after that, he drops by with the paper and something from the farm. When the strawberries are done he brings raspberries, and sometimes a few eggs, brown and flecked with crumbs of straw from the roost. They remind her of eggs from her aunt Lena’s farm in Lowpoint, Illinois. Curiously, he never asks her out to dinner. Never tries anything. Never touches her at all, in fact, except for the gentlemanly steering to his car. She’s gotten used to him in the sitting room, and so has Mrs. Johnson, who greets him like an old friend and then tactfully disappears. Mr. Johnson, a mild accountant who had a desk job in the war, shakes hands and also disappears. Lucy is upstairs with her mother in the playroom. Sometimes Willie comes in with toy cars to drive on the carpet. Carl talks to him levelly, man to man, never as if he is a five-year-old. One morning, he pulls out a rabbit’s foot and gives it to him. Willie stares at it, his mouth slightly ajar.

  “That one’s straight from Montana, where I grew up. I trapped that rabbit myself, so even though the rabbit wasn’t so lucky, it’ll make you lucky.”

  Kathryn watches Willie’s face, worried he might cry. He rubs his thumb over the end of it and says, “Claws!”

  “Let me see,” Kathryn says, and the boy comes over and leans against her side and gently rakes the foot down her arm. He’s right; the foot has tiny curved claws beneath the velvety softness. She strokes its length in the direction that the claws don’t hurt, its strange mix of bone and fur.

  “What do you say?” she asks Willie.

  They read the Sunday paper and smoke Parliaments. Kathryn’s rule about smoking is that she never buys her own but takes one when it’s offered, so she’s tried a lot of brands. She likes these for their smoothness. After they make their way through the sections she goes into the little kitchen at the side of the house and makes sandwiches. Then he thanks her and leaves. Even though she’s been wondering how she’s going to let him know that he’s too old for her, she’s beginning to feel insulted that he’s never once tried anything.

  One morning, he turns the page in the features section and whistles.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Harry James at Jantzen Beach,” he says. “Only tonight. How about it?”

  She agrees, forgetting that she intended to discourage romantic ideas. She loves Jantzen Beach. She loves the swimming pools, the ballroom, the twinkling view of the city from the Ferris wheel—she even loves the roller coaster, which various soldiers have coaxed her onto. It was always during the dizzying descent, when someone other than herself seemed to be screaming and screaming, that she found herself embroiled in a tight embrace: with Private Lewis; with Corporal Maxwell; with Ensign Dougherty; with Staff Sergeant Wilkerson.

  It’s hot out, late July, and she decides to wear a sleeveless black shell rather than the portrait-collar blouse she usually pairs with her taffeta skirt for dancing. As usual, she gives her bare arms a critical inspection. Something about the climate in Oregon banished her childhood eczema for good. But when her arms tan, a faint fretwork of white marks rises to the surface in contrast. Kathryn tells herself only she can see this evidence of her bandaged past. She tucks the blouse in so that the patent leather belt will show, adding her costume pearls, but costume of a very good quality. It’s hard to know the difference unless you rub one against your teeth, looking for the grit. The taffeta skirt was an indulgence bought from a women’s shop on Broadway, but the saleslady assured her she would wear it over and over, and she was right. It’s an elegant, shimmering plaid of black and silver and gray and white. Kathryn never gets tired of it, and she can pair it with any color.

  She almost doesn’t recognize him when she opens the door. His black hair gleams, combed back. His dark suit lies against his snowy, starched shirt. His tie, by sheer coincidence, glints with a silvery gray that matches her skirt. He doesn’t seem to register the change he embodies; he stands loose-jointed, the same as always, not like some country boys she’s known who become stiff as brooms when they cram themselves into Sunday clothes. He’s as easy in his suit as he is in his cloth coat.

  He gives a little whistle when he sees her. “Pretty nice,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she says. “You, too.”

  Jantzen Beach is lit like a fairyland, but one for grown-ups, all the children home in bed. He doesn’t suggest a walk around the amusement park, a late-night ride on the Ferris wheel, or a stroll over to see the pools reflecting moonlight. He seems all business, intent on getting to the ballroom. They hear the strains of the music before they arrive, coming out of the open doors and windows. The air is soft off of the Columbia, the heat of the day sifting through breezes that pleasantly rustle Kathryn’s taffeta.

  Inside, couples drift by to a slow number. The ballroom is at least twenty degrees hotter than outside, and Kathryn almost feels a reluctance to push into the wall of warmth, but the music is irresistible—she recognizes Helen Forrest’s voice even before she sees her—I had the craziest dream last night . . . about you. Kathryn has the sheet music to that one, but no piano to play it on. They stand a moment on the fringe of the dancers as the song ends, joining in on the applause. The notes of the next song begin, and Carl says, “Okay,” grabbing her hand. As he parts the middle, heading for a spot in front of the band, she sees the lean figure of Harry James himself, his trumpet to his mouth, leading off the intro. Carl swings her closer to him by her waist and begins a sedate foxtrot as she places one hand on his shoulder, the other clasped in his. Then she’s taken over by something she can’t quite describe. She’s always thought herself a rather plodding dancer, something in her heavy with the prohibition of the church she was raised in. But in this moment, she’s abs
olutely light, bobbing smoothly on the forefoot of her pumps, knowing when to sway left, when right, when to pivot in a sudden whirl. She’s like a floating leaf.

  It’s him, of course. His face stays smooth, the merest smile hovering; it’s something transmitted by the way he momentarily tightens and releases his grip around her waist, the way he pulls her into him so that they share the same center of gravity. When she realizes this, that she can transcend herself and her abilities if she gives herself up, she does. With this relinquishment, he increases the complication and subtlety of his movements and she ceases to have any notion of what comes next. Neither of them could have talked. Not him, especially, eyes a little lidded now with what he is summoning. Everything he has them do is one with the liquid wail of the horns. He doesn’t hurry; he doesn’t sweat. He doesn’t seek attention in any way, yet Kathryn gradually becomes aware that there is a slightly larger space around them than around the other couples. Once she looks up and sees the eyes of Harry James himself watching them as he purses his lips into the trumpet, fingering the valves. She steps wrong then, and Carl somehow hesitates a quarter-second and brings her back around to sync with him before she even has time to smile apologetically.

  Outside at intermission, they drink from his pocket flask, and he lights their cigarettes and blows his plume of smoke straight up at the night sky. “Not bad,” he says. She has to agree; nothing—none of it—is bad: not the faint dust of stars almost drowned out by the amusement park lights, not the burn of the whiskey at the back of her throat, not their two small embers tracing conversational arcs in the silence, and not the two of them together a moment ago, stepping the steps.