Shuttered Halo

She dazedly lifts the latch that connects the two cabinet doors open and stares blankly at the shelf’s lack of contents. “No coffee,” she calls over her shoulder.

“Tea?”

“Nah, none of that either.” Taking two steps backwards to the fridge, she turns around and slides her hand through the plastic handle, effortlessly tugging at first, then jerking quickly. Four transparent shelves greet her, a motley array of half-empty bottled condiments, two heads of cabbage, some butter. She searches frantically for drinks: “Grapefruit juice and Corona Extra.” She stares doubtfully at the aged carton of juice expired a couple of months back. “Or water,” she suggests. She hears him stretch behind her, stiff limbs cracking, the soft sound of the flannel shirt stretching across his back and a light sigh. “Corona.”

She sniggers. “With pancakes?”

He nods, black hair sweeping into his eyes as he throws his arms over his head again, folding his hands within each other and popping each knuckle. “With pancakes.”

She refrains from questioning, grasps the bottle and sets it next to his plate next to her place at the breakfast table.

He slides into his seat with a paperback copy of The Iliad in his hand. His thumb shuffles the pages, then randomly folds page 42 open, bending the covers back to meet each other, unfolding it and laying it flat in front of him. She’s sleepy and rests her head on the newspaper placemat in front of her. Tracing patterns in the sweat from her glass of water and looking through, she watches him methodically cut his pancakes with his fork and knife while reading, each bite a perfectly formed square. Rejected half-circles of pancake are pushed to the side with the edge of his fork, squares on one half of the dish, semicircles on the right. Fork upside down in his hand, he spears the geometrically flawless pieces (each one inch by one inch), swirls them counterclockwise in the deep pool of syrup and brings it to his mouth, eyes focused on the page he’s reading, without dripping the slightest bit of syrup. Eyes still not parting from the page, he takes a bite, snatches the Corona by the neck, pops the top off on the edge of the kitchen table and takes a sip all in one graceful move.

Mexican beer and Canadian maple syrup.

She seizes the opinion section of the paper behind which to hide her laughter, which typically irritates the introvert in mismatched plaid flannel shirt and boxers next to her, and pretends to read.

“Put that rubbish down,” he says placidly, taking the paper out of her hands without looking and replacing it with the travel section; he hates politics. “Useless,” he mutters. They never talk much, but she yearns to hear him speak. His voice is like the upturned collar against his gaunt bristly cheekbone—razor sharp, softened by the warm, gentle spell cast by red plaid flannel shirts.

He’s finished devouring the little square creations and is now doing in the semicircles in sets of threes—stab, stab, stab, swallow—takes a last swig of beer and sets the bottle down on the cover of The Iliad. She watches him amble down the hall, crossing his arms and pulling his shirt off over his head as he calls out something that sounds like words of gratitude.

She cleans up his plate, which is already wiped clean of sticky residue, and the emptied bottle and wipes the sweat ring off the cover of the paperback, carefully placing it on a shelf nearby. After laying the mismatched dishes in the cupboard she glances around to double-check and make sure he’s back in his room, scurries back to the table and folds open the opinion section.

Fifteen minutes later she hears the sound of hard-shell plastic being dragged across 30-year-old carpet down the hall and quickly crams the opinion section into the trashcan. He walks in in the khakis he wore to church with them the other day and a Phish tee; she feigns intent interest in a trip to Cuba, page 1, section C. He pushes the hair out of his eyes and picks up his watch from above the sink.

“Can I come, too?”

He looks up from wrapping the Velcro strap on his watch around his wrist. “Pardon?”

She shrugs. “Y’know…into town?”

He continues to stare at her blankly with a hint of the reply ‘no’ flecked in among the strands of green in his eyes; they’re almost the color of the Heineken bottles left in the kitchen windowsill, now emptied of beer and refilled with raw liquid sunlight.

He flips the latches of the case open and closed. “Teachers don’t give you long division to do over the weekend?”

She lies and shakes her head.

He inhales slowly and lets the breath pass between his lips even slower. “Okay. Check with your parents. And get dressed.” He checks his watch, which still hasn’t completely made its way onto his wrist, and jerks his thumb to the stairwell. “Hurry it up.”

Her parents aren’t home. She glances out the window—even this early in the morning, you can tell it’s going to be a nice day; warm, she expects, slightly cloudy, mid-seventies, like Thursday and Friday were. She slips off her PJs with the wrapped Christmas presents and candy cane pattern and quickly changes into jeans and a white t-shirt with rhinestones she tacky-glued around the edge of the shirt and sleeves, runs a brush through her hair a couple of times, grabs some flip-flops and hurries back down the stairs.

He picks up the case and swings open the Plexi-glass screen door, letting it flap back into its frame to close and they begin the walk out of the driveway and onto the street.

“You do this every day?” she asks. She’s horrible at making conversation and he’s equally disadvantaged at carrying one on.

His head dips down slowly and rolls forward in a moratory nod. “Yep.”

“How long?” she looks up at him while hurriedly walking to keep up with his lengthy strides.

He glances back out of the corner of his eye then refocuses on the stop sign at the end of the street, clearing his throat briefly. “Before I moved. After I worked in the café.”

“Which café?”

“Some place on the corner of Main and West Harrison. I waited tables.”

“Oh.”

They turn left at the stop sign, onto the sidewalk of a four-lane road called East Underwood. Cars fly past them, whipping the flare of her jeans around her ankles. She guesses he notices that she’s uncomfortable because he switches places with her so she can walk on the inside and he on the outside; having his tall frame as a barrier there is reassuring to her.

“How far is it?” she shouts.

“Three and a quarter miles.”

“Do you ever run it?”

“Huh?”

She laughs out loud at the mental picture of him running down a four-lane road, running like an ostrich with those long legs, one hand on his knit toboggan, the other holding the massive cello case. She sees a little smile creep across his lips and hear a small chuckle. “Nah, don’t think I’ve ever tried.”

She runs four squares of sidewalk ahead and turns back around, her pink flip-flops smacking the pavement. “I’ve never run on a four-lane road before,” she says. His lips tighten, draw into a restrained smile and he nods sluggishly again.

“How long have you been in the basement, Jamie?” she asks levelly.

He maintains his silence for about a minute and she squirms inwardly with impatience. “Started working at…Lorraine’s, that was the name of the place…started working there in July, nine months ago. Mr. Parker offered me a room two and a half months after that…moved in about a week after.”

“So you been downstairs about six months,” she counts off on her fingers.

“Sounds right.”

She grins, proud of her math skills. “This is the first time I’ve ever really talked to you. Except the other day when Dad had you come to church with us.”

“Easter Sunday,” he nods.

“You believe in God?”

He rocks his head side to side. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“You guess?”

He nods lightly; she refrains from further questioning, but watches him. If he would just let her, she’d go back to the house and sit down across from him on the loveseats downstairs and peel him apart layer by layer without any opposition from him, cracking each shell, revealing everything so every question she has could be answered.

After a few turns, she finds them downtown. They pass bead shops, bakeries and art galleries until he swivels the case around and leans it against a brick wall, bending his knees to a stoop and coming to rest Indian style. She stands to the side, picking little clumps of cement from between bricks with her raggedy fingernails and watches him flip open the latches on his case—one, two, three, four, five, six. Leaving the case open at his feet, he extracts the bow and rosin and gently waxes the bow, left to right several times. He reaches out behind himself, feeling for the bench behind him and climbing into it, gripping the neck of the cello and propping it up against his left shoulder. Before his attention turns and he becomes enraptured in the adjustment of the instrument’s tuning knobs, he reaches into his front pocket and extracts a meager handful of bills and coins, tossing it into the open case. As he tunes up, she stares, intrigued, at the change within; none of it is American currency. He’s not looking; his head is turned to the left. She reaches into her own pocket, digs out some change, snatches the foreign bills and replaces them with hers gracefully and inconspicuously.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” she fibs, clutching the treasure behind her back. “I’ll be in there,” she says, motioning to the Black Mountain Bakery a few doors down. He nods and turns back to his work and she dashes through the open door.

Sitting down at a little round, metal-legged table in the back, she lays out her finds in front of her: a one dollar bill circa 1961, Bahamas, trimmed in a woven green border reminiscent of seaweed with vividly colored fish on the back. A five-pound note from Britain—she’s seen those before in a burgundy felt bag of change her father brought back from London for her—and three of the same kind of coin. They’re either Chinese or Japanese, she doesn’t know the difference in the characters, and feel like the thin plastic coins that come with board games, the kind you have to snap off of the plastic rod when you buy it new; could it be real money? She’s never seen Oriental currency before; they were smart to make it so light. A Canadian penny embossed with a miniature maple leaf is left, and a penny with Lincoln on the front and entwined wheat on the back.

A shudder runs through her, a twinge of excitement and guilt as she slips them back into her pocket. She now has a piece of him, something that might evoke some something out of him, words or chronicles or long-winded adventure stories of how he acquired such riches. She wonders if the whole story he briefly told her on their walk was a lie; maybe he ran away to Japan his sophomore year of high school and seven years later decided to return and is in their basement cause he’s looking for something, maybe a house or family or job or a new cello or heaven knows what, but she can hear him outside now, the intoxicatingly melodious first note mingling with the sound of coin against coin, but whose coins are they, those of others falling into his case, the lady behind the cash register two feet away passing them from left hand to right hand, his or hers?