“You look wrecked,” he said, kindly. “Shop take all Saturday?”
“Most of it.”
“I hate that. Sitting there. Magazines from three years ago. Balloons if they are trying too hard.”
I almost laughed. The laugh would have been the wrong shape. I ate the muffin instead and let sugar be an alibi.
At lunch I sat in my car and did not eat. The lot was a grid of bumpers and windshields. Heat came up off the asphalt in a way that made the air look like water. I had packed a lunch I would not open. Opening it would have been a performance of health. I wanted the fever. I pointed at strangers, not with my finger, with my mind. That one. That one. The woman with the grocery bags even though this was not a grocery lot, a bag from the pharmacy, a walk that said she had somewhere else to be. The kid with the skateboard who was probably not a kid, just young enough to still believe a board was a personality.
Planning is a fever that wears work clothes. I talked out loud once, a single sentence about tape and gloves and a place that was not a driveway, and then James knocked on the glass.
I rolled the window. My face had to become a person in less than a second.
“You all right? You look like you swallowed a bee.”
Luis had said something like that. The echo made my hands go cold on the wheel. For a blink I was in a van at noon with a clipboard slapping glass. Then I was in my own car with a coworker and a muffin wrapper on the passenger seat.
“Telemarketer,” I said. “Won the lottery if I press one.”
James snorted. “Scam. Hang up. Come eat. I packed extra.”
I went. I ate his extra like a guest in my own life. Turkey. Bread that had suffered in a bag. A cookie his kid had probably packed, smashed, still offered. We sat at a table in the break room that had a stain no one claimed. He watched me with a kindness that was almost dangerous, because kindness wants details.