InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I like your kitchen."

Ella Dean is a (

chanteuse) wrote in

doorslogs,
@ 2014-02-23 23:58:00

Who: Ella Dean and Joey Alexander
What: A meeting. Of donuts.
Where: Donut place!
When: Just before February 14.
Warnings: Nada.

The bus ground up to the stop with a spit of processed air and slumped heavily against the curb. It was late. The route at nine thirty was sluggish and it was choked with people wanting to get out, but by the time the bus got close to Ronald’s Doughnuts, most of them were done. This place was a sad little strip of places that couldn’t be found inside a mall or even somewhere people walked to, a happenstance set of stores and a car dealership that no one was going to visit spur of the moment. The bus’s doors gasped open and a thin trickle of the last few on the bus got off. None of them looked like they were there for anything new, they trundled away on obvious routes worn in through routine, polo shirts in strong, primary colors for places that hawked authorized electronics and even a man in a suit so cheap it looked shiny and papery, who walked quickly and with purpose toward the car-lot across the lanes of traffic.

The girl at the very end climbed slowly down the steps with a cheap paperback folded up in her hand as if she’d idled the precious twenty minutes lost bumping around on cheap springs by reading, and as the change in light - the non-committal sunshine hit her - she looked up, hand shading her eyes as the bus lurched on off without her. She appeared small and insignificant in the isolation in the landscape, lost and she moved without certainty in one direction and then another, until she caught upon the anchor of the blue sign and the reassurance of the lettering and of the location.

The glass of the donut place was smeared close to. Her own reflection wobbled, refracted as light glanced off the windshields of the cars in the lot next door; Ella saw only the toe of her shoe, a splash of a stain, a faded red spread over the cheap plastic cap of it. They were sneakers that could be thrown away, the kind bought out of wire bins at Target or at Walmart that cost under ten dollars. The hose above was wrinkling across her knee beneath the pale, industrial blue of a stained shift, mostly hidden by the long, crumpled yellow cotton cardigan that had been tugged down to where the heel of her palms met her fingertips. It looked moderately less cheap than the shoes. It had been bought on sale and it swallowed her, obliterating the line of her shoulders and the proportions beneath the cardigan. There was a small ambiguous patch of something she hadn’t noticed on her elbow. As she lowered her head over her book again, the untidy knot of blond curls was visible just above the nape of her neck.

Doubt had begun to bubble up, percolating like bad coffee. Max had not been censorious but Max had stood back from decision without indicating which was best, offering instead a weight of a history that twisted and swayed faintly overhead. Ella’s fingers tightened on the cheap, yellowed pages; she looked up as if she might search out the next bus stopping alongside the road.

He was already inside. He'd been inside for awhile, long enough to suck down a cheap cup of coffee before he started working on the refill. Joey didn't know the difference between good coffee and bad coffee, he knew none of the intricacies that made for naming the different beans, the different areas of the world they got picked at. He actually didn't think he'd ever seen a coffee bean that wasn't ground up like powder and piled in a can like loose ashes. He didn't know how to recognize blonde roasts from gas station soot, but he knew what tasted good. Maybe a little milk made all the difference, because this stuff was leaps and bounds above the powdered, chalky stuff that they had at the hospital. The coffee was a lot smoother than the the stuff they brewed(& burnt) at the shop. He tore the corner off of another little cup of creamer and dumped it into the phantom swirl in his paper cup. They had little stir sticks and miniature straws crammed into the plastic display that held sugar packets and napkins, but he ignored them and took another sip.

The newspaper was spread open on the bright blue table, one of many that lined the big wall of windows that faced the street. He'd gotten through most of the pages by just looking at the pictures, and was now invested in the back few pages dedicated to the personals. With a pen borrowed from the girl at the cash register, he circled the block dedicated to FOR SALE and leaned a little close to inspect the fine print with a squint that said he probably needed to invest in glasses. He could probably go to his grave pretending that the strain didn't bother him, though.

When the bus pulled off from the stop, the sunlight glared off of its metallic side, and he glanced up with a frown aimed at the vanishing, lurching mass. He started to glance back down at the paper, but the girl standing outside made him pause. He watched her for a moment, not nearly knowledgeable enough to make any kind of judgements or assumptions on her based on her clothes or the way she looked around with worry like one of those girls lost in a fairytale forest. Or maybe one overwhelmed on the first day of school, he remembered. He wasn't sure if he should wave to her or not, if it was actually her or not. Besides, she looked like she might turn tail and run for the bus' vanishing bumper.

He was late. Or he wasn’t coming. Indecision fought uncertainty, warred it out on the battleground of the strip of shade under the awning. Ella’s eyes slid from the world of courtly manners where everyone’s lives tied up neatly with ribbon at the end (two bucks from the secondhand store) to the strip of asphalt out front, the streak of cars along the road like colored water. She thought he’d be a car, he hadn’t known about the bus-routes. She’d liked the truck, Max’s truck for the handful of weeks she’d had it; the air felt cleaner when it whistled past you, without a hundred other people’s stale breath left behind. It had felt like riding the road instead of crawling along it. She watched the traffic sail past, boats on a livid sea and hesitation rode along her shoulders like a tight-wire act, exquisitely balanced. Maybe he’d come and gone, maybe he’d decided anyone who came with a bloodhound who demanded credit and criminal history wasn’t worth the trouble of befriending.

She fiddled with the watch on her wrist, time sliding on in seconds she could count off. It was the kind bought in plastic boxes in the mall, sold under glass to people aimlessly looking for money to waste and for people who didn’t go near the shops where they displayed them without price-tags. It was cheap, the face was scarred with age and the strap was red plastic. He hadn’t shown up for the second time, Ella gave up on the book. It was easy, the kind of written-away time where nothing bad happened and everyone knew the way it was going to end, steps in a dance. She hadn’t liked them before, but now she had a shelf full, romance that didn’t take a single thing but time. She slid it into the bag across her shoulder that looked like it had another life carrying diapers, and studied the counter through the glass. The diner at work was faces she knew, a monotony of tedium that bore up under routine but did not expand easily around an added hour. And the coffee was better here; she’d had a donut the last time she’d waited around half an hour for a boy who’d re-tied ribbons.

She wore tempered resolution and a vague air of having been washed out under the lights when she pushed through the double-doors. Inside, fluorescence competed with strong sunshine, the glare strong contrast from the shade beyond the doorstep; Ella was the remains of a summer tan fading, the escape of two or three curls trickling down the neck of the polyester uniform.

She lined up, ignored the line of pastries for the kind of coffee she hadn’t poured out from a warmer, and paid with the careful counting out of a whole lot of coins.

He found himself moving to stand when she walked through the glass doors. It'd been an instinctive move, and probably something that he'd picked up from the kind of old movies where men were always standing up for women in petticoats. He didn't quite get why, but assumed it had something to do with class or manners. He wasn't real familiar with either, but he wasn't trying to advertise it, and so he stood without a clue as to why or what he was supposed to do after.

Not that it mattered in the end, because the woman went for the register counter instead of his table. Joey stood there for a moment longer, feeling like he should be shrinking under the glare of donut shop lights, which seemed brighter than lights other places did, but nobody was really looking at him, and even if they had, he'd have just looked right back. He'd never been especially self-conscious, that kind of thing couldn't survive in a family like his.

Considering a lot of things(because thoughts got tangled up about more than just donuts and coffee and little girls with hairbows), he picked up his coffee cup and drained half of the scald in a long, bittersweet swig as he made for the register himself. There was a small pink sign on the counter that said refills were 50¢ and he fished a couple of quarters out of his back pocket on his way. The coins were pushed onto the counter alongside hers and he motioned with his paper cup for the girl behind the counter who complied in pouring both with only a small sigh of morning fatigue. Joey considered silence for a moment longer before he glanced to the blond woman in the uniform. He thought uniforms were horrible things to have to wear, but he'd worn one every day for fifteen years, so maybe he just had a bad association.

He took a sip of coffee that was nearly black save for the dregs of his last sweetened cup at the bottom. "The.. uh, chocolate is good," he said motioning to the case of breakfast things. Not that she'd asked for his opinion, but that rarely stopped him.

Ella hated the uniform. It was itchy-seamed and heavy. It bunched in the bottom of the laundry basket, all the bright cottons of little girl dresses from the week and one worn-out blue sitting at the bottom, heavy creases like a Monday morning used to feel over and over. There were two, and they traded off, thick polyester that held tight to the sounds and smells of the shift, a constellation of stains at the bottom of the hem that no washing would clear away. This uniform was large, enough to swallow the space between hip and breast. It was loose at the collar, formless, and it bloused out, boxily beneath the cardigan, until it hit her knee, the fraying edge of one stain whitening out the blue. She hated it but it was safe, anonymous with the stash of plastic tags she kept on the top of her dresser from all the people who passed through temporarily, jobs they couldn’t handle after a late shift. Ted dangled from her lapel, beneath the cardigan, in bright yellow paint on red.

The girl behind the counter looked like she didn’t care for the donuts. Ella was watching the way she slung coffee like a jaded bartender in the upscale places around the city. She’d stood and watched them, good coat over a poor dress, waiting for a client or two, and she’d liked the way it was a rhythm, greased slick with time and practice until it had no effort to it at all but the smooth sway of a good piece of jazz. Coins clattered down beside her, skittering loose change and then the low interruption of a male voice; Ella jumped.

Her throat was bare; the tilt of her head upward was sharp, skittish. He was tall, this man who recommended breakfast out of a glass case, but he wasn’t close as close. People did, even in this city, recommend things to one another. She picked up the coffee in the cradle of her palms and she held it, just breathing in the smell of it, not burned, not stale, but fresh. He was tall, but it wasn’t his fault, and her mouth moved in something that wasn’t a smile but apologized for not being one. “Yeah,” she said, slow and there was the South tucked in at the back of her voice, sweet as sugar but sanded down by New York and the city until it was an almost, like the syrup-dregs of bitter coffee. “But I figure chocolate, you can’t even pretend it tastes like breakfast.”

She took a step back. A small one. And then she looked him over. She couldn’t see a bit of the boy who’d tugged her hair and sulked his way about school but she hadn’t seen a bit of him in any one of the men who’d passed her by through the doors or walking across the parking lot. She’d figured finally she was still looking for an eight year old, with a sunburn on his nose, not a man grown enough to get himself to a counter to buy breakfast instead of taking it. “You’re not…” Maybe there was a bit of him, in there. Blue eyes strained past suspicion to find it.

She scared easy. When he'd been little, he'd thought of fear like big dark things you couldn't run away from, things that hid under beds and inside closets. A few years later, and he hadn't quite realized that there was nothing to be afraid of(there were still monster movies and old mole-nosed widows at the end of the street), but he knew it was more important to play tough than to die. Turn up your chin like those punk kids he saw with their leather and their mohawks, like you weren't scared of shit even if your heart was rattling like a faulty pinball lever in your fucking chest. It'd been good practice for when he was inside, when showing weakness could be a damn death sentence on the next shift change, when a guard could turn his back and you could be bleeding out under a high noon sun that seemed all the brighter for the razorwire gawking at you like little silver birds on a line. Five seconds and a modified toothbrush was really all it took. No, those were the situations when you didn't blink, when you remembered the punks with the mohawks, when you turned up your chin all over again.

Now, though, it was all different. Now, Joey realized that he was the one that others were fearful of. He caught the look sometimes, sidelong at the gas station, untrusting analysis of the ink on his arms and the shades on his face. Women buttoned up their sweaters that one extra button that made it tight at the neck when he stood next to them in line. He knew he looked like a criminal, he fucking was one. The kind of guy who looked mean on default, something to overcompensate for the frightening lack of tough on the inside.

He thought he'd rather look mean than fucking sensitive, like Shane picked on him for.. but then there was the time that he'd scared Sam so bad she'd fallen to her knees shaking and crying, and there was now when he hadn't even been trying to be anything but himself(maybe even a nicer version of himself) and he'd made the girl jump. So he thought again maybe not.

She was already stepping away, or he thought he could have suggested maple instead of chocolate if she thought the later didn't belong in the breakfast case. Instead, he palmed the warmth of his coffee cup, heat a comfort through the paper, and he began to turn for his table. You're not… He hesitated, cocking an eyebrow. His own work uniform was less specific than hers. Traditional black, cotton that wouldn't stain so easy and bluejeans that'd had the grease washed out of them so many times that they were just the side of faded that was sad and worn. "Ella, right?"

She’d learned quick that some people noticed when their shoulder brushing yours made you scramble, maybe drop that basket of groceries until it tumbled and some people didn’t. He had, she could see the flicker like silverfish darting to light in his eyes and she dipped her chin tight and low and looked at the oily surface of the coffee in her hands instead of looking at anything that resembled pity or knowing or the half-steps between. Some people didn’t notice, caught up in their little whirl, and maybe he didn’t look like he’d be one of the noticing kind, the kind of lean that didn’t leave much over for other people. But he’d noticed, and her fingers tightened on the fragile little paper cup.

Ella didn’t want to be scared. Mean was better than scared and strong was better than small, and she’d gotten better with the diner where no one needed you to say more than half a string of words said to everybody else that you could predict, that she had the spare on over for those who said things you couldn’t. Joey, because it was Joey, and when she lifted her head on up from the coffee, clear blue eyes that didn’t have a thing in them that said she was scared, she could find a little bit of the little boy in the slant of his mouth and the shape of his eyes, wasn’t a bogeyman from behind the door. A terror conjured by an old man now long gone to rot, but ghosts hung around long after someone read them their prayers and told them to go.

“Right,” she said, folding fingers over fingers until her hands were steepled around the coffee cup like she was holding a prayer-book. Her fingernails were short, clipped close and unpolished, she curled away from him and toward the counter like indecision but she stood still on stained tennis shoes, and she tried out smiling because it wasn’t his fault he was tall enough that her head wouldn’t even make it to his shoulder. The smile was weaker than a butterfly, but it was there, living. “And you’re Joey. I waited a while outside,” she shrugged and the bag slid down her shoulder a little, “But y’all were in here. I thought…” she faltered, looked at him and looked down at the coffee once again. The smile ticked up one corner of her mouth, “I kinda figured it was just me and my book.”

She was folded hands and library books. She was southern candied yams and femininity that didn't bother with polish. She was polite and pretty and instinctive flinching that was better at home in kicked dogs than girls who he thought looked way too young to have kids. He likened her to Sam for a moment, but maybe she wasn't that young. Closer to Tess, maybe. The only girls he knew outside of bars were his sisters, and he could see as clearly as daylight that Ella was nothing like them. He thought of his sisters as loud and mean, and it warmed his heart because loud and mean was the only way to make it in their neck of the woods. If you didn't have money, you just had to be loud and mean.

But Ella didn't seem loud and mean. She didn't seem like the girls with bright lipstick and long cigarettes either, the ones that drank hard and hung around until closing time, picking up men like scraps left behind in butcher's paper, discounted by the end of the night. Joey didn't know any other kind of woman, but he thought she seemed nice through distance, like the girls at the checkout counter who had to smile and take your money. The kind that had a counter between them and him so they didn't need to be afraid, but they would eye his tattoos or his hands in his pockets like they thought it might be worth it to be afraid anyway.

He stood there frozen for a moment with the too-little-too-late realization that he had no idea how to proceed in everyday conversation. His conversations were limited to gritty shop talk that revolved around women problems he couldn't relate to and game scores that he had money on. Lately he had conversations with doctors and hospital staff and Shane, which all were more like yelling than talking, and he didn't think that kind of thing would be helpful here either. Ultimately he just said, "Yeah," and agreed that he was Joey. It seemed safe.

Then attention became pointed at the book when she mentioned it. "What'ya reading?"

The coffee warmed through the paper all the way over to scalding. Ella traded one hand for the other, one worn-edged paperback for cheap cup of coffee that smelled like it had been poured fresh, like a beginner magician, lost ribbon of sleight of hand. The book flashed briefly, the pale pink of sugared almonds and cheap weddings. She slid it into the bag with shyness that had everything to do with embarrassment and nothing to do with tattoos and tallness. “It’s just a book,” she said, with her fingers curling back into her palm. Just a book filled with patterns, a trajectory of true love where no one died and there were no bills to pay, just balls and handsome words. It was like watching a movie for a couple hours except a movie cost twice the cost of a book and Ella didn’t mind reading the same one over.

He paused long, like maybe he’d expected someone older or maybe someone who came looking for more than a cup of coffee; she didn’t know. She hadn’t expected him to be older either, like life had taken a good long look at him, mussed his hair some, shaken his hand and stolen his cards. He - Joey - didn’t look like a little boy and he didn’t look like he’d expected her at all. “It’s a novel. Happily ever after,” she said, like that explained things, and she looked away instead of all the way up because no one she’d ever met in New York who’d been cynical had ever liked happily-ever-afters, and she couldn’t tell what he was but quiet.

She didn’t think ‘murderer’ right off. She’d expected to, Max’s warning-within-a-warning in the back of her head, but he looked more like a man than he did a nightmare, and she lost the word she’d expected stamped across his head, in the worn denim and quiet height and the way he stood in the middle of the floor like he’d gotten lost. She’d gotten good at conversation with people who didn’t know how to begin, beginnings as dissonant as notes out of place but she’d lost them in the handspan of months since. Someone came close up behind and said excuse me like it was a bad word, and Ella moved, old tennis shoes squeaking over linoleum and the coffee in her hand quaked on the surface, butterfly kissing down somewhere far away.

“We can sit?” Maybe he’d expected someone older, who knew how to talk. She shrugged the bag up her shoulder, the book and sugared-almond fairy tales tucked away. “Unless you want that chocolate.” A smile that was thread-thin strung.

It didn't occur to him that books could be embarrassing. Joey thought that all books meant the same thing, even though he understood that there was a difference between the different kind of books. There were textbooks, which the inmates read because they wanted to understand their case better. Those were the books that guys read because they wanted to get out and have something to do other than read. Those were thick, bound books that didn't look frilly and pink, they didn't look like wedding cake or smiling damsels on the bows of ships. Those books looked like torture, day in and day out, no pictures, lots of numbers at the bottom of every page referencing other books that you had to read. An unending cycle of torture that was endured because even that was preferable to long nights and nothingness. Some people read the other books, the worn paper books that got taken up for pleasure and not escape. The lifers read a lot of those, and Joey had determinedly stayed away from the library upon realizing that, like he'd somehow contract a life sentence if he started getting comfortable that way.

"Um," he blinked to the pastry case when she mentioned the chocolate again. He remembered what she said about it not being quite for breakfast, and he shook his head in decline. Joey actually didn't eat breakfast, hadn't since he'd been inside. To him, breakfast was a slap in the morning, breakfast was bright lights and seven ams, it was standing in line and orange juice still half frozen in its little lunchroom carton. Now that he was on his own time, there were better things than breakfast. Things like sleeping in until the last moment, sustaining on lots of coffee until it was time for lunch, his stomach whining at him, fast food made all the more delicious for the wait. "No, we can sit." He pointed back to the little table with the spread out newspaper, questioning.

Ella didn’t read the news. Maybe it was like closing shutters on a house that wouldn’t see sunshine, bolting the door with half a dozen chains from Home Depot and painting flowers on the walls instead of going outside to find their reality. She didn’t like reading it or seeing it, she didn’t like pictures and words to make it real, scrapbooked snippets of other people’s lives they couldn’t keep to themselves. She listened at work, when the radio skipped over songs and into the patter of news that skipped like radio records, lingered slow and somber when it was serious. She pulled at the cuffs of the too-long sleeves until yellow slid from wrist across palm all the way up to where her fingers curled and followed the line he’d drawn with her coffee held like a prayer-book in front of her, to the spill of news-sheet.

She sat with one foot tucked up beneath her, the loose line of the shift swallowing up the algebraic jut of knee and thigh in the sea of blue and she curled the tips of her fingers around the paper cup like a live-wire clipped tight to a battery. Seated, she could see the room but the room couldn’t see her. It wasn’t like being lost in between tables, coffee-pot for ballast. This wasn’t her place, it was just a place, and the coffee in front of her shimmered like spilled oil. The last time she’d tried meeting someone who called themselves friend, she’d tasted salt on the back of her tongue, but when she tipped up her chin to look at him, focus drawn in tight in clear blue, he didn’t look like he was going to lay out his life amid the salt and pepper shakers. Joey looked like words dried up on his tongue too, Sahara-silent. Ella sipped coffee, reached out for sugar packets and stirred thick stream into the bitter-brew.

Joey didn't mind quiet. It was a familiar practice, one so familiar that it seemed normal even when it wasn't. He'd had quiet meals for most of his life now, the solitude of tv dinners in the dark, the muted corners of whited out cafeterias that always smelled faintly of bleach. They weren't having breakfast now, just coffee, and so maybe that quietness ran a little deeper. Maybe if they'd been too busy chewing to talk, the unspoken things wouldn't have seemed so loud in his head. He didn't quite know, and he took a sip of his coffee before remembering that it was roasted bitter enough to seize up the tongue. Sugar packets were the remedy, and he reached for a couple as well. His reach came up short though when he saw Ella reaching for the same, and he pulled back, awkward and waiting for a beat before he reached again, ensuring that there was no reason for them to even touch the same sugar sachet at the same time.

Joey stirred and swigged, then stirred again. The newspaper was folded up in a way that the circled passages of sale ads, which were typically devoted to the back pages, now became the cover story. Cleaning up old bikes and reselling them made for easy money, but it was an uncomplicated way to spend his time more than anything. He liked old rusty things, and he wondered if maybe he should start working on jets or spaceships, something big enough and old enough that he'd never finish it so maybe he'd never have time again. Because projects always came to an end, and that's when he really had to sit back with hands newly clean and think about everything else in his life. Joey glanced at Ella across the table, then he looked out the window because he didn't know where to look. When an old man walked by asking for spare napkins because his table's tin ran empty, Joey handed them over with a halfway glance and a nod that took the place of any need for words.

She watched him hold back like he was reining in a bogeyman, like either he’d dissolve or she’d dissolve if somehow they brushed up close. Ella’s fingers made snow-drifts of the paper packages, soft, white-powder snow that didn’t fall in Las Vegas. There was no sludge, no drift-snow in Vegas, the shift beneath the cardigan left her sleeves bare and the shiver was over-zealous air-conditioning rather than any winter-creep close to the skin. Her fingernails nudged along the scratched formica of the table, the mess kept neat, within the imaginary boundary of being permitted to leave. “You planning on melting?” she said, clear but quiet, and she smiled like maybe he was the small boy who’d pulled her pigtails into order again after all, warm curling up the corner of her mouth. Max had always been the one who understood little boys, “Or maybe you figure I am?”

The little apartment that cost more in rent than she’d ever paid before, that place was full of words. Beth talked, all the words she’d just learned and some that weren’t English at all, she talked at the TV and she talked at the people in the halls on the way home until they talked back at her, smiling. Ella didn’t talk outside the walls. She recited the script, the one they’d given her along with the name-tag and the apron. It was safer, easier that way, to follow the lines, even invisible ones. But the man with the want ads circled like a game of xs and os, maybe the lines were even more rigid for him. She pulled the newspaper toward her with her fingertips, took a sip of coffee and spoke with the deliberate ease of before.

“What are you looking for?”

"Melting?" He had a guilty look, always had. In his youth, it was mainly because he'd always been guilty of whatever he'd been accused of, whatever local thievery had inspired a shop owner to come to his front door and lash out at his mother like she'd ever give a shit enough to punish him for it. Even if she had, she'd never been able to catch him. That was the good thing about being fast, and maybe fast took the place of the guilt because he could take guilty so long as he didn't have to take the punishment part. Of course, once he was grown, the punishment part stuck for good, but maybe he was too big to be fast at that point.

So the look was perpetual now, guilty. Even if, like now, he'd done nothing more wrong than miss the point of reference. He didn't know what she meant by melting, and he looked a little worried for it. Her fingers were skinny with short nails that weren't painted bright to disguise nicotine stains, and he wasn't sure he'd ever seen nails like that. Self-aware, he pulled his hands into his lap and away from the newspaper when she reached for it. His hands with bike grease forever wedged dark under some of the cuticles. "Uh," he started recklessly, but drew a breath through his body that reminded him to chill the fuck out. He was fine around people in passing, customary glances that didn't give a shit, but conversations were hard. It was like the words seized up with the realization that they didn't belong in the free world. Joey pushed his hands back onto the table and grabbed for his coffee again, joints looser at the wrist now, knuckles curled without clench. "There are a couple bikes for sale that I might drive by and look at.. fix 'em up bikes, yeah?"

Ella didn’t think of guilt and think of bars and strip-lit walkways. She didn’t think of television buzzing on low and the cat-calls of inmates crossing the halls, the chink of keys. Her world was smaller, more confined, it bubbled up like soup on the stove around the small, contained things she took home with her. When she thought of guilt, she thought of the kids who came in to work and bailed on a ten dollar check having picked stuff off the menu that was cheapest. She thought of little kids promised ice-cream if they stopped wriggling on the seats, who remembered only when she came to take the plates away. If she dug, deep down, pried with the unpainted fingernails, she’d find herself. Lips tight, guilt was face turned away. Guilt was silence.

“Melting,” she repeated, soft like it was snow on her tongue. She’d liked movies with brick roads in them, fantasy lands that ended well. “From the Wizard of Oz. Except it’s water.” Ella turned her coffee cup in her fingers, a perfect circle on the damp, tannin-colored ring on the formica, and fidgeted with another sugar packet, end-to-end-to-end, turned over with neat, pinching movements. She didn’t explain. She looked at the coffee, at the spread of marked newsprint and drank slow, bloom of black coffee and saccharine across her tongue, careful with the cup. His hesitancy, the stumble-shuffle of his hands back into his lap, soothed over crawling anxiety, the stand-straight hairs on the back of her neck. A murderer who didn’t want to brush up against her, let alone touch her. It was almost calming.

“Fix ‘em up bikes?” She didn’t know what it was, soft lack of comprehension, like Italian used in a sentence without transition. The end curled up, a question, encouraging. Her eyes flicked up to his face, steady. Expectant. He’d explain.

The coffee was bitterness softened by the tang of granular sweet, and it warmed his throat where the words didn't want to come out. It helped somehow, the way the sweet sat on his back teeth, made him tongue their ridges with tastebuds masked by cheap roast. It made the words almost comfortable, and they let go of the place where they sat huddled tight in the dark with clenched fists, ready to bark. They came out slowly, brought back to the light with the familiarity of a conversation he actually knew how to have. "Yeah," he began.

Abandoning the coffee cup, Joey reached past it to point out a patch of newspaper that was circled double. The small print spoke of a couple dirt bikes that a man had no more use for, probably once belonged to kids now long gone at college. "Teenagers like 'em for going out to the desert," he tapped with the edge of his thumb where it said that the asking price was three hundred dollars, not quite in working order anymore. "Clean it up, paint it, sell it for maybe nine.." Other circles denoted cars to be sold for scrap, engines long dead. He moved along to point out one or two, "Can check 'em out, see if there are any parts worth buying. Out here, people go through radiators pretty fast.. because of the heat.." He shrugged a bit, it was a small movement, more of a twitch in broad shoulders. The shrug preceded the jump of his eyes from sale ads up to her face. Watching to see if she had any other questions, ones he could answer easily, ones that made him seem a little less guilty.

There were stories in the back of newspapers, she remembered now. She remembered newsprint spread wide over cotton sheets soft with washing, crumbs dipped into the folds. Reading out personal ads that were tiny pieces of someone else’s life; a fondness for Victorian literature, long walks in the mountains. Missed connections; Coop had told stories with his scratchy-morning cheek pillowed on his hand of all the way the missed connections re-connected, as if even having other people out there hurting was something too sharp for her without him blunting it first. This side of the newspaper held stories beneath the business-like adverts; Ella wondered if the two dirt bikes belonged to people who’d liked riding them and grown up or maybe stopped enjoying it quite so much. Her elbows came down, pinioned the paper to the table with soft, yellow-colored cardigan. She looked.

“I never had a car,” she said to black and white, to bikes that could be cut up, their pieces jumbled with others like a jigsaw of broken things made to work again. “I never needed one. My sister has - had,” she corrected herself, and she wondered what had happened to the big tank of a truck, the one shiny like her sister took care of it. She wondered if Max liked bikes, too. “A truck. I borrowed it once, it was like being on top of everyone else.” She was studying the papers, her fingers curled up beneath the edges of the long sleeves. “Do you have one? A bike?”

"Yeah, trucks sit high," he said absently. There'd never been trucks when he was a kid, except for the delivery kind. The ones with the metal ledge that hung low in the back, perfect for hitching a ride so long as the driver didn't notice. He knew that was a city thing, but not something that kids from here might have ever done. Las Vegas was a bejeweled metropolis, but it was a speck in Nevada, where everything else seemed a little more rustic. Joey thought he might like rustic one day, but it seemed like the kind of thing that one didn't pursue until they were good and ready to commit to it. He stared at the soft yellow of her sweater sleeve as he thought about it. Then he blinked up with a cocked eyebrow. "You get around okay on the bus?" He supposed if there was no other option, she had to.

And although he could have pointed, Joey just tilted his head toward the window to his right. Where the blinds were drawn into vertical, narrow slats that allowed a good view of the parking lot. A bike sat at a lean in one of the spaces. The paint was a matte black, but the rim spokes were lovingly shined.

There had been plenty of trucks back home. No cars, no one picked a car that couldn’t take dirt tracks and the roads that wriggled around the town, wide and dusty. No one picked a car if a truck could take winter and packed, baked earth in summer. There had been no buses either, Ella remembered driving the old sedan her mother drove to church and the grocery store, the wheel’s plastic leather warm beneath her fingers. She hadn’t driven a truck; you couldn’t get down out of a truck without swinging, something showing if you wore dresses and she wore dresses every day. Ella curled her foot beneath her thigh, worn-soft plastic sneaker sole tucked flat up against wrinkled stocking, and picked the styrofoam edge of her cup with her fingernail. She liked cities, where the houses were strung close together like fairy lights, and she liked being able to walk places without miles between them.

“The bus is okay,” she said, but she’d liked Max’s truck. Maybe, if she saved enough, if she got a job in the evenings singing sometime, she could buy some kind of car like the ones in the back of the ads, the kind that needed fixing up some and could get around otherwise. Ella wondered how much they cost, to fix up. How long it took. He’d settled down some, talking about it, like a cat that had to be pet a certain way or it would bite. She turned her head and she followed the line of his sight.

The hulk of the bike gleamed in winter sun. It looked lower than a car and it looked mean, like nothing would cut up in front of it on the highway. When Ella thought of bikes, she thought of ten-speeds and streamers. “Did you,” she circled one of the ads with the tip of her finger, “Fix it up? Or was it like that when you got it?”

"But not real convenient, yeah?" He'd never been one for busses, but he'd never necessarily had to rely on them either. Maybe he could have pitched all of his savings into something other than a bike upon his release, but all he'd really needed at that point was a way to go. Maybe he could have taken one of those big greyhounds all the way out here to Vegas, back when he'd first set out on a mission to find his little sister(the only connection he knew he could rekindle). Maybe he could have, but those things ran on tight schedules, and after fifteen years of staying in line on a warden's clock, schedules were terrifying. He told himself that he liked working at the shop because it was what he was inherently good at, but maybe he liked it because the schedule was flimsy too.

"It was fairly good when I got it," he nodded in thinking back. "I didn't have time to fix anything up then, just wanted to come out here to Vegas, you know? So I paid a lot for it." Still less than most people would pay for a bike, but he wasn't some young kid starry-eyed in a dealership, and he wasn't an old man trying to feel young again with bells and whistles. He'd only wanted the promise of distance and speed, and he'd paid for it in fresh parts that he didn't have time to stall himself. "What do you do with the kid though, the little one?" Terror spit inside of him like a rusty oil can when he realized that he couldn't remember its name or if she had more than one. Were those the kinds of things that normal people asked about continuously until it was stuck-deep and ingrained in memory? He didn't know. He also suddenly didn't know if that was a stupid question? Maybe kids could ride city busses, maybe they did all the time.

Ella saw bikes on the highway. Little commas of people curled around metal, so fast they were flying along the gray road-river. Birds without wings. She caught up with the conversation, the incipient question, ‘Why?’ lost in the skipped-beat assumption. No time, because he’d gotten out. Prison was a lost paragraph, an empty space. She’d hoped fervently for the man behind the regular, unemotive text in the little book - the little books - that he stayed out of it, the nightmare for adults that was vacant absence of anything she knew. She scraped a nail down the styrofoam, sheared off fluff from the white cup and added it to the accumulating snow-drift of can’t-sit-still in front of her.

“She can ride a bus,” she said now, and her mouth ticked up at the corner; for all the tight-wound knot of family that surrounded their center, planets revolving a sun, they didn’t have kids, did they? She imagined the Alexanders like a tribe, Prokofiev soared in her head. No little kids on bikes. Ella guessed he didn’t have any, or none that he knew of. “She’s a baby, not a kitten, honey.” She didn’t say her name, didn’t supply something that had been used in and out of newsprint so frequently it was rubbed black with other people’s words. She kept it cupped tight between her palms like the coffee cup, and she smiled at his not-knowing, gentle. “The bus isn’t convenient. But you get to know the times. It gets me around fine.”

She looked over at the case of donuts, “You want one?” The wallet was some kind of cheap leather, rubbed to white in the corners. It was flowered, the kind picked up in line at the market, cheap off-hand purchases. She pulled it out of the bag, stirring contents like a witches’ brew, time ticking down on her wrist. “Figure I’ve been here twice. Should try the donuts.” The tease curled in the corner of her mouth, level blue eyes and a perfectly-innocent tone.

"Guess you work mostly mornings, makes the bus easier that way, yeah?" Joey thought of mornings as a time of work, but nights were better suited to lowlifes. His knowledge of busses didn't extend beyond a vague understanding that was built solely out of whatever he saw in tv shows. Weeknight features on small screens encased behind wire mesh. Because of that, he knew that being a lowlife didn't mean money and cars, sometimes it meant peddling dope out of grocery back doors and bus stops. That kind of thing happened more frequently at night, he supposed.

He looked over to the donut case when she mentioned it, rows of glazed and brightly sprinkled. "Yeah, I got it." Her flowered wallet was out, but Joey was on his feet faster. He could have asked her what kind she preferred, but that seemed like time to be wasted when she'd likely ask him not to buy them for her at all. He wasn't sure he knew how to argue otherwise, so it seemed best to act before she had the chance to interrupt. A couple of quick steps to the counter, and he was returning with a small powder-blue box in a minute's time. The half dozen selection special. Joey took his seat across from her once more and had a fresh swig of coffee as he opened the box. Inside was a small stack of napkins on top of six different donuts. Chocolate ones and spangled ones and powdery ones that the lady said had raspberry jam in the middle. "Didn't know what you wanted, so got a bit of everything," he explained.

Joey stopped and started, sputters of conversation whiting out to nothing like one of those old bikes listed in the back of the newsprint, but he was kind, same as he’d been as a brash little boy with no money in his pockets. The chair squealed back on formica, all runaway-quick. She half expected him to disappear, reticence and blackened nails and kindness. Ella had been bought things before, but the last time anyone whose name she’d known had bought her anything it had been cheesecake. The last donut she’d had had been New York, standing at the edge of Central Park with the baby snug against her chest. It had been stale, rescued from a hospital canteen, a nurse pressed it on her as she left. She looked down into the box and saw the glass-fronted selection, looked up with the line of her eyebrow pulled up high like a question and the mouth twitching like trying not to laugh.

“Y’all could have asked, before buying out their entire stock. Don’t anyone else want donuts today?” The flowered wallet slid home; maybe she could shove a couple bills under the newspaper when they were done. He didn’t look like he had all that much to him either, sparse-boned and lean like he’d gone in to grow where there hadn’t been sun to grow to. She picked out one, sugar scattering, licked the powdered dust off her wrist, and bit into something better than a memory of stale baked goods at the side of a park.

“Pretty good.” Ella licked sugar off the roof of her mouth and nudged the box closer to his side of the table, invisible boundary line drawn. “Thanks.”

"You can eat three donuts," he assured her. Joey remembered little sisters eating sugar until they were sick because if you were ten years old and in charge of the meal plan, sugar was always on the menu. Still, half the box didn't seem like it would be that dangerous, although he supposed she was kind of small. And a mom to boot. He figured moms cared about things like grams of sugar and they only bought the boxes of pasta that promised they were vitamin enriched. "Take whatever you don't want with you to work." He certainly wasn't going to take it with him to the shop. Even if the box was blue, there was something slightly feminine about donuts. The guys would eat them, but Joey doubt he'd ever hear the end of rainbow sprinkles. Riding the slim edge of amusement at the thought, he picked up one of the cakey ones with the colorful jimmies that clung to pink glaze and took a bite.

The taste was sweet vanilla, cloying and rich enough that he had to chase it down with a swig of coffee just for the pleasant contrast of bitterness. "Yeah, pretty good," he agreed before taking the rest of the donut in a bite from the edge of his thumb. He still ate like a kid, pizza boxes and cold bowls of cereal. Everything swallowed down fast like he might have to fight somebody for it if he didn't. Old habits born from sickled stomachs and lanky bones. He drank some more coffee and tried to think of what to say. He thought back to the conversation he'd had with the sister, Max. "Its good that you have a sister that looks out for you like that." If the comment was out of the blue, he hoped it wasn't awkward. His sense of normal conversation topics was skewed as fuck what with the hotel and shootings and parole boards. He wondered if maybe she'd rather talk about pleasant things like coupons and the weather. "I got little sisters, so I get it.."

Ella laughed at the prescription of what could and could not be had. It was mellow alto, the same as the speaking voice but the laughter wasn’t quiet-as-quiet, dampened down and softened until it wasn’t anything bigger than contained in cupped hands. The donuts in the box were sticky-sweet, the kind of confection that would have sweetened the first day of school but he sounded, then, more like the scuffed-edges of a brother than anything else, like the little boy with the scabbed knuckles and the freckles, and she set her donut down on the side of her plate (just one bite gone) and dusted off her fingers, and smiled like fear had picked itself up and ridden on out of the room.

“You figure, huh?” The box would be demolished at work but no one would ask questions. She liked it, the calm of the diner. It had a rhythm like nightfall, predictable in its repetition and no one asked a single thing beyond the necessary. It was anonymity, and she liked that, plastic tags and baggy uniforms and no one who cared one bit about donut boxes and who’d brought them, until there was nothing but crumbs. She watched the first donut disappear and figured the second would follow. He was raw-boned, like growing, and she didn’t think of the sentence, just the way he still sounded, looked unfinished, like a teenager barely done brushing up against adulthood. Her smile slip-slid, and her fingers folded once again around the coffee cup, elbows dragged back along formica until she wasn’t anywhere near the line.

“I love my sister,” Ella said, because she did. Max was hard, like all the answers knotted up in prickly beauty and a hand on her gun and maybe Max had been relied on too long. Ella thought guiltily of men whose name she didn’t know, of Ian, and she broke the donut into pieces with her fingers. “But most of the time, I think I’m a problem she has to fix, you know?” Maybe he did. Maybe his sisters were as much trouble as she was for Max.

The laugh seemed to make him uncertain all over again, curing the hitch of a shoulder blade in social newness. It wasn't a sound he heard all that often lately, the gentle and inherently warm sound. Ella's smile reassured him eventually, evacuating whatever uncertainty had momentarily tried to take root. He smiled back, but his version was smaller. A flickered thing, up and then down again.

"She's just trying to make sure you're okay," he assured her on the subject of Max. He admittedly knew next to nothing about their relationship, but Joey knew protective when he saw it. Inherent animal instincts, through and through. Honed by iron bars and starved dogs, he knew protective well. He might have once thought that it had everything to do with being an older sibling, but that wasn't the kind of thing that occurred to him immediately anymore. After all, Shane was his older brother, and the bastard hauled off when the time was right. Joey didn't think he blamed him per se, but he couldn't quite explain the bitterness that sat on his tongue otherwise. He told himself that it was worthless to think about that shit now, all these years after the fact, but that wasn't enough to stop him on most days. "That's a good thing," Joey promised. Although that assertion was based on hope rather than experience. He was protective of Sam, but couldn't quite recall anybody ever being protective of him. Which was fine, he'd never needed it.

"What time you got to be at work?" He asked it with a glance up to the plastic kittycat clock with the swinging tail that sat on the wall.

She thought about it. About okay, what they made of it. Okay for Max was bullets in guns, in the practical mapped out cleanly to its end. Okay for her, the last real okay had been laughter on a sagging mattress with a knit blanket wrapped tight round its edges, the squeeze of a palm. Okay could be anything in between. The donut crumbled sweet across Ella’s tongue, the shape of it in her fingers closer to uniform than anything she’d made in her own kitchen. It had to be harder on Max than on her, all that summoning up the snap to bite. Joey didn’t look like he had the teeth to growl at things or to haul off and hit them as cleanly as Max might. He had sisters, though. Her face was somber as she ticked over the pieces, the shuffleboard of a sister she almost, sorta-knew who was pretend-dead somewhere. Maybe their father had buried her, maybe he’d felt something the first time in his life. “I know,” Ella settled on, because there’d been a chain of nothing-minutes, swung together in isolation. Maybe Max should have someone who did it for her.

Her eyes slid up to the clock, registered the trickle-away of seconds and minutes. “Soon,” it had run away quicker than she’d thought, the last time had been an alternation of pages and of sips of sweet-black coffee, the meandering past of the waitress with the coffee-pot and a hand out for two quarters per cup. Joey looked more comfortable now, less like the kind of dog that figured you’d kick him rather than call his name. “I should probably go.” The last mouthful of the coffee chased away the sweet. Ella crumpled the cup up, took a last bite of the donut and licked her fingers clean like her mother hadn’t taught her right off that that was no manners at all.

“Thanks. For the donuts.”

Joey nodded when she stood to go, savoring the lukewarm dregs of his coffee with a few last sips. "No problem," he said of the donuts, and his smile was faint, but it sounded like he meant it. He opened up the newspaper again as she moved away from the table, clearly still having time to kill before he headed off to the shop. He folded a flimsy corner back, and considered something with inspired eyes glancing up. "Same time tomorrow?"

But he didn't see her there, and the donut shop door was falling shut with its little bell jangling goodbye. So Joey swallowed back the taste of the words, realizing that they felt a lot better in his stomach than out there where she might give him that skeptical scared look that people sometimes gave him. He watched her through the window as she caught the next bus with the blue box in her hands, and he drank his coffee while still tasting his words.

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