Narrative: Jake R Who: Jake Ross What: Where the boy has been: snapshots When: Catch-up - post Carson, pre everything since. Warnings: Nada.
After: an empty diner long after Carson cleared off, belly leading the way. It smelled warm, and of the kind of food that was real flavorsome and stuck to the sides of your belly long after you’d been done eating it. He sat with his rucksack stowed beside him, canvas - new enough rather than brand new, two bucks from one of the small dusty-looking stores that had refuse sacks out front of things rich folks didn’t want anymore. He waited long after Carson’s empty glass was cleared on away, and after the light got good and low. There were all kinds of folks who ate out instead of at home. Jake never had before he’d left: grandma and grandpa were both real set on meals all together, hands clasped and bowed heads and prayerful words right over all that food, like salt to make it taste good.
Here, there were folks who looked gray and tired and faded above shirt collars that were just-undone, tie knots fat with slack at their throats and jackets that trailed over a shoulder, limp with the shape of a hard day’s work. There was a family right up close to the window, the kind who spoke Spanish in a low murmur, snatches of it Jake could catch over all the rest of the diner’s hum, a mom who leaned over her kids and cut up their food for them. Jake blinked hard at this, and he stuttered a sketch onto the back of a napkin, right up until the family cleared out and when the waitress swept by again, with that look that meant, ‘what are you still doing here, buying nothing?’ he cleared off out.
The house: it was real empty, apart from Jack and Jake hadn’t much bothered to ask the right questions because he figured Jack had his own problems what with losing his home right out from under him. Jake was an ask from Clem, and Jake figured Clem was pretty and persuasive enough that everyone did what Clem asked, but the little tuxedo house in Marvel still felt like people lived in it once. Like clothes still warm, wrinkled from a body. There were touches in it that felt real homely, that couldn’t be Shane and Graham, ‘less someone else was living here alongside him.
He beat it. Didn’t feel like much of anything, or maybe he was just too much crammed inside his skin so tight it might split: homes didn’t feel like anything without people in them and Jake didn’t know if they would ever come back. Didn’t pry none, didn’t ask: asking meant maybe finding out none of them could answer back and he wasn’t fishing to find no one else turning up dead. Didn’t like Graham none the better, but he didn’t want him dead. Walked the streets instead, figured on out New York and hovered in the doorways of places that had ‘help wanted’ signs up real high.
He got lucky once. Place real small, the tables jumbled in tight. Kitchen out back, that was busier than the waitresses skating past tables, the kind of place all steam and hissing sound and color: peppers and greens and the oily cream of potatoes and all of it right out there like art. They said the job was pot-washer, wasn’t much of anything, but maybe (and the man in the stained white overall squinted something awful, like maybe Jake wasn’t up to much) it meant graduating to the guy who cut all the vegetables at the beginning of the night. Some French word, but the restaurant wasn’t French none, so Jake didn’t know why they called it that. And all that art was right out there, and the best part was the feeding, every night he worked.
After, that was the bar. Someplace with greasy counters and dark corners, the place downtown that was cheap and didn’t card, but he lied pretty and he smiled big and thin, hollow like promises, and they gave him the job because they were real tight. And that, that was cleaning glasses and scrubbing toilets, but they gave him a place to stay, somewhere small where the walls touched in either side of the bed right above, where it was loud. And that, that felt more like a place all the insides of him could be than someplace meant for somebody better, who didn’t resent like it was a living coal. Stayed there instead, most nights. Went back to the tuxedo house mostly to check if Clem or Graham or Shane had come back at all, but mostly they hadn’t.
The street: watching a lighted window real distant. The baby his aunt’s toting around, she’s small and she’s probably real pretty (his aunt Clem is pretty, and Jake doesn’t much think about Graham) but far off, he can’t see nothing. Just that the baby - Joy - is real safe, and set somewhere no harm’s going to mess her none, and he can’t reconcile insides and outsides: he doesn’t want that baby hurt none, but he’s mad she’s here and they’re all gone and that everything is mixed up in a way it was never supposed to be, and it’s not his to be mad at all. Mostly he watches. Carson ain’t there, and maybe she’s gone back. He hopes she got the money still, can work out someplace to go that ain’t her Mom.
And the tuxedo house, that ain’t a place he can make art. He can do that plenty in the city, ain’t a soul who knows him well, except those he ain’t getting right up close to. Goes to the park instead, down where the men play chess, and draws them, one after the other. Draws the kitchen from memory, the dirty little bar, the people in that diner. Hasn’t painted none, but he draws until his fingers are cold, from the evenings where the light is short and fades quick, right up through to when the warm is starting to creep in, when the people on the pages of his sketchbook, they turn.
Going back: and he takes his things back once in a while, hasn’t sussed if Jack’s still here or he’s not. They’re both quiet, both don’t take up much room, Jake figures, and the house, it’s used to people who live a little bigger maybe. Leaves a sketch, last time he’s there which is memory, of that place in Gotham, something all long strokes and dusty shadow that maybe is Clem on the couch with the nail-varnish, and picks up a package of papers that says no one is coming, not to live a little or a lot in the tuxedo house.