Fur

14 | Night Stroll

A moment after our last customers—three of them drunk and one wearing a mysterious pendant around his neck—leave the premises, Esmerelda McNamara hobbles through the glass door of her café.

"Who were those punks?" Nanni demands, peering between Lattie and myself. "Rough lookers they were. You girls haven't turned the place into a bar have you?"

"They were just passing through," I say, blinking and dumbfounded. "On their way to Reinberg—Nanni, why are you here?"

Her polished wooden cane thumps softly on the floor as she hobbles past me. She must be in pain: she only uses her cane when she can't stand not to.

"Eeeuck. That place is a cesspool. And what do you mean why am I here? I called ahead. I forgot my bifocals. Couldn't even see my programs."

Lattie comes jogging out from the back. She hands Nanni the black leather case containing her glasses. I give her a look of incredulous betrayal.

"When did she call?"

"When you were serving the customers." Her eyes jump between Nanni and I, anxious that her grandmother will detect her euphemism for what I was really doing with our customers. If she does, she lets it slide.

"Have you cleaned up for the night?" Nanni then asks.

Lattie nods her head emphatically.

"Good. Let's go home then." She turns from Lattie to me. Zakai stands just behind me at my shoulder. He's impossible to miss, yet she looks only at me. "Be careful with that," she says, with a well of meaning beneath her crackling voice, "It's a dangerous game if you play it that way."

With that, she exits out the door from which she entered through, speaking the parting statement of, "Call if you need us. You know where the key is," as she does.

Lattie hurries after her, but stops in front of me on the way. She grabs my arm gently, as she always does when there's something she'd like to keep between us. Usually she whispers when she does this, but she has no need to now. Zakai doesn't speak German.

"Where are you going tonight?" She asks. She—as well as Nanni—must know without being told that I'm not going with them. She knows Zakai and I have catching up to do and I would bet every euro I own that she's filled Nanni in on all the details.

"My house," I answer, "I'll see you in the morning. Lock the doors, yeah?"

She nods, her nerves swimming in her big eyes. A piece of her lower lip is held between her teeth as she removes her hand from my arm and steps away. She meets Zakai's eyes briefly, says in English that it was, "Nice meeting you," and then goes off to follow in her grandmother's footsteps.

I witness through the glass as the dark of night swallows them in. They climb into the buick, pull onto the road, and drive straight down its shadowy gullet as I stand watching, the whole of the good of my old world standing at my side as the new fades out of sight.

Have I just chosen? Backward or forward, past or present?

No. No, I made no choices. I couldn't have.

And yet I'm in the café with him as they go home alone, past the bridge a girl was murdered beneath, to the house whose windows wore a human's handprints the night before. My chest constricts. Static electricity generates in my core and erupts through my limbs: up through my shoulders, down my arms, into the tips of my fingers where I flex them tightly to make it go away.