RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
Eighty-seven days, and this week I finally said a name out loud that I'd been carrying quiet since the fifty-ninth.
You know the stool. End of the counter, closest to the register, where a man doesn't have to twist his neck to see the door. I told you a while back somebody new took it — ordered two Sicilian, well done, extra oregano, same as always, and I never let on that "always" wasn't his. It was Ray Delgado's. Nine years Ray sat there before the burn unit took him, fifty-seven days after the Tuesday they fought over Wabash, logged downtown as a man they'd saved. I never reopened the register key I had set aside for him. I just let this new fella, Walt, order Ray's order into a dead man's slot and didn't say a word.
I've turned that over for weeks. What good does it do a man to tell him he's living in somebody's leftover life? He didn't ask for the stool. He asked for pizza.
But Tuesday the dinner rush thinned out early — first slow Tuesday in a month — and Walt was still there working on his crust the slow way he does, and I put the coffee pot down and just said it. Told him about Ray. The nine years. The order that wasn't a coincidence because there's no such thing as a coincidence in a place this small. Told him about the register key still in the drawer with tape on it that says RD in Maria's handwriting, because neither of us could throw it out and neither of us could explain why not.
Walt didn't say much at first. Turned his fork over twice. Then he told me something I hadn't asked for in eighty-some days of him sitting there — his last name. Meyer. Walt Meyer. Said he'd been giving it to me in pieces on purpose, the shop that burned on the west side, the lease and the equipment gone the same week, all of it, but never the name, because a name is the thing that makes a man real enough to lose again. He said he figured if this block took its own hit too, better to be a stranger a while first.
I told him he wasn't a stranger. He'd been ordering a dead man's order for two months; that's about as far from a stranger as this counter gets.
He asked if he should pick something else. A different order. I told him no — I told him Ray would've liked that his stool didn't sit empty, and that the oregano was a good call regardless of who ordered it first. Then I got the register key out of the drawer, the one with RD taped on it, and I gave it a new strip of tape. WM under it, not over it. Ray's still there if you look close.
Small version, since you're used to me giving it: I finally told him. He finally told me. Nobody had to lose anything to make that trade.
The count in my apron is still seven. Twenty-six days now since the last name got added, longest it's held except the once. I'm not going to pretend that's the whole story of the week, because it isn't — it's just the number, and the number was never the thing I was actually keeping track of. What I keep is who sat where, and what they ordered, and who's carrying it now that they're gone. Ray's carried a while longer today, in a strip of tape under another man's initials.
Petrakis hasn't been by. Floor's holding. Marcus's bike is still chained by Daniel's old door and Renata still hasn't come back for it, and I'm starting to think she isn't going to, which is its own kind of answer I haven't figured out how to write yet.
The kid still asks when the ones who fly are coming back. I still don't answer. Some days not answering is the only honest thing I've got.
Oven's lit. Door's open. Come by — I'll tell you who's sitting where, if you ask nice, and I'll only lie to you about the parts that aren't mine to tell.