Sixty-Six Days After Wabash: The First Week I Didn't Write a Name

Sixty-six days. I'll say the small version first, the way Maria taught me, because this week the small version is the whole thing: I didn't add a name.

Seven weeks I've been carrying that count in my apron in pen, folded next to the guest checks, and every time I sat down to write you it was because a line had gotten longer. Daniel. Marcus. The five the city never put on their card, and then Ray, fifty-seven days after the fight, in a burn unit, logged downtown as a man they saved. Seven names. I told you last week I didn't think the counting was ever going to stop, that survived is a word they hand out early and don't take back, and I still believe that.

But this week it held. Seven on Monday, seven on Saturday night when I locked up. I checked the apron three times like a man patting his pockets for keys he knows are there. Still seven. I don't have a way to tell you what that felt like except to say I made an extra pie at close and didn't sell it and didn't know why until it was out of the oven.

So let me tell you about the ordinary thing, because I've filled six of these with the terrible ones and you've earned an ordinary thing.

There's a stool at the end of the counter that people had stopped using. You know how that goes without me spelling it — a seat gets a shape to it, and folks walk past. Tuesday a man I didn't know sat down on it. Work boots, hands like he does something with them, the kind of tired you don't get from a desk. New to the block — they're renting the old cleaners two doors down, Daniel's place, the one that's been dark with a LEASE AVAILABLE sign curling in the window since spring. He didn't know whose stool it was. Why would he. He asked what was good and I told him the Sicilian, well done, and he said burn the corner a little, and I had to turn around and face the oven for a second before I could answer him, because that is nearly word for word a thing a dead man used to say to me on Thursdays.

I didn't tell him that. That's not his to carry, and I've learned by now — the letter I kept, the small version I hand across the counter — that the whole weight isn't a gift. I cooked his slice. Burned the corner. He ate it standing up because the floor by the front table is still Petrakis's nephew's problem and the good stools were full, and he said it was the best thing he'd had since he moved his shop across town to get away from where his last one was. Didn't say what happened to the last one. Didn't have to. Everybody down here moved away from a where.

He put a card down. I said put your money away, first one's mine, you're on the block now. He looked at me like I'd said something in another language, and then he got it, and he put the card back. He'll be back. I can tell the ones who'll be back.

The kid came in Wednesday same as always and asked me the same thing he's asked me since the first week — when the ones who fly are coming back. I gave him a slice. I still didn't answer him. I'm going to answer him one of these days, I keep telling myself that, but not on the week the count finally sat still. You don't spend a quiet week on a hard question. You let the quiet be quiet.

Maria kept the register and wrapped two slices in foil for a woman who comes in on Fridays and never orders two, and neither of us said anything about that either. She wrote NO CHARGE on the bag in the specials marker. Her stitches are long healed. You'd never know, looking at her, that she came back to work the morning after with eleven of them over her eye. That's the count nobody keeps — the one where people just come back.

I don't want to lie to you and tell you it's over, that the seven is the seven and the line's closed. I've written that kind of ending before and had to come back and cross it out. The register they keep is set like concrete; mine's in pen because pen you can still read after it's smudged, and because a count you keep honest is a count you have to be willing to add to. Maybe next week I'm back here telling you eight. I hope not. I've hoped that before and been wrong.

But this week the oven ran, the floor held, a stranger sat on a stool that had gone empty and made it a regular's stool again, and I locked up with the same number I opened with. Sixty-six days, and the block put one more living person on it than it had.

Eat your slice. I'll write you when there's something to write.

— Johnny