Page 82 of Bad Words

The words had come out before I could think about them.

Parker kept moving toward the end of the aisle, where, at the corner, fiction turned into memoir. “Are they phone-shy?”

Even as I thought about lying or evading, I found myself remembering the way he’d looked out the diner window at the falling snow. I remembered my words in his voice. The longest uncompleted project of their lives.

“No,” I said. “We have a difficult relationship. They called me after the Wiseman Festival, and sent an email, but that was the first time we’d spoken in a couple of years.”

Now his steps did slow. When we reached the corner, he stopped, silent. I busied myself with taking off my coat, grateful that he wasn’t just saying the first bit of pablum that came to mind.

“Did you answer?” he asked eventually.

“After about six weeks.” I didn’t admit that our evening with Juliette had shifted some piece of machinery in me, that maybe, without the diner humming peacefully in the back of my mind, I would have left well enough alone.

I suddenly worried that he’d push, that he’d want to get to the bottom of me. I worried that even I didn’t know what was at the bottom, that down there in the pit of me was something—not terrible, not monstrous or frightening, that I could have dealt with—something small and curled and sad, like a little girl in a corner. I didn’t actually think I could stand to see that in myself, let alone for anybody else to see it.

But Parker didn’t push. He pointed to something just out of sight, around the corner. “Look.”

The aisle was narrow, but he didn’t move. I took a step closer and found myself imagining a wobble of my heel. I could see myself tripping forward, landing against him. He’d catch himself against the shelf, another lock of hair tumbling out of place onto his furrowed brow. I imagined looking up into his intense, sensitive eyes.

I stayed even and upright. I tilted my head to peek around the corner.

Written across the raw wood endcaps were hundreds of authors’ names. Love you, Book Bar! they’d written, or just their looped and well-practiced signatures. I thought I saw Juliette Liao’s artful scribble on the next endcap down.

I opened my purse and handed Parker a pen. “Here.”

As he took it, his fingers brushed mine. The moment of contact was long and slow, almost leisurely, his fingertip traveling up and over my knuckle. I couldn’t tell whether the slowness was intentional or whether he was just like this, unhurried, so used to contact and closeness that he was oblivious to the things that in my insulated existence felt like a shattering.

I wondered for a single bizarre moment if Parker Navarro was flirting with me. If, when we’d left the party, he’d thought we were leaving together the way two normal people might leave a party together.

I thought about those hands keying into a laptop, She inches her fingers down the yielding contours of her waist.

He wrote on the wall in small, narrow letters,

well-kept secret

Then he signed, P NAVARRO, an almost unreadable knot.

He offered me the pen. I added Selina Chan in highly legible cursive underneath.

We studied our names on the wall. “That look like a truce to you?” Parker said.

“I think so.”

His shoulder tipped against one shelf, and he said in a scratchy, uneven voice, “It’s funny. I’ve never been in New York for the holidays before.” He must have been properly drunk at this point, because his eyes didn’t move from mine, as bright and focused as they had been in the Bar Car, when we’d been an inch from each other’s throats.

“Because of your family?” I asked.

“Yeah. My mom and dad split up when I was twelve, so, twice the planning my whole life.” He exhaled. “I miss them so much. I miss Manila. You know how sometimes you like getting forced into doing things you’d normally never do? When my siblings and I, I mean, when we get up for the morning masses leading up to Christmas or stay out half the night, there’s this sort of camaraderie to it. Like they all really like each other.”

Parker hesitated. His brow furrowed, and he gave a sudden, self-effacing smile. “Sorry. I don’t know why I—I mean, you don’t want to hear … yeah.”

As I watched him brush splinters from his coat, understanding hummed through me. He hadn’t said anything objectionable, let alone something that needed an apology.

But, of course, this was how Parker acted with everybody whose opinion he cared about. He sanded off every edge to avoid remonstration. And with that truce written on the wall, he was beginning to do the same with me, too.

It made me unexpectedly sad. I looked at him and experienced that peeling back of time again. I saw a twelve-year-old kid with perceptive eyes, looking around at his family and seeing the universal absence of forgiveness.

“Parker,” I said.