“It’s nice,” I find myself murmuring. “Us being like this. I miss this.”
“It’s nice,” Vita agrees noncommittedly and takes a sip of black coffee. She’s wearing dark-red lipstick, heavy mascara, and a headband with her hair in a ponytail. She tries to smile between drags from her cigarette. There’s a half-eaten stack of pancakes between us, a dissected turkey-sandwich, and a plate of cold cheese-fries with congealed gravy.
Our waitress with the varicose veins all up and down her legs comes up and asks us how we’re doing. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
“Can I get a refill on the coffee?” Vita requests.
“Sure, doll. What about you, hun?”
“I’m okay, thanks,” I answer.
After she leaves, I use my knife to mix the blueberry syrup with the strawberry jam and paint the sunset on my plate. Vita watches and smokes her next cigarette calmly.
“How’s therapy?” I ask.
“Amazing. A long series of breakthroughs. We laugh, we cry, we hold each other and curse our parents and men,” Vita quips, her tone similar to the one I’d always known and loved: a mix of irony, sarcasm, and sincerity. Her voice is raspier though than it was when we were freshmen. “Bonnie says that it might be a blessing in disguise. We weren’t ready. Life goes on.”
“So, she knows that you…lost the baby?”
I ask this without meeting Vita’s eyes.
“Everything I used to want was wrong,” Vita says vaguely and gazes at the lights on the highway. Then meeting my eyes with a coolness emphasized by a puff of smoke she adds, “But hey, I’m still here.”
Trucks and cars flash by in little orbs of light passing across her irises.
“I have a drug problem,” I confess randomly, deciding now is the time.
Vita’s eyeshadow looks like a collection of clouds, for a moment dissipating with rain. I expect scorn and disbelief. Instead, she lets me have this moment of too little, too late.
“That’s good, Danny. I’m glad you can finally admit that.”
The waitress comes back with our coffee. Steam rises from the cups as we sit in silence, waiting for her to leave.
“That’s beautiful,” our waitress comments, admiring my syrupy landscape.
“He’s an artist,” Vita tells her, an echo of pride that she used to exude whenever we met strangers who saw me doodling or sketching her in public.
“I’ve never seen anyone paint with their leftover food before. But I guess you can find inspiration in anything,” our waitress clucks amiably and stands for a moment to watch me scrape out more clouds in the sky. She walks off and we continue to sit, not drinking our coffee.
“How are your parents?” I ask Vita.
“Well, ever since I got back from the hospital, I’ve suddenly become five years old again. My mom won’t let me sleep without her by my side, so that’s been fun. She can’t leave me alone for a second. My daddy’s the same. Some days he’s good, some days not so much. He’s been calling me ‘Marcia’ lately. That’s his sister’s name.”
I try to touch her hand. She dodges and grabs her coffee cup instead.
“Can we talk?”
“What do you mean? Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Vita smirks.
“Yeah, we are. But I just want to…”
Vita takes a deep breath.
“I want us to start over. I want us to go back to the way we were. Do you think we can do that?”
“Why?”
Her voice is flat enough to butter burnt bread.
“I love you.”
Vita rips open several sugar packets and pours them one by one into her coffee, stirring the black liquid slowly.
“I think about you all the time, Danny. But that doesn’t mean we have to be together.”
“I know that I wasn’t there for you,” I hear my voice breaking. “I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most…I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“You don’t get to do that,” Vita corrects me. “I was the one who lost our baby. I was the one who had to drop out of school. You were the one who said you would be there for me no matter what. You were the one who never called, never picked up your phone, never showed up on time, always left for some reason or other. And where were you? Getting stoned with your friends? Working on your art or selling drugs?”
“I messed up. I got caught up, like you said I would. I lost track of us, and I lost track of time.”
“Time is something you don’t get back, remember?” Vita responds, lighting her fifth or sixth cigarette. “I don’t want you to feel sorry. I don’t want anything from you.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” I stammer.
“Sure,” she says, and then rises to go to the bathroom.
One guy drops his spoon as she passes by. I can still hear it clattering on the table.