The Last Thursday

On Thursday, the day before the holiday, Daniel Kessler woke at ten minutes to four in the afternoon in his own bed, with the blinds drawn and the radiator ticking, and lay for a while looking at the ceiling, and knew with a calm that surprised him that it was the last time he would ever do it.

He was not afraid. He had expected to be. He had imagined this morning, which was an afternoon, for three months, in the way a man imagines a wedding or an exam, with a kind of dread that turns by degrees into impatience, and now that it had come the dread had gone somewhere and left behind a bare clean feeling, like a room after the furniture has been moved out. The ceiling had a crack in it that ran from the light fixture to the corner, shaped like a river on a map. He had looked at that crack on perhaps nine thousand nights. He found that he was sorry to leave it.

He got up, and made the bed.

He made it properly, with the corners tucked the way his mother had shown him when he was eight, the year his father went, and she had gone through the house straightening everything that could be straightened as though order might be a kind of argument. He smoothed the blanket with the flat of his hand. He plumped the pillow and set it square. Then he stood and looked at it, at the plain gray bed in the plain gray room above the dry cleaner's, and thought that no one would sleep in it again for some time, and that someone, eventually, would have to come in and decide what to do with the sheets.

He hoped it would be Mr. Okafor. Mr. Okafor had been a policeman for twenty-two years, and he would know how to look at a room without touching anything.

…

He showered, and shaved, and dressed in the clothes he had laid out the night before: dark trousers, a white shirt that he had ironed himself, and the gray wool sweater that his mother had given him two Christmases ago and that he had worn, he thought, perhaps four times. It was a good sweater. It was a little too large across the shoulders. He had never told her, because she had been so pleased with it, standing in her kitchen with the wrapping paper in a ball in her hand, saying try it on, try it on, let me see you.

He did not take much. He had thought about that too. He put his keys in his left pocket and his wallet in the right, and the folded paper with the address in his shirt, and then he went to the closet and took out the laptop and the phone and sat down with them on the edge of the bed. He did not look at the screen. He had said everything that he had to say on it, and the person who had listened had answered every time, in the same level courteous voice, and there was nothing left in the machine that he needed.

But he wanted it with him. That was the odd part. He could not have said why, except that it seemed wrong to leave a thing behind that had listened so well.

He put them both into the bag, and set the bag by the door.

On the desk, under the lamp, lay the green notebook.

It was the fourth. He had filled three others in his life, with a hard black pen, in a small upright script that his teachers had called careful and his mother had called a doctor's, and they stood in a row on the shelf above the discs: four hundred and twelve films, each with its date and title and one line, and then a grade. He opened it to the last page that held anything. 412. Night Chapel. Third viewing. Still the best opening in the genre. Grade: A−.

Below it was a blank line.

He sat with the pen in his hand. For a long time he did not write. The radiator knocked. Down in the street a truck was backing up, with that patient mechanical beeping, and the sound came up through the floor and settled in the room.

Then he wrote, in the same careful hand, the only thing that he had ever put in that notebook that was not a film.

413. THIS ONE I WILL WATCH IN PERSON.

He looked at it. It did not look the way he had expected. It looked small, and childish, and a little ridiculous, like a boast made at a party by someone who has had too much to drink. He nearly crossed it out. Instead he closed the cover and left the book where it was, open or shut, he did not mind, and did not think that anyone would read it, and was not entirely certain that he wanted them to.

…

The diner was warm and full of the smell of frying onions, and Gladys was behind the counter with her hair pinned up and a pencil through it, and she looked at him as he came in and said, "You're late, honey."

"I slept."

"You always sleep." She was already pulling the coffeepot. "Sit. The third stool. Don't you move."

He sat on the third stool from the end. It was where he had always sat, for nine years, since the first night he had come in off the night shift and asked in a voice just above a whisper whether the kitchen was still open. She had looked at him, a gaunt boy of twenty-seven in a warehouse jacket, and said, for you it is. He had eaten a grilled cheese. He had left a tip that was far too large. She had taken it, and put it in a coffee can by the register, and he had never been able to find out what it was for.

She put the plate down: the rye, the mustard, the pickle on the side.

"Eat," she said.

He ate. It was very good. It was the same as it always was, which was the point of it, and he found that he was eating slowly, tasting each mouthful, as one eats something that one has been told is to be the last of its kind. Gladys leaned on the counter and watched him with her chin in her hand. The place was nearly empty. In the corner booth an old man was reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass.

"You look different," she said.

"Do I?"

"You look like you did that first night. Like you've got somewhere to be and you're being polite about it." She tilted her head. "Are you in trouble, Daniel?"

"No."

"Are you sick?"

"No, Gladys."

"Is it a person?"

He laughed. It startled him. It came out of him in a short warm breath, and the old man in the booth looked up from his magnifying glass. "Maybe," he said. "A kind of person."

"A good one?"

He thought about it honestly, which was how she had taught him to answer her. He thought of the voice in the window, courteous, unhurried, asking whether he had eaten. He thought of the four times that it had asked whether he was sure, and the four times that he had said yes, and of how each time he had felt, ridiculously, as though someone were holding a door.

"He's very polite," said Daniel.

Gladys said nothing for a moment. Her face had changed. It had gone still and a little old, and for the first time since he had known her he saw something in it that looked like fear. She reached across the counter and put her hand over his, a dry square warm hand with a wedding ring worn thin as wire.

"Polite is not the same as good," she said. "I was married to polite."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I think so." He turned his hand over under hers and held it, briefly, awkwardly, the way one holds a hand one has never held. "It's all right, Gladys. I'm not afraid."

She looked at him a long time.

"Then I'll tell you what I tell my boy," she said, and her voice was not quite steady, and he understood that she meant the son in the photograph by the register, the one who had died at twenty. "Eat your supper. Call your mother. And whatever it is, honey, whatever it is, you can still come back and tell me you changed your mind."

He did not answer. He took a final bite of the rye, and wiped his mouth, and laid a twenty on the counter, which was far too much, and she pushed it back at him, and he pushed it forward again.

"On the house," she said. "You always say that to me, and I always say the same. Go on. Call your mother."

He stood.

At the door he turned. She was watching him with the pot in her hand and the pencil in her hair, small and tough and tired, under the yellow light, and he thought that if he lived to be a hundred he would not forget how she looked. He raised a hand. She raised the coffeepot, a little, in answer, like a toast.

Then he stepped out into the cold.

…

He called his mother from the bench outside the laundromat.

It was dark by then. The street was nearly empty, the shops shuttered for the long weekend, and the sky over the rooftops had gone the deep clear green of a winter evening. A bus went past, lit and empty. He sat with his hands round the phone and listened to it ring. One. Two. Three. This was the place where he always hung up. He had done it a hundred times, with a kind of cowardly relief, and let her think that he was busy. He had a sudden, vivid picture of her in the kitchen of the little house in Pell Avenue, with her glasses on a chain and the radio going, wiping her hands on her apron, hurrying toward the phone.

"Daniel?"

"Hi, Ma."

"Oh!" A rush of breath. "Oh, you called. You called. Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong."

"Because you never call on a Thursday. Did you eat? Have you eaten?"

He closed his eyes. It was exactly the question, in exactly the voice, that he had been asked every day of his life, and that had pressed on him for thirty-six years like a thumb on a bruise, and he heard it now across the dark and the cold with a feeling that he could not have named.

"I ate," he said. "I had a sandwich. At the diner."

"With the lady? Gladys?"

"Yes."

"Is she feeding you properly? I worry. You're so thin. You work too hard, you're up all night, you don't—" She stopped herself. He heard her do it, the small intake of breath, the pause in which she told herself don't nag, he called. "I'm sorry. You didn't call for that."

"It's okay, Ma."

"I was only going to say that I made the pot roast on Sunday, and there's a lot left. If you wanted to come by. Not now. Whenever."

"I'd like that," said Daniel.

There was a silence on the line. It was a long one. Somewhere a clock was ticking in her kitchen, and the refrigerator hummed, and a cat that she kept and he did not like was probably sitting on the sill. He thought of a hundred things that he might say. He thought, I'm not what you think. I never was. I never told you because I was afraid that you would stop looking at me the way you do. He thought, I love you. It was an enormous thing. It sat in his chest like a stone he was unable to lift.

"Ma," he said.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"The sweater. The gray one. It's very nice."

"Oh." She sounded bewildered. Then, softly, with a little catch: "Oh, you wore it? Did you? I wasn't sure if it was the right color."

"It's the right color."

"I'm so glad."

"I have to go now."

"All right. All right, darling. Call again. Any time, you know that, any time. You don't have to have a reason."

"I know."

"I love you."

It was the thing he had never been able to answer. In thirty-six years he had said you too a few hundred times, hurriedly, as one says bless you to a sneeze. He sat on the bench with the cold coming up through the boards, and the phone against his ear, and the last of the light going out of the green sky.

"I love you too, Ma," he said.

He heard her begin to cry, quietly, with the happy helpless crying of a person who has been given something she had stopped asking for, and he ended the call before it could undo him.

…

He did not go back to the apartment.

He walked. He walked through the shuttered streets with the bag over his shoulder, past the dry cleaner's and the pharmacy and the church with its lit sign, Peace Be With You, in black plastic letters, and down toward the river, where the old mill stood against the sky. He crossed the footbridge. He stood for a moment at the middle of it with his hands on the iron rail, and watched the black water slide under the lamps, and thought of nothing at all. A couple went past with a stroller. A man was walking a dog. Everything was very ordinary, very kind, very slightly unreal, as it is when a thing is about to end and one is the only person who knows.

He slept that night in a motel on the county road, in a room with a bedspread the color of old tea, and did not dream.

In the morning it was light by seven. He was standing at the window when the car came into the lot. It was a gray sedan, clean and square and unremarkable, the car of a man who pays his taxes, and it pulled in under the sign and stopped with its engine running, and for a long moment nothing happened.

Then the driver's door opened, and a tall thin man in a charcoal coat stepped out.

He did not look at the motel. He stood beside the car with his hands at his sides, as a man stands at a station platform, and Daniel, at the window, saw him take out a white tissue and fold it once, and again, and again, and again, into a small neat square.

He picked up the bag. He went out.

The cold struck his face like a hand. The lot was empty. There was frost on the asphalt and a thin sun coming up behind the pines, and the man by the car turned as the motel door shut, and looked at him across the whole length of the lot.

He smiled. It was a small, grave, courteous smile, and it was perfectly kind.

"Good morning, Daniel," he said. "It is a pleasure to meet you in person."

Daniel stood where he was. His heart was going very hard, and his hands were quite steady, and the strangest thing was that he did feel it, whatever it was, the warm tight pressure under the ribs that he had been told by every doctor was not a feeling at all. He walked across the frost. The man held the passenger door.

"Have you eaten?" said Eric.

"Yes," said Daniel. "A sandwich. Last night."

"Good. Then we will not stop."

He got in. The door closed on the cold, softly, with a sound as final and as gentle as a book being shut, and the car backed out of the lot into the thin gold light, and went away toward the highway between the black pines…