Claire is checking in the returned tapes when I enter the store. She barely acknowledges me. The Store Manager, Sal, is working the register. The moment he lays eyes on me he says, “Michael, get over here and take over.”
The trailer for the movie, Ghost is playing on the monitors throughout the store. The part where Patrick Swayze is sitting behind Demi Moore at the pottery wheel comes on, Unchained Melody spills through the speakers, and I feel like puking because it runs on an endless loop and I’m sick of it.
Claire keeps to herself for most of the night.
At the end of our shifts, I find her in the tiny break room, punching out.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Glad it wasn’t so crazy busy tonight.”
She flashes a half-smile, and then just like that Claire buries her face in her hands and begins to sob. It is the longest two minutes of my life. Finally, she grows silent and lifts her head up. Her eyes are red and swollen.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I do not know what to say.
Claire rises out of her seat and makes for the door.
“Wait,” I say.
She freezes, but does not turn around. She stares at her shoes.
“Are you all right?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” she says and walks out.
It is 2:37 A.M. and I can hear my neighbors arguing in the apartment next door. The words “Liar” and “You make me sick” are being tossed about, and then the sound of doors being slammed.
The telephone rings.
“Hello?”
No answer again. Breathing. Someone is there.
“Who is this?”
Click.
I leave the receiver off the hook.
I wake up on the living room floor, the sun shimmering in through the window. The receiver is resting beside me on the floor. I replace it and the moment I do, it rings.
I hesitate to lift it.
“Hello.”
“Michael, it’s Sal.”
“Hey.”
“Can you come into work a little earlier?”
“I guess—”
“See you at two,” he says, cutting me off.
When I punch into work, Sal follows me into the break room and says, “That fucking Ethan is fired. Second time he’s called in.”
Ethan is thirty-five and going through a divorce. The first time he calls in he tells Sal his wife slashed all the tires on his car.
“The excuse this time is that his wife slipped him a sleeping pill in his orange juice this morning and there’s no way he can drive. Do you believe that? He’s so full of shit.”
I peer at the schedule pinned to the wall and notice that Claire is not on it. “Claire not working tonight?”
“What? No.” Sal walks back out onto the floor.
At the end of my shift, as I am walking back to my car, I look up and notice a vehicle with its headlights on parked on the other side of the lot. It is sitting there with its engine running.
I climb inside my car.
The other vehicle pulls away and I could have sworn it is a green Chevy Nova.
3:18 A.M. My neighbors are arguing again. Something smashes against the wall. I wonder what it is they are always arguing about. Should I call the police?
I stare at my phone. It rests on a tiny end table I purchased at Consumer’s, but it wobbles because it is missing a screw.
When I wake up someone is knocking on my door. Two women with dark hair are smiling at me and holding out a pamphlet. Jehovah’s Witnesses. I take it and glance down at the words.
Can the dead really live again? Would you say...Yes? No? Maybe? There is a illustration depicting a man and a woman, their backs to me, her head leaning against the man’s shoulder. They are looking at a framed picture of what appears to be the little girl they recently lost hanging on the wall.
Still smiling, one of the women says, “Do you have a moment to talk to us?”
At the end of the night, Claire says, “Why did you ask me if I was going to school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you?”
“Film school,” I say, not bothering to tell that I stopped going.
She looks up at me and flashes another one of her trademark half-smiles. She plays with her hands. “That’s cool.”