Sunshine

There was a young woman at that desk with a nameplate and a sharp uniform and a sharp look like she should have had a rank to go on the nameplate, but what do I know? She hit two buzzers, one that opened the inner door and one that, presumably, warned Pat, because he came walking out to meet me before I’d gone very far down the faceless hallway Mel must have brought me out of the last night of the giggler’s existence on this earth, but it was so characterless I was ready to believe I had crossed one of those distance-folding thresholds and was now on Mars. If so, Pat was there with me. Maybe we’d been on Mars that night too. “What if the wrong person showed up first and said you were expecting them?” I said.

“I told them middling tall, skinny, weird-looking hair because it will have just been let out of being tied up in a scarf for working in a restaurant and you never comb it, wearing a fierce look,” said Pat. “I was pretty safe.”

“Fierce?” I said. I also thought, Skinny?, but I have my pride. The part about my hair is true.

“Yeah. Fierce. Through here,” and he opened a door and shepherded me through. This was, presumably, Pat’s office. The chair behind the desk was empty, but had that pushed-back-someone-just-got-up look. Jesse was sitting on a chair to one side of the desk. “Someone I want you to meet,” Pat said, nodding toward the other person in the room, who stood up out of her chair, and said in a rather stricken voice, “Hi.”

Aimil.

I looked at her and she looked at me. With my funny vision the sockets of her deep eyes and the hollows of her cheeks had a glittering dark periphery. “Okay,” I said, planning not to lose my temper unless it was absolutely necessary. “What are you doing here?”

“Tea?” said Pat blandly.

“Tell me what Aimil is doing here first,” I said.

“Well, we’re in putting-all-our-cards-on-the-table vogue now, aren’t we?” said Pat, still bland. “Since the other night. So it’s time you knew Aimil is one of us.”

“One of you,” I said. “SOF. And here I thought she was a librarian.”

“Undercover SOF,” Jesse said.

“Part time,” added Pat.

“I am a librarian,” said Aimil. “But I’m sometimes a—er—librarian for SOF too.”

I thought about this. I’d known Aimil since I was seven and she was nine. She and her family had had Sunday breakfast at Charlie’s most weeks for years, were already regulars when Mom started working there and then when I started hanging out there. She was one of the faces I recognized at my new school. I’d lost half a year being sick and then Mom crammed the crap out of me the second half of the year so I didn’t lose a grade when I went back to school in the fall. (Yes, I mean crammed. Second grade is freaking hard work when you’re seven or eight.) In hindsight that was the beginning of Charlie’s being my entire life: I didn’t have time to make friends the six months I was being crammed. The only kids I met were kids who came to Charlie’s, not that I got to know many of them because I wasn’t allowed to annoy the customers. But Aimil used to ask for me, so I was allowed to talk to her. She talked to me because she felt sorry for me: I was weedy and undersized and hangdog that half year, and always doing homework. I forget how it started—maybe she saw me sitting at the counter studying, which I was allowed to do when it wasn’t too crowded.

We’d managed to stay friends outside of school although not inside so much; two years is the Grand Canyon when you’re a kid. She’d gone off to library school my junior year and did an internship at the big downtown library the year after I started working full time at Charlie’s and we used to get together to complain about how hard working for a living was. Two years later she got a job at the branch library near Charlie’s. Sometimes she still had Sunday morning breakfast at Charlie’s with her parents.

“When did you become SOF—undercover, part time, or hanging upside down on a trapeze?” I said. I did not sound friendly. I did not feel friendly.

“Twenty months ago,” she said quickly.

I relaxed. Slightly. “Okay. So why did you?”

Aimil sighed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She glanced at Pat and Jesse. I glanced at Pat and Jesse too. If they looked any more bland and nonconfrontational they were going to dissolve into little puddles of glop.

Aimil looked back at me. “You’re not going to like this,” she said.

“I know,” I said.