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Kim shuts off her car, and the engine’s low rumble is replaced with the whirr of parts cooling and settling. The heaters in the front console stop blasting, too. In the sudden silence, Jimmy tips his head back against the headrest and tilts to look at Kim.
He scratches just above his right ear. “You sure, though?” he says.
She closes her eyes for a brief time then glances to him. “Two weeks and I’m already counting billable hours instead of sheep,” she says.
Jimmy shrugs. “So drop me back at mine, head into the office.”
Kim gives him a look, one of her eyebrows lifting up.
“You could make a little fort around your cubicle,” he adds, drawing a square in the air with his finger. “Hole up in there until, I don’t know, February? March?”
“Jimmy,” she says.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I know.” Another sideways look to her, to her silhouette against the yellow-streaked window. The glass is fogged up at the edges. He opens his mouth, pauses, then says, “Thank you.”
She nods.
He opens his door to a rush of cold air and the smell of snow and damp and fires burning somewhere.
There’s a puddle of dirt-colored slush beside the passenger wheel, and Jimmy’s sneaker comes down right in the middle of it. “Damn!” he hisses. He lifts his foot and tilts it sideways and hopes maybe it was too shallow to really do anything, but then he feels water seeping, ice cold, through his sock.
“Ah—sorry,” Kim says, rounding the front of the car.
Jimmy shrugs and shakes his head. He steps past the water, and the two of them wander over the forecourt toward the restaurant. The parking lot is half-filled, tire tracks crisscrossed over the surface.
On the street opposite, cars idle at a drive-in, headlights on and exhaust pipes kicking up great grey plumes that glint in the colorful flashes of the menu boards and brake lights. Other cars are parked up beneath a hotel, one of those long two-storied things with a balcony, and Jimmy can tell which rooms are occupied by the way the snow thins along the edges of the roof there, the heaters running inside. In Albuquerque in December, the hotel is about a third full.
At the end of the street, visible down the perfect parallel lines of this city, the Sandias rise above it all. The snow on them comes all the way to the ground, thin in places but thick in the shadowed dips and valleys of the rippled hills.
“Jimmy?” Kim says.
He turns to her. She’s a few feet ahead, staring back to where he’s paused, lingering. “Yeah,” he says, and he gestures down to the mountains. “Just looking.”
Kim moves back beside him and looks, too. After a moment, she says, “Easy to forget we’re five thousand feet up.”
He nods.
She brushes a hair away from her mouth, tucking the thread behind her ear, then looks to him.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says again.
They carry on. Before them, the Owl Cafe glows: the sculpted roof lined with red and blue neons, marking out the head of the owl, the eyes. The strip lights are reflected in the shimmered puddles across the parking lot, twisting curves and spirals that drift and ripple as he and Kim tread through the water to the entrance.
Kim holds the door open and he steps inside. Another wave of air hits him, warm this time, and Jimmy tugs down the zipper on his coat. The diner is long and narrow, with booths along the outer walls and stools lining a center counter. Burgers hiss on grills and forks clatter on plates and from a jukebox somewhere the low and sad voice of Roy Orbison sings about crying.
They wait by the sign in the entrance until a waitress walks up to them, pencil tucked behind her ear. “Two?” she says, smiling warmly.
They nod, and she leads them between the tables, Jimmy’s right sneaker squelching over the linoleum. She stops at a two-person booth near the front of the place: old bench-seats and a shining metal table with salt and pepper shakers and a curving chrome jukebox controller about the size of a coffee machine.
Jimmy settles, the leather creaking, and Kim slides in opposite. Their knees brush. The seats are reaching slightly toward each other, coming out from the wall at different angles to match the curved front of the building. His right knee is an inch closer to her than his left.
“Cold one out, huh?” the waitress says. “Something warm to drink? Coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Kim says, “just black.”
Jimmy grabs a menu from between the jukebox controller and the wall, and he flips it over and studies the back. Looks up at the waitress. “I’ll go a chocolate shake.”
“Great choice,” the waitress says, smiling, and she tucks her pencil back behind her ear and moves away, revealing a large cartoon owl on the back of her blue t-shirt.
Jimmy shrugs out of his jacket and shifts in his seat, sitting so he has one leg under the table, one leg out, his damp sneaker seeping onto the linoleum. He rests his right arm on the edge of the bench behind him and twists so he’s facing the rest of the diner. There’s a rack of souvenir shirts like the one the waitress is wearing near the counter, and hats and postcards. At the far end, he can see the jukebox, playing some jazz thing now, and he taps the edge of his thumb on the hard corner of the booth.
It’s still light out, but it seems darker than normal with the cloud cover and the haze of cold over the windows, their corners frosted. After a few minutes, a couple arrives and they sit in the next booth down, and Jimmy moves his arm clear for them, turning back so he’s facing Kim again. She’s looking down at her menu, her eyes scanning the text.
So Jimmy unfolds his own. Burgers and all day breakfast and pies. He flips to the next page, then back, then looks up. Behind Kim, the row of two-person booths curves around the wall and down to the end of the diner. Above the last one, an enormous clock says that it’s Time to Eat.
Kim’s gaze flicks up to him. “So,” she says.
“So,” Jimmy says, and he raises his eyebrows. “What’re you going to get? Big decision, right?”
Kim shakes her head, smiling softly. “This is the same old New Mexico stuff, Jimmy. Why’d you want to come here?”
The doors open: more customers enter, and with them a whip of cold air that he can almost see curling through the diner like in a cartoon. He waits for the people to pass, then says, “Seemed fun.” Looks back to Kim and smiles and closes his menu again. Tucks it beside the chrome jukebox controller and studies the thing.
It’s all curved panels and buttons like something straight out of the fifties—which it probably is. There’s a slot in the top for coins, and a sign beside it in old-fashioned printed text that says, Quarters Only.
“D’you reckon this actually works?” he asks, poking at the buttons on the front. They indent, then slowly rise back out.
“Maybe,” Kim says. “I think you”—she flicks a lever on the top, spinning the vertical sheets of tracks—“yeah, here’s the options.”
Jimmy lifts his hips to reach into the front pocket of his jeans and rummages around for a couple of quarters, then he settles in the booth again. Slots a coin into the top of the wallbox. It rattles down into the machine. Something clicks. “Guess we’ll find out,” he says. He looks up at Kim. “Any requests?”
Her eyes glint. “Surprise me.”
He makes a soft humming noise. Runs down the options: love song after love song after love song. He flicks the lever to look at the next leaf. More love songs…and then he grins. Punches in D6. There’s a ticking sound from the wallbox, and then nothing. The current music continues uninterrupted.
Kim gestures vaguely in the direction of the jukebox. “Guess we gotta wait for Diana Ross to figure out where she’s going to, first.”
“Guess so,” Jimmy says, and he grabs his menu again, tapping his finger on the plastic cover as he opens it up. “Diana and me both.” He looks up at Kim. “I mean, breakfast food, dinner food, dessert food….what am I feeling here, Kim?”
She gives him a look. It’s still new but familiar already, her brows tilting and eyes meeting his.
He lowers his gaze and puts down the menu. Picks up his extra quarter then flicks it between his thumb and the side of his forefinger. Taps the edge of it on the metal.
And Kim takes off her own jacket now, one of her new black things. Her blouse is cream with greenish flowers, leaves and petals interweaving. She lays the jacket carefully on the back of booth beside her.
“—here we are, a coffee—and a chocolate shake—” their waitress says, arriving at the side of the booth. She sets their drinks down on the shiny metal table.
Jimmy’s milkshake is in one of those old-fashioned rippled glasses, condensation pearling on the side. He swirls the red straw, stirring in the whipped cream, then sips. It tastes almost exactly like the old diner shakes he’d drink with Marco on the way home from school, chocolatey and malty and cold.
The waitress pulls out her notepad. “We ready to order?”
“Yeah, think so,” Kim says, looking to Jimmy, and he shrugs—ready as ever. She closes her menu. “I’ll get the green chile cheeseburger.”
“Perfect. And you, hon?”
“Uh…” Jimmy says, and he stares blankly at the pages, then looks up at the waitress and shrugs. “Yeah, the same.”
“Two cheeseburgers coming right up,” she says, and once again she tucks her pencil back behind her ear without writing anything. Jimmy watches her go. The wide eyes of the owl on the back of her shirt return the stare.
He takes another long drink of his milkshake then pushes the glass forward, leaving a wet trail over the surface of the table.
The diner doors open again, bringing in another curling drift of icy air, fingers of cold that run over his skin. Down at the grill, a cook sends up plumes of smoke and steam, hissing.
Finally, the Diana Ross song fades out. There’s a brief silence, and then the kick of bright trumpets and horns.
Kim lets out a huffing laugh. “The Dragnet theme?”
Jimmy grins. “Mm,” he says. “Pop loved this show. I guess he liked, you know, the good guys winning.” He scratches his cheek then turns from her, flicking the lever on top of the wallbox to browse through the selection again. He raps the edge of his quarter sharply on the table one more time, then drops it into the top. Punches in another choice: J8. Glances to Kim. “Pretty cool, right?”
She gives him a small smile. Tilts her head slightly. Then she reaches for the briefcase that’s been beside her the whole time, turning it upright. And she flicks the latches open with her thumbs, two at once, click.
He exhales.
“Jimmy,” she says softly.
“Yeah,” he says, like he’s been saying all night—all week, even. “Yeah, I know.” Another beat, the same beat. “Thank you.”
She opens her briefcase and pulls out a couple of the practice LSATs Jimmy sweated through weeks ago. Sets the papers down between them on the table. “So, I looked these over at lunch,” she says, and it’s a new tone from her, a different kind of precise and measured. “They’re not great, but you know that.”
“Yeah,” he says. He pinches the red straw between his forefinger and middle finger and takes a long drink. The shake’s getting low; it rattles at the bottom of the glass, air pockets.
“I just mean—” Kim starts, and then she shifts, her knee briefly touching his where the booths are angled closer. “Jimmy, you’re getting some of the hardest stuff right and some of the easiest stuff wrong here.”
He blinks.
She flicks through. “This last question, you got this right, but you missed”—back to the front—“every single one in the first section.”
He pinches his straw with his fingers again and swallows the milkshake thickly, then says, “Lucky guess on the last one?”
Kim shakes her head. “Stop that,” she says flatly. She turns the papers around so he can see them, and talks him through the first answer. “So I’m just saying,” she continues, “with my help, even if we just sort out this easy stuff, we should be able to get your score high enough to help balance your GPA, right?”
Dragnet fades out on the jukebox. Silence, and then the theme to Goldfinger starts, Shirley Bassey and loud brass. Neither of them react. Jimmy runs his thumb over the cold exterior of his milkshake glass, wiping a trail through the condensation. “With your help?” he says, finally.
Kim gives him the look again, the new but familiar one.
“Kim, you’re”—he swallows—“you said you're already counting sheep.”
The look softens. “Jimmy.” Her hand ripples on the table as if she’d been about to move it to his. Instead, she picks up her coffee and takes a sip. Her mug is white with a cartoon owl on it. She lowers the cup to the metal table again. Rests her chin on her palm, looking at him.
“Kim, I’m good,” he says. Waves a hand over his papers. “I got this.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Okay,” he says, after a silence. He shifts in the booth, and his still-damp-but-slowly-drying sneaker squelches again. “But, you know, I can ask Chuck, instead…”
The eyebrows inch higher.
He chuckles. “Fine, maybe not, but, Kim, you—” He pauses. Kisses his teeth. Looks over to the opposite windows. Night is falling now, and the neon lights that hang above the center bar are coming up reflected in the glass: mirrored logos for Coors Light and Budweiser. “Kim,” he says softly, “if I can’t do this on my own, why do it at all?”
As he turns back, her hand moves again—but then the waitress arrives with their cheeseburgers, sliding the plates onto the edge of the table beside Jimmy’s papers, and Kim’s hand retreats.
The waitress smiles. “Two burgers—”
“Ah, hang on,” Jimmy says. He clears more room, and she settles the plates properly before each of them. “Thanks.”
The waitress nods. “Anything else I can get you?” A glance at Kim’s coffee. “Top you up?”
Kim shakes her head, and the waitress thanks them and moves on again, stopping at the next booth to check in with the couple there.
Jimmy scratches his forearm then looks back down to the table. His burger sits beside a nest of fries, chunky cut things with the skin still on. He reaches for one and then draws his hand back. Glances at Kim and raises his eyebrows. Are they gonna finish the conversation first?
“Let’s just eat,” Kim says, and then she seems to realize how the words sounded because she smiles gently. “I mean, before it gets cold, okay?”
Jimmy nods. He picks up his burger, staring down the length of the diner. Time to Eat, the clock says, still. So he takes a bite—it’s good, better than he was expecting, and he makes a muffled noise of approval.
They eat together in silence for a while—or they eat in the warm background noise of the diner: the grills hissing, the other patrons laughing and chatting, the clattering of forks and knives and turning teaspoons in coffee cups. Someone else takes over the jukebox again, and it’s Sonny & Cher, all jangling guitars and drums, then something Jimmy doesn’t recognize.
The sky darkens beyond the fogged windows.
Jimmy swallows the last of his burger, then sips his milkshake. Swirls his straw around in the dregs. “So how’s life upstairs?”
Kim finishes chewing and shrugs. “Would you believe I think I was being more useful down in the mailroom?”
He widens his eyes, popping a fry into his mouth.
She shakes her head. “Jack keeps getting the good assignments from Howard, always getting given the…well, whatever." She sighs. "I don’t know if it’s because he’s an outside hire. But I think a yellow highlighter and a piece of gaffer tape could do my job better than me right now.”
Jimmy points to her with a thick-cut chip. “Not with the same winning attitude it couldn’t.”
Kim snorts. She pokes at her own plate then looks back up. “Anyway, he managed to wrangle a week off over Christmas, so maybe I’ll finally get something useful then.”
“And if someone needs to sue Santa Claus, you’ll be there,” Jimmy says, swiping a chip through ketchup.
“Exactly,” she says, “ready and waiting.”
Jimmy chuckles. He finishes his milkshake, the too-warm and too-sweet dregs rattling up the straw, then he pushes the glass to the side.
Kim eats another chip. Dusts salt off her fingers above her plate. “How long are you back home for?”
“Just a couple days,” Jimmy says. “Been a while since I’ve had a Christmas there.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe…six years?”
Kim nods slowly. She wipes her fingers on a napkin then scrunches it up, dropping it on her plate.
And Jimmy shrugs. “They’re all the same, anyway. Same old conversations, same old—everything.” He exhales, and leans back in the booth, tucking his arm over the back of it again. The door to the diner swings open, sending in another whirl of cold air.
And soon, it’s completely dark out, just the haloed lights of the streetlamps and the drive-in restaurant opposite, glowing through the glass. He thinks of snowbanks back home, piled high against windows and doorways, along sidewalks and gutters. Or climbing outside shopfronts, waiting to be shoveled.
The reflections of the bright neons above the counter swim in the glass, and he looks to Kim.
She’s staring outside, too. Her head is resting on her palm again, her elbow beside her empty plate.
“What’re you gonna do for the holidays?” he says softly. As she turns to him, he adds, “I mean, other than the big Santa trial thing.”
Kim raises and lowers her shoulders, the green flowers waving. “You know, I don’t really…” she starts, and then she pauses. “I never really loved Christmas that much, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says quietly. “I know that.”
A waitress brushes past their booth with a tray of drinks, laying a steadying hand on the top of Kim’s seat as she twists by. Kim watches, then looks back to Jimmy. She’s wearing round gold earrings, little shining balls that glitter under the red neon sign hanging in the window right above them: the last few letters of All Day Breakfast. Kim lets out a thoughtful sigh, then says, “I guess I did love, like…the Jimmy Stewart idea of it.”
Yeah, Jimmy thinks. Yeah, I know that, too. It suddenly feels too personal to say out loud.
A new song clicks onto the jukebox. It’s not a Christmas song, but it’s maybe as close as the old catalogue can get: Nat King Cole, ‘Unforgettable’, somehow sounding like bells, like snow on a slanted rooftop. A couple stands up and sways to it in the empty space before the jukebox, awkward and confident at once.
Out the window behind the dancers, between the smudged yellow lights, Jimmy can imagine snow flurries, though it’s not snowing anymore. Hasn’t since early this morning. He thinks that by tomorrow it’ll all have melted—Albuquerque’s one day of winter already over, leaving just a few patches of white on the mountains and foothills.
He watches the couple dance until the waitress returns with another smile and clears his and Kim’s table.
She balances the two plates on her forearm and takes Jimmy’s empty milkshake glass. “Get you two anything else?”
Jimmy taps a finger and frowns. “What sort of pie do you have?”
“Oh, apple, chocolate, banana cream, uh, hmm—” She nods her head to a glass case filled with enormous plastic-wrapped pies. “We’ve got a lady makes different ones every day, I’ll check the cabinet.” She gives them another warm smile then moves on, weaving through the diner with their dishes.
Kim meets Jimmy’s gaze, raising her eyebrows.
But he breaks the connection again, looking behind her. There’s a potted plant on the flat partition between the booths, something green with long, flat leaves. He points to it. “What kind of plant do you think that is?”
Kim turns around to study it, then twists back.
Jimmy says, “Ficus, maybe?”
She shakes her head, smiling. “Leaves are too long.”
“Oh, hmm,” Jimmy says, and he pretends to study it a moment longer.
Down by the jukebox, the couple stops dancing, leaning against each other and laughing. The woman brushes a thread of red hair behind her ear, and they move to a booth, grinning.
The waitress returns again, pencil and notepad back in her hand. “There’s a good-looking sour cherry in there today. Think Marsha’s done well on that one.”
“Great,” Jimmy says, and he nods his agreement to the waitress. “Kim?”
She smiles and gives a light shrug. “Why not?”
The waitress nods and leaves again.
“So,” Kim says. She wipes off the table with the side of her hand, then shifts his LSAT test papers back out into the middle. Flips through a couple a sheets again. Looks up at him. “So, Slippin’ Jimmy, huh?”
Jimmy blinks.
“Tell me about a scam,” she says, and she raises her eyebrows, linking her fingers together atop his papers like she’s trapping them there.
“A scam?” he says.
“Sure,” Kim says. “You know, a good one, one that always worked, that you could really sell to people.”
He blinks again. Realizes his mouth his open and closes it.
“C’mon, you must have something good, right?” she says mildly, taking a sip of her coffee.
He scratches his ear then lowers his hand to the table. “Okay,” he says. Looks around, at the salt and pepper shakers, at the stack of napkins. He picks up a napkin and turns it over in his palm, then wipes a spot of ketchup from the metal table. “Okay, sure,” he says, and he smiles. “Well, there’s the black money scam. Me and Marco got pretty good at the double act for that one.”
Kim nods.
“Suitcase of cash I supposedly got off a guy who’d stained it black to get through customs without paying import tax, y’know?” He waves a hand. “Anyway, it wasn’t real cash, of course, except for one bill. I’d get the mark going with the story, wave around this special fluid you need to clean off the money, give them the demo on the real bill—”
“What as the fluid?” Kim asks.
Jimmy chuckles. “Oh, Windex.”
“Of course,” she says, grinning.
He nods along with her. “Even let the mark clean a real note themselves, y’know?” He taps his palm on the table. “That always got their eyes shining. And then the real cinch was getting Marco to buy into it, too. Get the two of them fighting over the briefcase, and eventually the mark would hand over whatever cash he had in his wallet and thank me for it.” Jimmy laughs softly, shaking his head, then stills. “We cleaned up good with that one a couple of times. It was just a pain making up all the dummy black notes.”
“I bet,” Kim says.
Jimmy shrugs, grinning effacingly. “Yeah, that was a classic. Why?”
She frowns thoughtfully, her laced fingers still trapping his practice test papers. “What made it good—what made people fall for it?”
He makes a thoughtful noise. “I guess it’s the same as always, right?” he says eventually. “People see a hundred bucks and they get tunnel vision, start making all sorts of assumptions.”
Kim draws her hands back now, and glances to his practice test again, eyes scanning it. Then she looks up. Folds in her lips and tilts her head. “The LSAT…you know that’s all this is, right?”
“What?”
“These logical reasoning questions,” she says, tapping the paper. “I mean, at their core. They’re just about you recognizing that leap. Like…the missing piece between a single stained note and a full briefcase.” She looks at him, eyes warm. “The flawed assumption.”
“The assumption,” Jimmy says. He looks at the papers now himself, at his circlings and crossings out and scribbled answers. “That all the notes in the briefcase are the same.”
“That all the notes are the same,” Kim repeats softly.
He meets her eyes again.
She gives him the same look as she’s been giving him for the last week, all turned down brows and gentle eyes.
“Oh,” he says, finally. He glues his eyes to the scribbled test papers, to failure after failure. To the thought of his one-forty score printed on that letter. All because he couldn’t figure out the logical gap in the questions, couldn’t figure out that he might’ve been gambling with a two-headed coin or a false-bottomed briefcase. That he might’ve just been buying a box of paper rectangles cut in the shape of hundred dollar bills.
“Sorry for the wait, you two.” And it’s their waitress, swinging back in with the two slices of sour cherry pie. She sets their plates down and then tops up Kim’s coffee and drifts away again.
Jimmy looks down at his pie. The cherry filling is dark and seeping beneath a latticed gold crust. A scoop of vanilla ice cream rests on top, slightly off center, slowly melting. He picks up his fork then sets it down. “I’m, uh—bathroom,” he says, and he rises from the table, smiling to Kim.
She smiles back a little uncertainly as he passes her, and his gaze skims off hers. His right shoe is still a bit damp, still squeaks over the floor, and he heads to the back of the diner, past the other booths, past the jukebox that’s playing damn John Denver, past the clock that still says it’s Time to Eat.
The bathroom is small and cramped, just one stall and a urinal and a sink, and he stands in front of the mirror. A little owl is pinned to the corner. It watches with spiral eyes as Jimmy splashes his face. Pats his cheeks dry with a hand towel.
He runs the faucet again, watching the water swirl.
An old pipe in the diner somewhere is creaking, a dull whistling until he shuts the water off. Ringing in his head.
When he gets back to the booth, Kim widens her eyes at him. “Your ice cream melted,” she says.
Jimmy looks at the cherry pie, swimming in a puddle of white. “Yeah,” he says, and he pushes the plate away. He swallows, then looks to her, to her green-flowered blouse and gold earrings and tired eyes. “Kim,” he says, and he exhales. Feels a tightness on his skin as he says, “Why are you doing this?”
She flinches, almost. A little blink and a shift backward.
“I mean—how can you want to help me with this? After everything?” And it’s finally the question that’s been nagging at him since he first saw her after their Thanksgiving phone call, since she first asked to see some practice tests, since she first suggested dinner.
Kim is silent, studying. She folds in her lips. “The way I see it…” she starts, finally, and she looks away. Pokes at her pie then sets down her fork. “The way I see it, Jimmy, we were both really selfish for a long time.”
He frowns, shifting forward slightly, hands on the table.
“But I guess I’ve been selfish since I came here,” she says, voice soft now, head tilted. “I guess I came here to be selfish. And it all came crashing down.”
There’s a silence. The Owl Cafe’s silence, the clatter and hiss. “You never lied to me,” he offers, eventually. “You were honest—told me you didn’t have time, that it wouldn’t be fair.” He sighs. “But I kept pushing.”
She looks to him now. “That wasn’t you, Jimmy, that was us.”
He swallows tightly at the acknowledgement. The door to the diner opens and closes, and he waits for the rush of ice. “Yeah,” he says.
“I was selfish,” Kim says again, and they sound like words she’s been saying for months, coming up to the surface over and over now because they’ve been held back for so long, like they’re gasping for breath. “I was selfish, and I—I wanted you.”
And there’s the air from the open door, but it’s hot now, burning on his forearms.
“I wanted you like I wanted the rest of it,” Kim continues, waving a hand. “Like I wanted the law degree and the nice briefcase and the big office on the fiftieth floor.”
He swallows again, his mouth dry.
“But you’re not one of those things. Not a...not a thing at all,” she says quietly, and her eyes lock onto his. “You’re…” She sighs. “Anyway. Maybe that’s worse than lying. Maybe that’s worse, making you think this could be something steady and then pulling the floor out from under you every time.” She stares at him, blue and bright. “So I get it.” And milder now, almost throwaway: “But I’d like to help with this. If you’ll have me.”
“Kim,” he says, humming the end of her name, shifting forward. His knee touches hers where the booths angle close to each other.
She raises her eyebrows. Waiting.
“Well, we can help each other again, then,” Jimmy says, and he clears his throat. Looks at his practice tests. “I can’t believe I spent a couple of months listening to some old fart instead of just hitting up the bars.” He lets out a fraying kind of laugh, then exhales through his nose. “What a waste.”
The jukebox changes. Eighties synths and kicking drums rise through the restaurant, and it sounds like driving down a road late at night, or like drunken mornings at Arno’s.
And he looks at his wrong answers, at the sharp black letters of his writing. Presses the side of his forefinger to his lips then lowers his hand. The woman on the jukebox sings about Bette Davis and Greta Garbo and other shadowed actresses, black and white icons with piercing eyes. The drums go on. He imagines sitting in that LSAT testing room, the smell of fresh paint, the hard-backed chair digging into his back.
He turns over the top page, looking at his own writing as if it’s a stranger’s. Taps the pad of his thumb on the paper.
“Jimmy,” Kim says.
He looks up at her.
Her face softens. “You really want to do this, right?”
And he scrunches up his brow. Taps his thumb again, light on the pages. Then says, “Yeah, I do.”
Kim nods like she’d been expecting the solemnity of his answer, like it all makes sense to her, somehow. He keeps waiting for her to ask him why, for her to ask what he was thinking or what he’s doing or why he hid it from her or why he’s here—but she still doesn’t.
Instead, she stands, and he watches her.
She holds out a hand, palm up. “Come on,” she says. “C’mere.”
He chuckles. “What?”
Kim jerks her head toward the jukebox, where the couple had been dancing earlier. “C’mon,” she says again.
So he grips her hand, warm against his, and he stands, too. She leads him down to the machine, past the counter and the booths, past the time-stuck clock. The jukebox itself is chrome like the wallboxes, curved and shining, and the records are stacked vertically beneath the glass. He can see one spinning. The synths and drums of the song continue, driving onward.
“Kim—” Jimmy says, as she grips his hand, drawing him closer. “What’re you—?”
She smiles, a small and almost hidden thing. Lays her palm on his chest. “Dancing,” she says, and then after a moment: “Being selfish again.”
He looks down at her, the red on her cheeks, the sparkle of her earrings. Her palm fits neatly against his own. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and he rests a hand on her waist, nestled among green flowers. They move, swaying slightly, a little off beat.
“I’m just happy,” she says after a while, “for you.” Her voice is quiet, barely audible. She squeezes his hand. “Jimmy McGill, the lawyer.”
He can’t think of anything to say, so he just squeezes her hand back.
Outside, the invisible snow flurries blow again, behind the haze of yellow and red-streaked windows, the frosted edges. There and not there.
Jimmy twists Kim around, letting go of her waist and tightening his grip on her other hand. She spins out and then back, returning closer, her chest touching his. As she laughs, effervescent and familiar, he feels the grin on his face like a weight, like a sudden irresistible force, but he presses his palm closer to hers like it’s something he needs to hang onto anyway, like it’s going to slip from him at any moment.
Then the song ends. The synths fade out. The jukebox arm returns the record to its place. Runs down the line and is still.
Kim lets go of his hand.
“Thanks,” he says softly.
She nods, breaking eye contact, looking past him. Her face draws inward thoughtfully. “You can do this, you know,” she says, after the silence. At his expression she waves an encompassing hand. “LSATs, law school, the whole deal.”
He smiles, weak and sideways. “Slippin’ Jimmy, the lawyer.”
“Well, why not?” she says. “Scams, logical reasoning. Selling people. It’s all the same, right?”
He studies her now. And he thinks, It’s all the same. And he thinks, The assumption was that all the notes in the briefcase were the same. He feels like he’s making the same face she’s been making at him all week. It feels like seeing something anew, unfamiliar and golden under soft light.
They don’t return to the sour cherry pies, to the puddles of melted ice cream. They pay at the counter instead, surrounded by novelty shirts and post cards. Kim covers her half first, then she heads back to the booth. As he hands over his card, he watches her gather up his papers and stack them inside her briefcase and latch it. He looks away.
When she gets back, he’s standing by the door, holding a thin plastic bag.
“Did you buy something?” Kim asks, smile flickering on her face.
He pulls out a sweatshirt: bright blue, with a Santa-hat-wearing snowy owl looming above a drawing of the diner, surrounded by snowflakes. The Owl Cafe, it says in red text. Happy Holidays.
Kim chuckles. “Wow.”
“Running low on winter clothes, you know?” Jimmy says mildly. He gestures with his old jacket. “Here, hold this for me.”
She takes it from him.
He pulls the sweatshirt out of the bag and then tugs it on over his head. It smells like new things, and the fleecy fabric inside is still soft and fuzzy. He pushes the sleeves up his forearms a little, then he holds out his hands to her, palms up. Raises his eyebrows expectantly.
Kim stares at him. His old jacket is folded over her arms. “I don’t want to know how much that cost.”
“But Kim,” he says, “you have to think of what it’s worth.”
She just shoots him a look, shaking her head and pulling back the front door. As he grins at her, she rolls her eyes, then jerks her head to the dark exit. “Come on, then, idiot, let’s go.”
“All right, all right,” he says, and he scratches his cheek, smiling, lingering for a moment longer in the warm air and clattering silence of the diner. He can hear the click and whirr of the jukebox starting back up, the arm picking a new song.
But spirals of cold air are blowing inside, and Kim’s holding the door open until he passes through, so the two of them cross the neon-lined threshold of the Owl Cafe together, and they walk back out into the snow.
art by @atlanticalien on tumblr and twitter
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