Free Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer

This neighborhood’s full of old folk. Someone must know something.”
    I was silent. He’d said “we.”
    “I just happen to be free,” he added. For a second, I wondered if he simply felt sorry for me. If he was trying to be nice and was channeling a very fancy great-aunt who had taught him well. But it didn’t seem that way. From the bottom of my heart, I swear that it didn’t. It felt honest.
    I gave out a too-happy puff of air and then sucked in and kind of snorted.
    “Want to go after work?” he asked. “I get off at seven.”
    A chill shot down my spine. I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to tell him all my secrets and I didn’t want to tell him any. I wanted to show him my foot, my whole arm, to know if he’d find me disgusting, awful. Just to know. I wondered if everyone had that. The one thing a person always wanted to say forever and ever to get herself out of things and into things. The one thing that mattered the most.
    “Okay,” I said instead. “I’ll come back.”
     
    On the street, out of habit, I thought of ways to hurt myself. It would have been so easy to do it then. It was dark out. Our block was always quiet except in the morning, when people sat in their cars as the street sweeper passed through. But now it would be deserted.
    All sorts of crazy things went through my head—me and Blot tapping on fish tanks at the pet store; me and Blot collecting lost mittens in the snow; me and Blot tangled in a big coffee-shop chair, reading about Ugli fruit and sharing a cranberry-walnut muffin. I spent what seemed like hours wondering what he liked for dinner. I imagined his apartment with a worn wooden table and huge, rickety windows that looked out onto two, maybe three bridges. I bet he cooked for his cool musician friends, mixing spaghetti and sauce and cheese in one giant pot and folding toilet paper into triangles for napkins. I wondered if he would tell them that there was some crazy girl at work who was obsessed with him. But in my true heart, that’s not what I imagined he’d say. I imagined him telling them my name, saying it just like he’d said it to me:
Lorca.
Like the
o
was a bubble that he nudged gently off his tongue.
L.
Ooorc. Ca.
    I kept my mind on him, and my whole body felt lighter, like there was some strong, warm current moving around me. And I did nothing bad. For hours, I kept myself in check.
     
    My mother had every other Friday off.
    After I got home from the bookstore, I decided to make dinner for her and Aunt Lou. If they were eating or full, it would be easier for me to leave to meet Blot for our not-date. I would bustle around the kitchen and then bustle out the door. Usually, I was on the couch. If I got up for some orange juice, my mother said, “Where are you off to, little girl?” and even if it was nowhere, I’d have to do a whole song and dance.
    Pasta arrabbiata. Lidia Bastianich used pepperoncini and prosciutto ends for hers. Me too. I set the table and lit candles. I was happy. I hadn’t hurt myself. I hadn’t done one thing. I even shaved my legs like a normal person. I’d kept thinking, in the shower,
Look at me! Look at me do this!
I put on clean jeans and socks that matched and I took more than four seconds to braid my hair. I didn’t put on music but I found myself humming. I kept thinking,
He’ll forget. He didn’t mean it.
But actually, in my heart of hearts, I believed he did.
    I said, “Dinner’s served!” Aunt Lou told me not to shout.
    Just when we were all ready to start, my mother looked at her plate and said, “You know what
arrabbiata
means, right?”
    I had a feeling about where this conversation was going.
    “It means ‘angry,’” she said. “Like a red-hot Sicilian woman. Aurelio made it for me the night I left him. He had no idea it was coming. So ironic. So ironic! He took the whole bowl of it and threw it against the wall. That’s how much he cared.”
    Aurelio was a man she’d dated in Italy. That’s all I knew