Free Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault Page B

about them.
    “How’re you holding up?” I asked, handing him the laptop that Nathan had sent me.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’m trying to get a new place fast. Because it’s hard to be in here.”
    “I can imagine. Did you two have a lease?”
    “Yeah, but they’re letting me break it. They understand.”
    Gregor led me to a spacious room with two desks—one slim and black, one heavy and oak. The black one had on it two neat stacks of magazines and had a clock over it that had the word NOW at each of the twelve hours instead of numbers. The wooden desk was dusty, scattered with paper clips. Over it was a framed poster of a mallard floating in brown, rippling water.
    “We shared this office space, Gretchen and I,” Gregor explained.
    “Let me guess,” I said, pointing to the second desk. “That one was Gretchen’s.”
    “Yeah. Her parents didn’t ask for the duck poster back.”
    Gregor paused while he hooked a couple of cords from the small drive on his desk to the Mac I’d given him.
    “It’s not any easier since the Waterses took Gretchen’s stuff away. It’s even more depressing. Like there’s this big empty hole where she was.” He pushed his leather chair toward me and gestured for me to sit in it. “I’m sorry. How are you doing?”
    “Not so great. Reality’s setting in, I think. It feels worse now than it did a couple of weeks ago.”
    He nodded, then glanced at my belly, as if that factored in somehow. I swiveled away from him slightly.
    “Yeah,” he said, looking away again. He glanced at the computer. “Um. Uh-oh. It says this is gonna take six hours.”
    “Oh, really?” I said.
    “Oh, shit. I had no idea. I’ve never had to use the Time Capsule before. I don’t know why I thought it would just be, like, zip-zap.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “I can kill time around here for a few hours. There are some things I’ve been meaning to shop for—I noticed you have the big mall down by the exit. Is there any kind of a baby store there?”
    “Uh . . . yeah.” Gregor hoisted himself onto his desk, pulled up one leg, and grabbed his toes. “I’m not sure. But it’s a pretty big-ass mall.”
    I felt silly for asking him this. Of course he didn’t know. But I wondered if he regularly used terms like big-ass, and if Gretchen liked it.
    “And maybe . . . I mean, I don’t know what you had planned for today, but maybe you and I could get out of here for a little bit, grab coffee or lunch or something. I thought maybe we could chat about Gretchen’s project some. I bet you know more about it than her family does.”
    “Yeah, prolly,” Gregor said, picking at his pinkie toe. “Sure, that’d be a good idea. You hungry for lunch now?”
    He glanced at my belly again.
    “No,” I said. “Is it even eleven o’clock yet? But if you want to talk now, how about coffee?”
    Gregor let go of his foot. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that.”
     
    I allowed Gregor to drive, and he chose a tiny coffee place with dim lighting, holey couches, and creaky wooden tables covered in African fabrics.
    “Gretchen wrote here sometimes,” Gregor told me as we waited in line. “But never for long. An hour, maybe two. She told me it was hard for her to concentrate in one place. She’d try coffee shops, she’d try the library, she’d try home. She’d even write at McDonald’s sometimes. She could never settle into one place to write.”
    “Maybe that came from her experience with Tammyland, ” I suggested. “Since with that, she was always writing from a different place. At a Dairy Queen over a sundae, over a piece of key lime pie at a folksy diner, or whatever.”
    “That was more about the food than surroundings, though. She thought it would be cute to make it look like she was stuffing her face on southern food or road food the whole time. But half the time she was writing in her hotel room and just making up where it was written.”
    “She told you that?”
    “Yeah.” Gregor