Free Moonlight in Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles Page B

When I told her I liked Will, she replied, ‘Take him! Hell, girl, he’s cheap. I couldn’t get anything out of him. I’ll probably go with Monty from Palm Springs or Joe in L.A. Where the fuck is Albuquerque anyway?’
    To be sure she wasn’t offended that I took one of her men, I gave her a bouquet of yellow roses and slipped her ten dollars. I didn’t like to owe anyone. Will stopped writing Dear Milla and started writing Dearest Daria. It was easier to correspond by e-mail, so I wrote my letters at work. When Harmon came into the office at eleven, he patted me on the shoulder and complimented me on my diligence. Pleased by his thoughtfulness, I smiled.
    ‘You have beautiful teeth,’ he said. ‘You should smile more often, so I get my money’s worth.’
    I expected to see an ugly expression on his face, like he’d worn so often in the days after the incident, but he looked at me in an avuncular way. This pleased me. I didn’t want to be his enemy. He’d given me a job. Thanks to him, I could correspond with Will and Jane and save to buy a flat in the city center. Though there were still tense moments, our wary circling had become an awkward dance as we worked together to run the office. He saw himself as a kindly boss, who complimented my work and let me go home early on Fridays. He hadn’t spent a year pursuing me. He’d never been jealous of men who looked at me or – worse – talked to me. He’d never attacked me. He didn’t care that I was a procuress of flesh. He was not the first man to rewrite history. I liked this version much better and decided to believe it.
    The chess game seemed to be over. A stalemate.
    A relief is what it was.
    He spent the morning taking down the photos of him and me at the bazaar, in front of the opera house, at the port. He whisked the pictures out of the frames and slid in prints of him with Olga. The poses remained the same, only his paws roamed her body instead of mine. He stood in front of my desk, staring at the photos of us in his hand, unsure what to do with them. Perhaps he considered tossing them into the bin. Suddenly, he extended the handful of memories and asked, ‘Do you want them?’
    Had he finally forgiven me for turning him into the office joke, something that wasn’t my fault? It was unlucky to throw photos away, so I accepted them. When he left for lunch, I glanced at the photos and wanted to make a gesture towards peace. ‘Wait!’ I called after him. He turned around. ‘Wait.’ I wasn’t sure what to say. I stood. ‘Um, would you like to have coffee?’
    He glanced at his watch. ‘Olga’s waiting. Later?’
    ‘Later,’ I echoed.
    He left, and I felt that we could go on, not as friends, but as colleagues with peace between us. I was relieved that five months after the incident, the awkward moments were slowly disappearing. If only I could say the same about my relationship with Olga. Was she still angry with me? Did she really want my job?
    I opened my briefcase and pulled out a salad that Boba had made for me, packed in a Tupperware container from Harmon. As I ate, alone at my desk as usual, I checked my inbox and found a letter from Will: ‘My darling girl, leaves swirl, trees dance, love’s delight, a moonlit night. When I think of you, I think of Pushkin and poetry. I think of War and Peace – only with a happy ending. I am so lonely lonely lonely but when I think of you, I am healed.’
    Will was alone and lonely. I, too, felt lonely. Jane was in America, Olga was no longer speaking to me, and Florina had emigrated to Germany. My other friends were married and lived in another world as well. Of course, I had my Boba, but there are some feelings a girl can’t share with her grandmother. Sometimes I really missed having a mother.
    I wondered what Mama would say about my Internet beau. Or any of the other boys I’d dated. I was not completely without experience. I’d had two boyfriends – both handsome snouts who felt that since