Free Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka Page A

school at the end of the street and Leigh would start there next year.
    He told me he never decided what he would do. The first few days, it was nice being alone in the apartment. The landlady, Lena, had been right about the morning sun. It hit the frost that accumulated on the window and made it glow. He brought in a table from the street. One morning he took his clothes to the trash out back. He trimmed his beard, littering the sink with bits of his hair. He wet a towel and rubbed his armpits and arms and chest, put on a new shirt, brushed down his jeans.
    He walked around. Didn’t do much, really. A month passed easily.
    One afternoon Lena knocked at the door. He knew it was her. No one else knew there was a door in back. Where the other residents of the building thought he was always coming and going to he didn’t know.
    A woman had come and asked if he lived there. I told her no, Lena said, that I didn’t recognize your name, but she left her name anyways.
    He looked at the torn paper Lena laid on the table, then went back to the stove. They didn’t say more about it.
    He didn’t call Sheila. Instead he went to the harbor and found a job washing dishes in a restaurant. Four days a week for the dinner shift. At five he ate with the kitchen staff. He wasn’t sure how he spent the rest of his time or how time had passed so quickly. He grew his beard again; he gave up the flattery of slim-fitting shirts. When he had trouble painting, he got glasses. He looked in the mirror and saw he had been changed by what had happened. After it rained, he’d walk out in bare feet, feeling the thawing ground underneath him. He took to novels, still liking the ones he found in boxes, slender books with dried pages. He bought food at the co-op in the center of town, small bags of cashews, bags of dried fruit and fig bars, and would eat them downtown, sitting on benches or curbs.
    At work they told him a woman had come in and asked for him. He understood then that he was simply waiting. When Sheila found him working in his garden, he went inside for drinks. They sat in camping chairs near a tree where the moss was so soft she slid off her shoes. She took out a half-smoked cigarette she then had trouble lighting.
    They went to a show downtown. She wore one of his cardigans. They sat in the back corner, against a record bin, both of them pulling their legs close. Her breath smelled like the alcohol they were sharing, and what she had eaten, and also a little of flowers, though it might have been her hair. Do you like the show? he asked between sets.
    This is what you do? she said. This, and your garden?
    And I wash dishes, he said, most nights. I just have tonight off.
    You left a lot to be able to do this, she said.
    I try not to think of it that way, he said.
    How do you try to think of it?
    I couldn’t really say, he said.
    She walked home with her hands in the pockets of his sweater in a way that he liked. He thought about kissing her, thought that her breasts would be small. In the apartment he turned on the lamp, took out his bedroll. She stood in the kitchen. You’ve been here the whole time? she said.
    Except the few nights I slept in my truck, he said, but then I found this, and she let me stay even before the first of the month.
    Is that the woman I met that one time?
    Yes. Lena.
    He asked her if she needed anything else, anything to sleep in, but she said she was fine. He went to the bed he had made in the kitchen.
    In the morning she was up before him, sitting in the garden with a book from the nightstand. She read out loud from one of the poems. When she finished he said, I don’t have to tell you what it was like for me, what it’s been like, do I?
    She said, I had to find your wife. I had to tell her that you had left, and she came and took your daughter while I stood there.
    There’s nothing I can say, he said. I’ve tried to think of something all this time.
    Later in the day, a man started to work on the foundation