Vernon Downs by Jaime Clarke

but nodded nonetheless.
    â€œI transferred to Parsons,” she continued. “Where are you staying?”
    â€œEast Village,” he lied. It was the only neighborhood he could convincingly speak of.
    â€œVery cool,” Shelleyan said.
    A cab lurched down the lane and they both watched as it rolled to a stop at the entrance to the shuttered Minetta Lane Theatre. An athletic cabbie with shoulder-length hair braided against the heat shook the locked theater doors and then drove off.
    â€œHave you heard from Olivia?” she asked, as if intuiting the thought that had dried on his lips.
    His nerves jangled at the sound of her name. He felt the sudden need to confide his ploy to impress Olivia with his connection to Vernon Downs, but all there was to disclose was his objective and its unsuccessful execution. “You guys stay in touch?” He winced as the question landed. The answer would tell him how much she knew about what had been said between them during that last phone call.
    â€œShe doesn’t have my new address,” Shelleyan admitted. “I need to write her.”
    Charlie clenched his bag. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, baffled at why Shelleyan had engaged him in such friendly conversation, if not at Olivia’s bidding. The concept that he and Shelleyan would be friendsso far from home seemed improbable. Their roles had been cast back in Phoenix, their relationship previously defined. “Hey, I’ve got to run. I’m meeting someone… .” He motioned in the direction of the Black Rabbit.
    â€œIs this your regular?” she asked, appraising the bar.
    â€œIt’s just a bar,” he said. “Great to see you.”
    â€œOkay,” Shelleyan said, and he rushed past her, touching her on the shoulder to evade the good-bye hug he sensed was imminent. “Wait!”
    He turned around, his dirty duffel swinging violently.
    â€œLet me get your number.” She rummaged in her bag. “Be fun to have old home week, huh?”
    The open door to the Black Rabbit was less than fifty feet away. “You can always reach me here,” he said, jamming his thumb at the gold-stenciled window. He laughed to indicate it might be a joke and it might not, waving and disappearing into the dark, cool bar. He spied Shelleyan copying the phone number into her address book. The sight of her provoked a set of fragile emotions: On the one hand, a sense of welcome familiarity gripped him, as if he and Shelleyan and Olivia had lunched together in the Milky Way yesterday rather than forever ago; but all that had happened to him since reminded him that Olivia, too, was off somewhere living her life while he was absent from her life. He longed to staunch the accumulation of time spent apart, and Shelleyan’s presence was a further insult to his situation.
    Charlie watched from the safety of a dim corner until Shelleyan was lost in a sea of NYU kids migrating toward Sixth Avenue. The empty bar had the clean smell of freshly polished wood. The elderly bartender nattily attired in a pressed white cotton shirt and vintage gold vest busied himself with aligning the bottles of liquor behind the bar, rotating the labels face out, putting his eyes in the mirror only when Charlie turned to leave.
    â€œDrink?” the bartender asked. A streak of late-afternoon light lit a dust mote that floated aflame across the vacant bar.
    Charlie hesitated. He knew that wood-paneled bars like the BlackRabbit were generally more expensive than the sinkholes on the Lower East Side—he’d wandered into the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel after an afternoon idle in Central Park and was dismayed at the fifty-dollar check for two vodka tonics and a watercress sandwich. He hadn’t even known what watercress was, and while he enjoyed the sandwich, he would forever associate it with that afternoon’s extortion.
    â€œMaybe a glass of water,” Charlie answered, “if you