A silence.
“And? You don’t want to know my name?”
But she spoke like she’d known him always, and Clay remembered himself, and asked, and the girl came walking back.
“It’s Carey,” she said, and left again, when Clay called out an afterthought.
“Hey, how do you spell that?”
And now she jogged over, she took the plate.
With her finger, she wrote her name, carefully, amongst the crumbs, then laughed when it was hard to decipher it—but they both knew the letters were in there.
Then she smiled at him, brief but warmly, and crossed the road for home.
* * *
—
For twenty minutes more, they stayed and they were quiet; and The Surrounds was quiet around them.
And this was always the worst of it:
Carey Novac leaned away.
She sat at the edge of the mattress, but when she stood to leave, she crouched. She kneeled at the side of the bed, where she’d paused upon arrival, and held a package now, wrapped in newspaper; and slowly, she put it down, she placed it against his ribs. Nothing more was spoken.
There was no Here, I brought you this.
Or Take it.
Or a Thank you said from Clay.
Only when she was gone did he lift himself up and open it, and reel at what lay within.
For Penelope, everything was going nicely.
The years flowed in, and by.
She’d been out of the camp a long time now, living alone in a ground-floor unit, on a road called Pepper Street. She loved the name.
She worked with other women now, too: a Stella, a Marion, a Lynn.
They worked in different pairings, traveling the city to clean. Of course, she’d been saving for a used piano in that time, too, waiting patiently to go and buy it. In her small apartment on Pepper Street, she kept a shoebox under the bed, with the rolled-up cash inside.
She continued mastering the English language as well, feeling it closer every night. Her ambition of reading both The Iliad and The Odyssey from cover to cover seemed an increasingly real possibility. Often she sat well beyond midnight, with a dictionary by her side. Many times she fell asleep like that, in the kitchen, her face all creased and sideways, against the warmth of pages; it was her constant immigrant Everest.
How typical, then, and perfect.
This, after all, was Penelope.
As the feat loomed up before her, the world came down in front of it.
* * *
—
It was like that pair of books, really.