I See You So Close by M Dressler

Author:M Dressler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948924900
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2020-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

“No one’s here.” Bill closes the café door, confused.

Harold is talking to Su Kwon. “You must be thinking we’re a bunch of liars, Su.”

I’m back in the present, I think, reeling. Why? Why?

Su is sitting in a booth with the Berringers. No one notices me.

I’m a wraith again, invisible.

“But that’s not what we’re about,” Harold goes on. “We’re not liars. Not one of us. How can something sacred be a lie? That’s how I see it. You have to protect what’s sacred. What’s special. Isn’t that right, Mary?”

I’ve been flung back across time. Time has schooled me, is that it, made this much plain: the past will not be changed, not even if you meet and know it.

I need to keep myself still and try to feel nothing. If I grow angry, with time, with fate, with truth, I’ll show myself, and my own time will be up.

Stay calm and cold, Emma Rose, I steady myself. Wait. Watch. Something will come to you.

Mary Berringer is patting Su’s hands. “Harold is right, dear. Now, Pete, you look like you’d like to add something?”

“I’d like to tell you my story, Su.” A skinny man with a long face comes forward from the meeting. “When I first came to the Bar, I was horribly down on my luck. I’d just lost my job. My whole company went robot-automated. I found myself out on the street, after twenty years of labor, no offer of help, not even an apology, no severance, nothing. Taken out like the trash. God, I was so embarrassed to know it. I tried to drink myself to death and bankruptcy. I was headed to the casinos to do just that. But then I stopped here at the café, and I admitted to Bill, ‘I’m hungry, I’m sad,’ and Bill said, ‘If you’re sad and hungry, stay here and we’ll feed you.’ You made a big lunch for me, Bill, and you said, ‘No charge, I can see you need it’—do you remember that? And Mary and John—I think you called them, didn’t you, Bill?—they invited me to stay at their place, and all they asked in return was that I help them with a little cleaning and polishing. The mayor came by the next day, and she asked who I was and where I came from and what my story was, and I told her I was a groundskeeper, and she said to me, you know, there would be nothing nicer than having a maintenance and plowing service right here, and not over at Dutch Gap. Martha said the old gold might be gone from this place, but there’s new gold here, and we’ll help you find it. And the next thing I knew, I was made so welcome you wouldn’t believe—although maybe you would, now you’ve been here a while. Then, after I’d been here a bit, I got the sense, I don’t know, I just knew, there was something more going on. I could see it in everyone’s

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