“Come inside,” he said.
She’d never been in his house. Natalie and Link went in and out to use his bathroom while they were enjoying the sunset on his porch, or to get a beer. But Mimi had never crossed his threshold. When she did, it felt like something he’d been missing there had been finally found.
She looked around with a hint of a smile on her puffed lips. She ran her fingers over the cast-iron gas range he’d restored, caressing the bakelite knobs. She peered at the titles of the books in the kitchen bookcases, over the honey wood of the mismatched chairs and the smoothed-over scars of the big, simple table.
“Come into the living room,” Alan said. “I’ll get you an ice pack.”
She let him guide her by the elbow, then crossed decisively to the windows and drew the curtains, bringing on twilight. He moved aside his piles of clothes and stacked up the suitcases in a corner.
“Going somewhere?”
“To see my family,” he said. She smiled and her lip cracked anew, dripping a single dark droplet of blood onto the gleaming wood of the floor, where it beaded like water on wax paper.
“Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” she said. Her nearly closed eye was bright and it darted around the room, taking in shelves, fireplace, chairs, clothes.
“I’ll get you that ice pack,” he said. As he went back into the kitchen, he heard her walking around in the living room, and he remembered the first time he’d met her, of walking around her living room and thinking about slipping a VCD into his pocket.
He found her halfway up the staircase with one of the shallow bric-a-brac cabinets open before her. She was holding a Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin robot, the paint crazed with age into craquelaire like a Dutch Master painting in a gallery.