Kite and Candy

The parking lot had one truck left in it. Eva's old Ford, rust spotting the doors like freckles. So the diner was still open, and I was not late, and whoever else was coming had beaten me there.

I walked onto the pier anyway. Wind off the strait, salt in my nose, the neon sign over the door buzzing that tired buzz it'd had since before I was born. Eva had run that place for forty years. Tonight was the last night. Word got around town fast when a diner like that died.

And there he was. Leaning on the railing at the far end of the pier, looking out at the water. A folded bundle under one arm.

Freddy.

Three years since I'd seen him. He'd been my cubicle neighbor at the county records office, back when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven and we spent a whole summer flirting over tax liens. We dated six months. Then he got the notary job across the country and we agreed, very adult of us, to end it clean. No mess. I'd thought about him maybe every week since.

"Hey," I said.

He turned. His shoulders had gotten wider. His smile had gotten softer, somehow, like the edges wore down.

"Jackie." He opened his arms and I walked into the hug before I could talk myself out of it. He smelled like cold air and cotton. I'm twenty-eight now, by the way. He's thirty. Keep that math in your head.

"Long drive," I said into his jacket.

"Worth it." He pulled back and held me at arm's length. "You look good. Library agrees with you."

"Library's quiet. I've gotten boring."

"Doubt it." He knocked his shoulder into mine, easy, the way he used to. "Come on. Eva's waiting."

The door creaked. Inside, the diner was warm and yellow, all the old wood beams still holding the ceiling up, the fryer smell baked into the walls after all these decades. Eva stood behind the counter in her usual apron and her usual expression, which was fond and unimpressed at the same time.

"There she is," Eva said. "The girl who used to take out ten library books a week and read half of them in my booths."

"Hi, Eva." I got up on a stool. "I'm a fast reader. Let it go."

"Forty years I've been feeding this town. I get to say what I remember." She was already pouring root beer over two scoops. She slid the floats to us. Vanilla ice cream, the real kind, and the glass sweating right away. "Sit. Eat. I closed the register an hour ago, so don't ask for the bill. My last night, my rules."

Freddy took the stool next to mine. His knee bumped mine and neither of us moved away.

"Chili dogs still on the menu?" he asked.

"What do you think?" Eva turned to the griddle. "I made a batch just for tonight. Boy, you look taller. You eating enough out there?"

"Trying to, ma'am."

"Don't ma'am me. I knew you when you couldn't parallel park."

Eva talked while she worked. She was good at it, talking and cooking both. Stories about the cannery days, the strike of 1971, the foreman who kept a parrot in the office, her late husband buying the building at auction because nobody else wanted a rotting fish factory on a pier. She turned it into this. Four decades of chili dogs and floats and high school kids and old fishermen.

I listened with half an ear and gave the other half to Freddy. That's just true, so you might as well know it.

"So how's the notary business," I said. "Thrilling?"

"Riveting. I stamped a will last month that left everything to a parrot." He sipped his float. "The bird. Not the family. The bird."

"You'd do the same. Don't lie."

"For the bird? Absolutely."

And there it was. The banter. Three years gone and it just picked up where it left off, like a book I'd dog-eared. We'd always been like this. Six months of dating and it never got heavy, never got complicated, it was just easy. Then he moved and easy wasn't enough to build on, apparently. Or we didn't try. One of those.

Eva set down two chili dogs in baskets. She'd piled them the old way, onions and mustard, cheese melted under the broiler. She pointed a spatula at us.

"You two sit up straight. These are the last chili dogs this kitchen will ever make."

"We're honored," Freddy said.

"You should be. Now hush, I haven't told you about the fire of '89."

She told us about the fire. Then the flood. Then the raccoon that lived under the floorboards one winter and got fat on dropped fries. Freddy laughed at the right spots. I mostly watched his hands wrapped around the float glass and thought about how I hadn't been touched by anybody in eight months and how dating apps were a landfill and how I maybe should have texted him first, once, sometime in three years.

Eva drifted off toward the kitchen to put things away. The dining room got quiet. Just the neon buzz through the window and the water slapping the pier posts.

Freddy set the folded bundle on the counter between us.

"So I brought something," he said.

"What is it?"

"Unfold it."

I did. Paper and bamboo spars, and it opened up into a bright red diamond kite. The kind with the long tail. There was a faded coffee ring on one corner and a crease I recognized, because I'd made that crease, at his going-away thing, when we wrapped it sloppy at the office party.

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah."

"Freddy. We were going to fly this. Out at the beach, before you left. And then it rained for a week straight and you just... went."

He ran a thumb along the bamboo frame. "Kept it three years. Moved twice with it. It's been in every apartment, usually on top of the bookshelf. Roommates asked about it. I said it was a souvenir." He looked at me. "It's not a souvenir. It's a promise I didn't keep."

The wind picked up outside. The sign buzzed louder for a second.

"You kept a kite for three years," I said. My voice did something weird on the way out.

"I kept more than the kite, if we're being honest. But the kite is the part I can hand you."

I looked at him. He looked back. Red went up his neck, all the way to his ears. Thirty years old and he still blushed like that. Same as the records office, same as the supply closet incident we never told anyone about.

"Freddy," I said. "What are you actually doing here?"

"Visiting for a week. Business thing, that's real, I fly out Sunday. But I heard about Eva closing and I thought, that's the place. That's where I ask her." He stopped. "That came out wrong. Not ask her anything weird. Just. There's a thing I've wanted to say to you since the moving truck, and I chickened out, and the kite's been sitting on my shelf judging me for three years."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "The kite was judging you?"

"Every day."

"So what's the thing you wanted to say?"

He took a breath. Outside, the tide was coming in under the pier and the whole old building creaked on its pilings, the way it probably had for a hundred years. Eva was clattering pans in the back, giving us room, I think. Old women know when to wipe counters and let a moment happen.

"The thing I wanted to say," Freddy said, "is that I never should have left without flying the kite."

* * *

The kitchen light snapped off. Then on again. Eva was doing one last pass, and I heard the fryer hiss and go quiet for good. That sound had been the heartbeat of this place for forty years. Now it was done.

Freddy watched the doorway until she reappeared, apron off now, folded over her arm like a flag at a funeral.

"Last fryer basket of my life," Eva said. "Well. Last one I'll ever wash. Some other fool can buy the place and burn oil." She looked at both of us, and her face did that fond and unimpressed thing she'd perfected over four decades. "You two want dessert before I lock the till for good?"

"What's left?" I asked.

"Blackberry pie. Made it this morning. It's good. It's always good, don't ask a stupid question."

"A la mode?" Freddy said.

"For free? Of course a la mode." Eva cut two slices without waiting for an answer. She knew the answer. She'd known the answer to everything since before I was born.

Here's where I tell you the thing I noticed, sitting there with chili dog grease on my fingers and a kite on the counter between us. Freddy wasn't looking at the pie. He was working up to something. I knew the look. I used to see it across a cubicle wall every time he wanted to borrow my stapler and pretend it was a big favor.

He waited until Eva set the plates down and drifted off again, pretending to count straws or something.

"So," he said. "The thing on my shelf. The thing I chickened out of saying."

"You said it. The kite."

"That was chapter one." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, then turned it back. "There's a chapter two and it's dumber and I need you to not laugh."

"No promises."

"Fair." He rubbed his jaw. "When we were