The Five A.M. Map

I wrote the email the night before the funeral, which I know sounds bad, but hear me out. Luther wasn't going to read it. He'd been my cousin and my drinking buddy and the only guy who ever told me the truth about my job, and he was gone at thirty-one, and I was sitting in my apartment with a suit bagged and pressed on the chair and a laptop open on my knees, typing to a dead man. That's grief, I guess. It comes out however it wants to.

The subject line was "hey man, you'll never read this!" Real sentimental stuff. I started typing around eleven and didn't stop until one.

Look, I said, you always called me the nice-guy realtor and you meant it as an insult, like you meant everything, and I think you were right. I've been doing this two years now. I show people houses and they walk through with those faces on, the faces they're going to wear for the next thirty years of mortgage payments, pretending to be happy already, and I nod along and say things like "great light in here" and "the neighborhood's really turning around." I'm twenty-five years old and I talk like a brochure. You would hate it. You'd make that noise you made.

The thing is, I said, I don't even know what I'd do with a real night anymore. Everything's polite. Dating apps, coffee meetings, the whole slow waltz where everybody's careful and nobody says what they want until month three, and by then you're stuck. I just want one night where nobody's performing. One raw, honest, wide-awake night with somebody who says yes because she means it and not because I asked nicely enough. Is that so much to ask? Don't answer. You can't.

I sent it to his old address anyway, because it made me feel like I'd told somebody, and I closed the laptop and slept badly and got up at six to put on the suit.

The reception was at his sister's house, casseroles on every surface, aunts everywhere. That's where I met Marissa, sort of met her, because it turns out she was Luther's neighbor's daughter or something, a family friend from way back, twenty-four, moved away three years ago, home for the weekend like half the room. We ended up standing by the folding table with the lemonade, and she said maybe eleven words total, all of them dry, all of them funny, and I thought, there it is. That's a person who isn't performing either.

She had these flat, unimpressed eyes and she looked at the whole party like she was auditing it. I liked her immediately. We talked for maybe four minutes about how casseroles multiply at funerals, and then somebody pulled her away, and I stood there like an idiot with a stack of napkins in my hand.

Here's the part I almost didn't do. I'd been doodling on a napkin half the afternoon, because I get twitchy at these things, and it turned into a little map. The Shady Grove farmers market, the one out on the edge of town, the gravel lot, the vendor tents, the coffee cart that shows up before the sun does. My grandma used to take me at five in the morning, before it got crowded, before anyone was pretending anything. I'd drawn it from memory, crooked streets and all, a big X by the market entrance where the coffee cart parks.

So I took a clean napkin and wrote on it, "X marks the spot, 5 a.m., no strings," and slid it under Marissa's napkin like a spy in a bad movie, and then I walked to the other side of the room and helped carry chairs and did not look at her for a solid forty minutes, which was a personal record.

She finally found me by the coats. She didn't say anything, just raised an eyebrow, picked up her purse, and left, and I stood there convinced I'd made a fool of myself at my cousin's funeral reception, which, yes, was going to go in the email to Luther too.

Then my phone buzzed. It was a photo of the map, her finger pressed right on the X, and the caption said, "I'll be there if you are."

I read it about nine times. Then I typed back, "I'm serious. No strings, no performance, one morning." She sent back a thumbs up, which is the least romantic thing a human being can send, and somehow that was the most reassuring thing anyone had sent me in two years.

I didn't sleep much again. The alarm went off at four and it was still dark, and I drove out to the lot with the windows down because it was one of those early fall mornings where the air feels like water. Gravel crunched under the tires. The security lights made little yellow islands out in the dark, and there were already trucks backing up to tents, men in hoodies stacking crates, and the whole place smelled like fresh bread from somewhere I couldn't see yet.

I texted her when I got there: "You actually came."

She was already standing by the entrance gate, arms crossed, wearing a jacket and boots, looking exactly like someone who shows up when she says she will. She answered out loud instead of texting, which I liked. "I always keep a map date. It's the only kind of date I keep."

I laughed, and she almost smiled, which felt like a trophy. We walked over to the coffee cart, where a guy named Ray was setting up before the sky turned, and he poured us two cups without a word, and we stood there holding them, warming our hands, watching the vendors argue about table space in low morning voices.

"Okay, real question," Marissa said, blowing on her coffee. "Why a map? Why this?"

"I don't know how to say anything without a slide deck anymore," I said. "This is the first thing I've drawn by hand in years. I thought you'd get it, since you do data all day."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Luther talk about me?"

"He mentioned you once. Said you were the only person under forty in this town who never lied to him."

"That sounds like him," she said, and looked out at the tents for a while. "I stare at dashboards ten hours a day. Numbers other people made up. When I saw that map, all crooked and stupid, I thought, this guy drew a thing with his actual hand and mailed it under a napkin at a funeral. That's either the worst move I've ever seen or the only honest one anybody's made around me in months."

"It was a bad move," I said. "But honest."

"It was a terrible move," she said, and drank her coffee, and I could tell she was deciding something, so I let her.

"Here's mine," I said after a while. "I sell people houses where they're going to pretend to be happy. Nice lawns, nice schools, everybody smiling at open houses. I've done it two years. I'm so tired of the pretending, man. I'm tired of being the brochure."

She looked at me sideways over her cup. "So what are you doing out here at five a.m. with a stranger?"

"Stopping the pretending," I said, "if you're stopping it too."

The sky was starting to go gray at the edges, and down the row a woman was unloading bread into baskets, and Marissa turned her cup around in her hands and took a slow breath like somebody about to say a thing she'd already decided.