Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey Read Free Book Online

she wrote that one-line email, that everything okay? She probably looked into a mirror to make sure her nose was still sitting on her face as usual, and I’m not one of those people who think of the right thing to say at the right moment, so that day at the restaurant I didn’t try to explain myself or my moods or my lack of an ability to control myself and that other day I didn’t write her any reply to her one-line email, didn’t tell her anything was okay or not okay.
    I paid the woman for the minutes of Internet and she said, Thank you so much , and she seemed to mean it more than the average person.
    There was a diner across the road and I went into it and took a whole booth for my little self. I stared at the menu and did not think of my husband. I stared at the tile floor and did not think of where I was or why I was here. A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat, which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger, what things you were going to turn into your body. She asked me if I was traveling by myself and I said I was and she said, Aw, good-onya , brave little one you are, don’t get too lonely, do you? , and I smiled so gently and did not throw the salt shaker across the restaurant.
    After a while the old man at the booth beside mine leaned over—
    Where are you from?
    So I told him where I was from and he asked me where I was going and I said, The South Island ferry, and he said, Today? And I said, Whenever .
    Well , he said, I’m on my way back to Taupo if you’d like a ride. I make this drive fairly often and even though I’m old I’m still a good driver, so you shouldn’t worry about that.
    Oh. Okay.
    The reason I make this drive so much is that I put my wife in a home up here so she could be with her sister. She doesn’t like it there, but she didn’t like living with me either. She likes when I come visit, is what she says, but she isn’t really sure who I am and she doesn’t understand that I’m her husband. Isn’t that too bad?
    The man looked at me then went back to looking out the window. No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.
    There’s not much for me anywhere , he said, but he didn’t sound sad. My orchard has dried up, my wife’s brain is gone, my children moved to Australia. Even my only grandson died. Leukemia. That never made any sense to me and never will.
    He shook his head and smiled.
    But this is a nice place. Good pies. Nice waitresses. It’s a perfect place to stop on the way to Taupo. It’s a very nice place. There are still a lot of nice places like this, you know, even though lots of other things have gone wrong. You’re not in a hurry to get to the South Island, are you?
    It seemed to take a reason to be in a hurry and I didn’t have any reasons, I knew, and maybe that was it, maybe I had come to New Zealand to find a reason in this quiet country where everyone was happily waiting on almost nothing, to wait with them until a reason found me or I found a reason.
    You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It’s bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn’t healthy at all.
    Eventually the old man drove me to his house outside Taupo and he told me that I could go waterskiing and hang gliding and kayaking because there was a lake nearby and people in that lake did things like that, but I didn’t tell the old man that I didn’t want to ski or glide or yak because that was not the kind of person that I was and I was not on an adventure and I was not a tourist and I was just a person. I smiled and said, Oh, that sounds nice, and he said, It is, it’s nice, it’s a nice place. I’ve lived here for about thirty years and it’s very nice.
    I woke at four the next morning in the old man’s guest bedroom, which was actually not a guest bedroom but the abandoned room of his daughter: