If he went home, he’d just be rattling around the apartment, pissed off at himself. “No,” he said. “You go on to lunch, get warmed up. I’ll take care of the booth.”
“You sure?”
“I promise not to bite anybody.”
“There’s a comfort.” She stood and picked up her coffee. “All right. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
Ben huddled in the booth, hands jammed in his pockets, glowering. He didn’t sell any soup. Or anything else.
His phone rang again. Unknown Caller.
“May?”
“Hi!” she said. “How did you know it was me?”
“Nobody calls me. Where are you?”
“I’m actually close to your place. At the Starbucks near the Fiftieth Street subway?”
“I’m not there.”
“Oh.”
“You know where union Square is?”
“I don’t know where anything is.”
“You still have some cash?”
“Sure. I only spent a few dollars on coffee.”
“Take a cab to union Square. I’m working at the farmer’s market.”
A pause. “I can’t bother you if you’re working.”
“You won’t be bothering me. You’ll be keeping me company.”
“I don’t know, Ben. I feel bad calling you at all. I was thinking I can go to the Public Library, maybe. If I get online—”
“May-Belle, get your ass in a cab, or I’m coming to get you.”
A longer pause. Shit. He sucked at this. “I’ll feed you honey white-bean soup with ham when you get here,” he offered.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“See you in a few minutes, I guess.”
“Yeah. See you.”
When he hung up, the wind was whipping the flap of the tent around, and the sky had turned darker. Downright ominous.
But Ben felt a lot better.
* * *
She turned up at noon, looking like a drowned rat.
He was talking to a customer when he spotted her, and he shoved the jar of honey into the woman’s hand. “Just take it,” he said. “On the house. If you like it, you can buy some more next weekend.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, delighted. “How wonderful of you …”
But Ben didn’t hear the rest, because he’d already walked out of the tent and wrapped a protective arm around May.
“Your shoes are soaked.”
“I know. I wasn’t sure where to stop the cab, and it dropped me off over there.” She pointed to the far side of the market, over the top of hundreds of tents arrayed in long rows that wrapped around the outside of union Square. Three blocks long and two blocks wide. He’d stranded her at the far end of a football field in the rain.
“Fuck. I should’ve said which street.”
“It’s okay. A little water won’t hurt me.”
But after he got her settled under the booth’s protective tent with a bowl of soup, she started shivering. Soaked to the skin. As if May had needed one more shitty thing to happen to her.
Balancing an empty box against the edge of the table, he started packing jars of honey into it. “They wouldn’t let you on the plane?” he asked.
“No.” Her mouth puckered into a fist. “The TSA website says that if you lose your ID, they can ask you some questions and if you answer them right, they’ll let you through security. But what it doesn’t say is that the airlines have their own separate policies. The woman at the airline counter said I couldn’t check in without ID unless I had a police report.”
“That sucks.”
“It’s the rules, you know? But I think it’s okay. If I can just log in to the airline website, I can use the credit card number to change the ticket to later today, and then I’ll check in online and it’ll all be fine.”
“How’s it fine?” He paused, a jar of honey in hand. “Don’t you have the same problem?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying. If I went straight to TSA without checking in—which I can do, because I don’t have any luggage—then they’ll ask me some questions about my identity to confirm whatever is in their databases, and I’m home free. It’s because I went to the airline counter to get boarding passes that I ran into trouble, and by the time I was done figuring all that out with the lady at the counter—they have a special line for people with problems, and of course it was nine miles long and so slow—I’d missed my flight.”
He put the jar in the box and heard glass crack, realizing too late he’d forgotten to be gentle with the packing. And that his heart was hammering in his chest, his body full of restless anger on May’s behalf.