In Summertime Saga

The evening air was cooler on the bike and the streets were mostly empty and I had three pizza boxes bungee-corded to the rear rack and the warm smell of cheese and basil was following me down every block. Tony had given me the addresses on a yellow sticky note in handwriting that looked like a doctor's prescription and I'd spent two minutes in the parking lot decoding it before I realized the first one said Beachside Heights.

Beachside Heights was a three-story apartment building on the south side, stucco walls painted a color that might have been peach ten years ago and was just beige now. I locked the bike to a rack out front and grabbed the first box and went through the glass doors into a lobby that smelled like floor cleaner and old carpet.

The directory was on the wall next to the elevator. Gold letters on a black board, some of them crooked.

104 - Padbury / Delgado 201 - Terry / Sara 204 - Wang 301 - Hendricks 302 - Salieri

I stood there reading it for longer than a delivery boy should have. Padbury was Lily, the comic shop girl. Wang was Liu and Kim. Terry was the pier captain who'd sell me a boat eventually. Salieri was Tony and Maria, which made sense because Tony had said he lived close to the restaurant and this was close to the restaurant. And Hendricks was Tina.

Tina Hendricks. Apartment 301. The bank manager. Luigi Vercetti's widow. Former mob accountant who'd quit the life after her husband caught the wrong end of it. Ran Saga Financial, which meant she ran the vault, which meant she controlled access to lockbox 11082, which meant I needed her eventually for reasons that had nothing to do with the pizza in my hand. In the game, her route didn't even unlock until the main story was deep into Part 2. I was standing in her lobby with a pepperoni and mushroom.

I took the elevator to the third floor. The hallway was carpeted, quiet, nicer than the lobby suggested. I found 301 and knocked.

The door opened and Tina Hendricks was standing in a silk robe. Dark green, tied at the waist, not tied well. Her hair was down, copper-red, falling past her shoulders in waves that caught the hallway light. Green eyes. The Christina Hendricks build the game had been very accurate about. The robe was doing its best but the body underneath was winning and I was holding a pizza box at chest height and staring at a woman who made the box look small.

The apartment behind her was nicer than the lobby. Hardwood floors, a kitchen island with granite, big windows facing south toward the water. Candles on the counter. The place smelled like her and like candle wax and faintly like the wine in the glass on the island.

"Pizza for Hendricks?"

"Oh, wonderful. Becca, the food's here!"

Behind her, in the apartment, a redheaded girl on the couch turned to look at me. Becca. Copper hair like her mother's but straight, green eyes like her mother's but meaner. She gave me a look that landed somewhere between boredom and contempt and stayed there. She was in shorts and a tank top with her feet on the coffee table and the TV was playing a reality show at low volume.

"Who's that," Becca said.

"The pizza boy."

"Tell the pizza boy his bike is blocking the handicap ramp."

"It isn't," I said.

Becca looked at me. I looked at her. She went back to her show.

Tina took the box and the money was already in her other hand, folded, ready. She tipped like a person who'd worked for tips once and remembered. The bills were warm from her palm when she handed them over and her fingers brushed mine during the pass and she smelled like jasmine, heavier than what she'd wear during the day.

"Thank you, honey. Have a good night."

The door closed. I stood in the hallway and counted the tip. Twenty dollars on a thirty-dollar order. I put it in my pocket and took the elevator back down. The elevator was slow, the kind that shudders between floors, and I leaned against the back wall and thought about Tina Hendricks in a green silk robe and the vault behind her bank counter and the lockbox with Frank's name on it. The building hummed around me. Three floors of people I could name and reasons I'd be back.

The second delivery was near the mall. I rode past Hillside Mall's parking lot, mostly empty now, the big anchor stores dark. The Pink shop on the second floor still had its lights on, that specific pink glow visible from outside, and through the window Ivy was behind the counter. Tall, reddish-brown hair, green crop top. She was reading a magazine and looked permanently bored. I lifted a hand as I rode past. She looked up, saw me through the glass, and waved back with two fingers without changing her expression. I didn't stop. The delivery was three blocks past the mall to a house where a guy in sweatpants opened the door, took the pizza without speaking, and closed the door. No tip. Some people.

A sprinkler was going on a lawn two houses down, hitting the sidewalk in a rhythm, and I rode through the spray and my left shoe got wet and it stayed wet for the rest of the ride and I felt it every time I pedaled.

The third address was across town. I rode through the residential blocks where the houses got smaller and the yards got narrower and the cars in the driveways were older. The streetlights were spaced further apart here and the dark between them was actual dark, trees overhead blocking the sky. A couple was walking a dog on the opposite sidewalk and the woman laughed at something the man said and the sound carried in the quiet and then I was past them.

I didn't recognize the address from the game, which either meant it was a location that didn't matter or it was someone's home and the game just hadn't shown me the inside. The buildings on this block were smaller, older, apartments where professors and teachers and people with more education than income lived. I found the number and went up a narrow staircase to a second-floor door and knocked.

The door opened and Ms. Bissette was holding a wine glass.

She was out of her school clothes. No cardigan, no reading glasses on her head, no knee-length skirt. She was wearing a loose white linen shirt, untucked, with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows, and soft pants, and her feet were bare on the wooden floor and her cinnamon-brown hair was down instead of the half-up twist she wore to class. She looked younger without the teacher clothes.

"Oh!" She blinked. "The delivery boy. You're in my French class, yes?"

"Oui, madame."

She laughed. Short and real, and she covered her mouth with the hand holding the wine glass and the red wine swayed and almost spilled. Her classroom laugh was measured and part of the lesson. This one surprised her.

"Come in, come in. Set it on the counter, please."

Her apartment was small. One main room with a kitchen at the back, a couch facing a bookshelf instead of a TV, a desk by the window with papers stacked in neat piles, and books everywhere. On the shelves, on the desk, on the arm of the couch. French novels, mostly, with soft covers and titles I couldn't read. The whole place smelled like her classroom but more concentrated, the perfume she wore to work plus the wine plus garlic from a pot on the stove. She'd ordered a pizza with garlic already cooking.

I set the box on the counter. There was a postcard on the fridge from somewhere in Provence, a photo of lavender fields with handwriting on the back in French I couldn't read. A small corkboard above the desk had a class schedule pinned to it and a photo of a younger Bissette standing in front of a building with columns and a group of people in academic robes and she was smiling wider than I'd ever seen her smile in Summerville.

She came up beside me to open the box and check the order. Close. The freckles across her nose and the bridge of her cheekbones that I'd never noticed from the back row of French class. Her eyes were blue-grey, lighter than they looked under fluorescent school lights.

"Parfait," she said. She reached for her wallet on the counter and pulled out the bills and when she handed them to me her fingers closed around mine for a beat, the tips of her fingers cool from the wine glass, and she held the contact and said "merci" in a voice that was softer than her classroom voice, lower, the accent let loose.

"De rien," I said, which was one of about nine French phrases I actually knew and I was pretty sure I pronounced it wrong.

She smiled. Her lips pressed together and the corners of her mouth went up and her eyes got warmer and she pulled her hand back with the money in my palm and where her fingertips had been was still cool.

"Study for Thursday's quiz," she said. "The irregular verbs."

"I'll do my best."

"Your best is better than you pretend it is." She said it lightly, already turning back to the pizza box, opening the lid. Steam rose between us. She pulled out a slice and took a bite and closed her eyes for a second and said "pas mal" to the pizza, not to me, like she was grading it.

I was at the door. She didn't walk me out. I left her apartment and went down the narrow staircase and the night air hit my face and my hand was still cool where she'd touched it.

I rode home through empty streets. The streetlights turned everything orange and flat and the town looked smaller at night, compacted, the buildings lower and the sky bigger. A dog was sleeping on someone's porch and it lifted its head when I rode past and put it back down. A traffic light changed from green to yellow to red over an empty intersection and I ran it because there was nobody to see. My left shoe was still wet from the sprinkler and the cold had set into my sock and I'd stopped noticing it and then noticed it again.

I'd played this town on a screen. Clicked through every route. Watched women undress in pixel art and forgot their dialogue the second I closed the tab. Now they were behind real doors and the doors opened when I knocked and they were standing there in silk robes and holding wine glasses and they were real and their perfume hit the hallway.

I pedaled harder. The wet shoe squelched and the pizza smell was gone from the rack behind me and the four hundred fifty dollars in my pocket was warm from my body heat and the town was quiet and I was eighteen and barely started.

I turned onto my street. Debbie's house was dark except for the porch light she always left on. Jenny's window was dark. The telescope in my room was still pointed at it.

I locked the bike. Went inside. Put the money in the drawer. Lay on my bed and thought about Tina's robe and Bissette's fingers and Ivy's wave and the directory board with all the names.

The ceiling fan turned. The house creaked when the temperature dropped. I closed my eyes.

Tomorrow was a school day.