Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis

drowning.
    â€œSit down, man, you’re blocking the view,” someone said, and so he took a seat at a table near the stage.
    Her voice was bird song. Her voice was a mermaid singing. Her voice was perfume and wine and a soft feather against his cheek.
    He ordered a beer. People chatted around him, half listening. They clinked glasses and coffee cups and ashtrays and he wanted them to stop, to pay attention to her, to respect her. A jewellery box lay on a stool beside her, the kind with a little plastic ballerina that popped up when, as now, the lid was open. Something about that box, the innocence of it, pierced him. A guy with thin legs and huge, military-style ox-blood boots flipped a quarter into it on the way to the bathroom. She smiled at the guy. Tom put a dollar in the box and her smile flowed over him like honey. He listened to her sing five or six more songs. He emptied his pockets of change.
    â€œC’mon, Patty,” someone said. “Time for the next set.”
    She closed her little jewellery box, looked Tom straight in the eye and said, “I’m hungry.”
    He bought her dinner, and she ate with clear purpose, hunched over her food, making tiny smacking noises with her glistening lips. She put large pieces on her fork and thick slabs of butter on her bread. She ate a 16-ounce rib-eye cooked medium rare with the red juices pooling at the edge of the heavy white plate and lots of pepper. She ate two baked potatoes smothered in sour cream and salad and pecan pie with vanilla ice cream. When she was done she’d licked her fingers one by one, sucking for a moment on her thumb. He watched her over a beer. She ate his French fries. He couldn’t eat—all his senses were full of her. He asked her to come with him, back to his room. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”
    In his room overlooking the street, she stood with one hand pressed up against the window glass, her back to him. She told him her story. She was barely twenty and living in a haphazard relationship with a few people. They were “authentic,” she said. Poets and musicians. They were starting a newspaper. She sang for her supper. They lived in a cold-water flat in Alphabet City, but would probably be evicted soon. She told him there had been a couple of men in her life, in her bed. He thought there might be more. He didn’t care.
    He felt enormous next to her, all hands and feet and bony shoulders. When he held her in his arms he felt he held blown glass covered in velvet. He touched his tongue to a tiny mole on the inside of her elbow and tasted vanilla. He circled her upper arm with his thumb and middle finger, marvelling at her delicacy, at the precision of her structure.
    Now, driving on this deserted road in the middle of the night, he shifted uncomfortably, trying to rearrange his sudden erection. “Miles, to go, pal. Miles to go,” he said.

    That afternoon, as Tom pulled into the driveway, he was surprised to see Patty’s dented Pinto already there. He had stopped into Ed’s Garage to get the spark plugs on the truck changed, then grabbed a quick burger down at Gus’s Corner. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Patty should be at work by now. Was she sick, he wondered? Something wrong with one of the kids? Ivy? The teasing? He’d tried to talk to Ivy about it, but she’d just laughed him off, said nobody was teasing her, what would they tease her about? He had to get a cell phone.
    Rascal barked even before he closed the truck door. His bark sounded normal, just his usual dopey glee, nothing alarming. Still, Tom jogged up the steps. As he opened the door Rascal jumped up to greet him. Patty’s singing came from the kitchen. Nothing amiss then. When had he become such a Cassandra, expecting the worst?
    â€œ
But the sea is wide . . . and I can’t cross over
. . .” It was a sad song, but Patty’s voice rang out as pure as clear