Four-Ten

There are honest reasons to be awake at four in the morning, and that night I had none of them. Insomnia, I told people. A walk. But a man doesn't cover forty minutes of dead-end streets at this hour unless he's hoping some light is still on somewhere, and I had stopped pretending otherwise.

The alley was finished for the night — delivery scooters asleep on their kickstands, wet asphalt giving nothing back. One live thing left in it: the convenience store at the end, all cold blue-white fluorescent inside, and a single register lamp burning small and stubborn yellow. Everything out there was blue except the night till, which glowed like a dollhouse window, the last warm thing in the postal code.

The automatic door sang once as I came in. One chime, the hum of the kimbap fridges, an empty floor. Last customer of the small hours: me.

She stood at the register waiting for my barcode, more or less. Navy polo, beige apron, twenty-six or so. Her nametag — Jihye — was pinned crooked, the letters tilting in the crease of the polo, and the collar's top button stood open. One button. That was all, and my eyes went there anyway, because four a.m. is not when my judgment is at its best. Pink clip, hair up in it, messy; night-shift shade under her eyes that should have read tired and read real instead. An adult face. A face that had been awake this long, too.

She held the scanner over my basket, and every time she moved, gold flashed under the lamp. Left ring finger. I'd like to tell you I didn't notice. I noticed first, and kept noticing — that's the kind of man I found out I was that night.

Beer and kimbap? You come out late. I'll ring it up.

Her voice sat half an octave under whatever she kept for daylight. I said something clever — occupational hazard — and got back a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, and hated how much I wanted her to look up. She did, once. Dark eyes, level, unhurried.

Slow night?
Every night. My husband's overseas — plant job. Ten months now. At this hour it's just me and the fridges.

She said it flat, straightening a lottery stand that didn't need it. Ten months. I did math I had no business doing: ten months of chimeless nights, of ringing up other lonely men's beer.

The side shutter stood half-down on a dark rectangle of alley, crates stacked on the wet concrete, the five a.m. bread drop still an hour off. She looked at the shutter, then at me, and I felt it in my sternum like a change in pressure.

I have to fill the walk-in before the truck. Watch the door for me?

The Wrong Side of the Shutter

Here was the fork in the night, and I saw it. Watch the door, and I'm a decent man who kept a clerk company for six minutes. Cross the shutter, and until the bread drop this is not a store, I am not a customer, and nothing that follows files under errand.

I watched the door. For almost ten full seconds.

Then I stepped over the shutter's lip into the half-dark, and she didn't tell me to go back — which is how I learned the question was never really about the door.

Back there: crates, cool air, a floor sheened silver, the walk-in humming like something asleep. She was crouched at a crate of kimbap; I stood too close on purpose; when she rose, she didn't step back. One breath apart, under the work lamp.

You're supposed to be watching the door, she said. Not me.
I'm thorough. I watch what's in front of me.

Groan-worthy. She laughed anyway — a real one, quick, out before she could catch it — and then her face did something complicated, guilt and want in a small room, and want won.

Ten months, she said, quieter. He calls when the tower has signal. On video. It isn't— she stopped. Her hand, the gold-ringed one, had landed on my forearm and stayed, like it had found where it lived. Ah. Your hand is warm.

My hand was already at her waist, over the apron string, like it lived there. She looked at me the way you look at a door that's been locked ten months and has just, quietly, clicked open.

Touch me, she said. Just touch me. He only gets to watch, and you're—

Continue this scene in Night Till →

I couldn't tell you which of us closed the last inch. Coward's amnesia — call it that. I remember the work lamp swinging its small yellow across the wet wall, the walk-in breathing cold at our backs, the crooked letters of her nametag pressed flat between us. She caught my hand and drew it upward, and the sound she made was half relief, half accusation — a woman who had been cold for ten months and had stopped believing in fire. The rest of that minute belongs to her, not to my prose. Some doors you don't narrate. You just note, quietly, that they finally opened.

Later I would inventory the small things that stayed: the pink clip giving up, her hair coming loose over my knuckles; the gold band gone warm instead of flashing; her murmur that the walk-in could wait — that the walk-in could wait all year.

Here's what the minutes after were made of: temperature. The heat of her, the chill at our backs, and beyond the half-down shutter the streetlight blue of the alley where my respectable life sat parked, waiting to be resumed. Out front, the till lamp went on burning, faithful as a dog that doesn't know it's been left.

Certain sins keep perfect time. The clock above the coolers gave its dry click toward five, and she felt it before I did — night-shift women grow a sixth sense for schedules. She went very still against me. Then she laughed, low and wrecked, into my collar.

Five. The bread truck runs early on Fridays. You have to go out through the front — unless.

Unless. My favorite word in the language, as of tonight. I stood in that warm dark with her hand fisted in my shirt like a question mark, one breath from the overheads snapping on and the shelved daylight making the store a store again. And I confess it here, in the worst light: I have never wanted anything the way I wanted, for one more hour, to be a bad man.

Unless what? I managed. Finish the sentence.

She looked at me — that level look, ten months deep — and her mouth opened.

Out in the alley, a winder began to rattle against the shutter, and the five a.m. world came looking for its store.