Still Here

Gia squeezed between sunburned families on Kalakaua Avenue, their souvenir bags knocking against her legs. They had nowhere to be and needed the whole pavement to get there. Ahead, a man unfolded a map and stopped to consider it. She stepped off the curb before he could discover a reason to turn it sideways. At the stop, the bus was still there, its doors open. She was late, but so was the driver. For once, she approved.

She hurried through the open doors. Her worn wedge caught on the top step and recovered with what she hoped looked like purpose. Above the rooftops, the clouds held the last light along their frayed edges. Gia settled by the window and tugged her linen trousers free of the seat’s edge. She brushed a dark curl from her cheek then checked her watch. Four minutes late. Someone else’s delay had finally done her a favor.

She might have enjoyed it if her hand hadn’t already found the black notebook in her bag. She drew it out, opened it, and brushed a crumpled piece of orange candy foil from the page. A folded slip worked loose from the inside cover; she nudged it back with her pen. She pushed up the cuffs of her work blouse, then printed NOVEMBER 1 and underlined it twice. Beneath it: BUS / DUE: 5:36 / BOARDED: 5:40 / EXCUSE: —. Capitals left little room for misunderstanding. The dash would remain until someone provided an explanation. Useful information, she told herself. Everything in the notebook was useful information.

At the front, the driver waited while a woman folded a stroller. Gia watched the seconds move. Beneath the entry she added STILL HERE, pressing hard enough to leave the words embossed on the next page. When the woman finally sat down, Gia shut the notebook.

The notebook hadn’t begun with buses. It had started with Daniel, her husband, whom she had met in college and married before either of them had much practice being an adult. He was from Hawaii. She was from Rhode Island. Following him home had sounded like an adventure, which it was, provided an adventure could include missing your family while paying too much for milk. On their anniversary, she had waited for him until the restaurant closed. Afterward, he had insisted he was only twenty minutes late. She had told him twenty minutes was not all evening.

“Does it matter? I said I was sorry,” he had said.

It mattered. She couldn’t explain how much without sounding like someone bent on ruining an evening over arithmetic. She had worn the green dress, its silk catching behind her knees each time she shifted on the vinyl seat. Across the table, the untouched wineglass held a thin crescent of light. The waiter smelled faintly of starch when he leaned over her, and three times she told him Daniel was parking. Above the table hung a faded streamer, its torn end stirring whenever the waiter passed. Even the decorations had overstayed something. Daniel had said he’d lost track of time helping a friend move a sofa. That was what she carried away from the argument. The next morning he brought flowers. She bought the notebook.

At first, it was dinners. Daniel said he would be home, and she wrote down when he actually appeared. Then he was late for the couples massage, which was supposed to relax them and instead required her to explain an empty appointment to a stranger in soft shoes. By the time he kept her waiting at the airport, she no longer had to remind herself to record anything. Her hand knew where to go. Then she started recording other people’s delays. Contractors who kept her waiting. Meetings that began late. The pharmacy that said ten minutes and meant forty.

She worked in environmental planning, where a deadline was generally understood to mean something. Her colleagues admired her precision until she began emailing them their arrival times.

“Excuse me. Is that yours?” The woman beside her pointed at the orange foil against Gia’s shoe. A canvas shopping bag sat between her ankles, green onions leaning out of it as though they, too, would have preferred a window seat.

Gia picked up the wrapper. “Apparently. I thought I’d gotten rid of the evidence.”

“My husband bought three bags. We had six children come to the door.” The woman shifted her shopping as the bus rounded a corner. “Now he says we can’t waste it.”

“Very responsible of him.” Gia tucked the foil into her bag. “Mine left the empty wrappers in the bowl so it would still look full.”

The woman laughed and tucked a blond curl behind her ear. Gia smiled. She could see Daniel flattening each wrapper with enormous care, delighted by a joke he had arranged for an audience that hadn’t arrived. It was annoying how easily she could still find him funny.

“Will he have dinner ready when you get home?” the woman asked. “I called mine from work and gave him very specific instructions. There’s rice involved. I’m not taking chances.”

“Daniel’s supposed to be putting up a shelf.” Gia rubbed her thumb along the notebook’s spine. “I’ll cook after.”

“Books?”

“Yes. They’re still in boxes. Every time I want one, I have to remember which box it’s in.” She paused. “The shelf’s been in the hallway for weeks.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t like that.” The woman caught a green onion before it slipped from her bag. “Does he know how to do it?”

“He does. He just—” Through the window she saw a couple waiting to cross, the man holding a small child’s hand. “He gets caught up with people.”

“Well, maybe tonight you’ll come home and it’ll be done.”

Before Gia could answer, her phone buzzed against the notebook. “That might be him,” she said, already reaching for it.

Daniel: At Duke’s with the guys. Don’t wait on dinner. Love you.

“No shelf?” the woman asked.

“Not tonight.” Gia turned the phone facedown. There was the evening, settled in a few words. At least he had remembered to tell her.

A muffled tune came from the woman’s shopping bag. “Oh, that’ll be Leilani. We’ve got hula practice tomorrow.” She gave Gia an apologetic smile and answered. “Aloha! No, I haven’t forgotten. Are we meeting before class?” Her voice warmed. Gia found herself listening. “Tell the girls I’m bringing something afterward. And don’t let anybody eat before I get there.” She laughed and tucked the onions farther into the bag. Somewhere, there were girls expecting her and a table she would arrive at with food.

Gia slipped the elastic off the notebook. The woman had turned toward the aisle, leaving her free to open it without an explanation. Above them, the air vent rattled. Beside her, the conversation rose and fell, easy as breathing.

Gia checked the time and wrote DANIEL / DUE: 6:00 / HERE: ______ / EXCUSE: THE GUYS. She ruled the blank line with the edge of an old bus pass. If she couldn’t make him arrive, she could at least make the space he left perfectly straight.

That blank space had become the worst part. Once someone arrived, she could write the number down and stop waiting. Until then, she carried the unfinished entry everywhere.

Outside, palm shadows stretched across the Waikiki awnings and slid away as the bus moved on. Hotel windows held the last of the light. The bus stopped for a man waving from the opposite pavement. Gia looked at her watch. Then she looked at his face as he climbed aboard, grateful and breathless. She put her wrist under her bag.

When her stop came into view, Gia pulled the cord. The chime cut through the engine’s rumble. As the bus slowed, she tucked the notebook into her bag and rose, steadying herself on the seat back. At the doors, she waited through the brakes’ long hiss, felt for the step’s edge with her wedge, and stepped onto the pavement. Warm air met her face. The doors folded shut behind her; the departing bus stirred the loose hair at her neck. She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and headed toward the market for eggs and cilantro.

At the market near her home, the cashier recognized her. “Your husband was here earlier. Got your coffee filters.” Gia almost said that coffee filters were not a shelf. Instead, she paid for her groceries and thanked the cashier. She slipped through the doors into the warm evening, the grocery bag brushing her thigh, and headed south toward home.

As she reached the bungalow, the surf unfurled along the nearby shore, then subsided to a low hiss. She shifted the grocery bag to her other hand and found her keys. Inside, the dim rooms still held the day’s warmth. By the door, a bowl of leftover Halloween candy sat beneath a plastic skeleton she had yet to take down. The coffee filters sat on the counter. In the hallway, the boards for her bookshelf leaned against the wall, exactly where Daniel had left them three Thursdays ago.

She set the groceries on the counter and laid her notebook beside the stove, open to his name. The ceiling fan clicked every third turn. She had once timed the interval to see whether it stayed the same. It did. That, at least, she could count on.

Daniel called while she rinsed the cilantro. “Hey, beautiful. You find the filters?”

“Yes. Thank you.” She dried her hands. “You said six.”

“I know. Mike’s in town. We got talking.” Behind him, somebody laughed hard enough to cough. “I’ll do the shelf tomorrow.”

“You said that three Thursdays ago.”

He sighed, and she reached for her pen, already feeling like the unreasonable one.

“Can we not do the whole prosecution tonight?” he asked.

Gia turned back several pages. MASSAGE. AIRPORT. SISTER’S BIRTHDAY. ANNIVERSARY. Each heading was boxed; each excuse crowded into a narrow column on the right. “Do you want the dates?” she asked, running her finger beneath the entries as though she were reading him a receipt.

“No. I remember.”

“You don’t remember accurately.”

The noise on his end faded. Wind crackled through the speaker against her ear. “I let you down tonight,” he said. “And the airport. I know.” He paused. “But that dinner, Gia. That isn’t what happened.”

She looked down at the open notebook. Whenever he tried to explain that night, he began with the twenty minutes he’d lost helping with the sofa. To her, that was his explanation: a friend’s sofa had mattered more than their anniversary. She cut him off. Eventually he stopped trying; she took his silence as agreement. “I kept the reservation.”

“So did I,” he said. “I took a picture to send you that night. Never sent it. By the time you called back, we were arguing.” She heard him draw a breath. “Let me find it.”

She waited, listening to his breathing. Then her phone chimed. The photograph showed Daniel sitting at a restaurant table with two glasses of wine. He was wearing the blue shirt she had bought him. Beside his elbow stood a little brass lamp. She did not remember a lamp. She remembered a faded paper streamer.

She pulled the folded slip from the notebook’s inside cover and opened the reservation confirmation. Eight o’clock. Two people. Their anniversary date. Those were the details she always checked, unfolding the slip until its creases wore soft. This time she read past them to the restaurant’s name. It was the place they had first booked, before she found somewhere quieter.

“We changed restaurants,” she said. “I sent you the new booking.”

“You didn’t.” He sounded tired, not triumphant. “I went to the place on the original booking. The sofa made me twenty minutes late, but I got there. I called from the table. You didn’t answer. When you finally called back, you were already home.” She remembered her phone face down in her bag. After a while, she had stopped wanting to look at it.

Gia opened her email and searched for the replacement booking. There it was: the booking for the little restaurant with the vinyl seats. She remembered choosing the green dress to match its dark walls. She had written Daniel a note beneath the confirmation: Change of plan. Meet me here instead. Love you. Above his address sat a small gray word: Draft.

Her fingers tightened around the phone. She lowered it to the counter and rested her palm flat beside it until the tremor passed. Then she touched the screen as though the word might rub off.

In the notebook, ANNIVERSARY sat inside a box she had gone over until the paper nearly tore at the corners. DUE: 8:00 / HERE: DID NOT ARRIVE / EXCUSE: SOFA. Underneath: The waiter stopped asking. That part was true. The empty chair was true. Somewhere else, another chair had been empty too.

For months she had demanded accuracy from everyone. She had kept the old confirmation in the book she used to prove them wrong, certain it supported her account. She looked at the photograph again. Daniel was not smiling. She had imagined him laughing with his friend while she waited. Somewhere along the way, she had begun to remember it.

“I didn’t send it,” she said. The words came out so quietly that he asked her to repeat them. She did. “I’m sorry.” He stayed on the line. For once she let the silence remain something she couldn’t measure.

“I’m coming home,” Daniel said at last.

When they hung up, she made eggs and ate them sitting down. Then she carried her plate to the sink, fetched the screwdriver, and sat beside the unfinished shelf. The instructions said to attach bracket A to side panel B. For once, the next step was unambiguous.

When Daniel arrived, she had fit one bracket backward. He stood in the doorway, smelling of fried food and the night air. “You started.”

“I got tired of looking at it.”

He crouched beside her. His hand moved toward the screwdriver, then stopped. “Can I help?” She passed it to him. They took the bracket off and fit it properly. Neither mentioned how long that took.

Afterward they sat on the floor, the finished shelf between them and the door. Daniel rubbed a dent in the wood with his thumb. “I don’t think this makes us okay.”

“It doesn’t,” she said. She was relieved he had said it first.

“I’m sorry you’re so far from your friends and family,” he said. “I took you away from your home, and then I keep leaving you here on your own.”

“I was wrong about the anniversary,” she said. “And I kept using it against you.”

Daniel turned the screwdriver in his hands. “It hurt,” he said.

She nodded. “But the airport happened. So did tonight.”

“I know,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to keep reminding me.”

They agreed that a change of plan wasn’t settled until the other person had acknowledged it. She would eat when she was hungry; he would stop promising things he wasn’t going to do. The anniversary entry was hers to correct. The rest would take more than an apology.

In the morning, she took the notebook to the kitchen table. Last night’s conversation was still with her as she opened it and found the anniversary entry. Beneath ANNIVERSARY, she wrote WRONG RESTAURANT. BOTH WAITING. She did not cross out the old entry; she wanted to remember having been certain. Daniel’s arrival time stayed blank. She closed the book and left it in the drawer beneath the coffee filters.

She went out alone. At the corner, she realized she had forgotten her watch. She nearly turned back. Ahead, a bus bound for the Kalakaua Avenue stop idled at the curb. She ran.

It was still there when she reached it. The doors were open, the driver trying to lift a woman’s shopping cart up the steps. Gia’s eyes went to the clock above his head. Then she bent and gripped the bottom of the cart. Together they lifted it aboard.

“Mahalo,” the woman said. Gia lifted her bag into her lap, making room. The woman sat beside her and tucked the cart against her knees. Gia found a piece of candy in her bag, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth. She tucked the orange foil into a side pocket. The clock ticked on. Still here. The driver waited for the woman to settle. Gia waited too.