PATRICK JAMES

THE RELOCATED L

Flirting with the coffee maker and, perhaps, the line cook, Clara spun, tray in hand, behind the counter. She'd laughed when you knew her and she was laughing now, moving with a sort of aimless grace that kept her customers from barking at her to hurry up.

Her cotton Tee hugged the upper ends of her arms and revealed just a bit of skin, soft and without blemish, where her apron tied around her midriff. She stood with a sway, like a number of thin, small-chested girls, but her stance was as natural as her hair color, which she hadn't dyed since high school.

You could have called her pretty then and you could certainly do so now, but she'd argue that she hadn't gotten pretty until she'd changed her name.

It was the afternoon. You were sitting at the foot of your bed, shirtless--back when you could get away with that--sprinkling what was left of a bag into a spliff.

She: lolling about on her back on your bed, rolling to one side.

Her hair: dangling black over the duvet's corner, tickling your shoulder.

"I'm tired of it," she told you. "It's clunky. Like the Oldsmobile."

She laughed and rolled back over and kissed your neck, traipsing fingertips atop your collar bone.

"I like the Oldsmobile," you told her. You remembered saying this but not what you said afterward.

It was summer and your parents both worked and this wasn't the first spliff of the day. Her hands were smooth so you leaned back into the bed and she giggled and lolled and blew on your neck.

As you licked the edge of the paper, you closed your eyes.

"I'm serious," she said, laughing.

You ran your hand atop the carpet in search of the lighter. Soon there was smoke and more laugher and sighs.

There'd been a cassette in the tape deck, one of the mixes you used to make for her, but at the moment, you couldn't for the life of you recall the sound. Only the click, plastic and mechanical, at the end of the tape.

"Clara, honey," said the man at the counter beside you. "Could you top me off?" He smiled when she smiled, bigger after she filled his mug.

"You okay?" she asked in your direction. She meant did you need more coffee.

By summer's end she'd migrated the L and chopped her hair. No more perfect jet-black Carla. She was 18, and she didn't need to dye her hair like some junior-high poser. And maybe she didn't want to spend every afternoon stoned, okay? And you were the one who was going to college. So, why did you care?

Soon you were schooling at State; soon she was waiting at the diner. There wasn't really a severance so much as a reduction of calls.

There was that one call: 3 a.m. after whiskey in a lonesome dorm. Her father had answered at the same time she did. You said "Carla" and she hung up. And that was that for the next few years.

There were sweaty nights and truant mornings, afternoons with girls that almost erased those with Carla. You graduated and floundered and ended up gainfully employed, pushing paper at a place near home.

In the span of six months, your parents gave you object lessens in death and mortgage and you found yourself paying home-owners' tax. Empty and yours in familiar tract, the house was situated but two tree-lined blocks from the diner.

"Were you this nervous around me in high school?" she asked on the first day you went in.

You shrugged, opting not to explain the blackness of your suit, trying hard to conjure her hair at that tone, submitting to silence and finding a seat at the end of the counter.

"Clara," yelled the line cook as plates of waffles and omelets stacked up, "I need you back here."

You took your eyes off the line cook and looked into your cup and longed for the replacement of that insolent L.