Without taking my eyes off the screen, I reach for the hot cup and take a sip. I can hear her pull up a chair next to me and sit down.
“Don’t you have some real work to do? Or did Patrick order you to watch me drink the whole cup?”
“I was just curious if you tracked down your penemy.”
“My what?”
“Your penemy,” she repeats. “Get it? Like a pen pal, but he’s your enemy. Pen enemy. Penemy.”
“Clever.” I still haven’t looked at her. I’m focused on my screen. I only have about ten more minutes before I need to be on air. “I already told you I couldn’t find him on PeopleFinder. Short of driving out to San Diego, I’m not really sure how to track him down.”
“Taking a break already, Anette?”
We both turn to see Patrick sauntering into the room with a stack of papers in his hands. He always carries the same stack of papers around the station when he wants to look busy without doing anything productive. He also has never called Anne by her actual name, but I guess ‘Anette’ is close enough that everyone knows who he’s talking to.
“I was just bringing Naomi her coffee,” she says.
“I didn’t realize delivering coffee requires sitting down.”
I turn back to my computer, rolling my eyes. She mumbles a quick apology and hurries off. As usual, her shoes don’t make a sound on the carpeted floor. Patrick watches her go and then turns to me.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you that you’re doing an excellent job, Naomi.”
He’s one of those people who pronounces my name like nigh-oh-me, even though I’ve corrected him countless times. I don’t even bother anymore, but I wonder if he realizes that he’s the only person at the station who pronounces it like that.
“Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate it.”
“You’re a natural on air,” he continues. “And your graphics are impressive. Your predictions are spot on, too. Really great job. Emmanuel would have been proud.”
“Oh. Thank you. Didn’t you know that I was preparing the graphics for Emmanuel for the last two years? In fact, he didn’t look at a single radar for the last year and a half before he retired.”
“You’ve been here for two years?” Patrick says. “Huh. Doesn’t seem like that long ago.”
“Yep. Two years went by in a flash.”
His whole face turns red. He wrinkles the pages in his hands. I smile at him to try to ease some of his embarrassment. He leaves the room, and not long after, Anne returns. I try to shoo her away.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” I warn her.
She rolls her eyes. “What’s he going to do? Fire me?”
“Probably.”
She laughs. “Tell me about San Diego.”
It takes me a moment to remember what we were talking about before Patrick interrupted. “That’s where Luca’s first and last letters came from. I can only imagine he’s probably still there.”
“He watched your weather report.”
“So? He could have accessed that from anywhere. You don’t always have to live locally to get the local stations.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait for him to send me another letter. Maybe he’ll include his return address next time.”
“What if there isn’t a next time?”
Aside from the two-year gap, I never went longer than a month without hearing from him. The only difference now is that I can’t write back. I wonder if it’s intentional that he left off his return address. It has to be. Maybe he just wants to mess with me. Or maybe he doesn’t want his wife to know that he’s writing to me again. My best guess is that she’s the reason I hadn’t heard from him for two years. I don’t blame her if she read the last letter I sent – the last one before the postal service started kicking my letters back to me. I would have felt the same way she did if I had read a letter like the one that I sent. I had never considered until after I sent it, and he never wrote back, that someone other than Luca might read it. No amount of returned mail could make things right. I spent the last two years feeling like a part of me was missing. Now it was back, but was it really? He wouldn’t just send a letter like that after two years, with no return address, if he didn’t intend to follow up.
