“To our stories.”
Two forlorn, half empty glasses clinked. The sound was magnificent. Liesel and Art took a sip.
“You know,” said Art. “My mother had old diaries kept after the war, with words this tape record could never make up for. My father destroyed them at one point, in a fit of grief after she died.”
“That is a shame...but I do not blame him. Not at all.” Liesel thought back to the mayor’s wife’s library, so awfully plush and filled with books, whose pages had burned alongside that woman’s chronic mourning. She thought about regret.
“Neither do I. I got awfully upset at him and I truly shouldn’t have.” Art put his face in his hands for a brief moment.
20
The three split the bill for their meal that day and with tearful farewells, prepared to part ways for their own separate journeys. Liesel braced herself for the blinding memories that would be waiting outside for her once more and would be there time and time again. Art tucked his recorder back into his pocket. Although his mother’s diaries were in shreds, he planned to hold what words he could grasp of Anja and his father closer to him than anything else. And Leah, she tossed her backpack and a mass of brown curls over her shoulder once more.
The winter evening passed quickly- conversation melted into conversation, and the flaxen gold outside shed its glow for a doleful sunset.
The girl took a sip of her water. “It was lovely to see you both again. I knew we would all get along so well.” Getting along was indeed a curious way to put it. It was certainly a moment of briefly lived parallels for all of them.
“I haven’t interrupted anything important, have I??”
“No, no,” Liesel and Art both answered. Their pale, fogged faces were still raw with habitual grief
and twisted into sorry smiles.
“Take a look at the menu first, we should be ready to place our orders. Then we’ll catch up.” The
girl and Art were both starving, perhaps for different reasons, so they agreed with Liesel
nonetheless.
“It’s all in the past, Art. Those afternoons you spent with your father- I can say without a doubt that they were still all the more invaluable.”
Art looked up and nodded. “Grief and thievery. They’re a curious combination, aren’t they?”
The afternoon light pulsed flaxen gold outside, and Art and Liesel shifted with a start as a figure approached them in a rush of denim and jewelry.
“Oh my god- I'm so sorry I’m late. I just got back from school.” the girl said breathily. Her round face was flushed as she tossed a mass of brown curls over her shoulder as she sat down.