Permanent

“Where do you want to go?”

“I saw a bagel place around the corner?”

“Sure.”

They headed west on Belmont, not saying anything and moving away from each other when a man walking his dog crossed between them. At the bagel place Hannah ordered after Rebecca, choosing something cheap and easy to eat quickly. The place was almost empty, and they got their sandwiches and chose a table outside. Rebecca sat forward in her chair and opened the bottle of water she had balanced on her tray.

“So,” she said, and took a sip before looking up at Hannah. “Can you tell me about your relationship with Rabbi Held?”

“He was the principal of my high school, and he taught the advanced Talmud class for girls.”

Why was she being so guarded? It was as if the whole thing had been locked up somewhere and all she could do was knock stupidly on the box.

“Mrs. Schack seemed to think it was a bit more complicated than that.”

Rebecca’s voice was cautious, but her eyes narrowed a little, irritation flickering somewhere under the surface.

“If you already have several counts, does it really matter what I say?”

“The more counts we have the stronger case we have. And the number of convictions will determine how long he goes to prison.”

“You’re sure you’ll convict him?” What a bizarre conversation to be having.

Rebecca leaned back a little. “We’re pretty confident about two of them, but there are two others that are less definitive.”

“What’s the story with the two you do know about?”

“Chana—“ she started, sounding annoyed.

“It’s Hannah now.”“Excuse me?”

“I changed it to Hannah when I graduated from high school.”

“Hannah, then. Can you just tell me what happened between you and Rabbi Held?”

“He was my teacher,” Hannah said, gripping her Diet Coke. “He told me never to tell anyone.” She tried not to think of the way he had said it, gripping her bare shoulders hard enough that he left purple-yellow fingerprints.

When she got back to the shop an hour later Owen was helping an Asian girl choose a nose ring. Blade was working on a big black guy wearing a Chicago Fire Department t-shirt, and there was an older man with a buzz cut and a beer belly paging through the sample wall. Owen looked up when she walked in, and she saw him examining her, checking to see if she had been crying—she hadn’t—or if she was angry.

She felt like she sometimes did when they left shows at the Double door or the Metro, the kind of shows where the drums hit her chest like someone was inside trying to pound the hard way out on the flat plate of her sternum, and the cymbals shimmied in her temples. Hannah smiled at him, but the smile didn’t feel like anything, and she could tell he still wasn’t sure what had happened. He excused himself from the Asian chick and followed her back to the room where she put her purse down and clocked back in.

“Are you okay?” He looked really worried, his green eyes wide and frightened. She remembered how quickly and completely she had fallen in love with him.

“Yeah. I’m okay. Let’s talk about it on the way home.” She gestured towards Blade, who was nodding along with the Beastie Boys playing on the stereo, his long black goatee brushing back and forth along the forearm of the man who was getting his bicep tattooed. Owen nodded and gave her an uncertain smile before they went back into the studio. Their shift ended at seven, and as Paige and Kelson and Bobby shuffled in for the evening shift, Hannah and Owen tidied up and filed receipts, trying to get out quickly.

Hannah hoisted a big bag of garbage into the dumpster behind the store and then leaned back against the brick wall for a second, catching her breath, and squinting against the glare that screeched off of the glass sided condos in the distance. She loved the studio. Even after three years, there was a tingling thrill in her stomach when she got to work, some small shard of the life she’d left behind always reminding her how forbidden it was. And then there was the delicious feeling of doing it anyway. But it was hard, too, and sometimes it still scared her how permanent her work was. If she was having a bad day, or didn’t really understand what somebody wanted, or made a mistake, the mistake would be with that person for the rest of their life. Sometimes she just didn’t feel like shouldering that much responsibility. It was kind of silly, she thought, because it wasn’t like she was a surgeon or anything, but sometimes she just wished she could fuck something up entirely and not feel bad about it every day for the rest of her life.

Owen pushed the back door open from the inside.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.” She followed him back inside and grabbed her bag and phone. They left through the front door, passing four people waiting in the front of the store.

“God, I’m so glad we don’t work second shift anymore,” she said.

“Yeah.” Owen sounded distracted.

 Continue reading…