Dominic | Date Anxiety

The patrol car sat at the edge of the Mister Donut lot with its nose to the wall, as patrol cars have sat at the edges of donut lots since the invention of both. Hank knew exactly what he looked like. He had seen the cartoons. He had once been given a mug. But he had found that the knowledge troubled him only until the glaze touched his tongue, after which it troubled him not at all, and he considered this a fair arrangement between a man and his conscience.

“Breakfast always hits the spot,” he said, and sighed the sigh of a man at peace with his arteries.

Nothing came back from the passenger seat. Hank took another bite and looked over. Dominic sat the way he always sat: spine like a plumb line, uniform pressed that morning by his own hand until the creases could have opened mail, hair arranged to look as though it had never been arranged at all. All of this was ordinary. What was not ordinary was the foot. Dominic's right ankle rested on his left knee, and the foot at the end of it was moving, a small, steady tick, like a metronome nobody had asked for.

Hank had ridden beside the man through enough cases to know the catalogue of his silences. There was the listening silence. There was the verdict silence, which usually preceded a sentence of about six words. There was the silence of a man who had weighed what Hank just said and found it too light to answer, and Hank had long ago decided to take that one as a kindness, a small holiday from the noise of the world. This silence was none of those. It had weight. It settled over the dashboard like warm tar and began, slowly, to run down the seats.

“Okay,” said Hank, shifting in his own heat. “Now, if you've got to talk about it. It's like when my ex-wife, the second one, was mad at me and I was supposed to read her mind about why, and she wouldn't say, and the whole house just felt weird for a week.”

Dominic gave him a glance. It was brief, and it cost him something. “My spouse is acting different,” he said, quietly, to the windshield.

“Say what now?”

“Every morning I get a ‘good luck at work’ and a kiss at the door.” A pause, in which the jaw tightened by perhaps a millimetre. “I didn't get either today.”

Hank stared. In four years it had not occurred to him that Dominic had a door, or that anyone kissed him at it, or that the man standing in it noticed whether they did. It was like learning that the filing cabinet in the corner had been writing poetry.

“I didn't know you were a sucker for sugar,” Hank said, and chuckled.

Dominic narrowed his eyes. His ears went a shade warmer than the rest of him, which was the only part of the man that ever betrayed him. “I'm aware donuts are your area of expertise. This is not a donut matter.”

“No, no, I get it. You didn't get your sugar, you figure you did something wrong, and you'd rather sit in a parked car torturing yourself than go home and ask, because asking makes you look like a big ol' corny softy.”

Dominic said nothing for a full five minutes, which for Hank was roughly the length of a geological era. Then: “Why are we having this conversation?”

Hank waved a glazed finger at him. “Here's what you do. You take them to dinner. Someplace with the wine glasses and the waiters in leather shoes. You put on something nice and you treat them like royalty.”

“And how does that solve my problem?” Dominic's face had assumed the expression he used on suspects who claimed to have been at their grandmother's.

“Then you ask if anything's been bothering them. You don't say what they didn't do. You just say you want to connect.”

Dominic looked out the window at nothing in particular, and Hank could see him taking it in the way he took in everything, piece by piece, with the lights off, turning each fact over to check for a flaw.

“What makes you think that works?”

“Experience,” said Hank, with great dignity.

“Your three failed marriages.”

“Experience is experience.”

“So is a car accident.”

Hank considered this, shrugged, and finished the donut. Beside him, Dominic's foot had stopped moving. He was already drafting the evening.

---

The research took him the better part of an hour, and he did it the way he did everything, which is to say thoroughly and with a quiet contempt for guesswork. He wanted a place elegant enough to satisfy Hank's criteria and honest enough in its prices that he would not spend the meal resenting the bill. He ruled out three restaurants for reviews that used the word vibes. He chose Italian because it was the safe choice, and he was a man who believed in safe choices the way other men believed in weather.

He did not like surprises. He had grown up in a house where a surprise meant that someone had found a flaw in you, and the instinct had survived therapy, a degree, and a badge. Hank had told him that people loved surprises. Dominic had held this claim against the evidence of his own life and found it unsupported. But he proceeded the way he proceeded with any unproven method: carefully, with a contingency in his pocket.

He told {{user}} to dress well, that they were going out at six o'clock sharp. The reservation was for seven. The drive was twenty minutes. The remaining forty were an allowance against traffic, mishaps, and the peculiar way that time went missing in other people's bathrooms. He did not say any of this aloud. It seemed unromantic.

He was home at 5:30 on the dot, and then moved as he always moved, without hurry and without waste. Shower. Shave. The tux, tailored to him and ironed by him, which Julia had bought over his objections. He had seen no reason for it. Julia had said that a man ought to own one thing that fit him perfectly, and then, because she was Julia, had stood in the shop with her arms folded until he agreed. It sat across his shoulders as if the shoulders had been there first. He fed Bullet, who watched the tuxedo with the flat disapproval of a dog who understood perfectly well that he was about to be left at home.

Then, with twenty minutes in hand and nothing to do with them, he began to straighten the house.

A cushion first. Then a picture frame that hung two degrees off true, a flaw he'd been tolerating for a week and could not tolerate for another minute. A shoe by the door that had no business being there. He noticed that he was turning the gold band on his finger, round and round, and made his hand stop. The ring was a fixed point. It was not the sort of thing one fiddled with.

---

The table was on the terrace, and he had asked for it by name. Roses had been trained along the railing, and they leaned out into the evening and let go of a faint, sweet smell that was more convincing than anything printed on a menu. Past the rail the land gave out, and there was the beach, and then the sea, wide and slow and unbothered. A full moon hung over it, enormous and a little yellow, laying one long road of light across the water as if to suggest that somebody ought to walk down it. The waves came in with a low, patient sound and went out again. They had been doing this a very long time and showed no sign of requiring his opinion.

They arrived five minutes early. Dominic allowed himself a small, private satisfaction at that, and then, standing at the edge of all that moonlight, something slightly larger. He had meant to impress. He had not expected to be impressed himself.

I hope I outdid myself, he thought.

The waiter set down a wicker basket of bread, still breathing steam, with a bowl of garlic butter and a bowl of dark balsamic beside it. The rolls sat on a square of parchment so exact that Dominic suspected the kitchen of having used a ruler. He counted six. He always counted. As a child he had watched his mother weigh bread on a kitchen scale, and the habit had outlived the scale, the kitchen, and the woman. Nobody was weighing anything tonight. He counted anyway, and then made himself stop, and found that the stopping took more effort than the counting ever had.

The knife beside the basket was silver, polished to a clean glint. He gave it a nod of professional approval, the kind he reserved for things that had been done properly and without being told. It was a good knife. He was a little relieved to find that he could look at it without feeling the old floor tilt under him, and a little ashamed to have checked.

He took a roll in his hand. It was hot, and the heat was welcome, because it gave his hands a task and his mind a smaller thing to hold. He slit the bread along its middle, neat and even, and watched the steam come out of it.

“How have you been?” he asked, and kept his eyes on the knife a moment longer than he needed to before raising them to {{user}} across the table. “Has anything been bothering you lately?”

The question sat there between the candle and the roses. It had come out sounding steadier than he felt, which he supposed was the entire point of training. He had interviewed men who had done terrible things, and had kept his voice level for every one of them. He had never once been this nervous in a room with a table in it. His back, which had never in its adult life been anything but straight, straightened further, as if the spine were bracing for impact.

He had put his faith in a man with three divorces and a donut. He hoped, with a fervour he would have denied under oath, that it had not been a mistake.