Chapter 106: Another Farewell
McLaren's, mid-August.
The bar had its usual Thursday evening texture — not packed, not empty, the specific comfortable middle ground of a neighborhood place that had been doing this long enough to know its own rhythm. Andrew came in at nine, took his usual spot at the counter, and nodded at Karl.
"The usual," he said.
"Juice, coming up," Karl said, with the specific inflection he used when he was making a point about something.
"You have a problem with juice?"
"I have a problem with a grown man ordering juice at a bar," Karl said, making it. "It confuses the atmosphere."
"The atmosphere survives," Andrew said.
Karl set the glass down and leaned on the counter with the manner of someone who had information and was deciding how to deploy it. "You know more than ten women have come back looking for you in the last two months."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's a problem for me," Karl said. "I'm the one who has to explain that you're not here. I've become your social secretary."
"I appreciate your service," Andrew said.
Karl looked at him with the expression he wore when Andrew was being Andrew and there was nothing productive to say about it. He picked up a glass and started polishing it, which was the bartender's version of ending a conversation.
Andrew turned on his stool and looked at the room.
He saw her immediately — corner table, glass of white wine that looked like it had been nursed for a while, the posture of someone who was waiting for something and had been waiting long enough to get comfortable with the waiting.
Lola.
He looked at her for a moment, then looked back at Karl. "That woman in the corner."
Karl followed his gaze. "Been here three nights in a row. Nobody's managed more than thirty seconds with her." He looked at Andrew with the dawning expression of someone realizing something. "Do you know her?"
"Yes," Andrew said.
Karl set the glass down. "Of course you do."
Andrew picked up his juice and walked to the corner table.
"Hey, Lola."
She looked up, and the particular quality of her expression in that first second — surprise, relief, something she wasn't quite hiding — told him everything about how long she'd been working up to this.
"Andrew." She stood, and they hugged the way people hugged when they hadn't seen each other in a while and were genuinely glad about the reunion. "You look good."
"Sit down," he said. "Tell me what's going on."
She sat. He sat across from her. She turned her wine glass in her hands.
"I got into East LA College," she said. "I'm enrolling in a few days. Monterey Park campus."
He looked at her.
"That's genuinely good news," he said. "Congratulations."
"Thank you." She said it quietly, meaning it in the specific way of someone who had been holding something for a while and was finally setting it down in front of the right person. "I've been wanting to tell you since I found out. You were the first person I thought of."
Andrew didn't say anything for a moment.
East LA College was a solid public institution — the kind of place that changed trajectories for people who came in without advantages and left with something real. Lola had sat the SAT on a compressed timeline, worked a demanding job simultaneously, and gotten in. That was entirely her.
"You did the work," he said. "That exam was you."
"You told me to take it."
"Lot of people tell you to do things," Andrew said. "You're the one who actually did it."
Lola looked at the table. The bar noise moved around them.
"I leave the day after tomorrow," she said.
"Already?"
"I've been submitting materials, finishing things up at Ned's office, packing." She looked up. "It came together faster than I expected. Once I decided, I wanted to move before I talked myself out of it."
Andrew recognized that — the specific wisdom of making a decision and then not giving yourself time to erode it.
"When did you find out your scores?" he said.
"Six weeks ago."
Six weeks. She'd known since the middle of July and hadn't reached out until three days before she was leaving. He thought about why — the specific psychology of wanting to see someone and also being afraid of what seeing them would mean with a departure attached to it.
"You've been sitting in this bar for three nights," he said.
She smiled slightly. "Karl told you."
"Karl's face told me."
She picked up her wine, looked at it, set it down again. "I wasn't sure how to — I didn't want it to be a whole thing. I just wanted to see you before I went."
"Here I am," Andrew said.
Karl appeared at the table with a fresh glass of wine for Lola and a raised eyebrow at Andrew that communicated several things without requiring words.
Andrew ignored all of them.
"To East LA College," Andrew said, lifting his juice.
Lola smiled — the real one, the first fully unguarded one of the evening — and touched her glass to his.
They talked for a while in the comfortable way of people who had enough history to not need to perform anything. Lola talked about the program she was enrolling in — paralegal studies first, then transfer to a four-year program if it went the way she planned. She'd already looked at the transfer requirements. She'd already mapped the timeline.
Andrew listened and thought that this was exactly what happened when someone who had always had the capacity finally had the opportunity — the plans arrived fully formed because they'd been waiting.
"Ned's handling it well," she said, about leaving the job. "Better than I expected. He said—" She paused, and something complicated moved across her face. "He said maybe someday I'd be his boss."
"He's not wrong," Andrew said.
Lola looked at him for a long moment with the expression he'd come to recognize as her version of saying something without saying it.
"I'm leaving the day after tomorrow," she said again. Not new information. Something else.
Andrew looked at her.
She looked back.
"Are you sure you don't want to—" she started.
"Yes," Andrew said, before she'd finished.
She laughed — the sound of someone surprised into it — and her face changed completely in that moment, all the careful management gone.
"Just like that?" she said.
"You've been sitting in a bar for three nights," he said. "Yes, just like that."
Two days. The specific quality of time that knew it had a boundary — not sad, not urgent, just fully itself.
On the second morning Andrew made breakfast, the real kind, the kind that took an hour and filled the apartment with the smell of something worth waking up for. Lola sat at the counter and watched him work with the focused attention she brought to things she wanted to remember.
"You're good at that," she said.
"I've had practice," he said.
"No — I mean the way you do it. Like it matters."
He looked at her briefly, then back at the pan. "It does matter."
She was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to miss that. Someone cooking like it matters."
He plated it and set it in front of her and didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything to say that would improve on the fact of the breakfast.
JFK, Terminal 4. Nine-fifteen in the morning.
Ned had driven them, which had been Lola's request — she'd wanted to say goodbye to both of them, and Andrew suspected she'd also wanted the specific formality of an airport departure rather than a sidewalk goodbye. The right container for the right feeling.
In the car Ned had been quiet in the front while Lola and Andrew had talked in the back, and Andrew had been aware of Ned's careful non-attention to what was happening behind him with the awareness of someone who had made a decision about what he was and wasn't going to observe.
At the terminal, Lola checked her bag, and they stood in the departure hall with the particular airport quality of time — both slower and more final than regular time.
"I'll remember you," Lola said. She'd said things carefully all morning, choosing what she actually meant rather than what was available. This was what she actually meant.
"East LA College," Andrew said. "Then transfer. Then wherever."
She nodded.
He hugged her first — she came into it immediately, and they stood like that for a moment in the specific way of people who were saying something that didn't have better words available.
When she stepped back her ears were red and her eyes were bright.
She turned to Ned, who had been standing a respectful distance away with the expression of a man who had decided this was a moment he was witnessing rather than participating in.
"Thank you," she said to Ned. "For everything. The job, the—" She stopped. "All of it."
Ned looked briefly uncomfortable in the specific way of people who received genuine gratitude and didn't know what to do with it. "You did the work," he said, which was, Andrew thought, the right thing.
The boarding announcement came over the PA.
Lola looked at Andrew one more time. The look of someone finishing something and knowing they're finishing it.
"Goodbye," she said.
She turned and walked toward the gate without looking back, which was the right decision and Andrew could see her knowing it was the right decision in the set of her shoulders as she went.
Andrew and Ned walked out through the terminal doors into the August morning. The heat hit immediately — the specific JFK heat of tarmac and jet fuel and open sky.
"Are you not at all—" Ned started.
"I'm glad she's going," Andrew said.
Ned looked at him.
"I mean it," Andrew said. "She sat in that bar for three nights because she didn't know how to say goodbye to someone she cared about. That's — that's a person who invests. She's going to do well." He paused. "The right ending for this was her walking through that gate. Not her staying."
Ned was quiet for a moment. "You're either very healthy or very defended."
"Probably both," Andrew said. He thought about Evan, about the year after, about the particular education of losing people and building things and losing those too and building again. "I've had practice with goodbyes."
Ned looked at him with the expression he'd had in Aldrich's garden — not quite respect, but the adjacent quality. A reassessment.
"Drink?" Andrew said.
"It's nine-thirty in the morning," Ned said.
"Coffee, then."
Ned looked at the terminal, looked at the parking structure, and sighed in the way of a man who had nowhere pressing to be. "Coffee," he agreed.
They walked toward the parking structure in the August heat, and Andrew thought about the fall semester, six weeks out, and the particular feeling of a life moving in the direction it was supposed to move.
Lola was going to be fine.
So was he.
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