Dark Rivers of the Heart

had hope.
        The only waitress serving the tables was strikingly beautiful, half Vietnamese and half black. She wore the costume that she-and Valerie-had worn the previous evening: black heels, short black skirt, short-sleeved black sweater. Valerie had called her Rosie.
        After fifteen minutes, Spencer stopped Rosie when she passed nearby with a tray of drinks. "Is Valerie working tonight?"
        "Supposed to be," she said.
        He was relieved. Valerie hadn't lied. He had thought perhaps she'd misled him, as a gentle way of brushing him off.
        "I'm kinda worried about her," Rosie said.
        "Why's that?"
        "Well, the shift started an hour ago." Her gaze kept straying to his scar. "She hasn't called in."
        "She's not often late?"
        "Val? Not her. She's organized."
        "How long has she worked here?"
        "About two months. She…" The woman shifted her gaze from the scar to his eyes. "Are you a friend of hers or something?"
        "I was here last night. This same stool. Things were slow, so Valerie and I talked awhile."
        "Yeah, I remember you," Rosie said, and it was obvious that she couldn't understand why Valerie had spent time with him.
        He didn't look like any woman's dream man. He wore running shoes, jeans, a work shirt, and a denim jacket purchased at K-mart-essentially the same outfit that he'd worn on his first visit. No jewelry. His watch was a Timer. And the scar, of course. Always the scar.
        "Called her place," Rosie said. "No answer. I'm worried."
        "An hour late, that's not so much. Could've had a flat tire."
        "In this city," Rosie said, her face hardening with anger that aged her ten years in an instant, "she could've been gang-raped, stabbed by some twelve-year-old punk wrecked on crack, maybe even shot dead by a carjacker in her own driveway."
        "You're a real optimist, huh?"
        "I watch the news."
        She carried the drinks to a table at which sat two older couples whose expressions were more sour than celebratory. Having missed the new Puritanism that had captured many Californians, they were puffing furiously on cigarettes. They appeared to be afraid that the recent total ban on smoking in restaurants might be extended tonight to barrooms and homes, and that each cigarette might be their last.
        While the piano player clinked through "The Last Time I Saw Paris,"
        Spencer took two small sips of beer.
        Judging by the palpable melancholy of the patrons in the bar, it might actually have been June, 1940, with German tanks rolling down the Champs-Elysees, and with omens of doom blazing in the night sky.
        A few minutes later, the waitress approached Spencer again. "I guess I sounded a little paranoid," she said.
        "Not at all. I watch the news too."
        "It's just that Valerie is so…"
        "Special," Spencer said, finishing her thought so accurately that she stared at him with a mixture of surprise and vague alarm, as if she suspected that he had actually read her mind.
        "Yeah. Special. You can know her only a week, and… well, you want her to be happy. You want good things to happen to her."
        It doesn't take a week, Spencer thought. One evening.
        Rosie said, "Maybe because there's this hurt in her. She's been hurt a lot."
        "How?" he asked. "Who?"
        She shrugged. "It's nothing I know, nothing she ever said. You just feel it about her."
        He also had sensed a vulnerability in Valerie.
        "But she's tough too," Rosie said. "Gee, I don't know why I'm so' JUMPY about this. It's not like I'm her big sister. Anyway, everyone's got a right to be late now and then."
        The waitress turned away, and Spencer sipped his warm beer.
        The piano player launched into "It Was a Very Good Year," which Spencer disliked even when Sinatra sang it, though he was a Sinatra fan.
        He knew the song was intended to be reflective in tone, even mildly pensive; however, it seemed terribly sad to him, not the sweet wistfulness of an older man reminiscing about the women he had loved, but the grim ballad of someone at the bitter end of his days, looking back on a barren life devoid of deep relationships.
        He supposed that his interpretation of the lyrics was an expression of his fear that decades hence, when his own life burned out, he would fade away in loneliness and remorse.
        He