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The billboards were gone now, and Kim hadn’t seen a commercial in - what had it been, a year? She hadn’t noticed it right away, but there was the sense of bright, fluttering colors just at the edge of her vision fading away little by little, until they had vanished. She didn’t know what had happened to him - whether he’d gotten into some kind of trouble and had gotten disbarred, or whether he’d decided he’d had enough of New Mexico and drawn up stumps to practice his shady definition of “law” somewhere else. Chicago, maybe. Florida.
Once, while walking, she’d happened upon a bench that still had his face plastered on it. It was peeling, and someone had drawn on his face with a sharpie - an erect phallus, dripping and aimed for his mouth. She’d stared at the bench a long time before taking out her cell phone and calling the number, her stomach churning as she pressed the buttons. She was relieved when a robotic voice at the other end of the line told her that it was sorry, but the number she had just dialed had been disconnected or was no longer in service.
Driving around Albuquerque, she surprised herself sometimes, remembering which billboard had once held the garish yellow-green-pink. This one, now boasting the charms of a “gentleman’s club.” Instead of the pointing finger, smirk, vast expanse of forehead (“fivehead,” she’d once teased, and he’d laughed with her), a blonde with wet hair, plastered with glitter, mouth open, lipgloss-slick. That one, high above the highway, the one she’d watched on the news with Howard blustering behind her. It now advertised the nail salon, which had a pleasing symmetry about it.
Kim still went to the nail salon sometimes - only during business hours - to have her feet scrubbed and nails painted in beige, grey, pearl pink. She sat in the massage chairs and let the women crouch in front of her, feeling vaguely uncomfortable about it. She never touched the massage controls, telling herself it was because she didn’t like the feel of those plastic nubs digging into her back and anyway it was too noisy. She always brought a book so that she wouldn’t have to look around the room that felt empty, even when it was full of the bustle of nail technicians and clients. It didn’t even feel so much like a room as a shell - chitinous, split and discarded, shriveling with neglect. Something had crawled out of it once. Now it was gone. It would not come back.
“Excuse me!”
Kim was jolted out of her thoughts to see Mrs. Nguyen bending over her with a plastic cup. “Would you like some cucumber water?”
She held out the cup and Kim took it, the plastic smooth and cool under her fingers.
“Yes,” she said, although she doubted she could be heard above the chatter. “Thank you.”