She walked up the back dock unexpectedly, and she was beautiful. I hadn’t seen her since she moved from Chicago and I took a job at the Trib. When she left, she told me she wanted me to come along, but I had stayed behind, preferring the company of the boys at Chelsea’s and the girls who would go home with me when the lights came on there.

I hadn’t heard from her. And I didn’t know she was back in town. The beer at Chelseas’s had grown stale and the girls stopped coming home with me. Now, it’s eleven a.m. and I’m sitting on the back dock, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the shade, dreading the heat of the office and the clatter of the typewriter keys.

And here she is.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said.

She stood there, more beautiful than I remember, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she shifted the camera she was holding to her right hand. She dropped her keys into her jacket pocket. She left her sunglasses on.

“Can you please tell me where I can find Jessop?” she asked.

I stumbled, and flicked my cigarette. I stepped towards her. She did not back away, but did not approach me. I steadied myself against the wall. I took the flask from my boot. Took a healthy pull.

Peggy stepped into the shade. Still, she did not remove her sunglasses. I wanted to see her big-as-the-Wyoming-sky blue eyes, and remembered how cloudy they would get when she was angry.

“Where’s Jessop?” she asked again.

“Peggy, you’re beautiful.”

“I suppose I’ll find him,” she said.

Every hair was in place. She looked…well, that dame was something.

My throat closed up. I couldn’t talk. I lit another cigarette.

Wordlessly, Peggy Marie walked past me and pushed through the heavy steel doors. She had no dust on her new leather shoes. Her slacks were freshly pressed. And she smelled of lavender.

I never did find out where she was living, nor how she came to be in Chicago again. Jessop rarely spoke to me, and I was too new a hand to approach him about it. I did see her photographs of the car show in Detroit that next week, and they had her name below them.

Peggy in Detroit, at least right now. That explained the fancy Ford she had stepped out of that Saturday afternoon as I watched her in the parking lot. Her calf had flashed briefly in the sunlight as she got out of the car, and I didn’t know, then, that it was Peggy Marie. The old familiar lust returned, and when she was close enough for me to see her, for me to know that it was her, the wind was knocked out of me. Like I was seeing her for the first time again. And I knew I was wrong to have stayed in Chicago.

———-

The back of the original photo has the following written with a blue fountain pen in a woman’s hand, “Taken by Johnny that Saturday afternoon. 4 - 28 - 45″