The stranger was still hazy. He tossed his smoke into the river and walked off through a cluster of trees next to the deck.

“Hey,” I yelled out once more, trying to sound tough, failing miserably. “Fuck.”

Just go back to the car. Drive away. Stop by an ATM. Get 60 out and bring it back. Take the pizzas home. Eat the shit out of them. Just go. My heart said.

My brain told me that 60 dollars was nearly two shifts of work and if some angry customer called up Frontier saying I fucked up my last delivery, maybe I would lose my coming promotion, maybe I would be a pizza delivery guy forever. Shit, maybe they would fire me. Had I worked there long enough to collect unemployment?

These thoughts tangoed in my head until I was at the splintered wood of the river deck, listening to the roar of the river, searching in the near darkness for the path the smoking man had taken.

I was shocked to see the path was paved and lit by towering lamps, topped with big, fat, round soft yellow bulbs. They lined the cement path which cut through the woods next to the river before it led to a clearing about 20 yards through the woods.

At the other end of the path, still smoking a cigarette, I saw the man. His features still obscured in the cover of dark. He waved to me…

“Frontier Pizza?” He called out to me through the woods.

Relief dripping into my blood like a slow IV, I made my way through the path, enjoying the charming lighting as much as I could. If I ever secured a date in this dead dog shit of a town, maybe I would take her here some night.

It took about 30 seconds of brisk walking to reach the man. He greeted me with a younger face than I expected, looking just a little bit older than me, but much more masculine and much better dressed. He wore a black pea coat, a well-manicured mustache which would have made the hipsters down in Minneapolis grovel at his feet and a nice pair of leather shoes.

“Yeah, I have your pizzas,” I announced with the last of the breath in my lungs.

He greeted me with a thick puff of hard smoke. The guy must have smoked the non-filters I recognized from some of my old actor friends who tried to be kitschy with their death stick back in LA.

“Sorry, I left my wallet over here.”

The man led me away from the trail over to another public gathering place I remembered not from my childhood, but from the past few months, when I would come to visit the resting places of my mother.

I had forgot the town graveyard was just through the woods from Supervisor Park. The man and I walked through the lines of gravestones, rotting flowers and unlit candles which comprised the rest of the population of the place on a Saturday night at 11.

The smell of the man’s heavy smoke filtered through my body. A new scent developed which made the wind which whipped off the cold river behind us that much more frigid. Anchovies and pepperoni. I hadn’t noticed it in the car.
I stopped, but it didn’t matter, the man had already stopped as well, turned to me and grabbed the pizzas.

I looked down to see my mom’s grave resting next to my Converses. I had been at her grave just a few days before, the peonies I left still there, wilting in the cold of the night.