The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno Page B

the host stand as usual. And as usual, he looked behind me when he saw me.
    â€œShe’s at the store,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
    â€œOh, I wasn’t . . .” He stopped, shrugging. “Nothing. Hey, Louis.”
    â€œHey. Just picking up.”
    â€œYeah, I have you.” He went over to the counter and grabbed our bag of food, then placed it in front of the register. “Fourteen forty.”
    I took my wallet out of my front pocket. I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone except me, but I kept my wallet in my front pocket instead of my back pocket. I just never liked how it felt in the back pocket, and plus I kept losing it, so I thought I would try something different. And I hadn’t lost my wallet for over a year, so things were going pretty well. Until I opened said wallet to remove my twenty-dollar bill from its depths, and there was no twenty-dollar bill.
    â€œUh,” I said.
    There was also no debit card, because I’d left that in front of my computer last night (I bought an album, nothing weird). But there should have been a twenty-dollar bill. I had a twenty-dollar bill. I knew I had a twenty-dollar bill because Willa had just given it to me about ten minutes ago. We had transferred it from Willa’s purse to my wallet. I could picture it perfectly. It had happened.
    â€œGet me later,” Benson offered, handing me the bag.
    â€œThis is embarrassing.”
    â€œI know where you live,” he said, smiling. “Seriously, don’t worry about it. Get me later.”
    â€œI must have lost, the, um . . .”
    â€œLouis. Chill.”
    I took the bag from Benson and mumbled thanks.
    Willa was going to kill me, not only because I didn’t have change for her, but because our fourteen-dollar lunch was now, essentially, thirty-four dollars and forty cents.
    From the store to the diner, I had not removed my wallet from my pocket.
    Which basically proved my theory that the shit I lost, I didn’t actually lose.
    The shit I lost disappeared.
    On my tenth birthday, just over two years after Willa had fallen off the fire escape, my parents bought me my first nice tennis racket. A Babolat. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever held in my hands.
    My father took me to our local courts to play. It was nearing sunset and the city had taken on an otherworldly, mystical quality. I was ten years old and I had the most beautiful tennis racket that any ten-year-old had ever owned. My father cracked open a new, pressurized container of tennis balls, and we listened to the sound it made in the darkness—
whoosh
. We were the only ones on the courts. Three courts lined up next to one another and we were the only ones there, just my father and me. And my new tennis racket, buzzing in my hand. Like an extension of my body. Like a thing alive.
    We played for hours. We played until the lights came on and the moths started to gather and the sky darkened to a light gray. There were never stars in Los Angeles. Therewas never the pitch-blackness of the desert, which I’d seen only once before. The city towered around us, and I beat my father, again and again, and this racket and I became a unit. We became one thing. And I was so grateful that my father was home, because he was such a good father and I admired him so much, but he was just too often not here, he was too often on the opposite side of the world picking through muslin or taffeta or cotton.
    And Willa was always getting everything she wanted and now I had gotten what I wanted. This tennis racket.
    When we were done, I put my racket into my case and then placed it in the trunk beside my father’s racket. My father was holding up the trunk and he watched me put my racket beside his and so he couldn’t even yell at me when we got back home and we pulled into the parking garage and he popped the trunk and we walked around to the back of the car and the Babolat was gone. My racket was gone but