by Anne Tyler
“I was delighted she called me,” Willa said. She sat down in a molded plastic chair, making a production of it to hide the fact that Peter was not chiming in to agree with her. He had taken a stance beside the door as if he might leave at any moment, while Cheryl settled on the foot of her mother’s bed. There was another bed, but it was unoccupied, for now. All in all the room was fairly pleasant—small but airy, with plenty of sunlight coming in through a long plate-glass window that overlooked a parking lot.
“What I was wondering, though,” Willa said, “is how come you had my number.”
“I had no idea I had it! When Callie told me, I said, ‘What in—?’ Then I remembered that time after you moved to Tucson, when you called to give Sean your new number and I was the only one home to write it down.”
“She wrote it on her emergency list,” Cheryl explained to Willa. “Doctor, dentist, Poison Control…like I would be the type to go and swallow Mama’s allergy pills.”
She seemed different in the presence of her mother. She looked relaxed and expansive, loosely clasping one ankle and resting her chin on her bare knee. Side by side, the two of them were strikingly alike—their skin the same tawny gold and their eyes the same pearly gray, although Cheryl’s mouth, which was softer and more curved, must have been a contribution from her father, whoever he was.
“I don’t know why Callie made such a big deal about keeping an eye on one puny child,” Denise was saying. “Cheryl is no trouble! Lots of times she stays home by herself, even. Callie could’ve just called to check on her during the day and then had her over to spend the nights.”
“Or I could’ve gone to Sir Joe’s!” Cheryl said, lifting her head.
“Get real,” Denise told her.
Cheryl subsided.
“Well, in any case,” Willa said, “here we are. Peter, where are those things we brought?”
He stepped forward to hand her a paper lunch bag. “Puzzles,” Willa said, hauling out the word-search book, “slippers…”
“One slipper would’ve been enough,” Denise told her. She wriggled her toes, which were the only part of her left foot not covered by the cast.
“Well, I wondered,” Willa said, “but Cheryl couldn’t remember which leg it was that got shot.” She reached into the bag again. “Mail, such as it is…”
“Who did it, do you think?” Peter asked Denise.
“Pardon?”
“Who do you think shot you?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Took me a while to realize I was shot, even. First I was all ‘Funny, my leg’s not holding me up anymore.’ So I sat down. And it didn’t hurt one bit, can you believe it? Not at first. But later, hoo boy. Bone pain: nothing like it.” She turned suddenly to Cheryl. “Wouldn’t that make a good song title? ‘Bone Pain,’ by the So-and-Sos. Number one on the charts.”
Cheryl giggled.
“But seriously,” Peter persisted. “Was it someone you know, do you think?”
“You can ask all you want,” Denise told him, “but I can’t give you the answer. In this town, you don’t expect to identify every single person that fires a gun off.”
Peter slumped into silence.
Denise started riffling through her mail. “Most of this stuff I don’t even need to open,” she said. She came to the list of phone messages. “Hal called?” she asked Cheryl.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Oh, Hal!” Willa said.
They both looked at her.
“That’s what ‘Howl’ meant,” she explained. Cheryl’s misspelling all at once made sense, in light of how Baltimoreans turned “towel” into “tal.”
“What did he want?” Denise asked Cheryl.
“He didn’t say.”
“Well, I am just not up to that right now,” Denise said. She slapped the list down on her stack of mail.
“Hal is, like, our neighbor,” Cheryl told Willa. “He’s real mopey and bitter.”
“What is he bitter about?” Willa asked.
“What isn’t he bitter about?” Denise said. “See, Hal’s wife and me were friends, once upon a time. At least I was trying to be friends, because no other gal my age lived on our block. I was tickled to death when her and Hal moved in. Not that he is such a prize…But anyhow, a few times I had her over for a glass of chardonnay after work, and when Sean came home I’d say, ‘Look who’s here, hon!,’ but he’d just be all ‘So I see’ and ask when supper was. So anyhow—do you not know this story?”
“What? No,” Willa said.
“Okay: So, one day I tell Sean, I say, ‘Look. I don’t get why you have to act so grumpy with my girlfriend. What’s she ever done to you?’ I ask. ‘And we don’t have a single pair of couple friends,’ I tell him, ‘so Saturday I am having she and her husband to dinner and I’m counting on you to be nice to her, hear?’ And he says, ‘Okay, whatever.’ And Saturday night they come over and he’s polite as can be all evening. And Sunday morning he walks out, and him and her move in together.”
“What?” Willa said, and Peter seemed to come to attention. “I’m sorry, who did he move in with?” she asked.
“Elissa.”
“Wait, you mean Hal’s wife was Elissa?”
“Oh. You know her.”
“No, no, I only just learned there was an Elissa. So, let me understand this…”
“It’s like he was saying, ‘Nice to her? I’ll show you nice!’ And elopes with her. Well, of course it wasn’t really like that. Now I see they must have been carrying on for some time, and he was acting all cold just to cover it up. But wouldn’t you think he could have been more straightforward about it? Men are so bad at these things! And now I’m minus the both of them. I’ve got nobody left.”
“You’ve got me, Mama,” Cheryl said.
“So that’s what Hal is bitter about,” Denise told Willa flatly.
“Oh, my heavens,” Willa said.
“I’m going to look for a New York Times,” Peter said all at once, and he walked out. It was true: men were bad at these things. Willa pivoted in her chair to watch him leave, and when she turned back Denise was furtively blotting her eyes on a corner of her sheet.
Willa fished a Kleenex from her purse and silently handed it over.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Denise said. She blew her nose. “I’m not crying because I’m sad,” she said. “It’s more that I’m mad, is what it is.” She seemed to be addressing Cheryl, who was giving little pats to the ankle of her mother’s cast.
“Well,” Willa said. “I am just horrified.”
This was awkward, to say the least. She didn’t even have the right to apologize on Sean’s behalf, although that was what she felt the urge to do. She looked helplessly at Cheryl. Cheryl said, “There, there, Mama. He’ll come back; just you watch.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t want him back!” Denise said. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have him back on a silver platter! Sorry,” she added to Willa.
“No, that’s all right. Sean was never very…forthright, I have to say…”
“What’s this?” a nurse asked, wheeling a machine in. A huge, trudging woman with a wide black face, wearing a uniform resembling pajamas printed all over with teddy bears. “Things getting to you, hon?”
“I’m just having a nervous breakdown, is all,” Denise said into her Kleenex.
“She’s reliving sad memories,” Cheryl told the nurse.
“Sad memories, huh? Can’t have that,” the nurse said. She stuck a digital thermometer into Denise’s mouth. “You ought to be thanking your stars! You could be a whole lot worse off than what you are. Could have been shot in the spine; could have been paralyzed. You know how many quadriplegic young folks I have seen?”
Denise shook her head, mouth clamping the thermometer.
“Young brothers shot on the street,” the n
urse said, “and so accustomed to how it goes down that they’re brought to the emergency room already telling you what kind of high-tech, name-brand wheelchair they have in mind that is just like their cousin’s wheelchair and their brother’s and their best friend’s.”
Willa made a sound of distress, and the nurse transferred her gaze to her. “It’s not often we get a Caucasian shooting victim,” she said. She pronounced “Caucasian” with careful delicacy, the way Willa might have pronounced…well, the way Willa might have pronounced “African-American.”
The thermometer chirped and the nurse drew it from Denise’s mouth, giving it barely a glance before she shucked the sheath into the waste can and jammed the thermometer into a vase of other thermometers. “What level’s your pain at?” she asked Denise. “From one to ten.”
“Eleven,” Denise said.
“No, it’s not,” the nurse said. “I can see by the look of you it’s not. I am not upping your meds, I tell you.”
“I’m not asking you to up my meds. They don’t even work, and anyhow, they make me puke.”
The nurse shook her head and got busy with her machine, adjusting a couple of dials and pressing buttons.
“I don’t even want to know what all this is going to cost,” Denise told Willa.
“Do you have insurance?”
“Well, kind of.”
Willa decided not to ask what “kind of” meant.
“And it’s true it’s summertime, but even in the summer I need to check into work every so often.”
Why had it not occurred to Willa that Denise must work? Of course she did; she was a single mother. “What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m an office assistant at Linchpin Elementary. Same school Cheryl goes to.”
“Oh, that’s convenient.”
“Yeah, they’re nice about letting her hang around till I get off every day. And Mrs. Anderson, that’s the principal, she phoned this morning and said not to sweat it if I need to stay out for a while. But I should be helping them get ready for fall!”
“At least you’ve got a job,” the nurse told her, winding an electrical cord.
“Will you stop with the Pollyanna talk?” Denise said. The nurse tsked and wheeled the machine out of the room.
“A cop has been going all round the neighborhood, Mama,” Cheryl said. “He knocks on doors and asks people did they see you get shot.”
“Yeah, he came here too,” Denise said. “Heavyset fellow, acting like he couldn’t be more bored,” she told Willa. “Wanted to know if I owed anybody money. ‘Are you for real?’ I said. ‘You think it was my dealer, don’t you, collecting on my cocaine debt or something.’ ‘Ma’am,’ the cop says, ‘I am only asking what they tell me to ask. Don’t get yourself in a tizzy.’ ”
“Oh, dear,” Willa said.
“I hate when they call you ‘ma’am.’ ”
In the pause the followed, Willa heard a woman out in the hall saying, “Well, I wasn’t overwhelmed, to tell the truth. Or underwhelmed, either one. I was just…whelmed, I guess you could say.”
“It could have been worse,” Willa told Denise. “It could have been ‘lady.’ ”
“Ick!” Denise said.
But this seemed to lift her spirits. She asked Cheryl, “You been behaving yourself, missy?”
“Yep.”
“She’s been very helpful,” Willa put in.
“Oh, and guess what, Mama! Willa made me this thing for breakfast this morning called Bubble Eggs.”
“She did, did she,” Denise said.
“She boiled up this huge bunch of butter in the skillet and then she broke an egg into it and spooned the hot butter over it the whole time it was cooking and it bubbled up like a…balloon! It was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“Well, lucky you; you seem to be having a fine time,” Denise said. “I ought to get shot more often.”
Willa stirred and started to speak (it seemed something really should be said to this), but Cheryl only laughed. “Silly Mama,” she said, and she tapped her mother’s cast affectionately.
She was an admirably well-balanced child, Willa thought.
Peter walked in with a newspaper and a little plastic pot. “Look what I found in the gift shop,” he told Willa, and he held out the pot. Inside was a saguaro cactus barely three inches tall, its one stubby arm no bigger than a thumb.
“Oh!” Willa said, and she took it from him. Evidently when saguaros were this tiny their barbs were much closer together, because this one was positively bristly, like a little old white-whiskered man. She held it up to show Denise. “Have you ever seen a saguaro?”
“Not in real life.”
“Ordinarily they’re huge. Twenty or thirty feet tall, at least.”
She said this protectively, almost defensively. She felt the same kind of pity that she would feel for a caged tiger. Saguaros were not supposed to be cute! There was nothing cute about them! Saguaros were calm and forbearing; they had stoically weathered everything from Apache arrows to strip malls. But Peter was looking so pleased with his purchase that she had to tell him, “Thank you, sweetheart.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. Then he slapped his newspaper against his thigh and said, “So! Denise! When they going to let you go home?”
“Couple of days or so, I guess.”
“Couple of days! Couple of days after this one?”
“I guess.”
He looked over at Willa. “And here they’re always talking about hospitals kicking their patients out too soon,” he said. “So much for that idea.”
“Well, I did just undergo surgery,” Denise told him. “What did you expect?”
“Does Cheryl have any real grandparents?” Peter asked her.
Willa could have killed him. He was going to ruin things! But Denise just said, “Oh, yes, there’s my mom. She’s got Parkinson’s, though, so she lives with my brother and sister-in-law in Rhode Island.”
Not even Peter was brash enough to inquire about the grandparents on Cheryl’s father’s side. He just sent Willa a look. She knew what he was thinking: this was all her fault. They were trapped. She gave him her blandest, brightest smile and asked Denise if there was anything else they could bring her the next time they came to visit.
4
Airplane had the most appealing face. His eyes were a deep, thoughtful brown, topped by tufted black eyebrows that gave him a look of concern. His muzzle was a velvety caramel color, the whiskers sprouting from precisely placed dots that reminded Willa of the stippled scalp of a “real hair” doll that she had owned in her childhood.
And then there were his signature ears, which stood out so levelly that they might have been held up by scaffolding. Yet there was nothing stiff about them. When Willa ran one between her fingers, it was almost too soft to register against her skin.
She stroked his other ear as well, for symmetry’s sake, and then set the tip of her nose to his and asked, “What do you have to say for yourself, Airplane?”
He answered with an enthusiastic puff of meaty-smelling breath that made her sit up straight again on the couch.
In her left hand she held her cell phone, which she rarely used for actual calls, but she needed to dial Sean from her contacts list. She had the phone pressed to her ear and she was listening to it ring. It was late afternoon—a likelier time to reach him than in the evening, she had learned, when he often seemed to be unavailable. Maybe she’d miscalculated, though, because he wasn’t answering.
But then he picked up. “Mom,” he said.
“Hi, honey. I’m sorry to call you at work, but I thought we should connect so we can make a date for supper.”
“You’re in Baltimore?”
“Right.”
“How’s Denise?”
“She seems okay,” Willa
said. She was glad he had thought to ask; you couldn’t always count on that with Sean. “She’s still in the hospital, though, so we’re staying here with Cheryl.”
He didn’t ask how Cheryl was. “So, supper,” he said briskly. “We’re kind of tied up over the weekend, but how about Monday?”
“Oh,” Willa said. Monday was five days away. She wasn’t even sure they’d still be here. “Is that the earliest you can manage?” she asked him.
“It’s not like you gave us a lot of warning, you know.”
“No, well…fine, then. Monday,” she said.
“I’ll call someplace and make a reservation,” he said. “For four of us, right? Is Peter coming?”
“Yes, of course, and then also…well, we might have to bring Cheryl, if Denise is not home by then.”
“Cheryl!” he said. “Can’t she stay by herself for a couple hours?”
This made Willa sad. “I get the impression she might like to see you,” she told him.
“That would be kind of awkward, Mom.”
“Oh.”
“And I can guarantee you that Denise wouldn’t go for it.”
She could see his point. She said, “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“What’s wrong with leaving her on her own? She watches out for herself all the time, ordinarily.”
“At night? She’s just a child!” Willa said.
“So? We’ll eat early. You can be back before dark.”
Willa said, “All right, Sean. We’ll think of something. I’ll wait to hear from you, then.”
“Talk to you later,” he said. He hung up.
Willa clicked her phone off and put it down on the couch beside her. She set her nose to the dog’s nose again. “Oh, Airplane,” she said.
Airplane gave a little whimper, and Willa laid her cheek on top of his silky warm head and hugged him closer against her.
* * *
—
Over the day she had gained a better sense of this household, and therefore of its inhabitants. Cheryl turned out to be a tidy child, with staid, old-ladyish habits. (She preferred to do her own laundry, she said, because her mother let things sit in the dryer so long that they got all crinkled.) Denise was the helter-skelter type—her bed unmade, her room a sea of tossed-off clothing and People magazines and Diet Pepsi cans. The kitchen was equipped for only rudimentary cooking, with a few basic pots and some mismatched dishes and glassware, but there was an electric mixer and a large supply of cake pans and pie tins and cookie sheets because Cheryl, it emerged, loved to bake. She told Willa that when she grew up she might want to open a birthday-cake shop.
