by Anne Tyler
“I thought I might stay on a few days, if that’s all right with you.”
Cheryl whispered “Yes!” on a long outward breath, and Denise said, “Well, gosh. I know I should be arguing, but gosh. Thanks, Willa.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Willa said. “It’s not as if I have anything urgent waiting at home.”
“You don’t want to neglect your husband, though,” Mrs. Minton told her severely.
“It’s only for a few days.”
“You want to cherish him.”
“Oh, I do,” Willa assured her.
“Take it from me: I lost my husband many years ago, but not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d paid him more attention. He died at Gettysburg.”
Willa was startled. “At the…Civil War Gettysburg?” she asked.
“That’s the one. He liked to put on a rebel uniform and take part in famous battles, and this one time when he was supposed to be slain he didn’t get up afterward and they found he’d had a heart attack and died.”
“A re-enactor,” Ben murmured to Willa.
“Well, goodness,” she said.
“It was how he’d have wanted to go, though; I do take comfort in that,” Mrs. Minton said.
“But still,” Willa said.
“And now I’m rattling around in that house without a husband. This whole side of the street is rattling around; we all of us seem to be loners here.”
“Except for me and Mama,” Cheryl said. “And Sir Joe and—”
“No married people, though,” Mrs. Minton reminded her. She started ticking off on her fingers. “Hal’s wife has left him, Callie’s divorced, Dave is divorced, Ben here’s wife has passed…wait, are Barry and Richard married?”
“Not as I know of,” Denise said. “Barry and Richard are gay,” she told Willa, “which-is-fine!”
“So whenever I see somebody with a husband,” Mrs. Minton said, “I say, ‘Appreciate him, hear? Appreciate him while you have him!’ ”
Willa said, “I lost a husband myself, once.”
Denise would already have known that, Willa supposed, but everyone else looked interested. She told them, “Sean’s father was killed in a car wreck just before Sean left for college.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Minton said, with a satisfied nod. “I don’t have to tell you, then.”
“Right.”
“You get up some mornings and lay out the breakfast things and then you say, ‘Oh, dear, I seem to have set the table for two.’ ”
“Right,” Willa said. Although in fact she had never done that. But she knew what Mrs. Minton meant.
“You’re sitting around in the evening and you say, ‘Isn’t it bedtime yet?’ And then you look at the clock and it’s not even seven thirty.”
“And you talk to yourself,” Ben put in from his rocker. “You say, ‘So! Guess I should think about fixing something to eat.’ And your voice sounds kind of rusty because it’s been so long since you’ve used it.”
Willa looked over at him. He shrugged apologetically, as if the words had popped out by accident. “Lizzy’s been dead for seventeen years,” he told her, “and my only kid’s off in Uganda. Why do you think I still run that damn-fool paperwork factory I call a medical practice? I need to see another human being from time to time.”
“His son is a Doctor Without Borders,” Mrs. Minton told Willa.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Willa said.
“Except it means he’s on the other side of the world,” Ben said.
“Well,” Willa said. Then she said, “My father told me once that after my mother died, he started breaking his days into moments. Like, not worrying how to get through the whole rest of his life but just enjoying the baseball game he was watching right then on TV.”
“That’s nice if it works,” Mrs. Minton said.
“Yes, if it works. I don’t know; for me it didn’t seem to. I think I’m not a natural-born enjoyer of the moment,” Willa said. “Even now: I’m the type who goes on vacation and spends the whole time wondering if I remembered to turn the oven off, and whether we can manage that tight connection when we fly home.”
Denise laughed. She said, “Hoo, boy, all I would wonder is how to stretch the trip out as long as possible.”
“See there?” Willa said. “You just naturally know how to do that.”
Then Mrs. Minton said, “I have to be going, Ben. I need to water my African violets.” And Ben slapped his thighs and stood up to help her out of her chair.
* * *
—
There had been talk of Peter’s making his grilled chicken for supper, but when he failed to come downstairs at the proper time to preheat the grill Willa just went ahead and roasted the chicken in the oven. He didn’t comment when she called everyone to the table; merely took his seat with a grim expression and spread his napkin across his lap. And he allowed her to do the carving, which ordinarily he claimed as his own special skill. Clearly he was in one of his harrumph moods.
Now that there were four of them, they were eating in the dining room. Ben had brought over a wheeled typist’s chair that morning for Denise to sit in, so that even Cheryl was able to push her from the couch to the dining-room table or to the little desk in the corner where she kept her computer. According to Ben, the chair’s sturdy arms were a safety feature, but during supper Denise complained that they were a hindrance. “Like, when I try to shift from the couch to the chair they hamper me, know what I’m saying?” she asked. “So I’m thinking there has got to be a way to take them off.”
She looked at Peter. She waited. “Unscrew them or something?” she suggested finally.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. He forked up a morsel of chicken and started chewing it.
Denise looked at Willa.
“Why don’t I try and figure it out after supper,” Willa told her.
Peter forked up another morsel of chicken.
Mainly it was Cheryl who kept the conversation going. She was excited because Patty and Laurie were coming home tomorrow. “I can’t wait,” she said. “Patty always has the best ideas for things to do! Me and Laurie will be lolling around just bored out of our minds and then Patty says, ‘I know what!’ and she shows us some new card trick she’s learned or some new app she just got on her phone. When she grows up she wants to be a game-show hostess.”
“That child is entirely too old for her years, if you ask me,” Denise told her. “I couldn’t believe what she was wearing that time she came to the movies with us.”
“It was a super outfit!”
“It made her look like a hooker.”
Peter gazed meaningfully at the ceiling.
“Sleazy nylon top,” Denise told Willa, “with only one shoulder. What is it with the one-shoulder look? Like, ‘Whoops, imagine that: someone just tried to rip my clothes off.’ And cutoff shorts so short the pockets are hanging out at the bottoms, and patent-leather shoes with heels. Heels! On an eleven-year-old! Going to the movies!”
“Those were tap shoes, for your information,” Cheryl told her. “They’re for dancing in.”
“Oh, my mistake; I beg your humble pardon. Since it’s common knowledge everyone has to dance at a Pixar movie.”
“Who would like more chicken?” Willa asked.
No one answered.
Willa was starting to get a headache.
* * *
—
After she and Cheryl had done the dishes, she took a look at the typist’s chair and decided it would be possible to take the arms off. “Do you have a Phillips screwdriver?” she asked Denise.
Denise said, “Well, if I do it would be in the odds-and-ends drawer, I’m just about certain.”
This didn’t sound promising, but Willa went out to the kitchen to rummage through the tangle of tools and duct tape
and picture wire in the odds-and-ends drawer. Unexpectedly, a memory rose up from times her parents used to visit after the boys were born. Her father would come to her, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Think you’ve got a leak in your guest-room toilet,” he would say. “But I can probably fix it for you.” Or “I don’t know if you realize your pantry door is hanging aslant. Mind if I take care of it?” It was his way of showing he loved her, she knew. Even as she’d sighed inwardly to hear of yet another flaw in her household, she had felt touched by how hard he was trying.
And now it was she who was shaking her head, deploring the state of the odds-and-ends drawer but coming up with a Phillips screwdriver, finally, and kneeling beside the typist’s chair to set the world to rights.
Peter went up to bed immediately after 60 Minutes, saying he had a taxi coming at five o’clock the next morning. He did tell Denise goodbye and wish her a speedy recovery, and he told Cheryl to take care of her mother. Denise said, “Well, thanks for letting us borrow that wife of yours, hear?”
Peter didn’t say she was welcome.
Then Denise and Cheryl and Willa played a few rounds of I Doubt It—Denise propped on the couch, Cheryl on the floor, and Willa in the rocker she had dragged closer to the coffee table. It turned out that nowadays people didn’t say “I doubt it”; they said “Bullshit.” The first time Willa tried to bluff and Cheryl shouted “Bullshit!” Willa was so startled that her mouth dropped open. She glanced over at Denise, but Denise just blew a giant pink bubble of gum and went on studying her cards. So Willa adjusted, although when she herself suspected a bluff she just said “Ahem.” Cheryl and Denise thought this was hilarious.
After that, Cheryl went upstairs to bed and Willa took Airplane out. Then she settled Denise on the couch and wished her a good night, and at long last climbed the stairs herself.
First she stopped to wash up in the bathroom before she tiptoed into the guest room, although it turned out she could have made as much noise as she liked, because the air conditioner was running full blast. All the lights were off and Peter was either asleep or pretending to sleep; she wasn’t sure which. She had half expected that he would suggest she squeeze in next to him on their last night together, but okay. She undressed in the dark and settled in her own bed, pulling her blanket up tight against the refrigerated air.
She had worried she would sleep badly, but the tensions of the day must have exhausted her, because the next time she opened her eyes, Peter was moving about in the dimness collecting his belongings. Then he slipped out of the room, his bag brushing the doorframe as he exited. She lay awake imagining him shaving and dressing in the bathroom; she imagined him heading down the stairs and out to the street to wait for his cab, but of course she was only guessing, because she couldn’t hear a thing with the air conditioner running. She might as well be shut in a box, she thought—sealed away, airless. She began to have a slight feeling of panic. What am I doing here? she thought. Where, even, am I?
Eventually, she pulled herself together and got up to switch the air conditioner off. It gave a shudder and died. She crossed the room to open the other window and then climbed back into bed. Locust scritches floated into the room, along with a faraway ambulance siren. A few minutes later she heard a car pulling up. Two men briefly spoke, and a car door opened and shut and the car drove off.
Then all she heard were the locusts. Their scritches were back-and-forth scraping sounds like someone sanding a piece of wood, then stopping for a moment, and then sanding once again.
8
Willa had an e-mail from Sean saying, “Hi mom how about cafe antoine 6 tonite.”
“Fine,” she wrote back, “but I should let you know it will be only me.” She was hoping this would prompt him to offer her a ride. She wrote him after breakfast, and then she and Cheryl took Airplane for his walk. Maybe by the time they got back, Sean would have answered.
It was a beautiful morning, and several of the neighbors were outside—Mrs. Minton in her walker urging her dog to do his business, and Sir Joe hosing down his truck but pausing to send Willa a seductive smile, and Dave the detective scowling at his crabgrass. Dave was a saggy, paunchy man in a rumpled sweat suit; Willa had met him the day before when he’d brought Denise a giant bag of Utz potato chips. Now she gave him a little wave, but he stayed sunk in his own shoulders like a bird puffed up in a rainstorm. “He’s having a bad mood,” Cheryl told her. “He’s always in a bad mood on Mondays.”
“What’s wrong with Mondays?” Willa asked.
“His phone doesn’t ring anymore on account of Facebook.”
“Facebook?” Willa said.
“People don’t need him to track anybody down now.”
Willa laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Cheryl asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Willa said.
She was feeling very lighthearted today. Of course it seemed strange without Peter, but at least she could stay out as long as she liked without worrying she was neglecting him.
When they got back to the house she checked her e-mail, but there was nothing more from Sean. Elaine had sent something, though—a photograph of a spectacularly sharp mountain peak poking through a smoke ring of clouds. This was just like her. Elaine thought people wanted to see the places she traveled to; it never occurred to her that they might want to see her. She hadn’t even included a message; just “Mt. Alana” in the subject line.
Willa Googled Café Antoine’s address in case she really did have to drive there. It was in Towson, she saw. All she knew about Towson was that it lay just north of Baltimore. She went to the dining room, where Denise sat playing solitaire on her computer. “Do you think I could borrow your car for my dinner with Sean tonight?” she asked.
No point keeping it a secret; it was only natural that she would want to see her own son.
Without taking her eyes from the screen, Denise said, “Be my guest.”
She had maneuvered from the couch to the typist’s chair on her own while Willa and Cheryl were out on their walk. She had propelled herself into the dining room with just the heel of her good foot, she announced, fending off walls and random pieces of furniture with her hands. Clearly she was making progress.
“We’re supposed to meet at this place in Towson,” Willa told her. “I was wondering if I could check the route on your computer once you’re through there. I hate looking at maps on my little phone screen.”
Now Denise did look at her. “What place in Towson?” she asked.
“Café Antoine?”
Denise made a face. “That is so, so typical,” she said. “He didn’t know Café Antoine existed before I took him there.”
“Oh, dear,” Willa said helplessly.
“And watch what he orders. I bet it’s the crab fluff. I was the one who ordered that first, and I gave him a taste when it came and he just about ate the whole thing.”
“How annoying,” Willa said. It would be annoying. She felt a familiar flash of embarrassment for him.
“But anyhow,” Denise said, and she clicked a few keys on her computer and then pointed to a spot on the screen. “Here’s the map; take a look.”
Willa bent to peer over Denise’s shoulder. Even she could see that the route was fairly straightforward. Go west a ways and then north a ways. But Towson itself was a maze of small streets, not easily sorted out.
Denise’s hair had the bruised-fruit smell of her shampoo, which Willa had helped her suds up last night at the kitchen sink. Ordinarily Willa disliked that smell, but on Denise it seemed oddly pleasant.
“It may be that Sean will offer me a ride,” she said, “but I thought I should be prepared in case he doesn’t.”
“Why not just ask him?” Denise said.
“Oh…”
“Will she be coming?”
Willa didn’t bother pretending she didn’t know w
hom Denise meant. She said, “I believe she may be.”
“Well, tell her I hope she’s satisfied,” Denise said.
The thought of doing that made Willa laugh, and Denise sent a sharp look at her but then grudgingly smiled and said, “Or don’t, if it doesn’t happen to come up on its own.”
* * *
—
All morning long, a part of Willa was mentally flying west with Peter. By now he was crossing the plains; by now he was landing in Denver. She knew he would have a wait before he boarded the plane to Tucson, and she wondered if he would phone her then, but she didn’t really expect him to.
Cheryl’s friends Patty and Laurie came to play. The three girls walked to DuWayne’s Deli and brought back sandwiches for lunch—roast beef for the grownups and subs for themselves—and they took theirs out to the patio table while Willa and Denise ate in the kitchen. From where she sat Willa could hear Patty and Laurie’s high-pitched voices competing to describe a slumber party with their crazy cousins, and a scary movie they’d seen, and the mall their aunt had taken them to for earrings. She didn’t hear much from Cheryl. She would have thought there’d be some discussion of Denise’s shooting, but it didn’t come up, and when they brought their empty plates back in and Denise said, “Watch it!” wincing as Patty stumbled over her outstretched cast, Patty just murmured “Sorry” and kept going. She was the older of the two, and while it was true that she was wearing the skimpiest of outfits—a shirred bandeau across her flat chest, with the cutoffs Denise had complained about—she and her sister were such wiry little blond scraps of things that Willa didn’t see the harm.
After lunch the three of them went upstairs to Cheryl’s room. From the sound of it, they fell up the stairs rather than climbing them, and there was a series of thumps and scrapes overhead as if they were rearranging furniture. Then they played a game that involved a lot of arguing and revising the rules, and after that some sort of music started up. “That must be Patty’s cell phone,” Denise said, making one of her faces. “Can you believe anybody would give an eleven-year-old her own phone?”
