Me for You

by Lolly Winston

  Bethany forced her mind back to the creation of a replacement casserole, and a story for what had happened to Cindy’s dinner. It was a warm day, and she had picked up the basket, but then dropped it. She didn’t realize until she lifted the dish out of the pie basket at home that it was cracked. Not just cracked, broken! Three jagged shards of Pyrex. So she’d poked a spoon in to see how badly the casserole had been affected, and decided she’d better toss it and make a replacement. “Please, tell Cindy I am SO sorry. I owe her a Pyrex casserole dish!” Not the truth: I stole and devoured your comfort food! I made off with your comfort. Fibbing. Nice. She’d been a thief, and now she was beefing up on being a shameless liar.

  Bethany imagined eating broken Pyrex glass. A cut across her tongue, bright red blood staining the noodles. Those sanitary pads from hospital recovery that were unlike anything in thickness you’d ever get from the store. Like walking with a roll of paper towels in your pants. Enough, she sternly chided herself. Rudy! God, how she wished she were eating dinner with her husband. Since the day she was married, she’d looked forward to it every day: eating supper with her husband.

  Even in college, that man could cook. It hadn’t mattered if they were poor, or comfortable in later years—he always came up with something filling and delicious for his family.

  Bee’s favorites were his dishes mixing savory meats (or spiced tofu when CeCe was vegetarian) with sweet figs or apricots. But the best part of dinner was sitting down at the kitchen or dining room table—even at the picnic table outside under the birch trees—Rudy transformed every place into a dining haven. Even CeCe would relax into the meal, the stress of her day deflating.

  “Who has a funny story?” Rudy would ask. He liked to start dinner on a light note. When teenage CeCe found this irritating, Rudy added the criteria of beautiful—any beautiful thing one of them had seen that day. Sure enough, this little game defused the more serious topics they discussed next. Perhaps Bee had cheated during this second step. She never told Rudy or CeCe how sometimes her heart fluttered arrhythmically, like a bird that had crashed into a window and needed time and a few fluttery flaps to get back up and into the sky.

  6

  The day after Detective Jensen visited Rudy at the store, jolly show tunes were impossible to muster on the piano. He played Sasha’s more melancholy Chopin, and Beethoven sonatas. Murder. An inscrutable act. Rudy’s stomach dropped and his legs weakened, so that it was hard to operate the piano pedals on the baby grand.

  And the suspect, the confessor, was a coworker at the hospital? A place where his wife was so clearly beloved? Whenever Rudy went inside to pick Bee up after work, it took them forever just to get out of the place. Winding their way through the halls, every single nurse, doctor—anyone with a hospital badge—greeted her so merrily it was obvious that her easy, kind, lighthearted presence brightened that stressful and often sad place.

  Rudy was not biased by the fact she was his wife. Well, he was in that he adored her. But since the day he’d met Bethany in the grocery store parking lot by their college (okay, they’d officially met in class, but she didn’t remember him, didn’t remember a single thing about him, even though he’d complimented her on her photographs and her critique of other students’ work; she only remembered the moment when Rudy offered to carry her groceries in the Kroger parking lot, so they counted this as their first-time meeting), from the moment Rudy met her, very early in the school year, Bee already had so many friends. She was funny, smart, sociable. Yet she was not a Goody Two-shoes. She had faults. Sure she did. She was very orderly and neat about some things, but messy about others. Her schoolwork, art classes, and later her pharmacist studies and everything about the way she did her job: tidy, tidy, tidy. Oh, but her dorm room that freshman year: a snarl of sweaters and notebooks and drawing pads and charcoal boxes and loafers and slippers that made Rudy’s head hurt. At home, he and CeCe were always finding a book or cooling cup of coffee of Bee’s that she’d absentmindedly set down and forgotten. But Rudy counted himself lucky, because his wife wasn’t a slob—she made their house gorgeous—and she never got after him about chores or fix-it projects. She was never a nag.

  “Ronald Waters, Ronald Waters . . .” The PA lady, the unnerving calm of her cashmere voice. “Ronald Wa—”

  Rudy shut her out of his consciousness. He realized he had played the same frenetic Haydn sonata twice now, picking up the pace as he thought of some lunatic poisoning his wife—of the unholy piece of information this Detective Jensen had delivered.

  He breathed slowly through his nose to calm himself. They would get to the bottom of this. He and this Detective Jensen and whoever else was assigned to the case. He turned his mind to the piano, an instrument that had always taken him out of a dampened mood or troubled time. But not now. He looked up, looked for Sasha, but she’d slid away from the watch counter.

  Rudy burrowed into the music, into his mind, away from the store, away from his scratchy stiff jacket and pants, the women at the counters cooing about foundation and herding the line of customers there for a promotional offer into a proper queue. Everyone wanted one of the little brightly flowered bags with some sort of treasures within. It was only after Bethany’s death that he discovered she, too, bought those gift kits, yet she never used the little black mascaras. “Because of her contacts,” CeCe had explained matter-of-factly. “Plus, she was a crier. You know. Couple layers of this gunk and you’ve got raccoon eyes.” CeCe had tossed the tubes in the trash. She moved to throw away other things from her mother’s bathroom drawers, but Rudy had stopped her. This was only weeks after Bee’s death. After CeCe left, Rudy had picked through the trash, retrieving the unused tubes and organizing them in the drawer on Bee’s side of their double sinks.

  It was true, Rudy thought now, starting, then stopping himself from playing “Take Five.” He was in no mood for happy music. He wanted to play Mozart’s requiem. Bee’s eyes filled with tears easily, even at advertisements, but she would always wipe her cheeks quickly and smile, laughing at herself. She never wallowed. It was poignancy that got to her. He admired his wife for finding beauty and poignancy in so many things—small things. Sometimes this made Rudy feel a bit dim-witted, but ultimately he felt gratitude for her attention to detail.

  CeCe called the evening that they’d picked their way through the bathroom items, to announce that she and Spencer would go through her mother’s things for Rudy—which she understood was too much for him. They didn’t know he planned to never give up anything of Bethany’s. That he’d agree to their coming over, then cancel that day, feigning illness. People seemed to think that after the first anniversary of his wife’s death it would be easier for Rudy. But now he couldn’t even bear to turn the pages of the calendar—all those birthdays and holidays and anniversaries looming. Did anyone honestly think he was going to get through them? The day after Bethany died he had looked at the kitchen calendar, saw her upcoming dentist appointment noted in her clear, cursive handwriting, ripped the calendar from the wall, and stuffed it in the trash. He was self-pitying and childish and his daughter was the adult now. Well, she’d been the adult since kindergarten, frankly.

  Suddenly, Rudy realized he wasn’t even playing the piano at the store anymore. He was just sitting on the piano bench, with his trembling hands in his lap. I’m on break, he told himself. In my mind. No one noticed or cared. In the middle of a Lancôme gift gala, he was invisible. Completely alone. Lonely. He couldn’t recall ever being lonely while Bethany was alive. Yet he had taken his wife for granted at times. Certainly he had. Early on in their marriage, before he really knew how to be a better half. During the few times Bethany grew cross, she would point out Rudy’s minimalist conversational skills by carrying out entire conversations on her own. Good morning! Bethany would exclaim sarcastically. How are you? Fine, she’d answer, before Rudy could utter a word. How did you sleep? Fine thanks, and you?

  You didn’t even give me a chance to answer! Rudy would contest, looking
up from his paper. He loved the presence of his wife. Sometimes she insinuated that he loved her presence more than he loved her. Which was not the case in the least!

  “I hate it when you’re not home,” he’d confessed when she called from her annual pharmacists’ convention. “I can’t sleep without you.”

  “What? Rudy, that’s ridiculous. When I’m there, it’s like I’m an appliance.”

  That had been so far from the truth! He’d loved her more than anything, but his love hadn’t been demonstrative enough. Once, early in their marriage, she’d cut out a cartoon from The New Yorker that hurt him deeply. Without showing it to him, she stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet for a migraine medication. It pictured a woman in her coat, her purse on her arm, standing by the front door, ready to go out. Speaking to her husband, who sat in a chair reading the newspaper. The caption read, “I’m in the mood for love. I’ll see you in a few hours.” It was the only vaguely mean-spirited thing he could recall his wife doing. When she got home he said, “You know, Bee, this is funny and it isn’t, because I feel like I’m a good husband. And if I’m not, all you need to do is tell me.” Bee apologized. But Rudy took the episode to heart. From that day on, he became more demonstrative. (In his heart, in his mind, he already was!) Suddenly he understood how arranged marriages could work. Part of marriage was learning to fall in love. That afternoon he had pulled the cartoon off the fridge and taken it to the florist and bought Bee a dozen double-delight roses with a lavish bow, and at the bottom of the bow he’d attached the cartoon and written sorry as the new caption, and I love you. And they’d talked all through dinner. In the years to come, they had spells of finishing each other’s sentences, and became equally comfortable sitting together quietly without talking, feet entwined in the center of the sofa.

  Now, as a widower, Rudy turned up his opera louder and louder in the evenings, and drank more and more red wine. With a simple supper of frozen French onion soup or tri-tip from the deli. No vegetables, the volume knob his friend. Then he’d have a nightcap of cognac or something from one of the many untouched aperitifs on their bar until sleep finally blanketed him.

  Today he was hungover from the previous night’s cabernet, still stunned by Jensen’s revelation. He continued playing the piano, but with little bravado, irritated by the shoppers as they committed their usual transgressions: tossing gum wrappers, spilling coffee on the floor.

  Yes, madam, Yes, sir . . . Rudy heard the clerk’s voices coo as he closed his eyes and transitioned into “As Time Goes By.”

  When he opened his eyes, he looked up and over to the Jewelry Department on the other side of the shoe-sale circus and caught a glance at Sasha back at her station behind the glass case of glittering watches. She seemed entertained by the cosmetics frenzy. She waved to Rudy and smiled, then gave a thumbs-up, which he took to indicate that she liked his playing.

  Lunch. Was lunch with a coworker a date? Not really, he decided. They all had to eat, and the shopping mall was filled with choices of quick food for the hurried shoppers and harried workers. Maybe she’d have lunch with him today. The adrenaline of the Detective Jensen business made asking Sasha to lunch easy. He simply finished the piece he’d been playing and strode over to the watch cases to ask her. Soup, a salad, something quick. A rest for their feet. He’d love to hear about her home country.

  “Yes!” Sasha said when Rudy asked her.

  For a moment he was silenced by her enthusiasm. “Great,” he replied. “Noon?”

  “Noon.” She nodded. One firm nod and a smile that revealed her straight teeth, except for the one slightly overlapping front tooth that Rudy found so endearing. On one side of her face her one cheek had a deep dimple. The other cheek’s dimple was much diminished, a small scar crossing her laugh line up onto her cheek where the dimple probably used to be deeper. So many mysteries about this lovely woman. Sasha crossed her arms over her sweater set and leaned toward the warm watch case.

  “And Chopin and Beethoven and Elton John, I’d like to hear how you came to like them.”

  “Ah, remember, I have forty minutes only.”

  The forty minutes went by like four. Rudy learned that Sasha was just now trying to get a divorce, but her husband, an alcoholic, was AWOL, making it impossible to move forward. Meanwhile, his former unemployment and credit card abuse wasn’t helping her any.

  Rudy told Sasha briefly about Detective Jensen, brushing the conversation off as a minor procedural step, not mentioning the word murder. He didn’t want to talk about what he hadn’t even be able to process.

  “Do you have children?” Rudy asked Sasha, pushing aside his plastic sandwich basket.

  Sasha looked from the table to the floor. “We had a daughter . . .” She trailed off, then looked up at him, her eyes glassy with tears. She’d stopped eating her baked potato stuffed with broccoli and cheese. “Stefi.” She blotted her cheeks with her used napkin, not noticing a bit of paper that latched onto one cheek. Rudy fought the urge to brush it away for her. “We lost her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Rudy said. “She died?” He was almost whispering now.

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  Rudy did not pry. He reached over and dabbed away the fluff, squeezed her hand. Then he squeezed his own hands together in his lap. Had he been too forward? It was a Bethany or a CeCe motion. When you lived with women most of your life, you weren’t going to let a friend go back to work with something on her face.

  “Sorry. De-schmutzifying you without asking.”

  Sasha sniffled, smiled. “And you lost your lovely wife.”

  “Bethany.” Rudy was glad the food court was too loud, boisterous, and crowded for anyone to notice a guy in a tuxedo and a pretty Nordstrom employee fighting back tears over their fast-food lunches.

  As they finished their sodas they chatted quickly about music, and the store. They had plenty to talk about without getting into the details of an AWOL husband, potentially murdered wife, and lost child. Yet that invisible thread of grief connected them now. Rudy felt as though it had been there all along—stretching from the piano to the Rolexes—a connection that had perhaps initiated their friendship in the first place.

  “I’ll tell you more about Stefi another time,” Sasha told Rudy. “Next time.”

  There was going to be a next time. Rudy reached across the table to stack her items on her tray and clear them both. “I understand.”

  As they walked back to work, Sasha asked about Bethany—impressed by her job, smiling at the guff Rudy said his wife had often given him, saying she was sorry for such a loss after the number of years they’d been married. The lunch, to Rudy’s delight, was, above all, easy. The thing that surprised him most about Sasha—given how hard her life had been—was how quick she was to laugh. She giggled at his silly jokes, poked gentle fun at him, and laughed at herself. This made her seem younger than she probably was. Not silly. But lighthearted. Lovely. Kind. Fun. Everything that Rudy’s wife had been. And yet a world apart.

  They returned to their stations and Rudy launched into Sasha’s favorite Chopin waltz. Rudy realized—with a twinge of guilt for his betrayal of Bethany—that the only thing he wanted to do was cook dinner for Sasha that night. For a moment he fretted about the foolishness of this fantasy, about his assumption that she, too, always ate dinner at home alone. Maybe she had a slew of girlfriends who buffered her from loneliness. Rudy hoped so. He certainly didn’t want his own loneliness to seep out of him like the store’s bad aftershave and suffocate her.

  7

  Perhaps the thing Bethany had liked least about her job was managing young employees. She hated to be bossy, yet there is no room for error at a pharmacy. The new young pharmacist assigned to work for her was precise and fast for someone who’d just moved up from being a pharmacy tech. Unfortunately, he had the personality of a mollusk. An angry mollusk. His customer service skills were somewhere between lacking and belligerent, and she found herself trying to keep him from ringing up pat
ients and customers at the front window. His name was Waylan.

  “Your name’s nice. Like the singer?” she asked on his first day.

  “Ugh. Blech. Different spelling. Still sucks!” He capped a bottle, bagged it, and put it in the “waiting” tray. While some medications, such as loratadine and lorazepam, were easy to confuse—both a small white tablet to boot—Bethany could tell already that she wouldn’t have to worry about Waylan’s pharmaceutical skills. But she needed to gently but firmly work on his service attitude. The hospital, though not in the business of making big bucks, was a business nonetheless, and it wanted patients and family members to feel comfortable using the on-site pharmacy. Convenience. Compassionate advice.

  “Not your favorite musician, I’m guessing?” Her neck was stiff from a long shift. She tilted back her head, taking in the pockmarked acoustical tile above.

  “My parents wanted to give me a cowboy name.” Waylan threw the next order into the bin with too much force, and it overshot the basket, plummeting over the high counter to the floor below.

  Bethany was glad she had to bend down out of sight to retrieve the bag because she had to stifle a burst of laughter. This kid was the least cowboy-looking character you could imagine. Instead, a classic nerd. Too thin, with wrist bones bearing little knobs that protruded under his pale skin, thick glasses, wiry red hair that didn’t seem to want to conform to any style. She skipped up the three steps that led behind the pharmacist’s station, behind which were the rows of shelves with bottles. Handing Waylan the bag from the floor, she asked him to recheck the order to make sure neither the cap nor any of the tablets had broken.