“Isn’t it good enough that there might be leave? Does it really matter whe—”
“Yes. It does matter.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise you.”
“Spare a quarter…!” She laughs.
“Sorry?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. I suppose I don’t like surprises very much, is all.” That noise again. A nail being bitten? “Well,” she says. “I have to go, but if you hear anything will you give me a call?”
“I will.”
“Thank you.”
She hangs up. I toss the phone on the bed and turn to one side, then the other, in front of the mirror before getting dressed for the grocery store. There is still cab-money left, a stuffed-down pile in a Mason jar, enough for some quick meals, maybe. Enough to last until my next job, if I get another job in the next three days.
________
“Mia. I wish—man, I can’t believe I missed you. I was sure I’d catch you after work…What time is it there? Six-thirty, right? Where are you?…What I’d give to hear your voice. I mean, not the voice on the machine, but in real life…Well, I guess—I mean—Hell, Mia. There was so much I wanted to say, and it’s really not that much—it’s not anything important—but I wanted to say it to you in person. Don’t feel bad, though, for not being there. I’m not mad, I just…I miss you…I, uh, hope you’re doing okay, and I hope you know that I’m doing okay…I’ll call again as soon as I can. You have letters coming. And I got yours! About two weeks ago, and it smelled like you…I’m so happy you wrote, you don’t even know…Anyway, uh—I guess I’ll try again when I can…Love you, M…Bye.”
________
“Mia, hon, it’s Olivia. Are you there?… Hello-oo…Well, I received a phone call from Jakey just a little bit ago and he said he tried to reach you, but that you weren’t there…Where are you? Are you all right?. . .We’re just worried and want to make sure you’re safe, so give me a call, if you will, when you get in. If I don’t hear from you by this evening—well—I suppose I’ll drive out…It’s a very long trip, of course, but we have to know you’re okay, because if you’re not, as Jake’s mother, I can get a Red Cross message to him if I need to…He wouldn’t be able to come home, of course, if something’s happened to you—sorry, dear, they just don’t do that for girlfriends, and I think they should, really—but at least he wouldn’t be uninformed…Not that I think anything’s happened to you. Heaven forbid…But—Oh, this is silly. I’m sure you’re fine. Please call me when you get this? Our Jake is so worried about you—oh, and he said he forgot to ask you to please send him a care package. Unless you’ve already sent one, of course, but if you haven’t, we ask that you please do it soon. He said you know what he wants…If you’re too busy, hon, I can certainly put one together and get it out for him tomorrow…Okay, dear. I hope to hear from you later.”
APRIL 19, SATURDAY
The setting sun falls bright and warm on my face and Chancey meows from the floor. I turn my back to the window and cover my head with the pillow, try to remember whether I fed him before going to sleep but after shopping, after coming home and listening to Jake’s message the fourth, fifth, or sixth time. After checking the number he called from and then dialing it, knowing it wouldn’t work. Clicks and fuzz.
Sharp pain in my heel. Chancey, his claws plucking my sock. “Sorry.” I slide out of bed and follow him to the kitchen, pressing play on the machine on the way. “Mia. I wish—man, I can’t believe I missed you. I was sure I’d catch you after work…What time is it there? Six-thirty, right? …”
When his food bowl is filled I sit beside him on the floor and stroke his tail and watch him jam his snout into the kibble. “I’m the worst cat mother, I know. I promise I’ll take better care of—”
“Mia?” Her knocks come brief and rapid.
On the other side of the front door, the sound of shifting feet, swipes on gritty linoleum. How many hours since she called yesterday? How many times today did I open my eyes, a second at the most, to gauge how high on the wall the day-shadows climbed? I was going to call her. I’d meant to call her. The microwave says it’s eight o’clock.
“Mia?”
I sit stone-still and breathe shallow, open-mouthed, and wait for her to leave. Chancey twitches his whiskers at me, round black eyes watching, watching, and then he is meowing, and I cover his nose and his mouth until he squirms free and runs out, into the bedroom. I think, Sorry.
She didn’t wait a full day. Here to confirm I’m no good and that anyone but me would be better for Jake. He must have told her when they talked that he’s only received one letter. One, compared to how many written by people like Denise? How many letters and stamp-collaged boxes clutter William’s side of the tent? I wonder if Jake pretends to be happy for him while making excuses for me. “She’s not much of a writer,” he might say. “She’s not good at putting her feelings into words, you know, but I know she’s thinking of me.” And William would say that was odd, for an ex-English instructor, and nice try, Jake.
Any other woman, a better woman, would send weekly packages and write letters every other day, would be home when he called. No wife material here, Olivia will tell him. At home at her table she’ll write a long letter all about me, hint not too subtly that I’m an unlikely candidate for marriage.
I believe that’s how she would phrase it, anyway.
“Mia.” She knocks again. “Hon, are you in there? Are you okay?”
I stay quiet. Chancey pads in, his toes lightly pat-pat-patting on the floor, and eats his last piece of food, sniffs the water.
“I heard you talking before, Mia. Please answer the door.”
Damn the cat, anyway.
The sink shines, empty, but the side counters are sloppy-stacked with dirty dishes, plates speckled with stuck food bits and glass-bottoms crusted with dried milk and orange juice.
“Mia?”
Dust devils hug cabinet edges and the final wedge of setting sun falls in orange highlights, as if making a concerted effort to magnify the cat hair and litter on the floor.
She knocks again.
“Just a minute.” I get up and rush to the living room—two pictures, there, to turn face-up—and the bedroom—one—and back to the kitchen for the picture on top of the refrigerator, her voice carrying on meanwhile.
“Oh! Mia, I’m just glad to hear your voice. Jakey was so worried. We both were. That’s why I couldn’t—well, I’ll just wait until. . .” She trails off.
I wish there were time to do something with the dishes, the litter box, the stovetop. A cheesed noodle clings to the edge of a burner, and circles of…something brown…spot the white porcelain top. But, no time. I straighten my sweatshirt, check my jeans for dirt and stains, and wipe anything off my eyes. I open the door and downstairs spices mingle with—is it rose? some strong flower—perfume. A yellow ribbon pin clings to the spot over Olivia’s heart, and at her feet stands a square bag on wheels with an extended, extendable handle.
“I’m so glad you’re home.” Her hands clasp in the tight space between her breasts. “I wasn’t sure until I heard you. I saw your lights on, and I thought it was your car out front, but…well, you took so long to answer, and you never know. I know how young women like to go out on the town on weekends, and sometimes they can’t get home, so they take cabs every—”
“Well, here I am.” I ask if she’d like to come in. She picks up her bag, small enough for less than three days’ clothes.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says, “but it’s a long drive, so I brought some things. I thought maybe you and I could shop for care package items for Jakey. Unless you’ve already sent one, of course. Look at me, talking without even thinking. Did you, hon?”
“I tried and tried, but there’s just—I’ve been working so many hours, and everything. I was going to do it tonight.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, that’s fine, then. But, let’s not go tonight. Let’s go in the morning, together, all right?” She moves past me into the kitch
en and stands there in the middle, then pulls a ribbon-magnet from her purse and hands it to me. “Here you go, hon.”
“Thanks.”
She sets her purse on the counter and I stick the magnet to the oven door.
“I’m just so glad to be here. I know how alone you must be; Jakey said you don’t have many friends, and going through something like this by yourself can be—well—it can be difficult.”
Jakey. “Yes,” I say. “I’m glad you came, too. I was dying for some company.” More and more, her voice comes easier to me.
“Oh, good!”
I start a pot of coffee and line glasses in the sink, spray water in each, and wipe off the counters while she sets up in the guest room. It’s the one room I don’t use, so it’s clean, at least. By the time she finishes and joins me in the kitchen, the pot’s filled halfway.
“That smells wonderful.” Her eyes pass over the sink and she says, “Do you have a clean mug?” She sits at the table and folds her hands in front of her and yawns.
There are no clean mugs, so I wash one and wait for the coffee to finish brewing. She looks again at the sink and then at me, starts to say something, stops, then says, “You’re not eating, hon.”
“I am.”
“Have you looked in a mirror?”
“I’m just tired,” I say. “The shifts are long. And they start early. I have to be there at six, you know, so I—I mean, it’s…I’d have to get up too early if I wanted breakfast.”
“You looked just beautiful at Christmas, and you had the same job, then.”
I wipe off the outside of the pot, where dust has layered. Jake and I never think to wash the whole pot. We only swish water inside.
“Mia,” she says, “you’re a stick. And what is all that?” She flips a hand at the mess on the counter.
“Dishes.”
“Those aren’t dishes, hon.” She slides out from the table and goes to the counter and picks up a sauce pan. “And this?”
“A lot comes in a box.”
“Sweetie, I’ve made pounds of macaroni and cheese in my time. Jake’s favorite side—when it’s not homemade—and I know how much comes in a box. It’s this much,” she says, pointing inside the pot, “plus about a half cup.” She picks up a short stack of black, plastic microwave trays with serving dividers. “What they put in these could hardly feed a child.”
Coffee’s on, so I fill a mug and set it on the table. She sits in front of it. “You really should eat more.”
“I eat just fine,” I say. “I was eating too much before, is all. I’m on a sort of diet.”
“Well, I don’t know what for. Jakey never liked his girls very skinny.”
I scratch my forehead to hide my eyes when I check the clock. Olivia has been here ten minutes and I can’t see past another ten, can’t see the inside of an hour, or a whole evening. Five in the morning, Jake’s time, and that he’s probably waking up right now brings a little comfort, stirs something in my stomach. I think, G’morning, and say, “How’s your coffee?”
“Perfect. Thank you, hon. I need it after that drive. I’d have been here sooner, but the weather was just awful.”
“Really? How long ago did you leave? I got your message just a little bit ago, and I was calling you back when you knocked.”
“Well, I left that quite a while ago, and I suppose I thought, why not? You need somebody, I need somebody. I’m just thankful the weather didn’t get any worse.” She looks out the window. “It’s fine here.”
“I wish you hadn’t put yourself through that,” I say. “It wasn’t necessary. I—really, I was just about to call you.”
“Don’t be silly.” She waves me off. “Anything for Jake. And you. You know that.”
I pour my own mug and the hot coffee melts the rubbery ring of a different day’s coffee circling the inside. I join her at the table.
“It was awful,” she says. “It got so bad I couldn’t even see and had to watch the tail lights in front of me just to stay on the road. And even then, you never can tell. They might pull off to the side to wait out the weather, and then what? I’d run right into them and be stranded.” She lifts her mug, sips, sets it down. “But I kept going, anyway. If you stay far enough behind, you have time to react to anything, and it was just fog and rain, after all. Though, we did end up standing still for about five minutes when we came across a tractor-trailer jackknifed in the median. Horrible,” she says. “I don’t know if the driver died. There was an ambulance, so I suppose he could have died. It’s dangerous out there today. Any other time I’d have stayed home. Dear, I so hope you’re careful. You are careful, aren’t you?”
“I try to be, yes.”
“Well. Because when you look at what it was like today, it just seems there are times when no one has any business being on the road.”
“You’re a saint to have made the drive,” I say.
“Oh, now,” she says. “Not a saint. Just a mother. It’s the least I could do. Jakey would do the same for me, for you, for anybody. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Not laughing outright means holding my breath. Two, three winters ago, Jake and I rented a cabin in the woods in Georgia, a two-bedroom, two-story house in the hills, cheap because it was off-season. The forecast had called for spring-like temperatures in the low to mid-fifties, so I left my coat on its hanger and packed light sweaters and sweatshirts. Our first morning there, Jake and I left the cabin with full travel mugs and slid down a rocky slope to a narrow, leaf-padded trail.
The first ten minutes had been lovely, had passed as advertised: a brochure morning of bird calls, twigs snapping in echoes, and a tree-silhouetted, bright orange sunrise over the mountain on the opposite side of the valley. The air smelled like fresh bark and we stopped for a minute to breathe it.
We walked half a mile before the crisp, refreshing breeze turned into a slicing, burning wind. I pulled my hair over my cheeks and said, “It’s freezing.”
“Yeah,” Jake said and closed his jacket tighter.
I tucked my hands in my sleeves, looping a cold finger around the travel-mug handle. The other hand I alternated from ear to ear, warming each for a few seconds before switching. “The forecast said at least fifty.”
“I know,” he said. “They also said a ten percent chance of snow.” He looked up at the sky. “Too bad you didn’t bring your jacket.”
“What’s funny?” Olivia says.
“I was just remem—”
“It’s true,” she says. “I would do anything for you and Jake. I hope you know that.”
“I do.” My tongue feels like jerky. I get up for a glass of water and drink it fast. Some of it spills down the sides of my chin and I try to wipe it away without her seeing.
“Water,” she breathes. “That must be how tired I am! It hadn’t even occurred to me, and I’m absolutely parched. May I have a glass?”
The glass I used was the last clean one. I wash it, fill it with water, drop in an ice cube and put it in front of her.
She drinks half of it. “He sounded wonderful, by the way. Oh, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to talk to him.”
“That’s twice you’ve talked to him…?”
“Three times, I think. Let me see…once when he first got there, the second time I told you about, and then this time. So, yes. Three. I’ve been very lucky.” She dips a finger in her coffee and gets up to put it in the microwave. “I hope you don’t mind me telling you this. I know you haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but I think the important thing is that he’s safe. And, well, he did try to call you yesterday, after all, but I guess you weren’t home.”
“No.”
The microwave stops and she pulls out her mug. “Well, like I said—and I know you agree, hon—all that matters is that he’s okay. I listen to the news every day, you know, and not a day goes by that I don’t hear about someone being killed one way or another. Did you hear about the crash?”
“No.”
“W
ell, when I hear or see things like that I just think, ‘At least it’s not Jake.’ I feel so horribly—
(Horrible, I think)
—for those poor, other mothers—”
“When was it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The crash. When was it? What kind of helicopter?”
“Don’t worry, hon. It wasn’t him. It was a Blackhawk, thank God.”
“Is that all?” I wait, but the sarcasm is lost on her. “Were there survivors?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so. There rarely are, you know. But you and me, and all of them, we have to stay strong. Have to believe in our President, and believe in the work they do over there and know that they wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for a good reason. You just have to trust that, and know that no matter how many die, it’s for a reason. Even if it’s a hundred. Four hundred! You’ll see. We’ll visit the memorial tomorrow, and you’ll see. And it’s not too bad, you know. The number. Fifteen, maybe? No—I believe it was…eighteen?” She rolls her eyes. “I can’t remember. Can you believe it? And I just saw it on the news this morning.”
She watches me over her coffee. “It’s hard. I know.” Her hand slides toward mine on the table, just to the center, and her fingers, the skin shiny like wet dough, beckon. I let her grip mine loosely. “You just have to have faith that he’ll be okay,” she says. “That’s what I do. I feel so badly that other mothers are losing their children to this war every day, I do, but I’m also so blessed that Jake has made it this far, because you never know. You just never know when and if it will be him.”
No good response for this, so I say, “He’s a good pilot.”
“I know he is, I know,” she says. “But sometimes, it just doesn’t matter. They have those little guys shooting them right out of the sky.”
Coffee. I take a long drink to dilute the acid in my mouth. “What were you saying earlier? Something about a memorial?”
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