Things You Won't Say

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “You owe me a hundred and fifty bucks,” Jamie said. She wasn’t sure of the exact total, but that sounded right, if she gave herself a generous tip.

  “Who, us?” one said. His tie was loose and he seemed to be struggling to focus his eyes.

  Jamie put her hands on her hips. Most of them probably had trust funds, or good jobs. They had that look—prep school haircuts and blue blazers.

  “Pay up or I’m calling the cops,” Jamie said. She didn’t have a cell phone with her—back then they weren’t commonplace—but alcohol had dimmed the guys’ reflexes. “Come on, Alexander,” she said when the guys hesitated. She’d overheard the name when she’d been serving the guys.

  “Shit, she knows you!” one of them said.

  “I told you it was a dumb idea,” said another, punching his friend in the arm.

  “Twenty bucks each,” Jamie said. She pointed at the guy who’d absorbed the punch: “Thirty for you.”

  They still might’ve turned and run, but then Jamie caught sight of two police officers patrolling the street a half block away.

  “Officers!” she called out, waving them over.

  It was almost comical, how quickly the guys scrambled for their wallets as the policemen crossed the street. “Everything okay here?” the shorter cop asked. Jamie vaguely registered that he was gorgeous—dark hair, broad shoulders, olive skin—but she was focused on counting the money.

  “Everything’s great now,” Jamie said. The guys had given her an extra twenty, but she decided not to point that out. They were already walking away.

  “They try to run out on the bill?” the officer asked.

  “It’s okay,” Jamie said. “I chased them down and got the money.”

  The officers were grinning now. “I still think we should put a little fear into them. Maybe dissuade them from doing this again,” said the second cop.

  The two officers turned and began walking briskly down the street. Jamie wanted to watch, but her customers had already waited too long, so she hurried back to the restaurant.

  “What happened to you, girl?” another waitress asked. “Your tables kept bugging me for stuff. Now I’m in the weeds.”

  “Sorry,” Jamie said. “Long story, but a table walked out on me.”

  “That sucks. Bring two pitchers of Michelob to table eighteen, okay? And your corner table wants a jumbo onion rings.”

  Jamie had just about gotten caught up when she saw a flash of blue in the doorway of the restaurant. The two officers were back.

  “Hello, 21 Jump Street,” said her waitress friend, nudging Jamie as they both stared. “Doesn’t that cop on the right look a little like a young Johnny Depp?”

  Jamie thought he was even more handsome. He was just four inches or so taller than her five foot three, but he seemed imposing. Maybe it was his broad shoulders, or the way he carried himself. As he stood there in the doorway to the restaurant, his hands by his sides, his eyes moving slowly across the room, he exuded calm confidence.

  Then his eyes stopped moving. They’d landed on her.

  Jamie found herself blushing as she walked over to him, suddenly grateful she’d taken that moment to rub away her mascara smears.

  “Hi, Officer,” she said. The last name on the brass plate pinned to his shirt read ANDERSON.

  “Just wanted to let you know we had a little talk with those guys,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be back.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled then, but his eyes stayed serious and watchful. “I don’t think you needed our help,” he said. “Looked like you were doing just fine on your own.”

  Jamie grinned. “I’m not sure about that. They were about to run off, and even in my Nikes, I probably wouldn’t have caught them.”

  He glanced down at her sneakers, and she had the impression he was checking out her legs, but maybe she was just flattering herself. She could’ve stood there all day, but the clatter of the restaurant invaded the moment.

  “Can I get you a beer?” she offered. “On the house.”

  “I can’t drink when I’m on duty,” he said, and she instantly felt foolish. Here she was, trying to corrupt a cop. “But maybe I’ll come in and take you up on that another time.” He extended his hand. “I’m Mike, by the way.”

  “Jamie,” she said. His hand felt very warm.

  He walked out, then she hurried to get the now-cold onion rings to her corner table.

  He didn’t come in the next night, or the one after that. Jamie had off the following night, but the other waitresses knew to be on the lookout for Officer Anderson, and they said he hadn’t appeared.

  A week passed, and she resigned herself to the fact that he’d only been doing his duty. The electricity she’d felt had begun and ended with her, a closed circuit.

  But then one evening she’d gone to hand a menu to a guy in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, sitting alone in a corner, and when he’d looked up, the menu had slipped between her fingers and landed on the table.

  “Are the cheeseburgers here any good?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They’re terrible,” she said.

  He laughed. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Brave of you, Officer,” she said.

  “Call me Mike,” he said.

  “So what can I get you?” Me, me, me, she thought.

  “Could I get a Bud on tap and a medium-rare with Swiss?”

  “Sure,” she said. It was just five-thirty, before the real rush began, so she lingered by his table after delivering his drink. She learned that he’d grown up in New Jersey, that he was twenty-four, and that he knew how to use one of the restaurant’s matchbooks to expertly balance the leg on his unsteady table.

  But she didn’t learn the most important—the defining—thing about him until the following week, when they’d gone out for dinner and he’d driven her home. She thought he was working up the nerve to kiss her good-bye, which was surprising; he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d struggle with confidence issues. Then he told her about his young son, who was the reason he hadn’t come into the restaurant sooner. He had custody of Henry during most of his time off.

  When he’d finished talking, he looked straight ahead, instead of at her. Almost as if he expected her to open her front door and run away.

  “What’s his name?” Jamie asked.

  Mike opened his wallet and pulled out a photo of a cute toddler with dark hair and eyes.

  “He looks just like you,” Jamie said.

  “Yeah, except he got his dimples from his mother,” Mike said.

  “Ah,” Jamie said. “And she is. . . ?” Her voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure what she’d intended to ask. But Mike seemed to know.

  “Not in the picture,” he said. “For me, anyway. We share custody of Henry.”

  “Ah,” Jamie said again. She sat there for another moment, and then Mike leaned over to kiss her. His lips were soft, but the rough stubble around his mouth scratched her chin and she made a small, involuntary noise in the back of her throat as he wrapped a hand around the back of her head, pulling her even closer. She’d had only three real boyfriends, but kissing them hadn’t made her feel like this. She felt as if she were dissolving into Mike. When he finally pulled away, she was dizzy.

  Jamie had always known she wanted to be a mom. She’d imagined in a vague sort of way that it would happen in her late twenties, and that she’d have three or four kids. But she was fresh out of college, with more than a decade of school loans in front of her. She was barely able to legally drink, and she often slept until ten or eleven in the morning after a late shift at the restaurant. Mike had a real job, an important one, as well as his own town house. When he mowed the lawn, he put Henry in a backpack carrier—at least until Henry was old enough to stand in front of Mike and put his own hands on t
he handle and pretend to push the mower. Mike changed diapers expertly, hoisted Henry onto his shoulders whenever they had to walk more than a block or two, which always made Henry giggle, and repaired leaky pipes under the sink while Henry lay beside him, banging his plastic Fisher-Price tools against the floor.

  How could she have avoided falling in love with both of them?

  Summer seeped into fall, and she began working at the public relations firm, which meant her schedule became more aligned with Mike’s. She fell into the habit of driving to Mike’s place on Friday nights, and he’d cook for the three of them—lasagna or chicken Parmesan or shrimp fajitas. She’d read to Henry while Mike did the dishes, or vice versa. Within a few months, Jamie had memorized the words to Green Eggs and Ham and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. After Henry fell asleep, she and Mike would go to the living room and cuddle on the couch. Sometimes he’d rub her feet while they watched a movie.

  Her friends teased her for being hopelessly domestic. They were hitting happy hours and dance floors, thinking about joining the Peace Corps or working temp jobs, getting drunk and making out with crushes. But Jamie had always felt older than her peers. She’d been cooking meals for her dad and Lou since she was fifteen, and the day she got her driver’s license, she’d begun to do all the grocery shopping and other household errands, too. She’d been an anchor for her family ever since her mother died. Her friends couldn’t understand what a deep sense of relief she felt in finally being able to lean on someone else.

  She and Mike fought over his propensity to shut down emotionally, over the fact that she got snappish when she was tired, over stupid things like whether to splurge on Thai or Indian food delivery. But they always found their way back to each other. Jamie would finish getting the kids to sleep and come downstairs to discover Mike had built a fire and opened a beer for her. Or Mike would fry up bacon on Sunday mornings and help the kids make a gigantic pancake that he’d cut into wedges for everyone to share.

  But now, for the first time, she’d sensed a kind of emptiness in him. The emotional steel running through his core had been chipped away, leaving this gray-faced, slumped stranger. Watching her husband become unmoored was terrifying.

  After they’d talked outside their home last night, they’d told the children a simplified version of what had happened. Mike hadn’t wanted Christie around, so Jamie had gotten her out of the house quickly. It wasn’t until Christie was gone and Jamie had tried to pour herself a second, desperately needed glass of Chardonnay that she’d realized there was only an inch left in the bottle. Christie must’ve consumed most of it, and that was their last bottle. Jamie had reached for a beer instead and uncapped one for Mike. But she’d ended up pouring his down the drain because he hadn’t wanted to touch it.

  Now, as the minutes and then hours ticked by and the bench seemed to grow harder beneath her, she realized nothing could have prepared them for this. No amount of stress or training or love.

  “Mrs. Anderson?”

  She looked up, expecting to see another cop with a sympathetic expression, but a thin guy in a suit with a cowlick in his brown hair stood there instead.

  “I’m Davis MacDonald, the attorney for your husband,” he said, extending a hand. His wrist slipped out from beneath his jacket cuff and she noticed it was hairless, like a child’s. Maybe he was even younger than she’d first thought.

  “We’re taking a break, so Mike asked me to check in with you and let you know it’ll probably be another half hour or so,” he said.

  “You’re from the union?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  Yes, Jamie thought. I need you to save my husband.

  But she just shook her head, and he started to walk away.

  “Wait,” Jamie called, and he turned around, his briefcase bumping into his knee. She stood up and hurried close to him.

  “Can you tell me anything?” she asked. “Do you think he’s going to be indicted?”

  The lawyer hesitated.

  “Tell me!” she said, her voice too loud in the open space. She saw a few officers turn to look at her, then quickly avert their eyes.

  “Look, we’re still a long way from that. The FIT team isn’t even done investigating,” he said.

  “FIT?” Jamie echoed.

  “It’s the Force Investigative Team,” he explained. “They’ve got a special task force for shootings like this so cops aren’t accused of tampering with evidence for their friends. Just sit tight for a while. I’ll give you new information as soon as I have it.”

  Jamie slowly walked back to her bench, digging into her purse for her checkbook, wondering how much a more experienced attorney would cost. Their bank account balance was just over six thousand dollars, but they needed to pay the mortgage and credit card bill in a few days. How many mortgage payments could you skip before your house was repossessed? Jamie wondered.

  Jamie went to church because it was important to Mike. But she hadn’t truly prayed since she was a teenager and her mother had been in the hospital with the staph infection. God hadn’t listened to her then.

  Now, though, she bowed her head, and began to pray with everything she had.

  •••

  On the bright side, the fire Lou had started in Jamie’s kitchen was a small one. The vent over the stove was going full blast, and all the windows in the house were thrown open now, which didn’t matter because the broken air-conditioning meant it was as hot inside as it was outside. Lou had found a can of air freshener in the bathroom and squirted it around, but the combination of floral-scented chemicals and burning plastic might have made things worse.

  The day had started off smoothly enough. She’d missed Tabby and the other elephants, so she’d brought the kids to the zoo, and as a special treat, she’d let them sneak in apples and toss them over the fence. Lou had breathed in deeply, filling her nose and throat with the honest smell of hay and dirt and mammal. Being here grounded her, which she’d sorely needed after the tumult of the past few days.

  Emily was wearing a pink dress and matching pink sunglasses with lenses shaped like stars. She’d rejected four outfits before settling on the ensemble this morning, and she’d asked Lou to paint her fingernails to match, but Lou had begged off, pretending to be allergic to the chemicals in the polish. She wasn’t sure how Jamie felt about nail polish for six-year-olds, and she didn’t want to mess up again.

  “How can you tell she’s pregnant?” Emily had asked as she looked at Tabitha and wrinkled her little nose. “I mean, wasn’t she already pretty fat?” Lou had hoped Emily didn’t think the same thing about her.

  “What we do is take a blood sample from behind her ear,” Lou had explained. “The skin is thin there, and when the blood tells us an elephant is ready to get pregnant, we put her with a male. You can kind of tell when the male is ready to . . . to, ah, make a baby.”

  “What happens?” Sam had asked.

  “They get excited,” Lou had said. That was generic enough, she’d decided. “Male elephants go through this period called musth, which gets their bodies ready for having a baby.”

  “Musth,” Eloise had repeated, making it sound like “muss.”

  “Then what happens?” Emily had asked. Her sunglasses had slipped down on her nose and she’d peered over them at Lou, like the world’s most adorable librarian.

  “Then the female elephant gets pregnant,” Lou had said, neatly skipping over the whole description of intercourse. Bad enough to try to describe how humans did it—no way was she talking about elephant sex to this crew. “She stays pregnant for about two years.”

  “Wow,” Sam had said. “That sounds boring.”

  “She’ll probably be happy when she gives birth,” Lou had said.

  “When is she going to have the baby?” Emily had asked.

  “Sometime this summer,” Lou had said. �
�Do you know the crazy part? We’ve got this thing called an ultrasound. It lets us take pictures of the baby as it grows inside Tabitha’s tummy.”

  “You can see inside her tummy? How?” Sam had wanted to know.

  “We have to put the ultrasound wand in her butt.”

  The kids had exploded with laughter. “In her butt!” Sam had shouted repeatedly, drawing a horrified look from an apple-cheeked grandmother who was holding the hand of a toddler.

  They’d stayed at the zoo for hours, visiting the baby cheetahs and eating popcorn and ice cream cones and mimicking the antics of the monkeys. Lou had checked her cell phone as they walked to the minivan in the employee parking lot. No calls from Jamie, which hadn’t seemed like a good sign. She’d noticed Sam watching, and she’d erased her frown and tousled his hair.

  “Did my mom call?” he’d asked.

  “Not yet,” she’d said.

  He’d just nodded, but Lou thought he looked sad, so she’d stopped at a vending machine and gotten a few bags of M&M’s.

  Lou wasn’t much of a cook, so when they got home, she’d decided to heat up a frozen pizza. She’d turned on the oven, and about five minutes later, the smoke detectors had erupted. That’s when she’d realized Jamie stored pots and pans in the oven, including one huge plastic Tupperware bin—probably because the kitchen was so small and cabinet space was at a premium. So much for the pizza.

  Lou found a bag of baby carrots and some Granny Smith apples in the refrigerator’s bins and cut everything up and arranged it on a big plate, reflecting that she’d made this exact same snack for the elephants countless times. She brought the platter into the living room, where the kids were watching TV.

  “It still smells bad in here,” Emily said.

  “It’ll air out soon,” Lou promised. She filled Sadie’s bowl with fresh water, then let the dog out back. She felt her cell phone buzzing in her pocket as she was calling for the dog to come in.

  “We’re on our way home,” Jamie said in a voice so raw and gravelly Lou almost didn’t recognize it.