gone unpaid, or report card unchecked, or e-mail unanswered. “When’s the last time we were on a date?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s three in the morning.”
“Not for at least a year. Not since he got sick. Let’s go to Monteleone’s. Have a cold Guinness.”
“Is it open?”
Tom tossed a pair of overalls in her direction, along with her twenty-five-year-old Who T-shirt. It was what she’d been wearing when they met, and no matter how much she’d changed since then, he told her he would forever remember her that way: an innocent kid from Ohio who still wrote letters to her grandmother once a month, and loved the Pinball Wizard. The only girl he’d met back then who’d made men wait in the lobby of her building before dates instead of inviting them up. What she hadn’t told him was that she’d been working seventy-hour weeks; she hadn’t had time for dating. He was the only man who’d stuck around long enough to propose and find out what her apartment in Queens had looked like. Still, it was nice that one of them remembered her youth so fondly.
She pulled the shirt over her head and buckled her overalls. When she stood, she pressed the side of her face into the crook of his arm. Above her, he sneezed. Then said, “I saved the lilies because I know you like them, but let’s take out the rest of the flowers when we go.”
She and Tom had weathered big fights and big egos, badly trained dogs, sick parents, sick kids, and a yearlong separation. She knew then that they would weather this, too. It reassured her that she could believe in that, in him. She’d been wrong last week when she’d told Audrey that nothing lasts because not everything dies. Sometimes love endures.
“Forget Monteleone’s. We’ll just wind up crying in our beers. Let’s walk down Broadway ’til we get hungry.”
“Deal,” he said.
It did not occur to her until three hours later, as she sat across from her husband eating buttermilk pancakes at Around the Clock on 8th Street and Astor Place, that the voice on the other line had belonged to Audrey Lucas.
33
Bones Break All the Time
A week after Audrey discovered Jayne Young’s body, Saraub Ramesh was high on Vicodin, watching the Vikings hose New York. His hospital bed was one of those Craftmatic adjustable jobs, just like he’d seen on TV when he was a kid. The game wasn’t nearly as disheartening as it might normally be. Then again, Vicodin.
In the wooden chair next to him, Sheila fiddled. She’d come to visiting hours every day since the accident, and even feigned an interest in football. Tuesday and Wednesday had been season recaps narrated by Mike Ditka. His sisters and their husbands had sat through that. His excuse, as he’d silently watched the boob tube instead of entertaining them at his bedside, had been his drug-induced stupor—it made conversation hard, and ESPN easy. The truth was, he’d never much cared for grand shows of affection, and they’d all kept staring, like the second he turned his head from the screen, they’d pounce, and weepingly declare their love for him.
His cousins, the new Ramesh and Ramesh, had come Thursday and Friday during NCAA rerun games. They’d razzed him about being the only person injured on the entire plane: You always were a spaz. Then they’d gotten teary-eyed, which he hadn’t expected.
“Why are you always flying all over the place? Why can’t you just stay still?” his cousin Frank had asked.
“Because,” Saraub answered.
Frank, a man with three kids, a nice house, a cashmere coat, and a smart, efficient wife, had sighed. “And your girl puts up with that. I envy you.”
Until that moment, Saraub had always considered himself the black sheep of the family. Over the years, he’d seen less of them because on a very fundamental level, they’d stopped understanding each other. Now, he reconsidered that assumption, and he reconsidered them, too.
That weekend—all twenty-six of them visited. Sisters, brothers-in-law, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles. They brought several four-hundred-dollar bouquets, made a racket, then tromped off for lunch at Ottomanelli’s. Their arrival had made him realize what had been missing from his studio apartment in Audrey’s absence: noise.
And today, Monday. A week since the accident. Sheila sat next to him, her glazed eyes on the game. Through it all, to his surprise, and perhaps hers, she’d been his constant. She’d cheered teams she didn’t care about, yelled at nurses to make sure he