of her own children immediately jumped into her mind. She tried to push them aside as she left Vicky in charge and walked past the other classrooms, where life was still undisturbed. Her heart was beating in double time.
“It’s a telephone call for you,” the office assistant said. “They told me it was urgent.”
“It’s about Henry,” Maria Savona said when Jill picked up.
Jill had been expecting a call like this for years.
“He’s okay. But he was exposed to something, we don’t know what. We’ve got a team in the air right now.”
“Where is he?”
“Still in Indonesia, in isolation. We will keep him there a few days to see if he manifests symptoms. Try not to drive yourself crazy with worry. We don’t know the means of transmission of this organism, or even if it’s contagious. It might be poison, it might be a parasite. Even if it’s airborne, he’s probably safe, he had a mask on. We’ll know more soon.”
Jill knew from Henry that the mask was not much protection. He would have needed a full-face respirator and a Tyvek suit if he was working in a hot zone. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
“I want to be candid with you, Jill. It’s my fault. I’m the one who sent him. He did this as a favor to me. If anything happens to him, I’ll never forgive myself.”
It wasn’t Maria’s fault. Henry would have gone, no matter what.
* * *
—
ON THE WAY HOME, Jill stopped at the bakery in Little Five Points to pick up Teddy’s birthday cake for the party the next day. She was determined to behave as if everything was fine. Henry knew how to take care of himself. She would tell the children…something.
“Teddy, the birthday boy!” the gray-haired woman in a candy-striped apron exclaimed. The display counter was filled with cookies and cupcakes and fresh loaves of honeyed bread, a million beautiful calories begging for a home. The aroma itself was fattening, Jill thought. But rituals had to be observed.
Inside the baker’s box was a red-velvet cake with white frosting and three Minions on top. Teddy grinned, showing a missing incisor. He loved Minions.
“Edna, you’ve hit another home run,” Jill said.
“Oh, I know my audience,” she replied. “What about you, Helen? Why don’t you pick yourself out a cookie? The oatmeal raisins are just out of the oven.”
Jill pulled into their drive. They lived on Ralph McGill Boulevard, near the Carter Presidential Library, in a 1920s two-story redbrick house that they bought during the recession. It was built by the people who had owned the brickyard, so it was solid—the one the wolf couldn’t blow down, Henry said. They didn’t have children at the time, or money, so they had set about remodeling it, just the two of them. Henry was adept with his hands. He built a workshop in the basement and trimmed the molding for the ten-foot ceilings, while Jill painted the living and dining rooms. One day Henry took a sledgehammer and knocked down the shiplap walls of the utility room hehind the kitchen, then remade the space into a screen porch. That’s where they ate most of their meals. Jill and Henry would sit there in the evening with a glass of wine, looking out on the zinnias and tomatoes in the garden. They talked about everything. Normal happiness. Something that the two of them had made together.
The house had good bones. An ample living room, with lots of light, looked out on the big tiled veranda that spanned the width of the house. The kids loved to play out there. There was an Amish porch swing they had bought online, and behind that, a trellis supporting a pomegranate that Henry had espaliered.
The upstairs they rented out to Mrs. Hernández. She was a solitary older lady who said she had only one cat, but there were always more. When the smell of the litter became oppressive, Jill would have a word with her. Jill really wanted to boot her out and take over the whole house. They could afford it now. The kids would have so much more room to spread out, and Jill and Henry would have the master bedroom upstairs. This was an ongoing marital spat. Henry was frugal. There were three bedrooms downstairs, he pointed out, more than enough to accommodate their family, and the rent covered most of the mortgage. Jill suspected he was too softhearted to ask Mrs. Hernández to leave.