stinks. Under it an equally smelly polo shirt. Below it jeans.
I come up with a button-down shirt, the other one my mother bought me, horribly wrinkled but better than this. Quickly I take off my shirts and fumble with the button-down, freezing again in an instant, standing there shaking with cold. My skin feels plastic. I have no coat.
By the time I’m dressed again I do not feel better. I look at my reflection in the car’s window and try without much success to slick my hair down in back. I wipe at the corners of my eyes and mouth.
Finally I stuff my keys into my pocket and I stuff my hands into my pockets as well. I walk-run the half block to Connelly’s. A little electronic bell goes off when I open the door. I hope there will be a crowd inside but there’s no one, just me for a moment, alone in an empty store. There’s a long counter to the right and no one behind it. There are aisles in the back and a wing that I can’t see. The lights above me are fluorescent and too bright.
A heavyset man emerges from an office and walks toward me behind the counter. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a thin gold chain with a cross on it. Connelly.
Help you? he asks, and I realize I haven’t moved from my place three inches in front of the door.
I’m looking, I say—I’m just looking around.
My voice is a husk of itself.
Connelly raises his eyebrows and shrugs. He is not as nice as he seemed in his pictures. He is not moving, I can tell—he suspects something about me.
I turn to my left wildly and see a wall of gardening tools. Rakes and those flat sharp-pronged things propped up against each other. Gloves and stuff. I walk toward it.
You a gardener? asks Connelly, eventually, after I have
stood there staring at things and not touching them for long enough.
My mother is, I say.
She never was though.
You looking for a Christmas present? asks Connelly.
I nod. I cannot speak.
Connelly comes out from behind the counter and asks me how big her yard is.
It’s small, I say. Like, barely anything.
So she’s got some little flower beds or something? asks Connelly. Some potted plants?
I nod.
He points to what looks like a miniature egg beater with sharp points. This is a great little tool, he says. Mixes up the dirt really good.
He looks at me when I don’t reply. You OK? he asks.
Does anyone work here, I begin.
He waits.
Does anyone work here named Francis Keller?
You know him? asks Connelly.
Yes, I say. Because I do.
Hang on, says Connelly, and he goes back behind the counter where he can still see me.
KEL, he shouts. He’s still looking at me.
I smooth my shirt. I clutch my hands together and release them.
I hear his voice before I see him.
• • •
The girl told me that I had to go for a walk.
She told me that she goes for a walk every day & so I should come with her once, just once.
It embarrassed me, thinking of this. Huffing & puffing away, laboring behind Yolanda, who, after all, is the pregnant one.
I told her that I would go for a walk if she would go see a doctor, & she said that sounded like a good idea, only she had no money to see a doctor.
“Don’t you have insurance?” I asked her. Stupidly.
“Nope!” she said brightly.
“Well what about when the baby wants to be born?”
“I guess I’ll find the money someplace,” she said.
In my heart I know it is why she has come to me, for help, & although I know I should be upset I can’t bring myself to be.
I told her I would give her the money. She made an appointment.
Yesterday she went out of the house at 10 in the morning and was gone for a very long time. Too long. By 2 I had told myself that she had left again & that was that & back to your old life, Arthur, but at 2:30 I heard her key in the lock & she came in carrying a bag of groceries.
“What are those?” I asked her. “You shouldn’t be carrying anything.”
“I got stuff for us,” she said.
I saw carrots peeking over the top.
“Good stuff for the baby,” she said. “Veggies.”
At 3 I was watching television when she said, “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“For our walk.”
My pulse began racing before I had even moved.
“To where?” I said.
“To the park. It’s nice out.”
“It’s