for some friends.” I spotted Jimmy in the greeting card section. He picked a card out, read it, and put it back before getting out another. He looked up at me, saw me watching, and waved. Haylie stood beside him, flipping through an Allure.
“So Tim gets back tonight,” he said. “I’m sure you know that.”
I nodded. I tried not to let my face change.
“You might move in, huh? After I move out? He said you might.”
I made a small, circular motion with my head, neither a nod nor a shake. The store’s stereo was playing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”
“You should,” he said. “It’s a great apartment.” He looked away. He seemed nervous. He had never had to talk with me without Tim standing right there. “Plus, you know, I think it would make him pretty happy.” He looked newly embarrassed, but he pressed on. “I figure it’s the least I can do, you know—move out and make room for you. He’s been a good friend.”
After Rudy left, I looked back up into the aisles. Jimmy was still looking at greeting cards. It was almost ten. Tim was well into his drive home, probably in southern Iowa already. Jimmy looked up and waved again. I waved back, smiling. He thought he was tormenting me, I’m sure. But I no longer felt a hurry to get anywhere. He was only wasting his own time.
I got back to the dorm just past midnight. When I first saw my mother sitting outside my room, I assumed she had come back for her phone. I walked toward her, shaking my head. I had asked for her phone again when I’d dropped Jimmy and Haylie at the town house. Jimmy said that he wasn’t sure where it was, but that he would look for it, and that he would probably find it around the time his car was fixed. I tried to think of how I would explain all this to my mother, and I tried to calculate how long this conversation might take. Half an hour. Maybe more. She would have all kinds of questions and concerns. I needed to read at least a chapter of chemistry before I went to bed.
She didn’t look up as I approached. She sat with her back against my door, her legs stretched out, one rubber-soled boot crossed over the other. She had her long gray coat spread out on top of her like a blanket. I stopped walking, and she looked up. She’d been crying.
“Hi,” I said.
She started to stand. The bottom of her coat caught under her boot, and she almost lost her balance. I held out my hand, and she took it, righting herself with a smile.
“Hi,” she said. “I met one of the girls on your floor.” Her voice was hoarse, quiet. “Marley? She plays the French horn?”
The bass drum of reggae music hovered overhead. I took off my mittens and put them in my pockets. I waited, my eyes on hers.
She held up one finger. She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose. “I’m here because…” She looked at the wall behind me. “Veronica. I’m here because I need a place to stay.”
My mind moved quickly to the acceptable. Her van had broken down. She had lost her keys, but she could get a spare from the office in the morning. The unacceptable—that she had had a fight with the boyfriend I imagined she was moving in with—hovered in the back of my mind.
She nodded, patient with my slowness, my steady refusal to understand.
I looked down. She had been sitting on a stack of folded sheets and blankets. I recognized the chenille throw that she used to keep on our living room couch, and the flower-print fitted sheet for the twin bed I had slept on for years. All at once, the floor seemed far away, and not at all dependable.
“I need to stay with you for just a while,” she said. She reached over with her ungloved hand to touch my shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry. It’s too cold to sleep in the van. You don’t know this? You don’t know this already? Honey. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
10
SHE WAS TOO TIRED to get into the whole story. In a nutshell, she said, she’d been evicted from her apartment because of the dog. Yes, she was having some financial troubles, which she was certain she could work out shortly. But she hoped