she has already had to take off from work this year. In a threatening tone she says she’ll come up tomorrow but that she may end up getting fired for it.
Angel and Johnny get on the phone together. I imagine Johnny nodding and Angel growing tearful. Johnny used to be a volunteer paramedic, so he asks me technical questions about Mother’s condition, questions I can’t answer.
Ryan starts to pray into the phone the minute I tell him the news. I tell him that I will pick him up in the morning, and then hang up.
Pat says he is very busy at work right now, and that with everyone else being at the hospital, Mother won’t need him. He asks me to call him after the surgery and let him know how it went.
When I hang up the phone I am exhausted. I feel like I have been awake for days on end. My eyes are dry from the sterile hospital air. I rest for a minute on the tiny bench in the booth, my forehead pressed against the metal change box on the phone. I take deep breaths, the cleansing kind that we talk about in my women’s group. I breathe until I am light-headed, and then I open my purse. I take out the card I wrote the mayor’s home number on. I dial, and when he answers, I say, “Meet me on Route 17 North next to the Houlihan’s restaurant.”
There is a silence, and then he says, “But that’s the—”
“I know. Just please meet me there.”
When I arrive at the Fairmount Motel he is waiting in the parking lot in his bruised-looking Honda. Chastity peers wide-eyed out of the back window. In the darkness, the dog looks alarmingly like a small child. Vince gets out of the car with his head down, wearing a baseball hat. He looks at me anxiously from under the brim.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I come here to think. I rent the room from one of the women in my reading group.”
“You come here to think?” He is looking at me as if I am a stranger, not the woman he confessed to love a few hours earlier. The summer air is a little cool, and I shiver in my thin blouse. Louis still has my coat. I think, Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.
“Look,” I say. “I’ve had a really hard evening. I thought maybe we could talk here.”
“All right,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
He tips his hat up and I can see his warm brown eyes saying, Yes.
I am suddenly so nervous I can feel my arms and legs break out in goose bumps. I walk ahead of him toward the room on the end of the strip motel, room number 111. I picture what lies ahead of me. The room simple, but clean. The bathroom with its nice deep bathtub. My novels in a neat stack on the closet shelf. My own pillows brought from home, extra firm. The room that has been filled with everything I need. I cannot believe, as I reach the door and fit the key into the lock, that I have actually invited another person inside.
LOUIS
I wake up at dawn on the den sofa, a paperback mystery folded over my chest. I tried to wait up for Kelly last night, but kept nodding off. I stand up carefully, stretching to ease the cramp in the middle of my back. I find my khakis where I left them the night before, in the den closet, folded on top of the Scrabble board. I know it is important to Kelly that our cleaning lady not know I am sleeping down here, so I have taken to doing my own laundry.
I make my way upstairs and look in on my wife. She is lying on her side, perfectly centered on her half of the king-sized bed. I can tell by her steady breathing that she is asleep. I don’t wake her. She will have to get up soon enough, to make it to the hospital in time to see her mother before surgery. I miss Kelly. I miss lying beside her. When I first started sleeping downstairs, I thought it would just be for a night or two, just until I pulled myself together, until I had done enough work on the Ortizes’ house to get some peace. Until I stopped having nightmares about Eddie’s fall. But the nightmares haven’t stopped, and I am never able to climb those stairs