night that the bar seemed to have no name—a neon Budweiser sign flashed in the window but only a smudged TAVERN was painted above. If Peter wanted to call, or needed to call, could he? Would he know what to look for in the phone book?
I’d like to say it was a lonely dinner, or that it didn’t taste as good without Peter there, that my heart broke and my mascara ran. But that would be a lie. Two men in streaked white aprons did the cooking and the dishes, behind a swinging door. No one cried in the bar. No one had a tantrum. Dionne Warwick and the bartender kept me company. All I had to do was look in his direction and he sauntered over. He asked nothing of me; he was all give. I ate a cheeseburger with mayonnaise and mustard and pickles and had a bag of chips without sharing a single one. Heaven for a mother of two, heaven.
But every half hour or so, I remembered who I was waiting for and wondered where he was. At ten o’clock I considered going back to Peter’s house; imagined stumbling upon whatever had kept him. A sick child, out-of-town guests. I pictured it like a diorama, his life, whatever it held, small and torn around the edges, ephemeral as paper.
Finally, close to eleven, in a last burst of he-could-still-walk-in-any-minute hope, I lingered a long time over a silver dish of vanilla ice cream. I saved the thick red cherry for last, waited until it was half frozen and tasted like some other thing entirely, a new category, a food I’d never craved before, a food for which I had no name.
June 5, 2010
When I picked up the phone and Ellie said, “Something’s happened, Grandma,” my first words were, “To your mother?”
They flew out of me, light and automatic, and not, I believe, dripping with hope. I would hate myself if they were. Softly she answered that no, it was her father. One of those moments when children realize, suddenly, the chain of relationships. My daddy is my grandma’s son.
Tom had fallen ill with chest pains, and as soon as Bryn Mawr Heart Center heard about how young his father and grandfather had been when they died, they’d ordered a battery of tests. I found this out not from Ellie, on the phone, but from a tearful Tinsley in the hospital corridor.
“He was out jogging with his new shoes.” She sniffled.
I bit my tongue, but the thoughts still flew: it’s my fault all the way round, then, isn’t it, Tinsley? For the shoes, for marrying a man with weak arteries and procreating! I said nothing; one had to be more forgiving of Tinsley at a time like this.
“Well, it’s good that he went to the hospital. That he didn’t try to, to—”
“Run through it. Tough it out,” she said. Our eyes met. She knew the language of men exercising, of coping with fleeting pain. Of course she did; she ran side by side with one, one younger and stronger whose spent sweatshirts didn’t even smell of effort (Ellie had sniffed it). As I observed her trying to rearrange her disarray—hands in her hair, wiping beneath her eyes—a frisson of doubt traveled through me; could I have misread that kiss, that touch, that moment at the birthday party? No. I breathed deeply and surveyed her. She really did look terrible, I must say. Her lovely hair was sticking up on one side where she kept scratching it and fluffing. Her face was swollen from crying, as if she was already at a wake. She blew her nose loudly and when I asked if she had a cold, she looked at me oddly when she said no.
“What did the doctors say?”
“They said they doubted it was serious, they’re just being extra cautious.”
I nodded; precisely what I’d assumed. Tom was young, after all. Ellie sat a few seats away from us, burrowed into a celebrity magazine that was wrinkled and wet looking from being pawed through. She glanced over at me once or twice and I noticed she was chewing her lip. Poor dear, she was probably scared and confused.
“Why don’t I take Ellie down to the cafeteria for lunch?”
“She’s already eaten.”
“Ice cream then?”
She shook her head. “She had some yesterday.”
I sighed. I contented myself with watching Ellie and cataloging what the doctors had done and said. They’d done an EKG earlier, but wanted an ultrasound, an angiogram, and some sort