worry lines relax. “I will, certainly. Patrick, would you do another sketch of that robot for me?”
Patrick had sat down at the table and picked up a red crayon. He looked relieved at Bobbie’s new tone, if still confused.
“Heckz. Yez.”
The door to the cafeteria’s kitchen was past an empty salad bar. The kitchen was darker than the dining room: light filtered through the porthole, swinging as the door shut behind Michael and Bobbie, glimmering across the stainless steel of the sinks and counters.
“That was very kind of you,” said Bobbie. She pulled a red handkerchief from her pocket. She raised it to her face, then seemed to realize she wasn’t actually crying. She wiped spots of oatmeal off her hands instead.
“Miss Bobbie, can I ask: What’s got you so upset?”
“It’s just something the captain said,” Bobbie replied.
Remembering how small the captain had made him feel, and now experiencing a little anger about how Jopek had upset Bobbie, Michael asked, “What did he say?”
“Oh, Henry asked last night, after we got back, if he could help the captain with his patrols in the fences outside the Capitol. Henry is always so eager around him. But the captain just said, ‘You ain’t got no job other than sittin’ on yer butt ’til I tell you otherwise, Henry.’ Maybe it’s good that the captain is taking care of everything, I suppose. Maybe he was only trying to be friendly. But something about the way he said it felt . . . not friendly. I don’t know why, but sometimes, when I look at the captain, it’s as if there’s a secret in everything he says.”
Like when I said we should get back to the Capitol at sunset, and the captain pretended it didn’t make him angry. But Michael pushed that thought down: he’d only imagined the captain’s anger.
“I’m probably just thinking too much. It’s all this waiting; it’s so difficult.” Her voice trailed off; she shook her head, frowning in wonder. “I can’t imagine how it must have been for you, out there. The cold. The lonesomeness. The not-knowing. I don’t know how you did that.”
“Aw, it wasn’t that bad,” Michael said, downplaying the difficulty out of habit.
“You sell yourself short, honey,” Bobbie said, looking him earnestly in the eye. “You do.”
Michael paused, tempted to again shrug off the compliment from this sweet old woman. He’d never known his own grandparents, but he’d always thought that old people’s smiles and their “Hey, good-lookin’” and “I think y’all might be the best marching band in the state” were too sweet—unearned was maybe the best way to put it.
But there was something far different from that too-sweetness in Bobbie’s eyes now:
This is painful, Michael. It’s safe for you to admit that to me.
“It was . . . tough,” he said.
“That’s one way to put it,” Bobbie chuckled, momentarily brightening. “Michael, may I ask a strange question?”
He nodded, wanting even more, after her kindness, to make Bobbie feel better.
“When you were out there, when you were just trying to get through each day,” she said, “did you ever pray?”
He started to say, No, or, to be polite, My family’s not really religious. But then he remembered seeing the Coalmount church, before he’d found the mirror-eyed mannequins. How the steeple had pointed for the sky. And he remembered the feeling he’d had on the cliff just before the balloon arose from nothing: that sense of awe, both good and terrible, as if a plan were being invisibly synced together for him and Patrick, like unseen clockwork behind a curtain. Those cliff-and-church feelings had not been yes-yes, exactly. Yes-yes was an inner quiet, both weapon and joy, that supplied an understanding of how Michael must handle himself in any present moment. The church-and-cliff feelings had felt different, somehow.
But now, Michael shook his head at that, inside. It was like a movie: real in the moments, but afterward you sort of laughed at yourself.
“I only ask because sometimes I wonder if this world is all . . . well, the end-times,” Bobbie said, and Michael got the feeling that letting her talk was the best thing he could do to help her feel better. “Because the plane that brought me to the Safe Zone? It was a crash, Michael. The pilots were attacked, and we fell out of the sky, a hundred souls on board. I should have been killed. And my husband—did I tell you Jack is his name?—only broke his legs. The government began to evacuate Charleston