crying women, but a hand lightly resting between her shoulder blades was all I felt comfortable with. “What haven’t you done before? Cry? First time? It does pass, usually when your eyes start to feel sore.”
She laughed again. “Oh, I cry plenty. It’s just my first time in a public place, except church, and no one minds if I cry there. I’m all one tender spot these days. Like a bruise, only it’s my whole body. Everything makes me feel weak and weepy. I haven’t had a letter from him in two months. That’s the longest it’s ever been. I sit in the front room tingling all over, watching for the postman. It’s like I’m holding my breath, but for hours. Then the postman comes, and there’s no letter.”
I’m all one tender spot these days, she had said. Something about that line gave me a twinge of anxiety. Fred Mueller had shown up to take out one last good science-fiction novel in the week before he fell dead in his sister’s front yard. Ralph seemed to think that was part of it—that the Late Returns could find their way to the Bookmobile only when they were close to the end. I recollected something else now from that day in eighth grade when Brad Dolan came to talk at my school. He’d mentioned that his mother had died alone, of uterine cancer, while he was trying not to get killed in Vietnam. He said it was the great regret of his life: that he had to go get rich after she was dead, when his money couldn’t do her any good. She had wanted to go to Paris, or at least Fort Lauderdale, but she’d never left New England. She never had a vacation. She never owned a car or a new coat, since she always shopped for her clothes at the Salvation Army. She gave 10 percent of her salary every year to her church, and later, after she was dead, it turned out the priest who ran the place molested little boys and had drunk away most of the church’s savings.
“Is he going to come home?” she asked, and looked up at me, smiling weakly.
My insides flopped, like a fish hauled up onto a dock.
I turned away from her. I didn’t want her to see my expression.
“I . . . I believe he will, Mrs. Dolan. I’m sure of it. You can have faith in that.”
She said, “I’m trying. Though I feel more and more like a little girl who’s overheard there’s no Father Christmas. Have you seen the films on Cronkite? Have you seen what’s happening over there? I want to believe he’ll come back and he’ll still be himself. Just as good. Just as kind. Not broken inside. I pray every day that I’ll die before him. That’s the only happy ending us humans can have, isn’t it? For the parent to die before the child?”
If she hadn’t said that, in precisely that way, I wouldn’t have done it. But I had read a line almost exactly like that only five months before, in my father’s final letter.
Ralph was sure I couldn’t give them anything that would hurt them. But then Ralph couldn’t drive the old Bookmobile and he’d never met any of the Late Returns.
I reached for Dolan’s first novel, Die Laughing! It was the movie edition, the one with Tom Hanks and Zachary Quinto on the cover, but when I turned and put it in her hand, it was a first edition. No . . . even that is not quite right. It was someone’s idea of what the first edition could’ve been. The SF pulp artist Frank Kelly Freas had done the original cover, and he’d done this one, too, which showed a sweating GI laughing maniacally while he rode his M16 like a child’s wooden pony. The actual cover (I looked it up later) was all but identical, except with another soldier in the background, weeping with laughter while he juggled grenades.
She stared down at the thin, raggedy book in her hands (25¢ ACE PAPERBACK across the cover and “War is no laughing matter . . . except when it is!”). Then her gaze found the author’s name and snapped back up at me.
“What is this? A joke?”
I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what to say. She searched my face with a rigid smile that expressed no humor at all.
“Take it home,” I said. “It’s good. One of his best.”