While He Was Away (27 page)

Customers crowd around us now. There’s a hand on my shoulder—Bonnie, peering down anxiously. And there’s Beau, standing behind her.

“Nine-one-one,” I tell them.

Beau pulls out his cell phone.

Linda’s eyelids flutter open. She winces as Isaac crouches beside me. He takes Linda’s left hand in his. He presses his fingertips to her wrist and starts counting beats. Tears are streaming into Linda’s hair now.

“Don’t move. Your ankle is broken,” Isaac says.

That’s when I see the odd angle Linda’s right ankle makes, just below the hem of her black pants.

Linda groans, her voice lower than I ever knew it could go.

“It’ll be all right,” I hear myself say.

Isaac shakes his head. “Forget the ambulance. I’ll take her.”

I look at him. “How?”

“That tray. Get it,” Isaac orders.

The round cocktail tray has stopped spinning. It lies flat on the floor. I grab it and hold it out to Isaac. He tells me to slide the tray under Linda’s ankle. “Gently,” he says. “It’s important to keep the bone stable while we get her to my truck.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Do it,” Justine says.

I nod. Isaac braces Linda’s ankle, lifting it slightly so that I can slip the tray beneath. Linda howls, an unearthly sound. Gritting my teeth, I slide the tray under the broken bone, and Linda lets out another cry.

“Hold on tight to that tray,” Isaac tells me. “I’m going to lift her. When I stand, you stand too. Whatever you do, keep her steady.”

The next moment, we stand. Isaac cradles Linda in his arms. I bear her on the tray.

“Linda.” Justine’s voice is full of longing.

Linda casts a wild look in Justine’s direction. “
You
.” There’s venom in the word.

“Hush, now,” Isaac says.

Linda moans. Justine leans against Tom.

“Coming through,” Isaac says. He’s not even breathing hard, carrying all one hundred and thirty-plus pounds of Linda.

She’s out cold suddenly, her head lolling against his shoulder. She’s never been that good with pain. Once, back in Ohio, she was working way too late after her shift at the bank, using a weed whacker on the ugly mass of yews that bordered our apartment building.

“Someone has to take a little pride in this place,” she told me through the dusk. And then she dropped the weed whacker and cut the tip off her thumb. She howled like a she-wolf then too and passed out on the cold ground. I called the ambulance.

“Lucky you didn’t lose your foot, working late like that when you’re so tired,” the ER doctor scolded her (and me too, I felt like). “But I’m always tired,” Linda told him. “So what am I supposed to do?”

Somehow Isaac and I carry Linda out to Isaac’s pickup. Somehow we lay her out across the backseat without that bone popping through her skin.

“She’s going to be all right?” I ask.

Isaac looks at me. I’m crying. I didn’t know it, but I am. His stern, handsome face softens.

“I’ll take her right to the hospital. She’ll be fine,” he says. Then he says, “You, Caitlin, Tom? You all can close up shop?”

I press my hand to the sudden pang at the back of my neck. “Oh God.”

“Do your mother proud,” Isaac says.

•••

I do it. We do it. Me, Caitlin, and Tom too, once he’s taken Justine home again and returned. We do Linda proud.

Or if not proud, exactly, we serve everybody who still wants to have dinner in the restaurant. We feed them the best we can with the food we’re able to lay our hands on—stuff that’s already been prepared, mostly. Salads, soups, and cold sandwiches. Isaac always preps in advance, so we’re able to dig into tomorrow’s Irish stew too. Then we get the few people who stayed to pay up, and we get them out the door. We clean the place but good.

Once the restaurant is empty, Tom hunkers down on a stool in front of the TV, a tumbler of scotch in his hand. He’s pretty much a basket case, he’s so guilt ridden.

“I screwed up,” he keeps saying.

I remind him for about the tenth time that it was my bad idea.

Caitlin shushes us both. “Lighten up, already. It’ll be okay.”

“Sure, thanks, right,” we tell her, not bothering to explain about Justine.

“You kicked butt tonight,” Caitlin tells me then.

“Nervous energy,” I say, undoing the top button of my polo shirt and fiddling with the ring around my neck. When I slip my thumb through it, then it fits. Only then.

Only because of the honey hands in the freezer am I able to remember: David’s hands are just about the size of Owen’s.

•••

I’m driving home in the VW when my cell rings. I fumble the phone out of my bag.

Isaac.

“Your mom made the mistake of eating a bowl of soup right before she fell. They have to wait to get all the food out of her system before they set the bone. It’s going to be another two hours at least. They’ve got her on morphine, so she’s pretty loopy, but she wants to talk to you.”

I pull the VW over to the side of the road and turn off the engine. I can’t hear her otherwise. Her voice is that wispy. She sounds far, far away.

“Hello, sweetie sweet.”

I have to smile. She hasn’t called me that since I was a little girl. “You okay?”

“Fine and dandy.”

She tells me how the room looks where she is, the color of the curtains in the ER—golden chrysanthemum, she keeps saying, like that’s terribly important—and the nurse’s plastic sandals—bubblegum pink, and also important. There’s a horrible taste in her mouth and her breath must stink, but Isaac is still by her side. She can’t get over that.

“No one’s ever stayed by my side but you, Penelope,” she says. “Aren’t you kind of relieved that for once it’s him standing here? Not you?”

I stare out the bug-speckled windshield. Beyond the smear and guts, the dark sky arcs like a spangled bowl—immense beauty I can’t yet clearly see. “As long as you’re okay.”

“It’s no trouble, me being here, Linda,” Isaac says from the background. “I told you that.”

Linda tells me that what she wants is for me to get home safely and rest up. She already has it all figured out. I’m going to be her right-hand man. No, girl. No, woman. I’m going to be her right-hand young woman, because her right ankle is broken, and she’s right-handed and footed too, so she’s going to need assistance. She’s going to need me every day by her side to keep the restaurant going, at least until school starts.

“Can you do that, and the night shift too?” Linda asks. “It’s only a few weeks.”

“Sure.” I rest my head on the steering wheel, suddenly exhausted. How will I spend any time with Justine—the little time she may have left, according to Tom?

“Night, sweetie sweet,” Linda says. “I love you.”

“Me too,” I say, but it’s Isaac who answers, “I’ll tell her that.”

Next day Isaac calls, bright and early. He and Linda didn’t get out of the hospital until close to dawn. He just brought her back to his house. She’s out cold now. Mid-afternoon he’ll take a break from work, check on her. If she’s up for it, he’ll buzz her back home.

“I’ll see you soon at Red Earth, right? The lunch shift?” he says.

I hear the worry and exhaustion in his voice. “I promised,” I say.

I can sleep for about another hour. I lie back in bed. And there’s a knock at the front door.

I close my eyes. Next thing I know, rocks hit my window.

That gets me out of bed. I go to the window, open it, and peer down through the honey locust branches.

Caitlin and Ravi stand at the base of the tree, looking up at me. She’s holding a drink carrier, which holds three big cups of coffee. He’s holding a paper bag.

Caitlin grins. “Meals on Wheels,” she says.

They’ve brought breakfast burritos. We sit at the kitchen table, and immediately I wolf mine down. When I look up, they’re both staring at me, open mouthed, their burritos barely touched.

“Guess you were hungry,” Caitlin says.

I wipe my mouth with a napkin. “I’ve been eating a lot of weird stuff. On the fly. This is like the best thing I’ve eaten all summer.”

Caitlin smirks. “I won’t tell Isaac you said that.”

“I need to have you over for dinner,” Ravi says. “My sister is an amazing cook. She’s teaching me. The three of us could cook together.”

“And me!” Caitlin says.

Ravi smiles at her. “Sounds good.”

I sit back and drink my coffee then and watch them eat. We talk a little bit about Linda’s accident, but mostly we talk about nothing—movies we’ve seen, the fall season on television, which can’t start soon enough. I give them their posters, and they promise they’ll put them up right away. Ravi will find a way to post his at the Walmart—even if it’s only in the break room. Caitlin has an idea about the factory where her father works.

“Speaking of which.” I glance at the clock. I have to get ready right away, or I’ll be late for the lunch shift.

It crosses my mind as they leave that Caitlin’s special date might have been with Ravi. I feel something twist in my gut—not a nice feeling. But then I think,
You
don’t know that for sure
. And more importantly,
Friends, that’s what you need, Penna. Just friends.

•••

I get to work by ten to prep for the first shift. Lunch turns out to be quieter, easier, and with Isaac’s help not so bad. Really the restaurant seems like it can kind of run itself for a day or two. Isaac covers most of the nitty-gritty details, checking stock, opening the till. To his visible relief—the glaze lifting from his eyes, his shoulders straightening a bit—I do a good job, following his orders.

Josh is on top of his game today. He moves efficiently around the floor, slapping down drinks and food faster than Caitlin and me put together.

“Inspiring,” I say as Josh whizzes past, balancing three entrees on his left arm and carrying two others in his right hand.

“Now don’t get all motivational on me,” he calls back over his shoulder.

At two thirty we close the place up. Josh heads off for a class; Isaac goes back to his house for Linda; and I drive the VW over to Tom’s. He’s sitting on the front porch, waiting for me. He stands as I approach the house, and when I see the set of his expression—stricken—I start to run. I take the porch steps two at a time, and at the top he catches my arm to keep me from falling with my momentum.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. After yesterday I’m not messing around with urgent care. That was just intestinal distress yesterday. This is…I’ve put a call in to the doctor. The nurse said we might need to look into some kind of medication—the first of the real drugs, I guess. She’s so depressed—hallucinating real bad. She thinks what she sees is real, no question about it. Seeing Linda like that pushed her into a bad place.” Clumsily, Tom pats my shoulder. “You sure you want to come in?”

I nod.

“Sure?”

“Don’t leave, okay?”

“Not a chance.”

Tom leads me inside and down the narrow hallway to her bedroom.

Justine is curled into a ball on her bed, her back to the door. I hesitate only for a moment, and then I go to stand by her. Her eyes are open, she must know I’m there. But she doesn’t look up at me. She doesn’t even blink.

“Take it down,” she says, swatting at the wall behind me.

I turn. There’s nothing to see but yellow paint. When I turn back to Justine, she hides her face in the pillow. From its depths, she tells me again to take it down.

“What?” I glance at Tom.

“A picture.” Tom shrugs helplessly. “That’s what she told me earlier, at least. I think she means a poster, from the way she describes it.”

“Down,” Justine says.

I kneel beside the bed, trying to meet her eyes. But she won’t lift her face from the pillow.

“What picture?” I keep my voice as quiet as I can.

She clenches the edge of the pillow until her knuckles whiten. “You can’t see?”

“No.”

“She’s everywhere!”

“She who?”

Justine’s bitter laugh is muffled. “A real beauty, that’s who. A first-class calendar girl, with her auburn hair and hourglass figure. She gets the letters. She gets them, not me.”

“What letters?”

Now Justine peers at me from beneath a white lock of hair. “Letters from her boy. I haven’t gotten any from mine.” Justine shifts her voice to a higher, biting register, apparently mimicking the calendar girl: “‘Longing won’t bring him home sooner. Get a war job!’ Damn it, I got a war job! Isn’t that enough? Why don’t I have any letters?”

“Hush, now.” I try to tuck Justine’s hair behind her ear, but she jerks her head away and hides again in the pillow. Desperate, I look at Tom.

He leans heavily into the doorway. “She worked at a factory while Owen was overseas. She sewed American flags.”