Commuters (25 page)

The couple at the table next to them, the older one, had finished their meal some time ago. Avery tuned out while Nona talked to them.

“He has one, I’m sure. Hello?” Nona tapped his wrist with her spoon. The apartment was quieter now, without Wendell rushing from table to table—Avery heard the rustle and clank of dishes in running water, coming from the back.

“Has what?”

The woman at the table was staring at him expectantly. “Train schedule?” she said. “The New Haven line? He thinks we’ll make it, but I don’t know.” Her husband appeared, coats slung over an arm.

Avery thumbed through his wallet and handed her a creased and crumpled paper, with its times printed in blurry red ink. Frankly, he was a little annoyed that he even had this thing. He was riding the train so often these days, to and from Hartfield, that he might as well start buying one of the monthly commuter fares. (A whisper of reality:
if Grandad even had another month.
) The guy at the ticket window was starting to say hi and automatically ring him up. It especially bugged him when Winnie took him to the station right at the reverse rush hour, 5 or 6 pm. He hated to see all those suits disembarking from the trains, with the same briefcases and the same tired smiles for whoever was dutifully waiting in the crowded parking lot. All of it made Avery want to shout,
Wake up, people!
There was so much more than this shuttling back and forth: job/home, job/home. There had to be.

But he couldn’t deny the pleasures of regular action, he who could clean and chop vegetables for hours in a haze of physical contentment. And though he tried not to, Avery couldn’t help warming to that first sight of Winnie when the train pulled into Hartfield’s dinky little station. He liked when her eyes found him, the way it felt to be expected.

The couple at the next table pored over the train schedule, laughing.
Big night for the suburban folks, out for a hit of lame performance art in poncy Brooklyn.
Avery lost interest and turned back to his dessert. Wendell came by with a brown plastic folder, with their bill. Their “bill.” Nona, who had cash ready, handed it to Wendell, who smoothly tucked it away without counting. Avery silently took back his schedule from the couple, who thanked him and hurried out to find a cab. Nona and Wendell began to make complicated plans to get together for coffee before she left, and Avery looked down. In his hands, a miniature map, where different-colored train lines snaked up and away from Grand Central, pinned down at intervals by dozens of black dots and town names. If he searched closely, Avery knew, he could find Hartfield among them.

Grandad wasn’t speaking anymore. Winnie was pretending that she didn’t remember how long it had been since he said something—“he’ll be so excited!” she said, snatching the photographs out of Avery’s hands, those few he had found of himself and his grandfather, scouring the only boxes of junk he had from home. Winnie lingered for one extra moment, on the one that had his mom (in wool hat and sunglasses) standing next to Grandad, one of her hands gripping the collar of a scowling, snow-covered Avery. But she said nothing, only handed the small stack back to him. “He’ll be so excited,” she repeated.

But Grandad wasn’t awake—he wasn’t asleep, either, just somewhere in between. Somewhere out of Avery’s reach. He tried for a while, like he figured he should, holding up a photo and talking brightly about whatever Christmas it had been, or trip to the dunes, his own disastrous bowl-shaped haircuts (bad, bad, very
bad). But Grandad’s eyes were unfocused, and his mouth gapped open wetly, which Avery hated and tried not to look at. He focused instead on the prickly white hairs of his grandfather’s whiskers, almost curling now, longer than the brush-cut on his head. Avery tossed the photographs aside. Screw old pictures—this man needed a shave.

So, without asking Winnie—without thinking to—he found a razor in the bathroom (electric, thank God) and went to work. This involved bracing himself, one knee up on the bed next to Grandad, and a hand on the side of his cool, dry face. The cheeks were no problem, of course, and the chin, while not exactly easy, was handled by Avery turning himself around and pressing close to his grandfather’s face, so that he could make those downward strokes just as he did on himself. When it came to the mustache, and the tricky area around his lips (which were parted and loose), Avery found himself cooing some kind of weird reassuring song, half comfort, half curses, as he navigated the folds of skin that hung there. It wasn’t until he was finished, still kneeling on the bed, that he saw Winnie in the doorway. Avery froze—what was the look on her face? He still had his shoes on—did he get mud on the bedspread, or something? He nervously put the razor on the bedside table and followed her into the hall, and downstairs to the kitchen, where it looked liked she was camping out—it was the only lit room amid the dark, cold rest of the house.

“I didn’t think to do that for him,” she said, her back still to Avery. “I suppose the nurses have been shaving him when they do his bathing, but maybe someone forgot, this week.”

“No big deal,” Avery said, uneasy. “It’s a guy thing. What’s all this?”

Winnie laughed once, flat and mirthless. She saw what he was looking at—the piles and piles of insurance paperwork covering the small table, the two phones, two pairs of eyeglasses, a calculator, and a million yellow sticky notes. “My homework,” she said. “This is what I get for opting out of math as a girl.”

Avery craned his head, but the first column of numbers, so shockingly high, made him rear back. “Whoa. Do you need—I mean, want some help with all this?”

Winnie waved that off. Neither of them, he noticed, ever spoke about Jerry’s will or whatever craziness he’d done to it before he got sick. It was as if all that had never happened, and maybe it hadn’t, Avery realized. Maybe everyone—his mom, Winnie, Rachel—had just forgotten all about that, in the chaos of Jerry doing…whatever he was doing. (Dying. Was he?)

“Did you deposit the checks?”

“Uh—not yet. Sorry.”

“But I thought you were opening this month or next! Didn’t you tell him that?”

Well, last week he
had
told Jerry something along those lines, glossing over all the continuing Blue Apple screwups and the problems with vendors and the fact that Nona’s leaving had thrown him into an utter tailspin so that he could barely bring himself to go to the restaurant, which was more or less rehabbed and ready to go. But he said a lot of things to Jerry, rambling on and on. You had to, when you were sitting next to someone blanked out in a vegetative state. Didn’t she get that?

“What are you waiting for?” Winnie said, pressing it. “You know this is what he wants.” Not
what he would have wanted.

“Have you talked to my mom?” This had its desired effect.
Winnie immediately began fussing with a series of pill bottles, arranging them in height order, shortest to tallest. Avery noticed there was no food in sight.

“We’re exchanging messages. And I speak to your stepfather, occasionally. I invite them to come and stay here whenever they want. I do, nearly every time!”

“She’s probably not up for that, I’m guessing,” Avery said. Winnie shrugged. “She called me,” he went on. “She wants me to—”

But Avery couldn’t say it. He rubbed his right thumb, red and abraded where he must have buzzed himself with Jerry’s razor.
Talk sense into her,
his mother had begged.
He should die at home. I want him to come home. He’s so far away, out there, and I’m—I’m
—then she had broken down.

“We should go, if you’re going to make the four twenty,” Winnie said. “Let me just tell the nurse.” She went into the darkened hallway, calling back, “There’s money for you on the table.” Avery, as usual, left the fifteen dollars untouched. It was either sad or funny, the way she still kept trying to pay for his train tickets.

In sleepy Cobble Hill, it was past midnight. Avery stood and left Nona and Wendell, wandering back through the rest of the apartment. He had to see this kitchen—the “kitchen”—and went past empty tables, wiped clean. How was this all pulled off? What was the trick?

In the cramped galley kitchen, a tall, red-haired woman in black-and-white checked pants and a white jacket—splattered and stained—was squatting on her heels, loading a fridge with plastic containers. She looked up at him without much interest.

Avery scanned the scene, saw the small but well-chosen selec
tion of pots and pans, the ancient range and oven, still giving off palpable heat, the hot-water attachment to the sink, the dishes drying in a rack. It was coming to him, even as the chef—for that was what she was—put a hand on her hip and gave him a
can-I-help-you
stare. “Did you cook…all that?” he said stupidly. “You cooked it. For real.”

“Well, I didn’t use a magic wand, that’s for sure.” The chef shut the fridge, gave a last wipe to the counter, and stuffed the rag into a garbage bag full of dirty linens. She had to nudge Avery aside to switch the lights off. His mind was whirling. This wasn’t a game, it wasn’t a performance at all, it was…

“What?” The chef laughed a little at his confusion, and pulled her hair out of its tight ponytail. “Did you think no license meant no sweat and tears?” She left, calling good-bye to Wendell. Avery followed her into the middle of the room, where Nona wasn’t.

Wendell came up to him, handing him a card. “We’ll be moving around for the next month or so. Things got a little dicey over the past week, so I’m scouting a better location. But just call anytime. You won’t need the password. Just remind me that you know Nona, okay?” Wendell clapped a hand on Avery’s shoulder and walked him to the door. “I usually get back to people in two days, with the time and location. Cool, man. Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks,” Avery said, still kind of dazed and now out in the hall. The card he held read
Dinners only. Invitation only. (718) 555–1223

Wendell shut the door between them, calling “Don’t tell your friends!” with a chuckle that suggested this joke was an old and favorite one.

Outside, Nona was sitting on the stoop. Avery came up behind
her and sat down, putting one leg on either side of her and his chin on top of her head.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said accusingly.

“Tell you what?”

“That wasn’t art.”

“It wasn’t?”

“I mean—that was real. One of those black-market places, right? I heard about those. I always wanted to check that out. But I didn’t think—”

“What?”

Avery said nothing. What he hadn’t thought was that you could do that kind of cooking, on the fly, off the books, no site or license, and have it all look so…normal. Normal like Wendell seemed normal, with his accountant hairstyle and friendly, regular-guy demeanor. He would have guessed anyone running that kind of operation—which was pretty ballsy, Avery thought—would be, well, more punk. But the chef looked like some woman with a job, like a tired mom…she looked a little like Winnie’s daughter Rachel.

Nona, who had a way of reading his mind, said, “Do you think they know your grandfather? And Winnie, and her family?”

“Who?”

“That couple trying to make the train.” She reached a hand back to smack him gently, for not listening, for not paying attention.

“They were from
Hartfield
?” Avery pulled his head up off her sweet-smelling hair.

Nona twisted around to eye him. Then she handed back a tiny piece of paper, crumpled into a ball, still warm from her fist. He
unwrapped it and read what she had written with the pencil on the table:

• 1. I hate me, too.
  
• 2. Is there any way to not be unbeautiful about this?
  
• 3. Asshole, you’re welcome!!!
  

Avery pulled her face gently toward him and kissed her forehead, her left eye. He was an asshole. He kissed the side of her mouth, her cheek; he put his hands down her front and kissed her throat. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for dinner,” he whispered, kissing her ear softly, gently folding her ear forward so he could kiss the curve of the bone there. He fingered the dark blue tattoos that were speckled on her throat; he slid her sleeve up so he could follow them down her arm.

In front of them, late-night dog-walkers passed by in silence, and blue TV screens glowed in the first and second floors of the buildings across the way. The trees here were starting to bud, and their sweet smell hung in the night air. Avery kept kissing Nona. He would make love to her tonight, and he would
not
cry afterward. She was leaving; he loved her. He loved her, and she was leaving. At least for now, here on this stoop on Strong Place’s tiny block, it was possible to hold those two things in his mind, when usually they bucked and fought each other until he thought he would go crazy. He held her in front of him on the steps and thought about restaurants with no names and people from Hartfield who ate at them, and about Gris and where she might be tonight, and what book he might read next, all while tree branches moved overhead, and the headlights of cars rolled slowly around the street corner and disappeared.

It was May. There was still plenty of chill in the air, but it was the first day of May nonetheless. The pool was finished; it had been filled (Winnie had imagined a more complex process than her own garden hose, but apparently not) and was tamped down under a thick brown tarp. The bright blue-and-white hand-rail lined the ramp that led carefully down to the unseen water. There was still only dirt in the grounds surrounding the pale stone deck, but plantings could be put in as soon as it grew warm enough.

Winnie slowly walked around the circumference of her pool, stooping every once in a while to pick up an errant scrap of twine or plastic wrap. She stopped to listen; the Meyers twins were home now from the hospital, and every once in a while a baby’s squalls reached her, even this far, blown on the wind from three doors down. Without the sycamore tree, she’d noticed that sound carried fast and clear across their corner of this Hartfield neighborhood, which made her wonder whether the Greenbergs or the Meyers ever heard her own choked weeping, which she tried to do
outside whenever possible, away from Jerry’s room, away from the nurses. But Winnie wasn’t weeping now.

She thought about the new babies on their street. Rachel as a newborn had cried and cried, endless hours each evening, and Winnie—who had supposed herself, after Danny’s easy babyhood, a fairly competent mother—was rattled, having deployed all her usual soothing and bouncing tricks to no avail. George had been working late then, almost every night, so Winnie was left alone with her sleeping son and her wild, thrashing, new daughter who arched her back and screamed when held, pausing only long enough for another deep, shuddering intake of breath. Winnie remembered how she simply gave up one evening, wrapping Rachel in a blanket and placing her next to her on the couch, crying still, while she herself read
Peyton Place
. Surprisingly enough, she managed to enjoy quite a bit of that trashy book. She would turn a page, and then reach over to pat her daughter. They each had their work to do, it seemed.

Nothing drastic happened to make it stop; there was no new trick she had found that soothed Rachel, and after a few weeks (weeks that lasted an eternity), the crying just phased itself out. It was time that took care of it, the way all the old-hand mothers and aunts had told her then. Winnie shook her head, there on the front lawn. Easy enough for her to say, now—for them to say, then. There were times she’d been in complete despair, walking a baby endless paces through the nighttime rooms. She should tell Rita Meyers this story, she thought, slip it in as a possibly unrelated anecdote, just in case it could help. She would bring some brownies over, later in the afternoon, and tell her about Rachel. Sometimes just a story can help.

Winnie squinted up at her house. She saw missing tiles high up on one of the gabled roofs, near a small, pipe-like chimney, and she saw a spreading stain like a shadow above one of the windows—a bathroom on the second floor, she thought, but couldn’t be sure. She noticed windows from rooms that she and Jerry had never used. The house was more closed up than not, Winnie understood for the first time. After another long look around the spring-wet lawn and the covered pool, she walked briskly back to the side door, near the kitchen entrance.

It was now May. There was no pretending otherwise. Though Winnie had long ago stopped marking checks or stars in that old calendar book—because all the days were now the same—she had made her own mental deadline, a date that had now come.

Upstairs, she took off her damp shoes before going in to Jerry. He was in bed as usual, eyes closed and mouth covered by the mask connected to the breathing machine. The nurse looked up from his magazine when she came in, and slipped from the room when she gave a brief nod.

She only needed a moment, to do what needed to be done. Winnie crawled carefully into bed with Jerry and lay there with him, on her side, with her head on his same pillow. The creases of his skin fell in soft folds along his sunken cheeks. She slid a finger under the elastic band holding the mask to his mouth to touch his face gently. She picked up his heavy hand and laced her fingers through his unmoving ones. A puff of fresh air blew in above them, from the open window. Winnie could hear teenagers shouting as they shot skateboards down Franklin’s steep hill.

She closed her eyes and breathed him in. She told him what she needed to, there on the bed, without any words at all.

In the hall, her eyes were dry. The nurse had a questioning, concerned look on his wide black face, but she ignored it and told him that she had set aside the Sunday crossword puzzle for him, as she’d noticed he enjoyed those.

Down in the kitchen, she dialed Annette’s home number. Following the plan she and Rich had put together over the past few weeks, he answered right away. They spoke little—
I’ll get her
, he said quietly.

“Yes?” Annette, suspicious, wary.

“I want to move Jerry back to Chicago. Back to you,” Winnie said. It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought, saying the words aloud, though they still made her heart pitch.

“What do you mean? What is this about?”

“Rich and I have discussed the particulars. There’s a service for this—a medical jet, with everything he will need. And the doctors already know about it, so they can help arrange it all.”

There was silence on the other end. Winnie put her hand flat on the kitchen table, clear for once of insurance paperwork, which she had finished organizing into folders, each neatly labeled, late last night. Everything was packed into clear plastic bins. They would go with Jerry.

“Dr. Rosen wants to wait until early next week. There is a little fluid near his lungs, but the new drugs should take care of that soon. And anyway, you’ll need some time to get a room set up there. I can tell you about the bed to order, the other things you’ll need.” Still nothing from Annette. “Do you hear what I’m saying?” Winnie asked, letting loose a shot of impatience.

“I don’t understand,” Annette said finally. “Why? Why now? Has something happened?”

Winnie chose to answer the last question. “Nothing’s happened. There’s still no change in his catatonia, only that the longer it lasts…” She stopped, changed course. “They don’t agree on how long he has. As I told you—or Rich, rather—one resident told me weeks—” Was that a muffled sob from Annette? Winnie went on. “But Dr. Rosen said it could be months, longer even. Maybe through the summer.”

Summer.
That word hurt. It kicked her hard, in the chest, in the stomach. Winnie put the phone in her lap and weathered the blow. She clamped down on thoughts of last summer, of those hot evenings here in the house, tiptoeing from room to room with Jerry’s hand in hers. She wouldn’t think about the pool that awaited him, outside in the lawn.

When she picked up the phone again, Annette was sputtering. “—finally come to your senses when he should have been here a long time ago, when he never should have—”

“I don’t want to argue with you, Annette. He’s coming home. What more do you want?”

There was a short pause. “Well, I could ask you the same thing. What more do
you
want?”

“What?”

“Is this some kind of strategy on your part, this sudden reversal? You’re trying to throw me off balance—is that it? I know you’re not pretending we’re about to go to court—in fact, this should all be discussed through the lawyers.”

Winnie looked at the ceiling and shook her head. She bit off the urge to hang up the phone. What stopped her: this was Jerry’s own child, his only child. Nor did she point out the contradictions in Annette’s behavior—after all, it hadn’t been lawyers calling
every few days for these many weeks; it had been Annette herself, alternately threatening and pleading. Sometimes Winnie tried to talk to her, but more often she just stood immobilized in the dark hallway, listening to the torrent of words unleashed into their answering machine. It occurred to Winnie that what drove Annette was a recognition of her own ugliness, this cruel lawsuit that had brought Jerry so much pain, and that the note of panic in the other woman’s voice meant that she’d realized her own chance of making it up to him was fast slipping away. But that didn’t make these rage-filled diatribes any easier to take.

Once, Bob had overheard. He was there at the house, taking out some storm screens, and after a minute or two of Annette’s voice into the machine, Winnie lost it—she yanked the cord out of the wall, cutting off the sound altogether. There must have been anger in her face, because after a minute her son-in-law spoke. He said what he had to say quietly but straight out: “She has a right to want her father back, Winnie.”

So those calls had done their work, after all; it had tunneled into her, all that pain and anguish. Not that she didn’t have her own. But Winnie, alone with a failing husband, got to thinking about Harold Easton, about those long weeks in the hospital at the end of her father’s life. She had been with him while he died, and as grim as the experience had been, she understood now in a way she couldn’t have then, the natural order of things, a child burying her parent. Maybe it was more Annette’s right than her own, to be with Jerry at the end.

Though it wasn’t just Annette that had led Winnie here, to the decision to give him up. Annette may have been where it started, but Winnie had traveled a long way in these past weeks, while
Jerry lay still and silent, the only sound from his room a nurse’s movement or the hum of his oxygen machine. With so much time, and so little to do, Winnie had spent most of it at his side, thinking about the life of the man she had known for such a short time. His whole life, that is. What did she know of it?

Images of Jerry as a young boy, scrapping with Frank and driving their mother to distraction—Winnie had devised most of these from a few stories he’d told. What had he been like as a schoolboy, as an army recruit, as a new father? She held up bits and pieces of his past, examined them minutely. The oxygen machine whispered; a nurse came in with fresh bedsheets. Sometimes, in those submerged hours, what little she knew would get mixed up with Winnie’s own memories. She would doze off, smiling at the time Jerry, as a bachelor, misread the amount of soap flakes required, and flooded the laundry room with inches of foamy lather…only to wake up with a start—his IV fluids were being adjusted—and realize that it had been
George
who’d had that washing-machine mishap, in their own house, one weekend she’d been out of town, when the children were young.

It took time, but as winter shaded into early spring, Winnie was able to face without flinching how little she knew about the man she had married. Confined to this small upstairs room, Winnie’s line of sight expanded. Her heart widened, painfully so at first, but she got used it.
Our marriage is like a station stop,
she thought once, resting her elbows on the bed and her forehead against his unmoving shoulder. An essential station stop, to be sure, and much loved—her eyes filled at this—but not the final destination, or the train itself, or a rail route’s long stretch of miles.

There were things, though, about Jerry that Winnie knew and
no one else could: that the soft white tuft of hair in the middle of his chest was the exact size of her hand. That he regularly dreamed about a pregnant cocktail waitress he’d met once, in a North Carolina bar, the night before he’d shipped out to Korea. The tender, thorough way he kissed; the way he took a hot shower both before and after making love; his surprisingly small bare feet.

She knew this: one night, last fall, when he rose from her bed and got hit with such pain in his back that he couldn’t help crying out, he had to sit down again. Eventually, Winnie had to help; it took many tries to get him upright again, unsteady and shaking, face pale.

“Son of a bitch,” Jerry had said then, turning to where she was kneeling, naked and worried, on the bed. “But it’s all worth it, looking at you.”

For days, Winnie held them close: what she knew of Jerry, and what she didn’t. What she had of him, what she never would. Something shifted inside her, and Winnie recognized what she could do, what she
wanted
to do: let Jerry go back to his daughter. Let him go.

After that, talking to Rich and making all the plans had been simple. She set her May 1 deadline; if there was still no change, she would tell Annette, and they would go through with it. It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, either. After all, losing Jerry had already happened. She had suffered that, and it was done.

Very little of this could be explained, though, to Annette. And though she was about to hang up on the woman, what stopped Winnie was an image of Rachel. Brave, loyal, maddening Rachel. Stumbling through her own life and always still in Winnie’s, al
ways
there
. The person that Winnie would need to have by her side when her own death came. The thought of Rachel gave her a surge of energy, and an idea came to her.

“Actually, there is something I want,” she said in response to Annette. “Not any part of Jerry’s estate, though. And your son doesn’t, either. He’s a good boy—a man, I mean. Jerry never signed the paperwork to change his will. I think his lawyer knows that, but I’ll make sure of it. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was just angry. Let that go, now, Annette.”

Silence.

Winnie straightened her back. “I want this house. He bought it for us, you know he did. On this, I won’t back down.” She heard herself—she heard
Jerry
—and smiled a little.

“You don’t mean you’re actually proposing…to
trade
my father for that property?”

“Call it what you want. Those are the terms.” Winnie considered her own words, this alien tone, and was grimly pleased. She felt light, free. She had a sudden understanding of business and its appeal—you drew a line in the sand and then waited. And what she was betting on was that the lawsuit over the house meant nothing to Annette anymore, now that Jerry was dying. Now that he was coming back to Chicago.

“I don’t understand you at all, Mrs. McClelland.”

“
Trevis
,” Winnie corrected.