A Little Hope(2)

She crosses her arms. She wishes it would rain. A rainy day would make it easier to call in to work and say she’s not coming.

Her mother always loved the rain. She would sit in the small kitchen with the cherry tablecloth, and smile hopefully at Freddie’s father, a farmer, who would look out the window, shrug, and sit beside her, his knee touching her knee. “A cozy day,” her mother would say, and it would be. They’d read the paper and later he’d watch The Price Is Right while she did needlepoint in the living room. “No point in working in this,” her dad would say, and the fire would swell in the stone fireplace, and their grandfather clock would chime, while outside the rain coated the fields of alfalfa, the tool shed.

She would give anything to stay home today—to have one of her parents’ rain days.

She planned to write full-time when Addie started school. Now with Addie in first grade, Freddie finally has the day to herself. She meant to write after the conference in Vermont a couple of years ago with Lance Gray, the famous poet.

“You see things,” Lance said in that session. He pointed right at her. Others had told her she was perceptive.

“Such a caring, sensitive girl,” her mother used to say.

Freddie expected to make tea every day, get the house together, volunteer in Addie’s classroom. To write. She imagined afternoons seeing the school bus turn the corner outside the office window, and hitting save on her laptop, sighing a satisfied sigh from another day’s work. You see things.

But when Mrs. Crowley advertised for a seamstress a few hours a week, Freddie saw the Help Wanted sign and decided to give it a try. “It’ll be good to show up somewhere,” she said to Greg, who shrugged. She imagined this routine forcing her to make the hours count—that she would get her writing done between dropping Addie off and heading to the cleaners. She feared being unmoored—that the whole day would get away from her. She thought a part-time job would put parameters around her hours, like the lines on a map.

Greg loved the writer in her. He would put on his reading glasses and skim over her drafts and nod and smile. He frowned when she told Mrs. Crowley on the phone that she could start the next day.

This was in August, when they found some irregularity in his bloodwork after his physical, and he started to notice some symptoms. Maybe Greg worried she was trying to make money in case he didn’t pull through. Maybe she was—even though money probably wasn’t a problem at this point. Greg’s boss, Alex Lionel, had treated Greg very well—stock in the company, a generous salary, a new Mercedes a few years ago. Their house was paid off, and they were savers. They were always planning for a spectacular future—a good college for Addie, trips to islands and Europe.

You see things.

To write, she always thought, you have to dive deeper. Maybe she wanted to stop seeing things. Now she likes the certainty of hemming and sewing. She likes that she can usually start over, yanking thread away, if she needs to.

Mrs. Crowley paid Freddie well to alter clothes from Wharton and the town over, even the town beyond that. After word of a capable seamstress got around, the jobs piled up. Who would have thought? This only started from her mother teaching her to sew, and from her time in college helping out with the costume department.

Now she’s with Mrs. Crowley four days a week in that store with all the clothes in plastic swishing around on the automatic rack, the smell of wool and silk, the radio set to NPR or the BBC. Crowley Cleaners is spacious and tidy with its streak-free windows and immaculate entry floor mat. Mrs. Crowley, a tough widow with her “My, oh my” and “Yes, dear” responses. Her shaky handwriting, her efficient bookkeeping. Her weekly checks made out to Frederica Tyler.

Freddie likes being needed.

If she tries hard enough, she can almost forget writing. Forget her goal to put a portfolio together before the holidays, to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was a silly idea anyway. How would she ever get to Iowa? The program always seemed like a stamp of legitimacy. She wondered what kind of pieces they wrote, what they discussed in small groups.

She hears the toilet flush and the water running. Greg brushing his teeth, as he always does, before breakfast and coffee. When he comes down, his charcoal hair will be slicked in place, his face will be cleanly shaven. He never looks wrecked the way she feels.

Wouldn’t she know if he really was ill, if the first round of medication the doctors started him on in August wasn’t working?

She plunks an English muffin into the toaster and puts out two cereal bowls. She sighs as she looks at the clock—how do the minutes just rocket by? She tiptoes up the stairs, and waves to Greg as she stands outside the bathroom. He is wearing the black silk robe that he wore for a Halloween costume several years ago—before Addie, before everything. Now it comes out in colder weather. “Hey,” he says.

“Well,” she says, “the Clark Gable robe has reappeared.” He had been going for an old Hollywood smoking jacket look with the costume, had grown a mustache and held a pipe.

He models it. “I think I’ll enjoy my breakfast in it.” His chest underneath looks solid. He is the most solid person she knows. Once, when they were dating, he pushed her car, the transmission dead, down the street to a safe spot.

“You should wear the robe to work.” She looks back at him once more. She can’t help it. She tries to memorize him.

Greg splashing hot water on his face. Greg’s hand gripping the razor, his other hand in a fist as though he could beat up anything. Greg with his hazel eyes, Wizard lying on the bathroom floor looking up at him.