A Little Hope(59)



“Stop,” Suzette says. “Stop.”

Suzette hears a car horn, a man’s voice calling out. “Hey!” he yells, and his shadow eclipses them for a second. “Hey, stop or I’ll call the cops!”

When Natalie looks toward him, she freezes. Her wild face drains. Suzette sees some fear, some horror in her eyes, and Suzette, bloody and hurt, face throbbing, head aching, body feeling bruised, turns to see who is coming to her aid. A thin man stands over them. His hair is gone, and his hazel eyes look hollow.

He looks like it’s his last day on earth.

Natalie backs away. Felicia picks up Natalie’s phone that fell out of her pocket. “Let’s go.” They scuttle toward the Shake Superior strip mall.

Suzette has had the wind knocked out of her. She doesn’t know if she should scream or cry or just moan. She squints and recognizes the man. The seamstress’s husband, Greg, who works for Alex Lionel. She and Damon saw him at a fundraiser event the Lionels hosted a year ago. He looked like a young George Clooney then. Such smoothness, charisma. He wore a black suit that night. He was smiling, shaking hands. Thick hair, dark and gray. Eyes that sparkled. Now she is speechless. She hurts so bad, but she forgets every injury when she stares into his eyes.

“Greg?” she whispers.

He smiles halfheartedly. “You okay? Let me call an ambulance… and the cops, too.”

“No,” she says.

“No?”

She shakes her head. “I think I’m okay.” She holds her side where it hurts the most.

He wears Adidas shorts and a workout shirt. His legs and arms are bare, and she sees a bruise above his wrist. Behind him, a Mercedes is running in the parking lot with the driver-side door open. “What the hell was that all about?” His voice sounds quiet.

He holds his hand out to her, but she feels his frailty, and worries she might pull him down with her. She uses her arm, the one the girl didn’t bite, to help herself to her feet. Her side aches where she was kicked. The pain is so bad she can hardly breathe. One of her sandal heels is broken. Her skirt is filthy. She must look like a zombie with the blood on her face.

Greg brushes some pebbles from her arm, and his hands are cold. Suzette wants to weep because he looks so terrible. She wonders if she will soon read about his death, and her heart breaks that on this hot day, he is helping her, and his face and body, so pale, look genuine and calm, as though he is presenting himself to heaven in some way. He holds her elbow and looks at the wound from the bite. “You need a tetanus shot.” He studies her face. “And maybe stitches.”

She tries to catch her breath. Is it her ribs?

Later, she will think about him saving her, about the way his eyes looked so far away, and how good his cold hand felt on her ripped skin. She knows she will think about him and just shake her head because life is like this. “It was my fault,” she says. “I always think I can save everyone.”

“Me, too,” he says, and he helps her along.





19. The Time Machine




Darcy was never the type of widow who would set a place for her late husband at the table, or bake him a small cake on his birthday. She didn’t keep his clothes hanging in the closet or his toothbrush in the holder. But the one thing she finds herself doing every year without fail at the end of summer, the time of year when he first got sick, is getting angry.

As each year went by, she thought the anger would soften a bit the way she had softened in so many ways with age (not complaining to the newspaper office every time the boy missed the porch and made her hunt in the pachysandra; not shooing the stray cat that would sleep under her porch swing; not chiding Tabby, who worked the register at the dry cleaning business, for failing to put the dollar bills in the same direction), but the general anger this time of year didn’t stop. And she welcomed it.

She would feel the end of summer approaching, and maybe it was the intolerable heat, maybe it was the insects everywhere (she couldn’t even sit with her tea on the back deck because the mosquitos would swarm around her), but she found herself in a rage every August. And this year she is worse than ever.

“If you would be so kind as to not insult me, dear, we can continue this conversation later,” she says to her daughter, Mary Jane, on the telephone before hanging up and wringing her hands. It is a Wednesday morning, and she has told Tabby she won’t be in until later this afternoon. She shakes her head, and fills a glass of water from the tap and sips it slowly. She thinks for a minute and can’t remember what annoyed her so much about Mary Jane. Something about her saying, “Mother, just relax,” or, “You know you can hire someone to do that, right?” Darcy shakes her head. Whatever Mary Jane said doesn’t seem that bad now, seconds later. She will have to call her back and apologize.

Darcy rinses her glass and sets it in the drainer. She examines the peel on a banana that she’ll eat later. She checks her small stack of bills and places them in her mailbox with a clothespin so the mailwoman will take them. She comes back into the kitchen, sees Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table, and attempts to read it once more. Her heart races as she does. She becomes so annoyed. Some phrases stand out: I think of you often; I sometimes think I see Luke in a crowd; I wanted you to know… Darcy holds the note on its thick stationery and crumbles it slightly—not enough to rip it. “That’s enough of that,” she says, and sighs.

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