A Little Hope(66)
She crosses her arms and looks out at the mowed expanse of lawn, the thick patch of trees outside her window. These days, she thinks constantly about Owen, the toddler in foster care whose mother has a heroin problem. He has been in foster care since that day in July, and Suzette inquires about him all the time, imagines bringing him here and letting him never feel pain again, letting him run across their backyard and cutting up French toast for him in his high chair. Damon has come around to the idea lately, and she wonders what the process would be like to foster him, wonders if the mother could ever stop doing drugs and if she and Damon would be okay if they had him and then had to lose him. She thinks of pain and the absence of pain and pushing Owen on a swing at the park and letting him climb into their bed every time he had a nightmare. She looks outside, and the moon sits like the bottom of an anchor over the rows of trees.
She sees that Damon has flicked on the porch light. She thinks of Ahmed and Ginger coming over in a few minutes, and something about the four of them sitting around the living room together makes her giddy. The laughing, the talking. Perhaps a card game or some Yahtzee. The wine. The scoops of ice cream in bowls. Giggling with Ginger as they go back for more ice cream and start raiding the cupboard for tortilla chips and salsa. Maybe tonight she will tell them about Owen and see what they say.
Not far away, the dark roads make Ginger Lord nervous as they always do, but Ahmed is singing Frank Sinatra to her in the old Saab convertible he got at Classic Motors last week. Yes, he’s singing. The car is pale blue, and when he showed up in it at their house, he beeped the horn, stood in front of it, arms crossed, Ray-Bans on, and said, “Hey, baby. ’Sup?” She shook her head and smiled. So this was his surprise? She didn’t say how impractical it was. She didn’t say maybe, with the wedding coming up, they should discuss big purchases like this. She didn’t even think any of this, because Ahmed’s charm just crept over everything. “You won’t be able to keep the chicks away,” she said. “How can I compete?”
He took out a small bag with a new pair of women’s Ray-Bans in it and handed them to her. “These will stay in the glove box, and you’re the only chick allowed to wear them,” he said. “Keys to the kingdom, baby.” Now they drive, top down, and the stars are out as they head to Suzette and Damon’s. She looks over at him as he watches the road and sings. This man will be my husband, she thinks. Less than two months until the wedding, where they will stand in her parents’ garden and she will wear a simple dress and he a tan suit. She still can’t figure it out. How did this happen? She remembers walking with him outside Suzette’s wedding. She remembers him driving her to the hospital that night in December. And she remembers finally kissing him months later and thinking, yes, yes, he is what I want. Nothing has ever happened this fast and unexpectedly for Ginger.
She hates to drive these roads at night—the back country ones that lead to Suzette’s—because they remind her of Luke’s accident. All she can think of was how helpless he must have felt—did he cry out when he swerved? What did he feel as Betsy smashed into that big, solid tree, the tree that still stands? It is odd that Luke will forever be that boy whom time can’t touch. When she pictures him, he’ll always be in that toy store that day. She will spend the rest of her life seeing him like this.
Even when she’s old, even when she and Ahmed have children and grandchildren, Luke will always be somewhere in the back of her mind. She doesn’t know what to do with this, and neither does Ahmed. They never talk about him. Except that one time when he stood in the bedroom of her apartment getting dressed, and she had that faraway stare she would get, and he said to her, tears in his eyes, “Am I enough?” And with that, she snapped out of it. She stood and kissed his forehead, then his lips, and said, “Yes, yes, you are more,” and she meant every word.
She rests her hand on his leg as he drives, and they hear crickets faintly amid the music, and some branches from trees hang low over the car. Ahmed looks at her and lip-synchs to Sinatra, and he rests his left arm on the window. In the distance, when the song is about to change, she can hear someone singing from the bandstand at the carnival, and there is that tug of something in her that thinks of Luke, but only for one second, the way Luke will always ever be there: in flashes, in bits, in the notes of a song.
On the other side of town, hours later, Darcy Crowley has a song in her head and cannot sleep. One her husband used to whistle: “Baby Face.” She keeps replaying it over and over in her head: Ain’t nobody could ever take your place. She wishes she could sleep. She should have left the air-conditioning on, but she thought she detected a nice breeze before bed. Now her bedroom feels stuffy. She hopes Mary Jane and Alvin put the ceiling fan on in Mary Jane’s bedroom. They are staying over tonight with Lizzie (and their standard poodle) because they are having their carpets shampooed. When Mary Jane asked if they could stay, Darcy clapped her hands. “For as long as you want,” she said. Mary Jane was surprised she would allow their dog, but Darcy has surprised herself in the last year. She had the Tylers’ cat here for a while, and she pet its head and changed its litter and even brushed it, so one night with a well-behaved dog is nothing.
Lizzie wanted to sleep with Darcy, which Darcy looked forward to (she imagined whispering back and forth and giggling together and hugging the sleeping Lizzie close to her), but when Lizzie fell asleep on the living room sofa watching that special on pandas, Mary Jane covered her with a sheet and placed a pillow under her head. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” she said, because Lizzie was a terrible sleeper. Just like her uncle Luke, Darcy thought.