Five Tuesdays in Winter(12)

Paula came flying out of her bedroom and dragged Kate back down the hallway. The door clicked shut and he heard no Spanish, just peals of laughter for the next half hour.

He’d planned to do some paperwork before starting dinner, but when he sat down at his desk, he pulled out Kate’s application instead: 2/14/68. Just as he’d remembered. She was well into her thirties, plenty old enough to be Paula’s mother. So what was she doing in there, giggling like a seventh grader? Her birthday was coming up. On Valentine’s Day, no less. Maybe she’d quit before then. She might expect a gift, or he might want to give her a little something and she’d take it the wrong way. Or Lincoln would.

They emerged from Paula’s bedroom flushed and watery-eyed. He quickly slipped the application back in its file.

“Entonces, nos vemos el sábado, ?no?” Kate said.

“?Sábado? Sí.”

They passed his desk without noticing him.

“Bueno. Hasta luego, Paula.” She added an extra half syllable to his daughter’s name.

“Adiós, Caterina.”

They kissed on both cheeks, as if in Paris.

He waved from his chair, not wanting to break the flow with clunky English.

When she came to their house the next Tuesday, she wrote down on a slip of paper (a bank receipt, he saw later, that stated she had $57.37 in her account) from her coat pocket her new phone number. She said she was moving closer to the store.

“With Lincoln?” Paula asked, and Mitchell for once was grateful for her prying.

“No,” Kate said, as if she might say more, then didn’t.

“Why not? He has such perfect teeth.”

Paula read the question on Mitchell’s face and said, “She showed me pictures of him.”

Long after she left, he got up from his reading to start supper and realized the slip of paper was still crushed in his hand.

The second and last date Mitchell had had after his wife left was with a woman who worked in the insurance office next to his store. Sometimes she’d come in when she got off work, and even though she talked too much and only looked at the oversized books with photos in any given section, he agreed to go to the movies with her when she’d asked him. They chose a comedy, but she kept whispering in his ear right before every joke, so that everyone in the audience was always laughing except them. He’d come out of the theater excruciatingly unsatisfied, far more unsatisfied than missing jokes should have left him. He felt abstracted and disjointed, and it occurred to him that the sensation was only a slight magnification of what he felt all the time. He couldn’t wait to get back to his car in the store parking lot and drive away. But she was in an entirely different mood. She nearly twirled down the street, swayed not too subtly against him, and asked if he’d like to get a coffee. He said no, without excuse.

The next day while he was unpacking a shipment of remainders in the stock room, he heard her through the heating vent. She was on the phone with a friend. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad. It was fun, actually . . . Yeah, he is, but I kind of like that . . .” Silence then a long cackle. “I do . . . All right, details. Let’s see . . . The high point? Oh God. Let’s see . . .” Mitchell left the box half-full and went back to the front of the store. That day he didn’t stay till closing but instead left at quarter of five. He did this for a week straight until one evening when his former employee, the employee before Kate, had a dental procedure and he’d had to stay. The woman didn’t come in. She never came in again. He saw her crossing the street once, and another time she was behind him at Westy’s, the take-out place up the block, but they didn’t speak. He couldn’t say when he stopped seeing her altogether, when she must have left the insurance company, over a year ago, maybe two.

He listened to Kate’s new message in the back office when she was out front at the register: “Hi. I’m not here. Say something funny and I’ll get back to you.” But her voice was not hopeful. It was the voice of someone stuck in Maine for no good reason. He hung up before the beep.

The only time he ever got any information about her was on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the week, without Paula, they worked together in the uninterrupted professionalism he’d established the first week of her employment. It was as if she never stood in his living room or giggled in Spanish with his daughter. He often hoped that Paula would bring up Kate’s name in the evenings, let something slip about her he didn’t know, but she never did. She spoke instead of teachers, friends, projects, a concert she wanted to go to. In history she was studying Watergate, and she wanted to know what he knew about it. His friend Aaron had been an intern in DC that summer of the hearings, the summer before Mitchell saw the hard node on his spine. He and Aaron had talked on the phone a lot, sometimes until two or three in the morning, passionate talk about the implications of impeachment and then, that hot August, the resignations. Paula waited for Mitchell’s version of the events, but what he remembered most now about Watergate was the feeling of being nineteen in a one-room apartment and the sound—though it had been silent for so many years now—of Aaron’s hyena laugh.

Finally, when he began to describe the break-in, Paula said she already knew all that, and when he said that it was the end of an era, the government’s undeniable breach of faith with its people, she said her teacher explained that, too. So he told her about his one-room apartment and how Aaron’s laugh nearly broke his eardrums, and she was inexplicably satisfied.