Five Tuesdays in Winter(15)

“Her birthday?” He feigned uncertainty.

“Have you been listening at the door, Dad?”

He wished he had the nerve.

“What should we get her?” Paula asked.

“How about a brooch?” he suggested.

“A brooch? What’s that?”

“You know a sparkly”—he put his fingers on his chest—“pin thing.”

“Oh my God. You are not serious.”

“Then make her something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. A drawing. A necklace. Or, what about doing what you used to do to the gravel?”

“Dad!”

Mitchell, remembering the hours Paula had spent with her rock polisher, lamented the loss of the driveway as a primary source of entertainment and gifts. He knew he’d have to drive Paula to the mall.

They saw Kate there that Sunday in the food court. She was eating a burrito, alone. Both he and Paula had the same irrational impulse to conceal themselves, for fear that she would guess their purpose, and shadow her through the shops in order to discover her preferences. After lunch, she went to the perfume counters in Macy’s. A saleslady offered her some powder on a brush, but Kate shook her head and said something that made the woman laugh. Mitchell’s chest contracted slightly at being denied the words. Then they watched her weave through the smaller stores with their red streamers and glittering hearts and loud reminders like Sweetheart and Someone Special.

“She seems sad,” Paula said.

Mitchell was relieved she’d noticed. He thought it was just his own wishful thinking.

Kate didn’t buy anything. They watched her leave the mall, scan the parking lot for her car, then head toward it. There was nothing outside—not above or below or in the trees beyond the mall—that wasn’t some shade of gray. The cold had eased and everything that had been solid was now a thick, filthy sludge.

“It’s an awful time of year to have a birthday.”

Paula agreed. They stood at the door Kate had walked through. She unlocked her car, lifted her long coat in behind her, shut the door, and sat for at least a minute before starting the engine. She’d been born in Swanton, Ohio. She’d had her appendix removed when she was nine. She didn’t like cooked green peppers or people in costumes or anything by Henry James. She had a mole on her scalp, just where her part began. With only this handful of facts, he admitted to himself as Paula drew hearts in the clouds she breathed on the plate glass, he’d begun to truly care for her.

They bought her a brooch and went home.

His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.

There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He’d always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he’d never been anything but this one self. Perhaps it was because physically there’d been little change; he’d lost no hair, gained no weight, grown no beard. He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.

Still, on the fifth Tuesday, as Mitchell made dinner during the lesson, the lasagna noodles quivered in his hands as he placed them in the pan. Nervous as a school-girl. He wondered where that expression came from, for he had never seen Paula ever behave this way.

Nervous as a forty-two-year-old bookseller was how the saying should go.

Kate had arrived with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates, which he’d set on a table in the living room. He’d been so startled by the gift he hadn’t taken in the rest of her, and now he couldn’t picture her in Paula’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed where they always sat (he’d often seen the indentation after she’d gone). Every now and then, as he went about preparing dinner, Mitchell glanced through the open doorway at the box of chocolates.

He was just putting the lasagna in the oven when Kate flew past.

“Where’re you going?” he said, unable to conceal his horror as she flung her coat over her shoulders without bothering to fit her arms in the sleeves and reached for the door.

“I’ll be right back.” The door slammed shut and he heard her holler from the walkway: “She’ll be fine.”

He went to his daughter’s room. The door was open but she wasn’t in it. On her quilt on the bed was a dark-red stain and a few pale streaks. Her bathroom door was shut. He stood in silence before it.

“I’m okay, Dad.” She sounded like she was hanging upside down.

“You sure?” He couldn’t control the wobble in his voice.

“Kate’s gone to get some stuff.”

He actually already had “stuff” in his bathroom; he’d bought it for her years ago. “That’s good,” he said. Kate’s choices would be better.

He felt pleased that he was not overreacting, that he knew right away what had happened and hadn’t called an ambulance. And then he looked down and saw the blood up close. He was holding the quilt in his arms. He didn’t remember taking it off the bed. It was a quilt his mother had made and he had slept beneath as a child. The stains and streaks seemed like warnings. Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn’t understand her, didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.