Forever, Interrupted(12)

Her face scrunches itself around her eyes and mouth, and I can tell she’s mad. The lines around her mouth become pronounced, and for the first time I can see evidence that she is an older woman. Does my mom have these lines? It’s been so long since I’ve seen her, I don’t know.

Maybe Susan doesn’t realize what she’s doing. Maybe she thinks she’s strong enough to cut off her nose to spite her face here, to give me this funeral arranging as a punishment, but she’s not. And she’s already bothered.

“Everyone in our family has been cremated, Elsie. I never heard Ben say he wanted otherwise. Just tell me what is going to be done with the ashes.” She looks down at the table and sighs, blowing air out of her mouth and onto her lap. “I should be going.” She gets up from the table and leaves, not looking back at me, not acknowledging my existence.

I grab the binder and head toward the lobby, where Ana is waiting patiently. She drives us home and I walk right up the front steps to my door. When I realize I’ve left my keys inside, I turn around and start crying. Ana soothes me as she pulls my spare key off her key ring and hands it to me. She hands it to me as if it will make everything okay, as if the only reason I’m crying is I can’t get into the apartment.





JANUARY


I woke up the morning after meeting Ben to a text message from him.

“Rise and Shine, Elsie Porter. Can I take you to lunch?”

I jumped out of bed, shrieked like an idiot, and hopped in place compulsively for at least ten seconds. There was so much energy in my body I had no other way of getting it out.

“Sure. Where to?” I texted back. I stared at the phone until it lit up again.

“I’ll come pick you up. Twelve thirty. What’s your address?”

I sent him my address and then ran into the shower as if it was urgent. But it wasn’t urgent. I was ready to go by 11:45 and I felt entirely pathetic about that. I put my hair up in a high ponytail and shimmied into my favorite jeans and most flattering T-shirt. Sitting around my house for forty-five minutes dressed and ready to go made me feel silly, so I decided to get out of my house and go for a walk. And in all of my glee and excitement, I locked myself out.

My heart started beating so fast I couldn’t think straight. I’d left everything inside, my phone, my wallet. Ana had my spare key, but that wasn’t going to do me much good without a phone to call her. I walked up and down the street looking for change so that I could ultimately call her on a pay phone, but it turns out, people don’t really leave quarters on the ground. You’d think they would because quarters are small and sort of meaningless most of the time, but when you really need one, you realize just how ubiquitous they aren’t. Then I decided to find a pay phone anyway since maybe I could rig it to call for free or there’d be a quarter stuck in the little change box. After scouring the neighborhood, I couldn’t find a single one. Which left me no viable option I could think of other than breaking into my own apartment.

So that’s what I tried to do.

I was on the second story of a duplex, but you could kind of get to the patio from the front stairs; so I walked up the stairs, climbed onto the railing, and tried to grab on to the rail of my patio. If I could get my hand on it and swing a leg around, I was pretty confident I could get onto the patio without much chance of falling to my death. From there, it was just a matter of crawling through the little doggie door in the screen that had been put there by the tenants before me. I had hated that damn doggie door until that very moment, when I was convinced it was my salvation.

As I continued my attempts to grab on to the patio rail, I realized that this might actually be an incredibly stupid plan, in which I was sure to be injured. If it was taking me this long to grab the rail in the first place, why on earth did I think I could easily swing my leg onto it once I reached it?

I made one final and valiant attempt to grab on before I got the cockamamie idea that it was best to go leg first. I was leg first when Ben found me.

“Elsie?”

“Ah!” I almost lost my footing, but I managed to get my leg back onto the steps, only slightly falling over in the process. I caught myself. “Hi, Ben!” I ran down the steps and hugged him. He was laughing.

“Whatcha doin’ there?”

I was embarrassed, but somehow not in any threatening way.

“I was trying to break into my own apartment. I locked myself out without a phone or a wallet or anything.”

“You don’t have a spare key?”

I shook my head. “No. I did, at one point, but then it seemed smarter somehow for me to give it to my friend Ana, so she had it in case of emergency.”

He laughed again. It didn’t feel like he was laughing at me. Although, I think technically he was.

“Got it. Well, what do you want to do? You can call Ana from my phone now if you want. Or we can go get lunch and then you can call her when we get back?”

I started to answer, but he cut me off.

“Or, I’m also happy to break into your house for you. If you haven’t given up on that idea yet.”

“Do you think you can swing your leg over this rail onto that one?” I said. I was joking, but he wasn’t.

“Absolutely, I can.”

“No, stop. I was kidding. We should go get lunch.”

Ben started taking off his jacket. “No, I insist you let me do this. It will look brave of me. I’ll be considered a hero.”