Not Perfect(44)
Tabitha’s phone pinged, and she was glad to be pulled away from that awful day. She looked. It was a reminder to herself that she had set so long ago that said Invitations. She was supposed to be working on the invitations for the bar mitzvah, but she hadn’t been able to come to any conclusions about where or how to do it. She couldn’t think of a single workable option. Even having it at the synagogue was expensive. She couldn’t do it at the apartment with all the burned-out light bulbs and lack of funds for food. She could invite everyone to the sports bar—it would be a game day of some sort. She let herself chuckle a little at that thought. Had she really reached this low point? But was it such a crazy idea? Levi loved sports, tons of people chose a sports theme for their bar mitzvahs. The best part, of course, would be that they could eat the food from the buffet. Tabitha wondered if anyone had ever done that.
She spent some time following up on her last interview with the pest control people. She still hadn’t heard from them. She emailed to check in, saying she was still very interested. Then she looked on various job sites and sent her résumé with the hope of setting up two interviews—one with a medical supply company, making home visits to see what people needed and following up the visits to make sure everything was working properly, and one with a tree care company, making appointments for people to have their trees evaluated and trimmed. She added them to her job-prospect list, reaching number nine, which made her think of item number nine on her other list, the one she flushed down the toilet.
She had spent a fair amount of time searching for Abigail on all the usual social-media sites, and she just wasn’t there. She took a breath and tried again, typing “Abigail Golding” into the browser. It took a second, and tons of Abigail Goldings came up, she knew them all now, had followed them all to dead ends, but none of them was the Abigail Golding. She kept moving, clicking on the next page, going back in time, years and years. Still, there was nothing new. She had spent hours making sure none of these were her. And then, like someone was teasing her or giving her a gift, she spotted an unfamiliar headline—the words Abigail Golding and Michigan jumped out at her, and she stopped, clicked on the link, and waited. A photo came up of a woman: pretty, dark hair, smiley, standing in front of a building Tabitha recognized from Michigan—was that the student union? Tabitha wasn’t sure what it was called. The headline said, “Alumna Gives Back.” She checked the date—it was ten years old. She read on about how Abigail Golding, graduate of the University of Michigan in 1992, gave money to a literacy program at the university. It was a tiny, one-paragraph article, which Tabitha read over and over again, leaving her wanting more and also wanting less. It didn’t say anything about where she lived or if she had a family. It was basically void of all important information. Still, this was the first picture she had seen of Abigail. It was also the first evidence, beyond Stuart’s words, that she was real, that she existed in the world. Tabitha copied the link and sent herself an email, so she could have the information—not much, but something. The only other time she’d come across something worth saving was when an Abigail Golding of Michigan had come up in an old obituary, probably for a great-grandmother. No address, nothing beyond the assumption that Abigail had never been married. Tabitha had found a phone number for the address listed for the deceased. It had turned out to be a nursing home, and the people there were unwilling to answer a single question.
Now Tabitha almost didn’t want to use this up too fast, the possibility of grabbing on to something—some thread of where Abigail might be, which would possibly then lead her to where Stuart might be. Even so, she googled the development office at the University of Michigan and called, before she could think too much about it.
“Development office, can I help you?” a young voice said. It was probably a student, Tabitha realized.
“Yes, please, I’m looking for an alum of yours. I’m trying to reach her to see if she wants to partner on a literacy initiative, and I came upon an old article which led me to you. Her name is Abigail Golding?”
Tabitha knew before she got the response, but she had to try.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the voice said. “But we can’t provide any information about our graduates, no matter what the reason is.”
“Well, I can tell you she will be very happy to hear from me,” Tabitha heard herself saying. The words on opposite day ran through her head. It was something she heard Fern say sometimes, and it struck Tabitha as a perfect use of the phrase now.
“I’m so sorry,” the person said again. “My hands are tied.”
Tabitha wanted to say something snarky like, Are they, are they really tied? Clearly not, since you answered the phone. But she didn’t. She knew it wouldn’t get her anywhere.
“Thank you,” Tabitha said, and ended the call.
She sat there for a minute just looking at the computer. She shook her head, trying to move away from this place of searching for something that she couldn’t find. She decided to stop looking for now, and instead wrote to Kaye to thank her for the night before—which had been great in every way. Fern had been thrilled and smiled so much; Tabitha realized how little she had been smiling lately. She would have to find ways to make Fern smile more.
She got dressed and made the beds. After that she had nothing to do, and she felt a strong need to get away from her computer. She walked outside, thinking that a walk would do her good, and before she knew it, she was standing in front of Nora’s apartment building. She looked up at the window she thought might be Nora’s—though it was truly a monster of a building, and she could be off by four or five windows. She didn’t see anything, any lights, any movement, but she wouldn’t really expect to.