“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Mom,” he said, “why are you doing this?”
She sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” she said.
“How did she even get in touch with you?”
“Her neighbor got in touch with me. Callie.”
“Callie What’s-Her-Name? The fat one?”
“She telephoned,” Willa said.
She stepped off the terrace into the yard—or what they called a yard, hereabouts: carefully sculptured gravel paths winding between clumps of succulents. She was feeling a bit tense; she tightened her hold on the phone because now Sean was asking, “Why you? And how did she know your number?”
“It was on Denise’s phone list.”
“Why would it be there?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” she said.
“This is kind of cockeyed,” he said, and she knew he would be raking his fingers through his hair the way Derek used to do.
“So anyhow,” she said in a rush, “we should get together while I’m in Baltimore!”
“Yes, okay,” he said.
“We’re flying in tomorrow afternoon.”
“Peter’s coming too?”
“Right. I’ll phone you once I’m settled and we can all go out to dinner someplace.”
“Okay,” he said again. “Sure. You can meet Elissa.”
“Who’s Elissa?”
“This woman I’ve been seeing.”
“Oh. Of course,” she said. “I’ll look forward to it.”
It was tiring, keeping track of his girlfriends. But sooner or later he was bound to find one he could stick with. Then Willa could start hoping for grandchildren. She longed for grandchildren.
After she got off the phone with Sean she didn’t go back inside immediately. She walked over to where a giant saguaro cactus towered, easily triple her height, its two symmetrically placed arms reaching up toward the darkening sky. Willa loved saguaros. She loved their dignity, their endurance. They were the only things in Arizona she felt a deep attachment to. The first time she saw one—a whole assemblage of them, actually, looming outside the airport last summer when she and Peter came to house-hunt—it was like meeting some mythical race. She had told Peter then and there that whatever house they bought should have a saguaro in the yard. Peter had been amused. He had viewed it as some sort of feminine thing—women and their gardens! But Willa had never taken much interest in gardening. She just loved saguaros, was all. She laid a palm on this one’s trunk, on a bare space between its bristles. It felt like a cucumber, cool and smooth and sturdy. It seemed aware of her. She could almost believe it was steadying itself to receive the pressure of her hand.
Peter stepped out on the terrace and called, “Little one?”
“Coming,” she said, and she gave the saguaro a final pat and turned to go inside.
2
“The first time I ever flew on a plane, a man stuck a gun in my ribs,” Willa said.
Peter said, “Say again?”
They were seated across the aisle from each other, but he had probably heard her just fine and so she merely smiled at him.
“A gun?” he asked her.
“At least he claimed it was a gun. I didn’t actually see it.”
“What’d you do?”
Oh, dear, now she remembered why she never told this story: it made her look so passive. “Um…nothing?” she said.
“Nothing?”
“It was complicated.”
He stared at her. A flight attendant came between them, wheeling the drinks cart back to the galley, and Peter briefly vanished from sight, but when he reappeared he was still staring.
“He said he’d shoot me if I made a move, and so I didn’t move and he didn’t shoot,” Willa said.
“But what was he trying to accomplish?”
“I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish.”
“And how did it end?”
“Oh, I was traveling with Derek—this was when we were just dating—and Derek took it into his head that we should trade seats and that was that.”
Peter sat back and considered for a moment.
The reason this incident had come to Willa’s mind was that Peter had been grumbling about the security line. He tended to get into arguments with TSA agents. “So you see,” she told him now, “I think security’s a good idea. If we’d had TSA agents back then, that man would not have pointed a gun at me.”
“But you weren’t sure there really was a gun, you said.”
“Well, no.”
“TSA couldn’t have prevented him from pretending he had a gun.”
“No, but…well, I would have known he was pretending, though, if he had been screened beforehand.”
“I can’t imagine what makes you say that,” Peter said. “Once you realize all TSA agents are idiots, why would you have any faith in them?”
Then he leaned out into the aisle and raised his empty glass toward the flight attendant.
It was the lawyer in him; he loved a good debate.
Another reason he’d been grumbling was that he’d tried earlier to switch seats with someone so he and Willa could sit together, but no one had been willing. Everybody seemed to feel very strongly about it. The boy next to Peter—still in his teens, by the look of him—had claimed he wanted to see out the window. Peter had grimaced at Willa. (She had refused to ask her own seatmate. She didn’t like to discommode people.)
“What’s a mere kid doing in first class, anyhow?” Peter had said to her in an undertone.
“Oh, is there an age requirement?” Willa had asked, all fake innocence.
Peter wasn’t amused.
Then it turned out that Peter’s seatmate and Willa’s seatmate knew each other, because once they were airborne Peter’s seatmate leaned forward and called across, “Dude! Are you going to order a drink?” and Willa’s seatmate leaned forward too and called, “Yeah, I figured why not, right?”
Peter cocked an eyebrow at Willa. These two were friends? And yet had turned down a chance to sit together?
“Like, a drink drink, right?” Peter’s seatmate was asking.
“Right.”
Till then, Willa had avoided looking at the person next to her so as not to get trapped in a conversation, but now she saw that he was no older than the other boy, with an effortful little blond silk mustache and a Wildcats T-shirt. (Not a chance on earth he’d try to talk to a woman with a flowered chiffon scarf knotted perkily at her throat.)
“Don’t they card people on airplanes?” Peter asked her, a little too loudly.
She gave him a prim smile and pulled a paperback from her purse.
All last night and then this morning, she’d had a feeling like Christmas Eve. She didn’t know what to expect of this trip. She was simultaneously thrilled and scared and hopeful—such a flurry of emotions all at the same time. And then every now and then she would ask herself what on earth she thought she was doing. Also, she was grateful that Peter had decided to come along, but she worried too that he wouldn’t enjoy himself, and that this would dampen her own enjoyment of her…well, not her grandchild, of course, but…
“Dude!” Peter’s seatmate called. He was leaning forward again; he was holding up an in-flight magazine. “There’s a free magazine in the seat pocket!”
“Oh, yeah?” the boy next to her asked.
“With a crossword puzzle in it!”
“Yeah?”
Peter was working on his laptop now; he still kept his hand in at the firm. He drew back a bit to make way for the boys’ conversation, but he went on typing. Meanwhile, Willa’s seatmate located his own magazine and flipped through it. He stopped at the crossword puzzle, folded the magazine open, and bent to root through the knapsack at his feet. When he straightened, his fac
e was flushed; he was one of those people with nearly transparent skin. “Could I please borrow a pen?” he asked Willa.
“Certainly,” she said. She fished a ballpoint from her purse and handed it over.
“Thanks.”
He began studying the puzzle. He started to enter a word, changed his mind, and went on studying. After a while he wrote something, and then something more. Willa slid her eyes sideways but she couldn’t see the letters. He had little nubbins of warts on a couple of his fingers the way Ian used to have when he was that age.
She randomly turned a page of her book—a detective story that she didn’t find very interesting.
“I got one!” Peter’s seatmate called.
“Yeah? What’d you get?”
“ ‘Detroit baseball team.’ ”
“Oh, I got that.”
“You did? Bummer.”
In fact, the boy next to Willa seemed to be making considerable progress. He had a way of holding his breath while he was trying to think and then letting it out in a little explosion when an answer came to him. “Yesss!” he said once, in a whisper.
“Dude?” Peter’s seatmate called.
Peter drew back again. He had his chin tucked in and he held himself ostentatiously rigid.
“ ‘To be in Paris,’ ” Peter’s seatmate called. “Five down.”
“Oh, yeah, I can’t figure that one.”
“I mean, what? Is it, like, ‘heaven’? Or ‘romantic’? Do you think it’s a line from a song?”
“ ‘Être,’ ” Willa called to him.
“Pardon?”
“ ‘Être.’ ‘To be,’ if you were in Paris.”
“Oh, yes.”
He bent over his magazine. The boy next to Willa started writing too, and Peter tipped his head and gave Willa a look: Really? She smiled at him.
“Then, ma’am? How about ‘needle holder’?” Peter’s seatmate called. “It’s got to begin with an e: four letters.”
“ ‘Etui,’ ” Willa called back. This must be a very fusty puzzle.
“Et what?”
“ ‘Etui.’ E-T-U-I.”
“Thanks.”
Peter said, “For God’s sake, Willa.”
“Would you like to borrow some earplugs?” Willa asked him. “I have some in my purse.”
He just sighed and went on typing.
Willa noticed that another emotion she was experiencing was happiness.
* * *
—
When they landed the sun was setting, and by the time they were outside the terminal hailing a cab the air had cooled to a pleasant temperature. Their driver, who wore a turban, spent the whole ride talking on his hands-free phone in some musical, curly language without any cognates that Willa could identify. He did seem familiar with Baltimore, though. He sped toward the city’s outskirts, where the warehouse roofs and factory smokestacks were suffused with a leftover, pale-yellow glow that made them look eerily beautiful. He rounded the harbor and threaded past clusters of brightly dressed people ambling toward the ballpark with babies and diaper bags and seat cushions and homemade posters. The cab left downtown behind and finally, after a long trek north, they entered a neighborhood of small, dingy white houses with squat front porches, some of them posted with signs for insurance agencies or podiatry offices. Peter gazed out his window without comment. Willa lifted a hand testingly to her hair. It worried her that Cheryl was probably old enough to know that Willa and Peter were not her grandparents. “These are, who did you say?” she would ask Callie. “I’ve never laid eyes on these people!”
The cab drew up in front of a house like all the others. “Here?” the driver asked.
“I guess so,” Willa said. Numerals reading 314 slanted down one porch pillar.
Peter paid the fare, and the driver got out to lift their suitcases from the trunk. Willa’s was the largest size allowed as carry-on—she liked to dress nicely when she traveled—and as she wheeled it up the little front walk it seemed pathetically large. She looked like some refugee, she thought, arriving on a stranger’s doorstep with all her worldly belongings. By now it was dusk but the porch light was not lit, and after Peter pressed the doorbell she had a moment of anxiety until she heard footsteps from inside.
Callie turned out to be just as Willa had imagined—an extremely heavy blonde in her early fifties, packed into tight stretch pants from which tiny, dainty feet emerged in little ballet flats. “Finally!” she said, raising her pillowy pink-and-white face in gratitude toward the heavens. “You made it!”
She meant that she had been on duty too long, of course, but Willa chose to believe that she was glad to see them for their own sakes. “It’s good to be here,” she said, stepping into the house. A smallish white-and-tan dog emerged from behind Callie’s calves, its comically oversized ears flaring out like, yes, airplane wings, and its tail wagging. And in the background now Willa saw a child lurking, some eight or nine years old, with chin-length, taffy-colored hair. She had a pudgy face and a keg-shaped tummy that strained her T-shirt, and her legs were so plump that the inseams of her shorts had worked their way up to her crotch. Willa had imagined someone a bit thinner and cuter, to be honest. She tamped that thought down guiltily. Surely a real grandmother would not have allowed it to cross her mind. She said, “Hello, Cheryl.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Willa.”
“I know.”
“And this is Peter, my husband.”
“Hi,” Cheryl said again.
“Hello there,” Peter said. His own suitcase was smaller and hung by a strap from his shoulder. He looked less supplicating than Willa—more like a regular tourist just casually passing through.
“Listen. I feel so, so silly,” Callie said. “I phoned Denise last night to let her know you were coming and she said, ‘Who?’ Said, ‘What in the world!’ Said, ‘Oh, my lord, I can’t believe you did that! Sean’s mother is no relation to Cheryl!’ Well, how would I know, right? I mean, onliest thing I know is she’s got ‘Sean’s mother’ on her phone list.”
“Well, of course,” Willa said soothingly.
“Denise said to call you right back and tell you not to come, but you know: by then it was so late and all…”
Callie hadn’t wanted to say goodbye to her one chance of rescue, was what she meant.
“And I was beat!” she added, proving the point. “And had already had to miss a day of work as it was. Today was my second sick day! Besides, I figured if you didn’t want to come you would have said so, isn’t that right?”
“Absolutely,” Willa said. “We were happy to come. How is Denise?”
“Well, she’s still in a heap of pain, she says. I’ve only talked to her on the phone, but Ben our neighbor took Cheryl in to visit today, and he said she’s doing real well considering what she’s been through.”
“How did she get shot?” Peter asked.
“Oh, that was the durndest thing! Cheryl, go fetch your stuff,” she said. Cheryl, who had been fixing Willa and Peter with a steady, measuring gaze, turned away reluctantly to climb the stairs behind her. The dog wheeled around and followed her.
“She’s a nice enough kid, I guess,” Callie murmured confidentially, “but she’s a kid, know what I mean? Lord, I am worn to a frazzle. Anyhow!” she said, switching to normal volume. “We had all stepped outside, late Tuesday, just about everyone on the block, because this unbelievable noise had started up across the street. This rackety engine noise, fit to bust your eardrums. First we didn’t know what it was, but when we got outside we saw this big old rusty truck, ‘Pressure-Plus Power-Washing’ painted on its door. Did you know people power-wash? These folks straight across the street have some kind of added-on deck, stupidest thing you ever saw—deck about as big as their whole house that you never see them using, and they w
ere having it power-washed at six o’clock in the evening. Well! Of course we were all like ‘Oh-la-la,’ we’re telling each other. ‘Don’t you wish you had a deck that needed a bath?’ Then all at once there’s this extra-loud slam of noise like a truck backfiring, and Denise sits down on the ground. Just sits plunk down on the ground like she’s been shot. And we start laughing. ‘That Denise, she’s such a card,’ we were saying. Till we saw that her shin was bleeding and we said, ‘Wait! She has been shot! She’s been shot, I tell you!’ And Cheryl runs up screaming ‘Mama?’ and Denise is looking like, ‘What? Hold on a minute: what?’ We were just flummoxed.”
“But who would do that?” Willa asked.
It was Cheryl who answered. She was coming back down the stairs with a green plastic trash bag hoisted high in both fists and smacking against her legs with each step, the dog so close to her ankles it was a wonder he didn’t trip her. “Some criminal, I bet,” she told Willa. “Cuz we’ve got this private-detective guy, Dave, right on our same block; keeps a sign in his window for all to see saying he’s a detective. Doesn’t even try to hide it. Some criminal he was closing in on must’ve shot off his gun and accidentally hit Mama.”
“Now, you don’t know that,” Callie said. “She doesn’t know the first thing about it,” she told Willa. “Dave wasn’t even home at the time.”
“The criminal could’ve thought he was home, though,” Cheryl said.
“Well, of course he could!” Willa caroled. “I couldn’t agree more!”
Oh, dear, exactly what she had resolved earlier not to do: put on that chirpy false speaking-to-children voice that she hated. (It was only because she’d been so pleased that Cheryl was talking to her.) And Cheryl didn’t let it go unnoticed. She narrowed her eyes at Willa a moment and then shifted her gaze to Peter, who told her, “He must not have been much of a criminal, I’d say, if he couldn’t handle his gun any better than that.”
He didn’t use a chirpy voice. Cheryl sent him an approving glance and said, “Nope, and that’s how come Dave was closing in on him, I bet. It’s not like Dave is all that hotshot of a detective.”
“Good point,” Peter said.