by Anne Tyler
They smiled at each other.
Children loved Peter. Which was so ironic, when you considered that Willa was the one who’d had children of her own while Peter and his first wife had deliberately chosen not to.
“Well, I don’t buy that,” Callie said. “I’m thinking it was Sir Joe, is more likely.”
“Sir Joe would never!” Cheryl protested.
Willa asked, “Sir Joe?”
“He lives next door to me,” Callie told her. “Him with his noisy Harley and his cigarette pack rolled in his T-shirt sleeve all Rebel Without a Cause.”
“He would never in a million years,” Cheryl said staunchly.
“And a barbwire tattoo around his biceps, to boot. Don’t forget your dog stuff, Cheryl.”
Cheryl dropped the trash bag on the floor at the foot of the stairs and headed toward the rear of the house, first sending a scowl in Callie’s direction.
“Can’t wait to get all that mess out of here,” Callie said to Willa, and then she lowered her voice and asked, “What’s the story, anyhow? Sean and Denise weren’t married? I never knew! Though I have to say, this does put a whole different slant on him leaving her. Not his method of leaving, I don’t mean, but, you know…”
Willa had no idea what method Callie was talking about. She was dying to ask—Sean had merely announced that he’d moved to a new place and so Willa shouldn’t phone him at Denise’s anymore—but a significant throat-clearing sound from Peter warned her not to. Men were so priggish about gossip. (Or sensible, Peter himself would claim.) So she just said, “Oh, well, couples. Who can ever tell from outside what might be going on with them?” Then Cheryl came back with a big sack of kibble and two plastic dog bowls, and Peter stepped forward to take them and they said good night to Callie. She was busy lighting a cigarette, though, and merely trilled her fingers at them as she took her first drag.
* * *
—
It was the dog who led the way to Denise’s house, bustling up the sidewalk purposefully. Cheryl followed with her trash bag, and Willa wheeled her suitcase just behind while Peter brought up the rear.
“Does Airplane not need a leash?” Willa asked, and Cheryl said, “Nah, he’s okay just in the neighborhood.”
“He never runs into the street?”
“Nope. Mama says he must have belonged to a guy’s guy, once upon a time. One of those guys that takes it for granted dogs will do what he tells them to, and so they do. We got him from a shelter. Mama let me pick out any dog I wanted, so as to make me feel better after Sean left.”
Willa hadn’t stopped to consider that Cheryl might have minded Sean’s leaving. She felt a twinge of something like shame for him, although of course she didn’t know his side of things.
The dark was that halfhearted kind that happens on summer evenings, so that even with all the lights off at Denise’s house Willa could make out its shabby condition—the flaking paint on the porch pillars, the rust stains trickling from the black metal numerals next to the front door. The welcome mat was so frayed that long, ropy strands of it straggled across the porch floorboards.
Cheryl drew a key from the chain that hung inside her T-shirt, and she unlocked the door and stepped in to snap the overhead light on. A foyer sprang into view, with a staircase on the right and an archway on the left opening into the living room. Somehow the place managed to seem both cluttered and bare at the same time. A sheaf of mail lay strewn across the rug just inside the front door. The one piece of furniture in the foyer was a gateleg table bearing an old-fashioned black corded phone and a box of Ritz crackers.
Peter set down his suitcase and asked, “Where do you want the dog things?”
“In the kitchen,” Cheryl said, and she led them to the rear of the house, to a kitchen with Mondrian-patterned linoleum from the 1950s and elderly, oversized appliances. This was how kitchens had looked back home, Willa reflected. She gazed around appreciatively, and then she walked over to the sheet of paper Scotch-taped above the wall phone.
Nowhere in the printed column of names did she find “Sean’s mom.” For that she had to look in the right-hand margin, where it slanted upward like an afterthought—a handwritten scrawl above another scrawl noting the number for Prince of Pizza.
Peter set the dog supplies on the table. Airplane curled himself onto a nest of plaid flannel beside the back door and gave a contented groan.
“Have you had supper?” Willa asked Cheryl.
“Kind of,” Cheryl said.
“Kind of?”
“I had some Chinese takeout I found in Callie’s fridge.”
“Do you want me to fix you something?”
“I’m okay.”
“Peter, how about you?”
“Oh, I couldn’t eat another bite after that sumptuous feast on the plane,” he said.
He was talking about the snack they’d been served shortly before landing—cheese and crackers. Willa said, “Very funny.” Then she asked Cheryl, “Is there a guest room?”
“Sure. I’ll show you.”
Cheryl led them back out to the foyer, where Willa and Peter retrieved their bags, and up to the second floor. The guest room opened off the hall to the rear, next to the bathroom. Twin beds nearly filled it, with a low bureau between them. No other furniture could have been squeezed in. The wallpaper was pink with white daisies.
Peter made a comically mournful face at Willa. “Great: separate beds,” he told her.
She gave him a consoling pat and asked Cheryl, “Do we need to find sheets?”
“They’re already on,” Cheryl said, and she lifted one spread to prove it. “Mama says you should always have your guest room set to go in case, like, your neighbors’ house burns down in the middle of the night and they need a place to sleep.”
“Does that happen often?” Peter asked.
“Not so far,” Cheryl said.
Willa liked it that Cheryl was so fond of quoting her mother. It implied that Denise was involved and invested, not some chilly absentee parent.
Cheryl opened the door to a tiny closet. “Hangers,” she said, gesturing grandly. “Shoe bag.”
“Perfect,” Willa said.
She lifted her suitcase onto one of the beds and opened it flat. Peter asked Cheryl, “Do you people have a TV?”
“Sure, downstairs in the living room.”
“Does it get CNN?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll go check it out,” he said, and he left the room.
Willa and Cheryl looked at each other.
Up close, it emerged that Cheryl had soft, tawny skin, unfortunately pouching a bit below her jaw, and opalescent gray eyes. She must have been making an assessment of her own, meanwhile, because she suddenly asked, “Do you wear lip liner?”
“Um, yes,” Willa said.
“I thought so.”
Willa had to fight down the urge to ask her if that was all right.
When Willa was Cheryl’s age, she had found older women intimidating. Scary, almost. She used to flinch inwardly when she met up with one, sliding her eyes sideways. Once, in a supermarket, she had not flinched—had bravely faced the elderly clerk who accused her of “pawing the pears”—and later realized it was because she’d been wearing big sunglasses at the time, so that her eyes were shielded. Now that she was older herself, she worried that she, too, might frighten children. She took it as a kind of miracle when Cheryl peered into Willa’s suitcase without trying to hide her curiosity. “How come you pack your clothes in Kleenex?” she asked.
Tissue paper, she meant. Willa said, “Oh, that’s just something women do when they have too much time on their hands.”
Cheryl said “Huh?” and Willa laughed.
Coming here had not been a mistake. Willa couldn’t say exactly how she knew that, but she did.
* * *
—
“Northeast Baltimore woman shot by unknown assailant,” Willa read. It was the headline of a newspaper clipping she’d picked up from the rug along with the supermarket flyers and the electric bill. Actually there were three clippings, but all of them were the same. Various neighbors must have slipped them through the mail slot.
In yet another Baltimore shooting incident, police report that a 31-year-old woman was shot in the leg around 5:45 Tuesday evening while standing in her front yard on the 300 block of Dorcas Road.
The victim was hospitalized but is expected to make a full recovery. No suspect was apprehended.
“It’s getting so you can’t step out of the house no more to watch a simple power-washing event,” one resident opined. “How much longer can this go on?”
Anyone having possible knowledge of the incident is asked to contact the police.
Willa placed the clippings with the mail on the foyer table, where she and Cheryl were collecting items to take to Denise the next morning. So far, they had a pair of terry-cloth slippers, a book of word-search puzzles, and a list of phone messages in Cheryl’s painstaking print: “Mrs. Mitten called to see how you are,” “Dentist called it’s time for our checkup,” “Howl called.”
Howl?
Cheryl hurtled down the stairs pell-mell, flip-flops slapping, and stopped short at the bottom to ask, “Can we watch Space Junk?”
“What’s Space Junk?”
“You don’t know what Space Junk is?”
“I must have missed it.”
“Oh, you would love it, Willa. It’s, like, only the best program in the world. Sit and watch it with me! Please?”
“What time is it on?”
“Um!” Cheryl said. “It’s recorded, silly.”
Willa could have taken offense, but she found it heartening that Cheryl had progressed so quickly to the eye-rolling stage. She said, “Let’s just see if Peter’s finished watching the news,” and they went into the living room.
Peter still had CNN on, but he wasn’t watching it. He was frowning at his cell phone, his feet propped on the coffee table. When they walked in, he glanced up and asked Cheryl, “Does this place have Wi-Fi, by any chance?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t suppose you know the password.”
“Cheryl two thousand eight,” she said. “Want to watch Space Junk with us?”
“No, thanks.” He stood up, still focusing on his phone, and moved to the armchair in the corner. Cheryl plopped herself on the couch and patted the cushion next to her. “Sit! Sit!” she told Willa.
The couch was brown corduroy, and it was dotted with crumbs and stains. The flowered brown armchair Peter was sitting on more or less matched it, and there was also a rocking chair and an oval brown-and-green braided rug, everything faded and hand-me-down-looking. But the TV was fairly new—flat-screen, at least—standing on a wheeled cart with a jumble of electronic equipment on the shelf beneath. From the coffee table, Cheryl picked up a remote control lying beside a yellowing philodendron plant and expertly stabbed at the buttons. A silver flying saucer appeared against a deep-blue background while eerie space-age music started up, woo-hoo, woo-hoo. As if summoned, Airplane trotted into the room and hopped onto the couch to settle between Cheryl and Willa. “This is his favorite show,” Cheryl said. It was true that his eyes were fixed on the screen and his ears were straight out; but then, his ears were always straight out.
“Bob Graham’s wife had a stroke,” Peter said, looking up from his phone.
“Oh, what a pity,” Willa said. She tried to remember who Bob Graham was.
“So let me just catch you up on what is going on here,” Cheryl told her. “There’s this bunch of total strangers, see, eating lunch in a hamburger joint. All these different people on their lunch break. And these space aliens come and kidnap them and take them off to study them, because they believe these people are a family. See? They want to learn how families work and that’s what they think these customers are. Get it?”
“Got it,” Willa said.
On the screen an alien who looked very much like an earthling, if you didn’t count the antenna sprouting from his forehead, was listening to a middle-aged black woman in a business suit and an olive-skinned man in striped coveralls, both talking at once. The man in coveralls was speaking Spanish.
The telephone rang in the foyer. “Shoot,” Cheryl said. Her eyes stayed on the screen.
The phone rang again. Willa said, “Should we answer that?”
Cheryl gave a loud sigh and punched the Hold button and got up. Airplane stayed where he was, watching the frozen screen intently as if he hoped to will it into moving again.
“Ron says they need me back in San Diego for a client meeting in August,” Peter told Willa, looking up again from his phone.
In the foyer, Cheryl said, “Carlyle residence.” Then “Hi, Mama.” And “Yeah, she’s here. And him too…Huh?…Him, her husband. Peter. My grandpa.”
Denise must have corrected her, because next she said, “Yeah, I know, but he’s like a grandpa…Huh?…Yeah, I did, and I showed her the sheets were on and all.”
Willa waited to be summoned—wouldn’t Denise want to confer with her?—but the next thing Cheryl said was, “Okay, I’ll tell her. Bye.” And Willa heard the clunk of the receiver against the cradle.
“Mama says her car keys are on the hook beside the kitchen door,” Cheryl said, returning to the living room. “She says we can come visit her tomorrow after ten.”
“How’s she doing?” Willa asked.
“She didn’t say.” Cheryl wriggled back into position on the couch and pressed the Play button. “Isn’t this a great show?”
“Yes, it is,” Willa said.
Although now a teenage boy in a white apron had appeared, and most of what he said was four-letter words. But Cheryl didn’t bat an eye, and neither did Airplane.
* * *
—
Cheryl said she didn’t have a regular bedtime, but when Willa suggested at nine o’clock that she might want to go up, she didn’t argue. “Airplane needs to pee, though,” she said. “Mama always takes him outside before he comes to sleep with me.”
“Oh, okay, why don’t I do that while you’re getting into your pajamas,” Willa said.
Peter glanced up from his laptop, which he was working on now. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked her.
“What?”
“You’re going to walk the dog alone in the dark where somebody just got shot?”
Cheryl, halfway out of the room, turned back to say, “The shooter wouldn’t still be there, you know.”
“I’m coming with you,” Peter told Willa. And he set aside his laptop and stood up.
Willa wasn’t sure how he planned to protect her from random gunfire, but she appreciated the fact that he wanted to.
Outside, the air was warm and heavy and some kind of locusts were scritching away in the distance. “I don’t know how people put up with this humidity,” Peter said.
“Well, I did notice an air conditioner in our bedroom window,” Willa told him. “We can turn it on, if you like.”
“No ifs about it.”
Willa was carrying a plastic bag that Cheryl had given her for dog poop. She hoped she wouldn’t need to use it, though. Also, it seemed odd to walk a dog without a leash. What if he didn’t consider her a person of authority? What if he ran away?
But Airplane walked docilely a few feet in front of them, pausing once or twice to investigate something invisible. Out by the curb he encountered a cat—just a shadow floating by in the twilight—but he barely glanced in its direction and the cat paid him no attention. In front of Callie’s house he stopped and lifted a leg, after which he turned and looked up at Willa. Evidently that was that, so s
he said, “Good boy,” and they headed back toward the house.
“How long do you think before Denise gets out of the hospital?” Peter asked.
“Maybe she’ll tell us tomorrow when we visit.”
“I don’t have a whole lot to do here, you know.”
“Well, Peter?” Willa said.
She hadn’t asked him to come, she was going to say. But that would have sounded ungracious, so she tucked her arm in his and said, “I’m sure it won’t be long.”
Then they went back inside, and Peter returned to his laptop while Willa and Airplane climbed the stairs to Cheryl’s room. It was very neat, for a child’s room. The only clutter, if you could call it that, was a lined-up array of horse statues on the bureau. Cheryl was sitting against her headboard, playing some sort of game on a handheld device. She wore pink pajamas with cap sleeves that showed her upper arms, which were wide and soft and squishy like a grown woman’s arms. Willa felt guilty all over again for noticing such a thing.
“Willa,” Cheryl said, “you know how you are Sean’s mom.”
“Yes?”
“Well, so, now that you’re in Baltimore, do you think he’ll come here to visit you?”
“Oh. I’m not sure, honey,” Willa said. Although inwardly, she felt an urge to make any number of promises.
Airplane hopped delicately onto the foot of the bed, and Willa wished them both a good night and went back downstairs.
3
Denise said, “This is so embarrassing. What was Callie thinking, to call you?”
She was sitting up in her hospital bed, looking perfectly healthy except for the thick white cast encasing one leg from the knee down. Seeing her gave Willa a whole different slant on Cheryl, because this was probably how Cheryl was going to turn out when she was grown: no longer plump but just enticingly rounded, at that perfect point where one more pound would have been one too many but you wouldn’t want her weighing any less. Denise’s hair was a streaky dark-blond color, hanging straight to just above the neckline of her hospital gown, and the fact that her part was slightly crooked added to her air of naturalness—that and her total lack of makeup.