by Monica Wood
In the ell, Quinn encountered another receptionist, this one in jeans and a red T-shirt that read GUMS: WE MEAN BUSINESS. “I’m already on file,” he told her.
“It’s been over a year.” She handed him a clipboard. “You have to do this again.”
At the end of the new-employee orientation, a numbing routine that concluded with an assigned locker and a complimentary cafeteria ticket, Quinn followed a section leader into the plant, an open floor with exceptional light and the kind of ubiquitous machine noise that could either inure you to all sound or drive you slowly insane. He was assigned to a chicken-faced woman named Dawna whose clucking voice carried. Because Quinn had performed many of these tasks before—after the boy was born, after the first divorce, after his big return and hasty remarriage, and again after the second divorce—Dawna deemed him a genius quick study. They were buddied up in the Rennie system, composing a fabulous duo entrusted to a complicated station that sorted and labeled and routed mail by the literal bagful. The place vibrated with the sound of gears and ignition and conveyance and old-fashioned human exertion.
For the first fifty minutes he tagged mailbags; for the second fifty minutes he stacked the labeler. For the third fifty minutes he snatched Zip Code–matched brochures from the conveyor and fastened them with rubber bands. Then it was time for lunch, which he got with his free ticket, and in the time left over he strolled the herringboned pathways of a sunny acreage called the “campus.” Rennie’s people got regular breaks, footrests, English lessons, and nine bucks an hour to start. There was almost no turnover. Quinn recognized a group of Somali women from his last go-round.
By two o’clock Dawna had graduated him to a station set up for a massive run of an office-furniture catalog. The machine performed separate tasks at complementary intervals, which had an almost lulling effect on his spirit until the sorter underwent a paper jam that required outside intervention.
The place spit him out at three. He sat in the back of the bus, nothing awaiting him but a long, empty, gigless evening. Normally he’d call one of the guys, get a burger someplace or sit in for supper with one of their burbling families, but he suddenly felt like a man in see-through skin. He recoiled from being looked at—looked into—by people who knew him.
At the first transfer, he impulsively caught the number 4 going west past Sibley Street. He pulled the cord, got off, and walked beneath a cool sun to Miss Vitkus’s house. Affixed to the phone poles along the street were lime-green flyers that hollered NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING. They flapped like caught bugs.
Her house looked tidy. The grass was trimmed and the feeders blinked with birds. The place seemed freshly rinsed, and he felt a stab of pride to have had a hand in it.
“You,” she said when she found him on her doorstep. She looked up the street. “How is it you don’t own a car?”
“I sold it,” he said. “I needed the cash.” He didn’t care how this sounded; at her age she’d probably heard everything.
“For what? Alcohol?”
“A conscience debt.” Why was he telling her this? “It didn’t work. Isn’t working.”
“Money rarely does.” She said nothing more.
He handed her a five. “You owe me some magic.”
She took the money, giving him a meticulous once-over, and let him into the kitchen.
Quinn sat down, his feet throbbing from Rennie’s concrete floors. Her cards were stacked just where she’d left them, though the quarters were gone, and the newspapers had vanished from the counter except for a single clipping, neatly folded.
“My son says you inspire him.”
She looked him over, unreadable. “Have you been drinking?”
“Not for eleven years.”
“I have a whistle here,” she announced, rattling a thin chain that hung around her neck. “They had a break-in down the street.” From the depths of her rumpled sweater she extracted a plastic contraption, one of those summons buttons worn by old people who fear a solitary death.
“I press the button and bingo,” she said, pointing to a box that looked like a piece of studio equipment from the forties. “Some Johnny-on-the-spot saves my bacon.”
Did he look as untethered as he felt? He nudged the cards. “Do something.” He didn’t know what he wanted from her. She was the oldest person he’d ever met—shouldn’t she know some things?
She hesitated, then moved creakily to the counter to snatch up the clipping. “You tricked me,” she said. “You’re the trickster, not me.” She shook the clipping, her eyes big and angry.
He knew what it was.
“I had boys in here before him,” she said, “and not a one of them cared to work. It’s the fathers who end up here, but they come with a thousand excuses. The boy has too much homework, the boy joined a baseball team.” She lifted her bunched chin. “You made me believe your boy was one of those.”
Quinn stared at Miss Vitkus’s neck, skin like crushed satin.
“Then I got an intuition. Something I’d half read, or half heard. I listen to the news. I read my papers, but not the obits. Not religiously, like I used to. Almost everyone I ever knew is dead.” She picked up her glasses and wrestled them onto her face. “Unexpectedly, it says here.” She looked up. “I should say so.”
Quinn could barely meet her eyes, which blazed with grievance. “It’s called Long QT Syndrome,” he told her. “Something electrical goes wrong in the heart.”
“A blinky electrical system?”
“Of the heart, yeah,” Quinn said. “The first symptom is usually death.”
Her voice softened. “How does a little boy get it?”
“You either acquire it through a drug reaction, or else you inherit it through a parent. He must have inherited it. It’s rare. Obviously.”
“Through a parent?” She frowned. “Are you next?”
“If you make it to middle age the risk goes away. What I didn’t know didn’t hurt me.”
“If it was you,” she said. “It might have been his mother.”
“Let’s assume it’s me. His mother has enough weight on her heart.” He tapped the cards, an old hand at misdirection himself. “I paid you the full amount.”
“So you did.” She took up the cards and began to work them, rocking the deck from one hand to the other. Her fingers, despite their aged knots, managed the rhythm. She’d been practicing.
“He’s your only one?” she asked. Quinn caught her look: apparently they would be using the present tense.
“Just him,” Quinn said, eyeing the cards’ undulations. The boy had sat here, watching these same preparations. His son, expecting magic.
She fanned the deck. “Pick one.”
He took the queen of clubs, slipped it back into the deck, and waited as she worked the cards. She turned over his card. “That it?”
Quinn nodded, surprised.
“I got a little flubby there for a second. I’m not myself today.”
“Make something disappear,” Quinn told her, wringing another five from his wallet.
Her eyebrows—or the creases where her eyebrows had once resided—rose. “The mark doesn’t get to choose.” She pocketed the money and waited. The air between them went still with possibility. All at once, so quickly that Quinn wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it, she plucked the news clipping from the table, closed it into her freckled fist, then opened her hand again, revealing nothing but her own naked palm engraved with a century’s worth of lifelines.
“Where is it?” Quinn asked.
“You paid for magic. I gave you magic.” That she refused to pity him—that she was, in fact, furious—made him feel a little less bereft.
He gave her yet another five. “What else you got?”
“Children take what they get. But adults, nothing’s ever enough.” She added, “Your boy and I were friends.”
“I should have told you,” Quinn said.
She sat back and folded her big hands. “And here I was thinking he turned out like a
ll those other boys, a layabout with no follow-through.” Her mouth appeared to tremble, but it was hard to discern her meaning through the hatch pattern of wrinkles. “His sterling reputation in this house was being tarnished through absolutely no fault of his. I feel very bad about that. Why didn’t that scoutmaster inform me? I have a working phone. Your boy and I had plans.”
Quinn felt strangely heated, as if he’d been caught under a police lamp. He looked around the house for signs of unfinished projects. “What kind of plans?”
“It hardly matters now.” Then he saw her expression change, as if second-guessing herself, or giving Quinn the benefit of the doubt. “He was a good boy and I’m terribly sorry,” she said to him. “It’s a pitiful thing to outlive your children.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Frankie perished in the war,” she said. “Randall died of cancer. He never did settle down—lots of ladies but no wife—though he was an excellent attorney-at-law. People said lovely things at his funeral.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This house was Randall’s, in fact.” She blinked at him. “Is there a worse indignity, do you think, than inheriting your children’s money?”
“Probably. But I see what you mean.”
“At the time I was low on funds and heading into the mixed blessing of a long life.” She leaned across the table to say this.
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Randall was sixty-one. Not a long life. But not a short one, either.” She paused. “Frankie’s the one I miss.”
A moment passed.
“His mother had to remind me before every custody visit,” Quinn said. “Even then I didn’t keep up. I barely knew him. That’s the truth.”
Miss Vitkus reached into the warm cavern of Quinn’s jacket. He felt her hand on his chest, brief as an alighting bird, before she withdrew it, the folded obituary materializing on her palm, and inside that, his five-dollar bill. She gave them over without a word. From someplace far outside himself, he accepted a knifing pity for the boy, who was missing this. That he could muster a feeling beyond disgrace felt like magic enough.
“Why didn’t you keep up?” she asked. She sounded merely curious. He surrendered then, yielding to her age, her lively face, her general mien of urgency.
“I didn’t understand the way his mind worked,” he confessed. An upwelling of sorrow befell him. Her eyes were still young. “I never figured out how to—how to be with him.”
She took this in—without judgment, it seemed to Quinn—then said, “Randall and I never quite found our feet together. He was a good boy, but we had nothing in common. So independent, ambitious, even as a child. I never felt as if he actually needed me.”
Quinn got up, pocketing the obit and leaving the money alone. “You want anything done? As long as I’m here?”
“I blew a light bulb in the parlor. I hate to get up on a chair.”
He began with the light bulb, which required a stepstool. Which also needed repair.
He returned on Saturday, the appointed day, and the Saturday after that.
As May gave over to June, Quinn arrived in the boy’s place, on time and carrying tools, fulfilling what he surmised to be the full breadth of the boy’s commitment.
“I’ve got a cake here,” she said. “You’ll like it. It has a secret ingredient.”
“Who doesn’t like a secret ingredient?”
“I suppose you could call me Ona.”
“You’ve been calling me Quinn.”
“So I have. But you’re a younger gentleman. I’m an older lady. It’s up to me to give permission.”
He was smiling now. “May I call you Ona?”
“Permission granted. My gutters are a mess, by the way.”
So he cleaned out her gutters, rehung a door, replaced the stair treads on the porch, watched the slow arrival of summer. Each Saturday he stayed for animal crackers or cake, an exchange of five dollars, a doggedly rendered Double Detection or 7-Up or Queen of the Air. Sometimes, she made things disappear: cards or coins or hankies with hand-tatted hems. These came to be his favorites, these sly deflections, the clever here-and-gone, simple tricks that required little more than a middling prestidigitator and an observer desperate to be amazed.
Chapter 7
On the fifth Saturday, the boy arrived with bad news: Ona was a spring chicken.
She had three-digit rivals everywhere, from Saskatchewan to Siberia. This oversight—that he’d traced the “oldest man” and “oldest woman” titleholders but neglected to check for understudies—appeared to cause the boy a deep-churning chagrin.
He unzipped his backpack in slow motion. It always looked store-new, the shiny red of supermarket cherries. He read from yet another printout, his hard-packed expression at odds with his delicate features. “After Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan, United States Territory of Puerto Rico,” he read, “the second-oldest person in the world is a lady, country of Romania, also age one hundred thirteen. The third-oldest person in the world is a lady, country of Japan, also age one hundred thirteen. The fourth-oldest person in the world is Mr. Fred Hale. We know him already.”
Finally he handed her the sheet. “If Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan and the lady from the country of Romania and the lady from the country of Japan and Mr. Fred Hale die, then the oldest person in the world will be another lady, Mrs. Flossie Page, age one hundred eleven, country of USA.”
“Hmm.” Ona leafed through the shortlist—eighty-two official contenders, mostly women. Mrs. Japan and Mrs. Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants. They had been listed by a research outfit committed to tracking the world’s oldest citizens. All these rivals of intemperate age, the youngest of them a good eight years older than Ona, the oldest of them shy of the all-time record by nearly a decade.
Ona conjured a vision of Madame Calment snickering in her celestial rocking chair. “This print’s too small,” Ona said, getting up. “I need my glasses. Come in here.”
The boy halted at the door of her parlor. She realized she’d never invited him past the kitchen. He laid the papers on her lap, then lighted on the arm of one of the matching wingbacks that had come with the house.
“Look at all these codgers,” she said. “What the heck are they putting in their oatmeal?”
“You can’t get in the running until you’re a supercentenarian.” The word galloped off his tongue as if he’d rehearsed it. “That means one hundred ten and plus. They think there’s around four hundred in all. It’s hard to track them all down.” He hopped off the chair and ran a fidgety finger down the side of the page. “See, it shows their birthday next to their name. Years plus days.”
Ona noted a woman from Oslo, another from Thailand, several from the American South, Annabelles and Elviras and Lavinias. A few men, mostly from Japan. “Who finds these people?”
“Researchers. Of gerontology.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is your mother a schoolteacher?”
“My mother is a librarian.”
“You talk like a librarian.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“I don’t either, really. I take tea with the ladies from church, but their health complaints can wear a body out. You’re a nice boy. Why don’t you have friends?”
“People don’t like you unless you do sports. The card tricks didn’t work out.”
“I warned you,” she said.
“One, I hate sports. Two, I hate band. Three, I hate lunch.”
“I told you not to try those tricks at school.”
“I’d rather do activities like this,” he said. “I love doing activities like this.” She wasn’t quite sure what he meant. Visiting old ladies? Looking things up on his Internet? Convincing people to chase world records for something that took not one iota of talent?
“So,” Ona said, “nobody’s keeping track of the hundred-to-hundred-ten crowd?”
<
br /> “There’s too many. Almost one-third of one million if you count the whole world. Which I do.”
“Where in blazes are they hiding?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said gloomily.
“And here I thought I was two or three pneumonias away from a record. We got all hepped up over nothing.”
He shook his head sadly.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll wait them out.”
She took out her cards to distract them both from disappointment and within a few minutes had him inside-out over a Hide the Jack that a below-average Border collie could have figured out in half a minute. He wasn’t stupid—far from it—just overly agreeable.
“What happened to Viktor the beautiful blond Russian boy?” he asked.
Ona blushed. The Frenchwoman’s ghastly photograph had been stuck in her head since she first saw it. Did she look like that, like a decomposing fig? Was it too much to ask this boy to mentally strip away her own cratered hollows, the baggy skin through which her bones showed like the hanger beneath the clothes? She had been lovely once. Could this twenty-first-century boy muster the drowse of imagination required to reconstruct her youthful body, her slender ankles and glossy shoulders, the oak-colored hair she’d crimped into Marcel waves with a potion of stiffened egg whites? Could he see beyond her overlaundered blouse and slacks to envision the bright poplin shirtwaist bought at McKay’s Fancy Goods in June of 1916? She thought he could.
“You can’t let a thing go,” Ona said. “Have you ever noticed that?”
“I have deficiencies,” he said ruefully, eyeing the cards. “What happened to Viktor the beautiful blond Russian boy?”
“Oldest story in the book,” she said. “What a goosy girl I was.”
He waited. With the unruffled patience of a cat. This did not seem like a deficiency.
“Kūdikis,” Ona said, then put her hand to her mouth.
“What’s kūdikis?”
She regarded him carefully; maybe it was the uniform, which could have been fifty years old; maybe it was his throwback manners; or the sea gray of his irises, which suggested an age and wisdom he could not possibly possess. “‘Baby,’” she confessed. Her stomach knotted. “I never told a living soul.”