“Yeah, we could do that. It’s just a little tricky...”
“I know.” The sandwich disappeared from view as Mack’s screen flashed with industrial ceiling lights. “Look Leonora, there’s your boy. Look how handsome he looks today! You’re a lucky lady, to have a good-lookin’ kid like this one.”
The camera came to rest on his mother’s thin figure, propped up in her adjustable bed. Her hair was immaculately styled as always, her face empty as a swimming pool in deepest winter.
“Hey Mom,” Mack said, as Tilda settled down with her sandwich on the edge of the frame. “You’re looking well. That yellow housecoat really suits you. Mabel chose it, did I tell you that? She likes yellow too.”
Leonora Evans said nothing, and Mack went quiet for a minute too. He was thinking about the color yellow and how, the last time he’d seen his mother alive and well, she’d been wearing a yellow sundress and even he—even her own teenage son who took her for granted every single day of her life and basically thought of her as part of the furniture—even Mack had noticed how beautiful she was in that yellow dress that day. Now he knew it had been a premonition: early the next morning, home from college on spring break, he’d found Leonora bent over double with a headache. Another day after that and his mother was gone, in everything but the most basic, biological sense—an aneurism had stolen everything but her ability to breathe on her own. She had been forty-nine years old.
“She smiled today.” Tilda was a good nurse; she had a sixth sense about when to break Mack’s silences. “I noticed she really likes the Everly Brothers. You know, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’? We’ve been listening to it during our exercises, and it’s twice now that she’s smiled. She’s a big fan.”
Mack very much doubted it. His mother had liked the Whoand Led Zeppelin, had been at Woodstock and then at Studio 54, before she’d followed Mack’s father down south to Florida. But Mack wasn’t about to burst Tilda’s bubble; she was too important to him. She gave up her lunch hours so Mack could talk into the air, sent him updates peppered with nursing-home gossip. Leonora was her favorite patient, she’d told Mack, and he hoped like hell that it was the truth, since his mother lived thirteen hundred miles away from him, in the Sandy Hollow nursing home in Jupiter, Florida. (We can’t talk to my one grandma, Mabel had told another child once,because she lives on another planet.)
Tilda was also discreet. She’d never asked him why, as the only living relative of a woman in a permanent near-vegetative state, he didn’t move his mother closer to where he lived.
Mack leaned sideways to pull the check from his back pocket and in doing so placed the ball of his right foot squarely in the middle of the dog pee. “This is a weird question,” he said to Tilda, while making a silent vow to take Gulliver to the pound, “but has she had any visitors?”
“Only Mrs. Weigand,” said Tilda. “Every Tuesday, like clockwork.”
“Mmm.” Irene Weigand had been part of his mother’s bridge group, all of whom were much, much older than his mom. Irene must be pushing ninety by now; the rest of them were presumably all dead. His mother had kept herself to herself down there in Florida, but she had loved bridge and apparently elderly retirees too, even if she never got to be one. Irene Weigand didn’t interest him, though. Not now and not ever. “No one else, huh?”
“Nope,” said Tilda. “Same time on Friday, Mack?”
“Only if it works for you.”
“You know it does. Have a good week, Mackie.”
“You too, Tilda,” Mack said without thinking, and then, “Goodbye, Mom.”
He ended the call, set the check from Sunshine Enterprises on his desk, and then reached down with one hand to peel the wet socks off his feet.
“You little asshole,” Mack said to Gulliver, who had wandered over to inspect his handiwork. “You can’t hold it in for like two hours?” Mack’s coffee was empty, so he took a can of Dr Pepper from his mini-fridge and clicked through his emails while Gulliver sniffed at the discarded socks in disgust.
Seven fresh emails since this morning: one from a former student, two from Mabel’s new school with forms to fill out, two from Hailey with dates for his diary (as if he kept one, as if he wanted a trip into the ninth circle of corporate hell). And finally, two emails from the English department, though neither of those was the one he was looking for, the one he needed. Mack was waiting for the email assigning his tutor group, the email that would give him the names of the six students he would guide through the highs and lows of their English major experience at the Cleveland Institute of Technology. The one that meant the department had made up their minds to trust him again.
3.
Hailey
It was the surprise in the man’s eyes that caught Hailey’s attention. They were like a cartoon character’s, the whites bulging so violently that she thought they might pop right out of his head. Her mind made quick work of the input it was receiving from the next table over: a charged silence spiraling outward from his general direction, those eyes, the strange, raspy squeak coming from his lips, the hands gesturing madly at his own throat.
Definitely choking.
A quick glance at her fellow diners, and Hailey’s assessment was confirmed. So was the bystander effect: everyone stared, and everyone waited for someone else to do something. Hailey’s lunch partner, a potential associate hire with an impressive track record in personal injury, blinked at her blankly. He’d never get a job out of her now.
Hailey stood, took three quick strides to reach the man’s chair. He was already turning blue.
“I’m going to perform the Heimlich now,” she told him as she swung his legs sideways. He shook his head, and Hailey ignored him. He was big and clearly reluctant; better to keep him seated. She reached her forearms around him, feeling the starchy roughness of his shirt through the thin fabric of her silk sleeves. He was as wide as a fridge; her hands barely met on his chest even though her body was pressed tightly against his back. Still, her fist found the sweet spot under his ribs, her thumb bone angled for maximum leverage. Lucky for him she worked out, at least occasionally, so the difference in their sizes didn’t matter. Her first thrust cracked two of his ribs.
The pain roused him. The man struggled to stand, with Hailey still attached to his back, her biceps unwilling or unable to release their hold. He flapped around like a marlin on a boat deck, and she saw the half-eaten T-bone on his plate recede farther and farther below her. He was lifting her off her feet, and still she couldn’t feel him breathe. Her legs scrambled, found chair and then floor. Too late she saw the man’s eyes roll back in his head, felt his backward momentum. In a panicked misfire, her arms pulled him even closer toward her, her hands trying again for the target at the base of his sternum. She found it just as the heel of her Chanel pump gave way beneath her, sliding across the floor and leading the way down for the rest of her body, and his too. Blackness closed in as the full weight of him landed smack on top of her.
When she opened her eyes, the man’s sweaty face was inches from her own. He was conscious and extremely, extremely concerned.
“Don’t move,” he said to her, and from far away she could hear paramedics parting the crowd. “Don’t move, hon, something could be broken. You could have internal injuries. You’ve been unconscious.” The color was back in his face. His cheeks were flushed with embarrassment.
Hailey sat up, fought the cartoon stars in the corner of her vision. The back of her head hurt, but not as badly as her ribs. The man watched as she pressed a hand to her side and gasped in pain.
“I think you broke a couple of mine as well,” he said. “I could sue you, you know?” But his eyes were grateful.
