Page 120 of Save the Date
Cara looked up. He held out the phone so he could read the message.
Battery dead. No way to get to motel. Found unlocked window. Bring me some pizza?
“I never leave windows unlocked over there. I’m sure she broke one so she could get back in the house,” Jack said.
“You should go home and check on her,” Cara said, hoping he wouldn’t.
He was already typing, and held up the phone again, so she could read his response.
Call a cab. Get out of my house and get your own pizza.
“You sure have a way with the ladies,” Cara said.
“Zoey ain’t no lady.”
***
After a while, Jack heated up their dinners, and was surprised to find she was actually hungry. They drank another glass of wine and rinsed out the dinner dishes.
“Will you stay here tonight?” Cara asked, drying the glasses and putting them back on the shelf where she’d so carefully arranged them on moving day two years ago.
“Do you want me to?”
Cara grasped his shirtfront, pulled him to her, and whispered in his ear. “There’s a time and a place for everything, remember?”
“I”ll bring in the dogs,” Jack said.
“Better text Zoey and tell her not to wait up,” Cara teased. She really was feeling a little better.
48
As soon as he pulled up to the house with the peeling pea-green paint on East Forty-Fourth Street Tuesday morning, Jack Finnerty felt the old familiar sensation of dread seep into his pores. He hadn’t been to this house in more than twenty-five years, but not much had changed. The grass was still bone-dry, because the old lady was too cheap to turn on a sprinkler. The shrubbery near the house still needed trimming and the concrete sidewalk was still cracked and potholed. The one thing that surprised him was how small it looked now.
But then, the last time he’d been here he’d been what, ten years old? He’d pedal slowly over here every Wednesday after school let out at Charles Ellis School on nearby Washington Avenue, lean the bike against the kickstand, and reluctantly drag himself up this same sidewalk, with the white envelope and the five-dollar bill tucked in his pants pocket.
He rang the doorbell, and felt his stomach muscles suck in, out of some decades-old force of habit. If he’d had a shirttail he would have tucked it in, and removed his ball cap, too.
The heavy front door, still painted that same mud brown, was open, and as he looked through the screen door, he could have sworn he saw that same ghostly-gray moth-eaten Siamese cat of his childhood flit from beneath the marble-top console table in the entry hall.
A moment later, Sylvia Bradley was peering out at him through the screen. She wore a flowered print blouse and baggy blue polyester slacks, and her ever-present old-school Keds. Like the house, she looked smaller now, too. And he was startled to see that she walked with a cane.
“Jack Finnerty?” Her voice was fluty, and overly loud.
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
“Well, come on in then,” she said, unlatching the hook.
***
The house was stifling, but in his memory, it had always been stifling. She plied him with a Dixie cup of warm Hawaiian Punch, and he was certain it came from the same can she’d opened twenty-five years ago, and that it had been sitting on her kitchen counter all this time. Sylvia motioned for him to sit down in the parlor, on an excruciatingly stiff tufted red velvet sofa. He pointed at the upright piano on the opposite wall, with its books of sheet music propped above the keyboard, and the metronome sitting on top.
“Do you still give lessons?”
“Unfortunately no.” She held up her right hand, it’s knobby joints red and swollen. “Arthritis.”
“That’s too bad,” Jack said. “You must miss your students.”
“Not really,” Sylvia Bradley said. “Children today don’t want to study piano. They want to play ‘keyboard’ and be in rock bands.”
