Page 38 of Give In to Me
I write back:Sure.
We go to the coffee shop. Joe is behind the counter, dark hair, wrong shoes, the build of a man who should be doing something other than making lattes. He makes mine without asking. I don’t comment on this anymore. It’s been weeks since I clocked him as one of Luciano’s men, and the fact that he’s still here, still watching, still making my coffee exactly right, is simultaneously the most comforting and most excruciating detail of my current existence.
He’s still watching me. Luciano is still sending his men to watch me. He’s pretending I’m air, but he can’t stop making sure the air is safe.
I sit across from David and wrap my hands around my cup and David talks about his batting average and a girl in his economics class who may or may not have smiled at him and I nod in the right places and I’m so tired.
“You’re doing it again,” David says.
“Doing what?”
“That thing where you nod and your eyes go somewhere else.” He puts his coffee down. “Elsa. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’ve lost weight.”
I haven’t weighed myself. I don’t own a scale. But my dresses are looser than they were a month ago, and my face in the bathroom mirror this morning had a sharpness that wasn’t there before, cheekbones more pronounced, shadows under my eyes that no amount of Martha’s mail-order concealer can fix.
“I’m fine, David.”
“You say that a lot.”
“Because it’s true a lot.”
He looks at me across the table with that open, worried face that makes me want to tell him everything and also makes me want to cry, because David is the sort of friend who would listen to the whole impossible story and then offer to carry my books and buy me a sandwich, and I don’t deserve that kind of uncomplicated goodness right now.
“Eat something,” he says. “Please.”
I eat a muffin. It tastes like nothing. David watches me chew with the focused concern of a person who has decided that my caloric intake is now his responsibility, and I let him, because letting David worry about me is easier than thinking about the man who kissed me and then turned me into a ghost.
SUNDAY.
My phone rings at exactly 1:15 PM, because church in Nebraska lets out at 12:45 and it takes Mama thirty minutes to get homeand get Daddy settled in his chair and put the kettle on and pick up the phone. I know this schedule the way I know my own heartbeat. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.
“Baby girl.” Mama’s voice, warm and Nebraska-flat and so familiar that my eyes sting before she’s finished the second word. “How’s my city mouse?”
“Good, Mama. How’s the farm?”
“Oh, same as always. Your daddy fixed the fence by the east pasture but it took him twice as long because his hip’s acting up again and you know he won’t admit it. I caught him limping and he told me he waswalking with character.”
I almost smile. Almost. “Walking with character.”
“That’s what he said. Man’s sixty-seven years old and stubborn as the day I married him.” A pause. The kettle whistles. I can hear it through the phone, three thousand miles away, and the sound is so specific, so home, that my throat closes. “And how are your studies, sweetheart? That thesis of yours?”
“It’s coming along.” The lie sits in my mouth like a stone. My thesis has been stalled for two weeks because my advisor keeps redirecting me to Professor Cuthbert for approval, and Professor Cuthbert hasn’t responded to a single email since her scholarship review summons, and the one person who gave me real, useful feedback on my proposal is currently pretending I don’t exist.
“Are people being kind to you?”
Mama asks this every week. It’s her version ofare you safe, filtered through Nebraska manners and a mother’s instinct for the things her daughter isn’t saying.
“Everyone’s real kind, Mama.”
“You sure?” A shift in her voice. Martha Lively didn’t raise a fool, and she didn’t raise a daughter she can’t read through a phone line. “You sound a little thin, baby.”
“I’m fine. Just busy.”
“Busy.” She lets the word sit. “You eating enough?”
