That was a Friday and we were folding up Sunday night. I sat by the front of the booth on a stool all Saturday and waited. I looked at every face that went by. I didn’t wander off to get lunch and I skipped dinner until Sor brought me some. I doubt I peed all day. By late Sunday afternoon I decided my uncle was crazy and I had been an idiot. I considered leaving him halfway through the season to head home and face the regimented life my father was pushing. He wanted me to follow in his bootsteps and become a cop.
Just after the evening lights came up and the music whirred louder, Elizabeth walked up to the booth in a blue dress with her hair halfway down her back. She didn’t make me stand around guessing. Instead, she let me take her on all the rides. We had swallows from my uncle’s flask and we made out behind the haunted house. She told me she was going to study art in college.
I was thick with love as I unrigged the Chevy that pulled the trailer and drove her home. We stopped five times to make out along the way. Just before we got to her house she made me pull over and handed me a slip of paper and opened the car door and ran down the block. In the light from the radio I saw that she had written out her name and phone number with instructions on when not to call so her parents wouldn’t interfere.
My uncle looked over at me as I folded and unfolded that paper late that night. We were in the car, hauling the trailer and the scale and my lame heart down the highway. He reached over and handed me a stuffed animal from one of the open boxes in the backseat and said, “She took her sweet time showing up, so I was off by a day. But I always pay up.”
I worried that she’d pick me up and put me down. But she found ways to see me until we graduated, and I began to gain confidence in us. Eventually we made it into the same state college. She was accepted into other schools, better schools, but exerted her will so that we would be together.
When she became pregnant with Mona, I dropped out. That was our junior year. We went through some tough days, her mother crying on the other end of the phone, family members on both sides convinced we had screwed up badly. I told them Liz was going to stay in school no matter what and she would go on to graduate school because there was something godlike in the way she could sculpt.
I learned to take any kind of work I could get, stocking shelves in grocery stores, hauling drywall around, wiping down cars at the carwash, hosing out port-a-potties. But for all my efforts, I wasn’t earning enough to support a family of three. I was sitting out on the back porch of our tiny apartment one night in the miserable summer air, halfway through a pint, when Liz called me into the bedroom.
She was naked and six months pregnant. Our fan was broken in the corner. She asked me to get undressed and lie down beside her on the bed. I thought she wanted me to make love to her and I felt the whiskey travel to my groin. But she said, “Wait. I have to talk with you.”
And like most things where Liz was concerned, I went along. She asked me to close my eyes. “Lie still,” she said. So I did.
I broke into a sweat and she blew lightly on my face. “Now I want you to think about the things you know how to do best in all the world—no matter how small.”
I laughed, and she said, “No, that will be your reward. Now clear your mind. Let things just drift through.”
“I can change the oil in the car.”
“Okay,” she said earnestly. “What else?”
“I’m still pretty good at math. Percentages.”
“Keep going.”
“Map reading,” I said. “I’ve always been good with maps.”
“Yes.”
“I think I’m a little drunk.”
“You’re not getting off that easy,” she said.
“I can … I can guess your weight within three pounds …”
“And my birthday within two months. So you can read people,” she said.
“I don’t know that I’ve read myself very well,” I said.
“Pity fest tomorrow. Stay on track.”
“I miss that old guy.”
“You said Sor taught you how to tell if someone was sick and if they had money and …”
“And if they’d lay that money down.”
“All right. Good with percentages and maps, able to read people and see if they’re sick or not. I don’t know about the oil change. But you can tell if they’re going to pay up. …”
I could see her mind racing. There was a long silence, and I’m afraid all I could think about were the little sounds she made when I drew into her.
“Insurance,” she finally said. “You could sell insurance. Quick, open your eyes.”
Before long her hair was falling around my face, her swollen belly moving back and forth over me, and I realized, in that way that I try and think of other things when she’s getting close, that she was right. It did seem like the kind of business where the more you could read someone, the richer your rewards.
Few things have come quick and easy in my life but twenty years later I was able to say we had a decent house in a pleasant neighborhood with a couple of fruit trees and a garage that we turned into Liz’s studio. She got all the way through graduate school, often with Mona on her hip. Her work showed periodically and a couple of the largest pieces sold—they were awfully big and expensive to make and move, so we were patient.
Our daughters, of course, were the real things. Lola was full of spunk from the start, walked early and could climb just about anything. She has her mother’s persistence, her eyes and her ruddy Irish skin. Mona made me think of a young Elizabeth Taylor when she was young, with intense dark eyes and hair. I’m afraid I’ve worried too much about our sleepwalker, though. And she only made it worse by staying up half the night talking with friends, but Liz told me I should leave her be, she’d grow out of it. She has her mother’s artistic nature, so maybe Liz read her in ways I couldn’t.
When I got laid off, I thought the world was over. I couldn’t find another spot anywhere. Employers wanted the younger guys. Suddenly I heard from an old friend who had been with the firm years back, a guy named Phil. Phil was the regional manager at a company on the East Coast now. We had known each other pretty well at one time and that meant he understood my record, my ethics, and what it is to support a family. He offered me a job in New Jersey.
Liz and I talked about it over several days. The plan was to let Mona finish out her year since she was a senior in high school. This would give Liz time to finish up a couple of her bigger projects and organize. Mona would go off to college and Liz and Lola would move to New Jersey. This would put Liz close to the New York market. She seemed ready to take this step.
Things made sense until I woke up that morning, the car packed for the trip.
When I think about that moment, I wonder what I was driving away from. I knew I was letting my family down, that I was all out of magic. Or I had the kind of magic that turns bad.
Mona
Mom removed one of the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d built into a mound. She cut it into fours for Lola who was watching a show in the other room.
I asked my mother if she and Dad were still together. “I’d rather know,” I said.
“Did he say differently?”
She knew he was sending letters to me and she had tried not to probe. In the past, she simply reassured me. I watched her pull another sandwich from the pile and quarter it without really looking.