“Then why’d you do it?” she asks. The lady with the long silver hair, combed straight. And big teeth. Like a horse’s.
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “Or her family.”
She sighs, leery of me from the moment she walked into the cold room. She hung back, by the door, just watching me with gray eyes from behind a pair of rectangular glasses. She’s got thin skin, like tissue paper, used tissue paper, crinkles everywhere. Her name, she says, is Louise Flores. And then she spells it for me, F-l-o-r-e-s, as if it’s something I might need to know.
“We’ll start at the beginning,” she says, sitting on the other chair. She sets things on the table between us: a recorder, a stopwatch, a pad of paper, a felt tip pen. I don’t like her one bit.
“She wanted to buy me dinner,” I say. I’ve been told that being up-front will go a long way with the silver-haired lady. Louise Flores. That’s what they said, the others who were here: the man with the chin strap and mustache, the cutthroat lady dressed in head-to-toe black.
“Mrs. Wood wanted to buy you dinner?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Heidi.”
“Well, wasn’t that nice of her,” she says bitterly. Then writes something down in the pad of paper with the felt tip pen. “Ever hear the saying ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?”
When I stare off into space, ignoring her, she prods again, “Huh? Have you? Have you ever heard that saying: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?” And she’s staring at me with her gray eyes, where there’s a reflection of the one fluorescent light off the rectangular glasses.
“No,” I lie, letting my hair fall in my face so I can’t see her. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you. That’s one I know. “Never.”
“I see we’re off to a great start here,” Louise Flores says with an ugly sneer, and presses a red button on the recorder. Then: “I don’t want to talk about Mrs. Wood though. Not yet. I want to go back to the beginning. Back to Omaha,” she adds, though I know good and well Omaha isn’t the beginning.
“What’ll happen to her?” I ask instead. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I tell myself, honest to God, I didn’t.
“To whom?” she asks, though she knows good and well who I mean.
“Mrs. Wood,” I say flatly.
She falls backward, sloping into the angles of the chair. “Do you really, truly care? Or is this just an effort to waste time?” She stares at me, hawkeyed, like Joseph used to do. “I’m in no rush here, you see,” she adds, crossing her arms across herself, across a crisp white blouse. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” and yet there’s a bite to her voice that suggests she does not.
“What’ll happen to her?” I ask again. “To Heidi?”
I imagine the warmth of that nice home, the feel of the soft bed, as the baby and I lay together under the brown blanket that felt just like the soft fur of a bunny rabbit. There were pictures on the walls, there in that home, family pictures, the three of them, pressed close together, smiling. Happy. It always felt warm in there, a different kind of warm, one you felt from the inside out, not the outside in. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not since Momma. Heidi was about the closest I’d gotten to Momma in eight whole years. She was kind.
The lady’s smirk is smug, her gray eyes lifeless, though her thin lips compress into a phony smile.
“As the saying goes, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” she says, and I imagine Mrs. Wood, in an orange jumpsuit like me, that kind smile washed off her face.
The girl stands there, on Halstead, before the door of the diner, peering through the glass. Not sure if she wants to come in. She’s come this far and yet she hasn’t quite made up her mind. I see through the glass that the baby is crying, still, though not disconsolate. More of a whimper. She has the baby swaddled in my raincoat, lying horizontally on her tummy as best she can manage with the leather suitcase in one hand. Good girl, I think. She was listening. She lays a hand on the door, and for an instant I’m no longer terrified that she won’t show, but suddenly terrified that she has. My heart scurries and a whole new quandary comes to mind: what will I say to her now that she’s here?
A young man in a hurry sweeps up from behind and nearly plows her over to get inside Stella’s. She staggers, retreating from the door, and I think that she’s changed her mind. This young man with his persnickety face, with too much pomade slicked in his hair, has made her change her mind. The man steps inside the warmth of the restaurant, holding the door open for the wavering girl. She eyes him, and then her eyes scan Halstead, trying to decide. Stay or go. Stay or go. After a moment of her hesitation, he briskly asks, which I hear vaguely over the clamor of a crowded restaurant, over dishes clinking and a multitude of voices, “You coming or not?” though the look on his face makes clear he might just let the door slam shut on her face and that of the baby.
I swallow hard and wait for her response. Stay or go. Stay or go.
She decides she’ll stay.
She steps inside the diner and the hostess with the russet eyes scans her up and down. The army-green coat and torn jeans, the musty smell that schlepps along with those living on the street, the baby, awed suddenly by the lights on the ceiling, the warmth of the diner, the noise that is distracting to me but somehow pacifying to her.
“Table for one?” the hostess asks the girl unenthusiastically, and I quickly stand from my corner booth and wave.
“She’s with me,” I mouth, and perhaps then the hostess makes the connection: my bare arms, a second warm, creamy coat swathing the baby. The hostess points in my direction. The girl makes her way through laminate tables, past obese bodies that spill out of banquet chairs, past waiters and waitresses carrying trays full of food.
“You came,” I say as she pauses before the corner booth. The baby turns, at the sound of my voice. It’s the first time I’ve seen the baby so close, under the canned lights that line the drop ceiling. The baby offers a toothless smile, lets out a dove-like coo.
“I found this,” the girl says, pulling out a familiar green card, which I recognize instantly as my library card, “in the pocket. Of your coat.”
“Oh,” I say, not bothering to hide my surprise. How silly of me to give away my coat without checking the pockets, and I remember jamming it inside en route from the public library to work the other day, a sci-fi thriller in my hands. She came to return my library card.
“Thank you,” I say. I take it from her outstretched hand, feeling the overwhelming need to touch that baby. To stroke her doughy cheek, or sweep the few strands of gentle snowy hair. “You’ll join me for dinner,” I say. I turn the library card over in my hands, and then stick it inside the quilted purse.
She doesn’t respond. She stands before the booth, her eyes—mistrusting, weary—looking down, away from me. “What difference does it make to you?” she asks, without looking at me. Her hands are dirty.
“I just want to