Monday I Love You (12 page)

“You think there's anything to eat in this place?” he said. “It's been a while since I ate.”

“I'll see,” I said. Usually Doris's fridge is on the empty side. She tells me to help myself to anything I want. Sometimes I bring some snacks when I come here. This time I forgot. Just as well. I got a couple slices of stale bread and smeared them with peanut butter, the crunchy kind.

“Thanks,” he said. Without warning, he pulled me down on the couch next to him. “Hey,” he said, taking a bite, “good. You make a good sandwich, all right.” The hand not holding the sandwich took me by the back of the neck. “Hey,” he said. Stunned, not accustomed to body contact, I sat, frozen, waiting for what would come next.

Still holding me, he took a knife from his pocket and showed it to me.

“See this little beauty?” he said, running his thumb over the blade, barely touching it. “She's my friend, she never lets me down. I take her everywhere. I can trust her. She's like a beautiful woman, you know?”

It hurt me to breathe. I licked my lips and nodded.

“Silent and deadly.” He laughed, and it was a strange and joyless sound. “Get it, Monday? Beautiful woman, silent and deadly.”

Goose bumps crowded on my spine. He laid the knife on his knee and took my other hand in his.

“Know what, Monday? I can read your life line,” he said. “I can tell you in one look how long you got to live.” He blew on my palm and scrubbed it with his hand as if cleaning it off.

“What's this? This thing here.” With a finger he traced the V William had cut into my skin so long ago. “What's this, where'd this come from?” he asked.

“When I was really little, this boy and I were going to be blood brothers.” I stopped, trying to steady my voice. He kept up the tracing until I thought I would scream, it tickled so bad.

“So we sucked each other's blood to make us blood brothers.” I could see it as if it were yesterday. “William cut his hand too, only not so much as mine, and the blood wouldn't stop so we had to go to the hospital. That's about it.”

I closed my eyes and put my head against the back of the couch. He's going to hurt us, I thought in despair. I don't care about me.… What a lot of bull! Of course I cared about me. But if he let Buster alone, I'd try not to mind too much about me.

If only I could get the knife away from him, I thought, maybe I could do something—fight him off, call the police. Anything.

As if from a great distance, I heard him say, “What happened to the kid who cut you?”

Keeping my eyes closed, I said I didn't know. “At the end of the summer, we went back home and I never saw him again. He went to Florida with his mother and her boyfriend.”

He was quiet for a while. I could hear him breathing. Then he asked, “What did you say his name was, the kid who cut you?”

“William,” I said, seeing William and myself on the boardwalk, running. We spent that whole summer running, it seemed. “He was my first best friend. We had such a good time. I'll never forget it. He almost drowned, and an old man pulled him out of the waves and we didn't tell anybody.”

I felt his breath on my face. My eyes snapped open. His face was very close to mine, his eyes glittering at me. I felt drawn into them, almost as if a magnet was hidden in their strange depths.

He took his hand away from my neck then and said, “Better get some shut-eye, Monday. That little baby's going to be up with the birds. I'll take off first light, see if I can get on the road real early.”

Like an old lady with arthritis, I got up. “Sure,” I said. The knife lay there. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

Buster was lying with his little butt pointed at the ceiling. I would've locked the bedroom door, but there wasn't any lock on it. I considered dragging the bureau over so it'd block the door, in case he tried to get in, and decided against it. Don't be a total ass, I told myself. I pulled the quilt over myself without undressing. Arms and legs as heavy as lead, I melted into the mattress.

I was exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. I imagined him out there, pacing, peering out the window, waiting for the storm to subside. Probably I shouldn't have gone to bed, should've waited up with him.

Maybe he was okay. Maybe my imagination was going haywire.

Then a shadow moved. The room was pitch-black, but I swear I saw a shadow standing by the bed. If I sat up and said, “Who's there?” he'd kill me. I was certain of that. If I pretended to be asleep, he might let me alone.

I smelled him. He was there, beside me. On the bed.

Oh God, I thought, help me.

Then I felt his face, his mouth on mine. He kissed me. Not hard, not passionately, just kissed me gently, with love and kindness.

I was stunned.

The shadow moved and was gone. I waited, planning what I'd say if he spoke.

I knew he was gone. I knew the room was empty of everyone but me and Buster. I turned on my side and slept without dreaming.

17

I was the kind of person who was never sure when to laugh. For the longest time, whenever something funny happened, I held back until the last minute, until I was sure it was all right, until everyone else had finished laughing, then I'd laugh. Sometimes I laughed so long and so hard people looked at me strangely, as if to say, “What's with
her?
” or “Who's the crazy?”

And for the longest time, I couldn't tell time. If there was a digital clock or watch handy, I could read off the numbers. But when it came down to telling time by a wristwatch or an ordinary clock, I was lost. I tried to fake it, but people always caught on. I think I was in the eighth grade before I finally got it down, and even then I hesitated, the same way I hesitated when it came to laughing, before I said firmly, “It's ten to eight,” or, “Twenty-three to six.” Or, “Thirty-one past three.” I wanted to be exact, wanted everyone to know I had the matter under control.

Once in a while I have a dream in which I'm in a room full of people. They're all looking at me and asking me to tell them the correct time. I call off the answers in a strong, loud, sure voice. But they don't stop shooting questions at me. No matter how many times I answer correctly, they keep it up.

I don't know why it took me so long. I tied my own shoes early, learned to dress myself, even get my arms in the right sleeves, my shoes on the right feet. I could button buttons, and I was toilet trained before I was two. But the thing people always remembered was that I couldn't tell time. It's funny how that happens. No matter how many things you're good at when you're little, they always remember the thing you couldn't do.

That might not sound like much, but it was. Is.

My father had his gall bladder out when I was nine. I can remember going to the hospital with my mother to visit him. He was in a ward with eight or ten other men. The beds were lined up neatly, the men tucked into them, so flat that all that disturbed the neatness was the men's feet sticking up, making little mounds at the foot of the bed. My father had on his pajamas printed all over with little sailboats, and his fuzzy blue bathrobe lay on his bed. His slippers were on the floor where he could get at them easily.

“Well, how are you?” we said. My mother had brought him a plant that I'd helped pick out. We stood around holding it until she finally put it on the windowsill. She asked him about the food, if the doctor had been in to see him that day, what he'd said. How was he getting on, when would he be able to come home.

Everything was fine and dandy, my father told us. His bones looked as if they were about to poke right through his skin. I felt very shy among all those sick people. There was a funny smell in that room that I didn't care for, and when I wrinkled my nose and, once, held it closed with my fingers, my mother frowned at me and made me take my hand away from my face. The nurse came down the aisle between the beds. Her thick-soled white shoes made squeegee noises on the tile floor, and her glasses glinted in the pale sun, which fought its way through the murky windows. She stuck a thermometer into my father's mouth, and we all stood there quietly until she took it out, looked at it and wrote something on the chart at the foot of my father's bed.

An old man lying in the next bed seemed to be alseep. But when I looked over at him, his eyes were open. They were like a bird's eyes, very small and quick.

“Those your sisters?” he asked my father in a squeaky voice. My father said no, we were his wife and daughter. “This is my wife, Grace,” my father said, “and my daughter, Grace. Mr. Timmons.”

“Which one is Grace?” the old man said, and my father laughed. My mother and I didn't. I knew from my mother's face she didn't think it was funny. I wasn't sure what I thought.

“I had a wife once.” The old man raised himself on one elbow. “She had two left feet and she kept salt in her belly button.”

I looked over at my mother, wondering if I should laugh now. But her face remained stony, and she pretended she hadn't heard what the old man had said.

“You want to know why she kept salt in her belly button?” the old man asked me. His little eyes were looking straight at me. My father said, “It's all right, Grace.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why,” said the old man, “she liked to eat celery in bed. Now you can't very well eat celery without salt, can you? That's why she kept a supply in her belly button.” Then he lay back down, closed his eyes and said no more.

I wanted to laugh. I felt a great swell of laughter rising in my stomach. But my mother looked so severe and my father so unwell, I didn't dare. I swallowed my laughter in great gulps, hoping it wouldn't cause gas later on and give me a stomachache. At that point in my life, I was famous for stomachaches. My mother went around with a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, like a mother in a TV commercial.

On the bus going back home my mother maintained a disapproving silence. She sat next to the window; she always sat next to the window. I would've liked to sit there now and then but she never asked me, she just slid in first. She got to see the sights, and I got to look at the back of the bus driver's head.

“I thought that was a funny story,” I said as we approached our stop. My mother turned her head slowly, as if she had a stiff neck and it hurt her to make any movement.

“I only hope I don't live that long,” she said in a cold voice. “When senility sets in, it's hard on everyone. Especially the loved ones. The poor old man's wife. Imagine him telling a story like that about her.” She clicked her tongue, making a
tch tch
sound, and pushed me ahead of her down the aisle, fearful that we might not get off in time, that the bus door would slide shut and we'd be trapped forever more.

When my father came home from the hospital, he looked worse than when we'd gone to see him. My mother was working then, so she told me to be sure to come straight home from school (as if I ever did any different) and make sure my father was all right.

We played go fish and he always let me win. When he got up to go to the bathroom, I could see it hurt him to walk. “Are you all right?” I asked. He always said the same thing.

“Never better, darling” was what he said. I really did want to know how he was feeling, but the main reason I asked him that was I liked it when he called me “darling.”

Every afternoon I made my father cinnamon toast and tea, and carried it to him on a tray. I set a little plastic flower in a glass of water, and put it on the tray to decorate it and make it seem more festive.

“My, my,” my father always said, as if surprised, pulling himself upright in bed. I put a second pillow behind him and drew up a chair. Sometimes, when he was feeling up to it, I read him parts of my diary.

“To what do I owe all this fanciness?” he liked to ask me. He sipped at his tea and ate a little toast, though not with much enthusiasm. I ate the rest.

“I enjoyed meeting your friend Mr. Timmons,” I said in what I considered a ladylike way. “Does he have to stay in the hospital a long time?”

“Well,” said my father, “I think he's on his way out.”

“You mean he's going home soon, same as you?” I asked, nibbling daintily on a cinnamon crust.

“No.” My father's long Schmitt face seemed very sad. “I mean he's on his way out. Of this world. He doesn't have long to live is what I mean. His wife died six months ago, and the nurse told me the old boy sort of gave up. Just as well. He doesn't have anyone left. No one to take care of him. He's not lucky like me.” He patted my hand, and I took the tray back to the kitchen. I didn't want my father to see how his news had upset me.

Poor little Mr. Timmons. I felt so bad I hadn't laughed, the way I wanted to, at his belly-button story. Wished I'd had the courage to laugh out loud instead of holding in my laughter until it was too late.

18

I woke with a sense of apprehension. What if he was still there, waiting? Knife in hand, running his thumb over the blade, watching me with those strange eyes.

I listened.

Buster was giving his teddy-bear mobile a workout. My mouth felt gummy, my eyelids brittle and frail, as if they might break off. I ran my hand over my face, to see if there were any traces of his lips. Any indentation. Or burn marks. Nothing.

I sat up, wondering if it had really happened or if it was a figment of my imagination. Maybe I had hallucinated and he hadn't kissed me at all. I got up and stumbled into the bathroom, first checking the living room, although I knew it'd be empty. I felt sticky and unclean.

The tarp was gone from the shower rod.

I avoided looking in the mirror while I brushed my teeth. No amount of brushing helped. My mouth still felt gummy.

Buster was still giving his bears a workout. I checked the living room for cigarette butts. Maybe he'd smoked after I went to sleep. The room was clean. It didn't smell of smoke. Thank God. Doris had a nose like a bird dog when it came to sniffing out cigarette smoke. I even got down and checked under the couch and chair for anything telltale there.