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Abby couldn’t argue with that. She went on pacing.
Then she said, “The waitress. The other one.”
“Well, I have no idea what her name was.”
“No, me either, but she called Lena Mrs. Something, I remember that. I remember thinking she must be the shy type, if she wouldn’t use Lena’s first name even in this day and age.”
She gave up pacing and went around to her side of the bed. “Oh, well, it will come to me by and by,” she said. She prided herself on her phenomenal memory, but it sometimes operated on a delay. “It will float up in its own good time, if I just don’t force it.”
Then she lay down and smoothed her covers and ostentatiously closed her eyes, so Red got into bed himself and switched the lamp off.
In the middle of the night, though, she prodded his shoulder. “Carlucci,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I can hear the waitress saying it. ‘Mrs. Carlucci, can I get you a refill?’ How could I have forgotten? Carla Carlucci: alliteration. Or something more than alliteration, but I don’t know the term for it. It just now came to me when I got up to go pee.”
“Oh. Good,” Red said, turning onto his back.
“I’m going to try Information.”
“Now?” He squinted at the clock radio. “It’s two thirty a.m.! You can’t phone her now.”
“No, but I can get her number,” Abby said.
Red went back to sleep.
In the morning she a
“Maybe so,” Abby said, “but technically, seven is morning.”
Red said, “Well, okay.” Then he went downstairs and made a pot of coffee, although as a rule he’d be leaving for work now with a stop-off at Dunkin’ Donuts.
At five till seven, Abby placed her first call. “Good morning, may I speak to Lena, please?” Then, “Oh, I’m sorry! I must have the wrong number.”
She placed the second call. “Hello, is this Lena?” The briefest pause. “Well, excuse me. Yes, I know it’s early, but—”
She winced. She dialed again. “Hello, Lena?”
She straightened. “Well, hi there! It’s Abby Whitshank, down in Baltimore. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
She listened a moment. “Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. “I keep telling Red, ‘Sometimes I wonder why I go to bed at all, the little bit of sleep I manage.’ Is it age, do you think? Is it the stress of modern times? Speaking of which, Lena, I was wondering. Are Carla and Susan and De
(“Last Tuesday” was how people were still referring to it. Not till the following week would they start saying “September eleventh.”)
“Oh, really,” Abby said. “I see. Well, that’s something, at least! That’s comforting. And so you don’t … Well, of course I can see that you wouldn’t … Well, thank you so much, Lena! And please give my love to Carla and Susan … Hmm?… Yes, everyone here is fine, thanks. Thank you, now! Bye!”
She hung up.
“Carla and Susan are all right,” she said. “De
“New Jersey? Where in New Jersey?”
“She didn’t say. She said she doesn’t have his number.”
Red said, “Carla would, though. On account of Susan. You should have asked for Carla’s number.”
“Oh, what’s the point?” Abby said. “We know he was nowhere near the towers. Isn’t that enough? And I’m not willing to bet that even Carla has his number, if you want the honest truth.”
Then she started loading the dishwasher, while Red stood gaping at her.
So: New Jersey. Another broken relationship. Two broken relationships, unless De
This was not characteristic of Abby. She believed devoutly in people’s capacity for change, sometimes to the exasperation of everyone else in the family. But now she seemed to have given up. When she phoned Jea
“I don’t know why,” Abby said. “There was never any real danger.”
The following morning, a Saturday, Amanda stopped by una
Abby pulled it off the fridge door and handed it to her. (Of course she’d kept it.) Amanda sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the phone and dialed.
“Hello, Lena?” she said. “Amanda calling. De
The burble at the other end must have been some kind of protest, because Amanda said, “I have no intention of upsetting her, believe me. I just need to get in touch with my rascal of a brother.”
That seemed to do the trick; she dipped her free hand in her purse and pulled out a memo pad with a tiny gold pen attached. “Yes,” she said, and she wrote down a number. “Thank you very much. Goodbye.”
She dialed again. “Busy,” she told her parents. Abby groaned, but Amanda said, “Naturally it’s busy; her mother’s calling her with a heads-up.” She drummed her fingers on the table a moment. Then she dialed once more. “Hi, Carla,” she said. “It’s Amanda. How’ve you been?”
Carla’s answer didn’t take much time, but even so, Amanda seemed impatient. “Good,” she said. “Well, could I have my brother’s number? I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”
While she wrote it down, Red and Abby hunched forward and stared at the pad, hardly breathing. “Thanks,” Amanda said. “Bye.” And she hung up.
Abby was already reaching for the pad, but Amanda pulled it away from her and said, “I am making this call.” She dialed once more.
“De
They couldn’t hear what his response was.
“Someday,” Amanda said, “you’re going to be a middle-aged man thinking back on your life, and you’ll start wondering what your family’s been up to. So you’ll hop on a train and come down, and when you get to Baltimore it will be this peaceful summer afternoon and these dusty rays of sunshine will be slanting through the skylight in Pe