Lita promised to call again tomorrow, and before hanging up, Ross told her how much they’d made today at the farmer’s market. “You didn’t have to do that,” she told him.
“I wanted to,” he said. “Not that I don’t love sitting around here by myself all day.”
She laughed. “I hear you.”
There’d been a trace of light in the west when Lita called, but the night outside was now full dark. He hung up the phone. He hadn’t told his cousin everything about the farmer’s market, and he found himself thinking about the chanting little girl and her mom with the bloody underwear.
Dick suck mushroom! Pickaninny pie!
Feeling uneasy, he turned on the television, but the DirecTV was out, and there was only snow and static on the screen. Turning on his laptop, he found that he could not connect to the internet. The room was well-lit, but the blackness of the windows made him nervous, and he closed the drapes, made sure the door was locked. Leaving the TV on, in case the satellite came in again, he put on a They Might Be Giants CD and looked through a trade magazine that he’d brought with him from Phoenix but hadn’t yet had time to read.
He finished the magazine, moved on to the Stephen King book he was reading.
An hour passed. Two.
When it became obvious that the DirecTV was not coming back on, Ross decided to call it a night. Leaving on only the light in the bathroom, he took off his clothes, got into bed in his underwear. He was hard for some reason, and he tried lying on his back for several minutes, then tried moving onto his side, but his erection would not go down, and he soon realized that if he ever hoped to fall asleep, he would have to take care of things. Pushing off the blanket and pulling down his underwear, he began to masturbate, thinking about Jill, imagining her naked.
Concentrating hard.
So he wouldn’t think about Lita.
NINE
It wasn’t possible.
Anna Mae woke up with the dawn—and Del wasn’t in bed next to her. She sat up, confused, thinking maybe she was still asleep and dreaming. She always set up the railing on his side of the bed at night so he wouldn’t fall out, and even if he had been able to crawl over her it would have been impossible for him to do so without waking her up. There was no way he could be out of bed.
Yet he was.
She heard noises coming from the kitchen.
The sounds of someone making breakfast.
“Del?” she called hesitantly.
Although he’d done it every weekend for the first forty years of their marriage, it had been years since he had been able to make breakfast for them. Even before the Alzheimer’s struck, his arthritis had been so bad that he had simply not had the manual dexterity to manipulate cooking utensils or even pour milk. Now, however, she smelled pancakes.
What was going on here?
Anna Mae got up, pulling her nightgown closed around her neck. Had someone helped Del out of bed, taken him into the kitchen and started making breakfast? It didn’t make any sense, but it was the only possibility she could think of. She glanced around as she walked toward the bedroom door, looking for some type of weapon, just in case. Leaning against the side of the dresser was the cane she’d bought her husband that he never used, and she picked it up, holding the handle tight, prepared to whack someone with it if she needed to.
From the kitchen came the clinking of silverware. Walking slowly, trying not to make any noise, Anna Mae moved down the hall, past the bathroom, past the linen cupboard. Gathering her courage, lifting the cane above her head, she stepped into the kitchen doorway.
And saw Del.
“Anna Mae!’ he said, smiling happily as he poured orange juice out of a pitcher and into a cup.
She screamed.
Del rushed forward, a look of concern on his face. “Are you all right?”
This couldn’t be. She felt like fainting. The husband standing before her had not existed for over a decade, and seeing him like this was like seeing a ghost. He put a hand on her shoulder, the way he used to, and she nearly melted. This was something she had never expected to experience again outside of a dream. It was the answer to her prayers. A miracle. But it was a miracle that frightened her, and while this was a good thing that had happened—a great thing—she could not help thinking it was a thing that was not supposed to be.
Anna Mae looked into her husband’s eyes. She didn’t know how an outcome that was so right could seem so wrong, but it did.
“What’s the matter?” Del asked, and while his voice sounded older and more cracked than it had the last time he’d been lucid, the familiar cadences were there.
She started crying.
His fingers touched the cheeks under her eyes, wiped away the tears. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here.”