After she returned home one warm afternoon in June, Caridad told Harrison about the truck driver who tried to kill her. By this time, she was driving again, but more tensely than before, her hands slick with perspiration as they clamped the steering wheel. She had to drive now that they had moved to the South and Caridad traveled to temp jobs throughout northeast Georgia. That morning, as she’d headed out to “work the phones” for a small company in Oglethorpe County, she’d nearly had a wreck on the two-lane highway. An oncoming pickup crossed the center line of the two-way road, rocketing toward her. Caridad yanked the wheel, pulling the car onto the shoulder and startling a herd of cows in a nearby field. Twangy music blared from the truck’s open windows as it whizzed past. A beer can flew out to dance on the blacktop.
“He tried to murder me,” she told Harrison after describing the near miss.
Though it was late afternoon, Harrison remained in bed. His sky-blue pajama top was wrinkled, the collar splotched with tea, and his grizzled hair was oily and salted with dandruff. “No one tried to murder you,” he said. “That driver doesn’t know you. It wasn’t personal.”
“Still, he tried to kill me.”
“It was completely random.” Harrison massaged his temples. “It wasn’t about you.”
“How is my almost being killed not about me?” Caridad glanced about the master bedroom in the ranch-style house they’d bought with her settlement money as the down payment. The room was shadowy and warm, the plum-colored curtains drawn shut. “Did you get up at all today?”
Harrison nodded. “I went for the mail, but now I feel queasy.”
Months after he and Caridad had moved to Georgia with Miles so that he could pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Georgia, Harrison had been stricken with a mysterious malady that kept him in bed most days since the spring semester ended, watching television and sipping honeyed tea. Plates, a mug, several balled-up tissues, and a collection of over-the-counter medications now crowded his nightstand. A sharp eucalyptus scent issued from an open jar of salve, permeating the stuffy bedroom.
Caridad palmed his forehead. His skin felt cool, even clammy to her touch, but this was likely because she had just come in from the heat of the day. “Any test results today?”
“No.”
Apart from prescribing antihistamines for hay fever, doctors at the student health center had been unable to diagnose and treat him. Harrison’s parents had arranged for him to see specialists in Atlanta—a pulmonologist, an internist, even a chiropractor and a psychologist. Caridad took time off from temping to drive him to these appointments, and they’d sent Miles to stay with her mother and sisters over the summer since Harrison was not well enough to look after him while Caridad worked.
He now gathered a few envelopes from a shelf under the nightstand. “Here’s the mail—mostly bills, but there’s a letter from Miles.”
Caridad’s heart surged. She reached for the small stack, but Harrison drew it away, holding it to his chest. “You made a bad bargain, didn’t you, when you married me?”
Soon after spending the holidays with Harrison’s family, Caridad had been served with a court order to comply with paternity testing, an action brought by Daniel. Thinking marriage might confer the appearance of stability should Daniel sue her for custody, she’d put off breaking her engagement to Harrison. In February, at the same time the paternity test revealed unsurprising results, Harrison was accepted to graduate school in Georgia, and Caridad agreed to marry him in early spring. Before Daniel could take her to court, she’d married, changed her name, and moved with Miles and Harrison to Georgia in July, nearly a year ago. At first, they’d enjoyed the newness of the South, the quiet college town, and the friendly inquisitiveness of their neighbors. Then they teamed up, bolstering one another against the pervasive Christianity and conservatism of the place in the way they had joined forces to evade Daniel.
But Harrison floundered in graduate school. He struggled to keep up with the reading, and his professors were unimpressed, even puzzled, by his papers. Before becoming ill, he’d earned incompletes in two of his courses, placing him on academic probation. Instead of studying in the evenings, last spring he’d begun sipping bourbon, listening to jazz on the radio, and bickering with Caridad about Miles. These days, they argued so often that they’d started seeing a marriage counselor, a middle-aged woman who’d floored them at their last session by asking, “Where do you see yourselves in ten years?” Caridad had no answer for that.
“Bad bargain? What are you talking about?” She fixed her gaze on the envelopes he held. “I don’t think like that.”
Harrison flashed a quick smile before handing over the mail. “By the way, darling, when you write to him, tell Miles that I’m allergic to cats.”
“But you’re not—”
“Please, darling,” he said, “let’s not bring a cat into this. Oh, and you had a call about a job. There’s a message near the phone.”
Caridad read Miles’s letter as she made her way to the phone in the front room.
Dear Mommy,
I miss you. Mimi is nice. She lets me play with Smoky. Can I have a kitty when I get home? How is my tomota plant and son flowers? I am camping with Leslie and Fill in July. Mimi to. That well be fun. I really want a kitty, ok.
Love,
Miles
When she finished reading Miles’s letter, Caridad returned the call, phoning Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford, the director of a nonprofit agency, who arranged to interview Caridad for a permanent position the next day. The agency was so new, Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford explained, that she was only now securing office space. She then issued directions to a family restaurant in Gainesville, about an hour from Athens, where she would meet with Caridad for the interview. After hanging up, Caridad set out paper and a pen on the kitchen table to answer the letter from her son.
Miles, my love!
I miss you, too! I think of you every day and wonder how you are and what you’re doing. I hope you’re enjoying your visit with your abuela and tías, and Mimi, but I am counting the days until you come home. Fifty-two. When you get back, we will find a kitten for you. Your tomato plant looks great, and the sunflowers will soon be taller than you are. Harrison sends a hug. He’s still not well, but he should be bet- ter soon. When he’s feeling fine, I know he will write to you, too. I’m happy you wrote to me! Please share what’s in the envelope with Mimi.
Love forever and ever,
Mommy
She turned over her letter, drew a picture of a smiling cat on the back, and put it in a padded envelope with small boxes of raisins, colored pencils, and stickers—treats she’d been collecting to send along with her letters. Since she had writing supplies on hand, Caridad pulled out a fresh sheet of paper.
Dear Leslie,
I hope you and Phil are well and that you are enjoy- ing the chance to spend time with Miles this summer. Only you know how hard it is for me to be away from him, but I had to send him. I’m glad Miles will have a few weeks with you in July. He’s sure looking forward to that camping trip.
We still have no idea what’s making Harrison ill. Honestly, I don’t think Harrison was prepared for graduate school. He’s enlisted me to read books for his comprehensive exam. Right now, I’m reading Pamela by Samuel Richardson for him. It’s an epistolary novel about a servant girl who’s trying to preserve her sense of self and dignity despite her master’s advances.
My hand is cramping, and as Pamela says in the novel, “I am going on again with a long letter; for I love writing, and shall tire you.” All my best to Phil, and please write!
Love,
Me
On her first day of work at the Cooperative Community Resources, Caridad slipped out of bed quietly, so as not to disturb Harrison. She showered and dressed in the front bathroom, taking care to make little noise. The last thing she wanted was Harrison flapping about like an overgrown bat in his black kimono, offering her dense buckwheat pancakes or fist-sized muffins the texture of upholstery ticking. But when she emerged from the bathroom, he was already in the kitchen, stirring a bowl of lumpy batter and humming to opera music playing on the countertop radio.
“Good morning, darling!” he said when he saw her. “I’m making oatmeal muffins for your first day of work.”
“I don’t have time. I have to be at work by nine-thirty, and it’s after eight.”
Harrison opened a cupboard and peered in. “Everyone comes in late on the first day. It’s practically de rigueur,” said Harrison, who, to Caridad’s knowledge, had never held a full-time job in his life.
“I want to leave early,” she said. “I’m not really sure where the office is.” She flashed on her restaurant interview with Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford, a heavy woman with a black cloud of hair and a sallow face, as mealy and grumose as the mixture in Harrison’s bowl. For all her volubility during the interview, Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford had been oddly evasive about the location of the new office, as well as the position being offered.
Harrison pointed the mucky spoon at Caridad. “You’ll get a headache if you don’t eat breakfast.”
“I’ll be fine.” Caridad tucked a pen and writing pad into her bag.
He stared into the bowl. “Forgive me if I happen to care about you.”
“I know you do.” Caridad paused to issue an apologetic smile. “Well, I’ve got to go.” She gathered her sunglasses, bag, and keys. “See you tonight.” Before he could protest, Caridad dashed out the door. She glimpsed Harrison through the carport window, sadly spooning batter into the muffin tin.
Caridad drove Harrison’s Mustang, hers now that his parents had bought a Lexus and given him their Lincoln. She steered the compact car, cutting through the fog-shrouded morning past the small towns—Arcade, Pendergrass, Talmo—that cropped up along the highway into Gainesville. As she drove, the mist burned away, and the landscape grew sharply green, nearly violent with color under the bright sky. Soon, the stores, restaurants, and houses thinned out, giving way to double-wides then barns, corn and cabbage fields, cattle, and even a few goat herds. Just past the Jackson County line, Caridad swerved to avoid a turkey vulture picking at a flattened squirrel near the shoulder of the highway, and she thought of Harrison.
The back of her neck tightened as if clamped. Why was he unwell? What if he had an incurable disease? What if it was fatal and these were his last months or weeks? Ashamed of entertaining and then lingering on such thoughts, Caridad regretted not being kinder to him earlier. What if instead he had a chronic ailment, a lifelong debility? She drove past a road crew, convicts in orange jumpsuits unloading rusted drums from a truck and bearing these into a nearby ravine. Sorry for these men, she imagined trudging forth, one shaky step after another, under crushing weight, and her throat clotted.
On the left, a cemetery appeared alongside the highway. Caridad gazed at a tall tombstone ornamented with gilt cherubs and nearly missed the turn that took her to the strip of office buildings in downtown Gainesville, the location of the resource agency headed by Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford. She parked behind the building that also housed law offices and a real estate agency. Finding no signs to direct her, Caridad stepped into the main entrance and was greeted by the receptionist, a young woman who was knitting something out of pink wool at her desk.
Caridad smiled at her. “I’m looking for Cooperative Community Resources.”
“That’s in the basement.” With a knitting needle, the woman indicated the door to the stairwell. “Down in Antarctica.”
“Thank you.” Caridad started toward the exit.
“Hope you brought a jacket,” the receptionist called after her.
As Caridad descended toward the basement, a damp chill crept up her legs, penetrating the soft fabric of her dress. By the time she reached the bottom stair, her flesh prickled with the cold. She took a deep breath, smoothed her hair, and pulled open the door to another reception area, a large space with mauve-colored walls trimmed with dark brown wainscoting. Still-life paintings of desiccated-looking fruit decorated the walls, and plastic palms stood near closed doors to inner offices. At the heart of the gray carpet, a desk was flanked by a short wall of filing cabinets. Behind the desk sat a blond wearing a sheepskin overcoat and poring over a glossy magazine. Caridad cleared her throat, and a cantaloupe-sized head capped with yellow curls popped up from behind the desk.
“Boo!” the small head cried.
“Boo,” Caridad said with a smile.
“You’re supposed to be scared!” The little girl wore a green hooded sweatshirt and yellow mittens. “Momma, she’s not even scared.”
“Hush up and stop scaring folks,” said the blond woman. “I done told you about a hundred times by now.”
“I don’t mind,” Caridad said.
“Of course you mind.” In the fluorescent glow of the desk lamp, the receptionist’s wavy hair framed her pink-cheeked face, and her violet eyes sparkled like amethysts. “Scaring folks is just rude.”
Caridad ignored this. “I’m Caridad McCann.”
“So you’re the new one?” The receptionist’s gaze measured Caridad from head to toe. “I’m Jan, and this here is Brittany.”
“Nice to meet you.” Caridad smiled again before glancing at her watch. “I should probably check in with Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford.”
“Ha! You think I’d be reading People magazine? You think I’d bring my kid to work with Peabody-Lunsford here?”
“How would I know?” Caridad shrugged. “This is just my first day.”
“Now, I had to bring Brittany on account of the ringworm. They won’t have her over at Vacation Bible School with the ringworm. Normally, my mother watches her when there’s no VBC, but Memaw’s got a hair appointment until noon.”
Brittany rucked up a sleeve to reveal a patch of pink blisters on her forearm.
“No one wants to see that nasty business,” Jan said before turning back to Caridad. “You may as well settle in. Micah will be here around ten.”
“Micah?”
“Yeah, he’s the other consultant. There are three of you, but one can’t start until next month. Peabody-Lunsford is in Puerto Rico for some conference, and she said for you all to read the agency information and grant stuff until she gets back.”
“Is there that much material to read?”
“Nope, there’s hardly nothing,” Jan said, “except the grant, but no one living can make sense of that. I suggest you bring some magazines and a big old coat. It’s colder than a meat locker out here, but your office is worse. That right door leads to your office. Behind me is the break room. It’s slightly warmer in there. We got a fridge and a microwave.”
“Got a bathroom, too,” Brittany put in. “But my mama won’t mop it.”
“That is not in my job description.” Jan pulled a file sleeve from the cabinet behind her desk and slammed the thick manila folder on her desktop. “Peabody-Lunsford can sure write some gobbledygook when she has a mind to.”
Caridad hefted the grant. “I guess I’ll go over this then.”
“You can make coffee, if you want, in the break room.”
“Would you like some?” Caridad asked.
“No-o-o-o, caffeine makes me edgy.”
While coffee dripped into the carafe, releasing a burst of warmth with its rich burnt-chocolate aroma, Caridad perused the grant in the break room, which was not as chilly the office—which included three desks, a corkboard, a carton of office supplies, a filing cabinet, and a typewriter—she’d been assigned. On a legal pad she’d taken from the carton in that office, Caridad struggled to translate the vague and obscurely written grant just for her own understanding. After deciphering a few confounding passages, Caridad dropped her pen and flexed her stiff fingers. The door to the break room banged open, and Jan appeared with Brittany at her side. “Micah called,” she said, a disappointed look on her face. “He’s not coming in today. He’s got to buy a car over in Lawrenceville. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Caridad nodded.
“I’m taking Brittany home for lunch and might not come back myself. If you feel like it, you can answer the phone,” she said. “If not, the machine will click on. The doors are all set to lock if you shut them all the way.” Jan withdrew from the threshold, tugging Brittany by the hood of her sweatshirt.
At the mention of lunch, Caridad’s stomach rumbled. She flipped through the grant to the end—one hundred fifty-three pages—and so far, she had transcribed only six of these. The small window above the sink framed two pairs of feet in high heels clip-clopping past, and a woman’s laughter rang out. Someone said, “Never again!” A church bell tolled twelve times—nine o’clock in Los Angeles. Miles would be up and likely heading for his ceramics class with Mimi. Caridad slapped the file sleeve shut and shoved the grant off to the side. She flipped to a blank sheet of lined paper and picked up her pen again.
Dear Esperanza,
I hate this, I hate this, I hate this! I don’t know why I’m here or what I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m not just referring to this stupid new job. I’m thinking about my life. Why am I here when my son is over two thousand miles away? I swear there are times when I
The phone rang in the outer office, startling Caridad. Thinking it might be Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford, she bolted for Jan’s desk to snatch up the receiver. “Cooperative Community Resources,” Caridad said. “How may I help you?”
“Hey, Jan, how you doing today?” It was a man’s voice. He spoke with a raspy drawl, an accent different from that which Caridad had gotten used to in Georgia.
“Jan’s stepped out of the office,” Caridad said. “May I take a message?”
“Who am I speaking to?”
“This is Caridad McCann. I’m a community resource consultant.”
“Why, I am, too. I’m Lazar, Lazar Chagall—like the painter, but trust me, no relation,” he said. “I haven’t started yet, but Jan needs some information for the conference we’re supposed to attend next month. She faxed me the form and left a message for me to call. Do you know anything about that?”
“No, and Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford isn’t here, but let me see what I can find out.” Caridad rifled through the papers stacked in Jan’s inbox until she found the form with his name on it. “Is it for Southeast Prevention Education Workshops?”
“That’s right—SPEW.” Lazar chuckled. “They ought to rethink that acronym.”
Caridad picked up a pen. “I can fill in the form for you if you want.”
“Okay, here goes. For occupation, put down social worker. Where it asks about education, write in MSW, and for marital status, mark single. I’m twenty-eight, so check the box for twenty-five to thirty-five.”
“So am I,” Caridad blurted out. “I’ll be twenty-nine in a few months.”
“I guess that makes you the boss of me,” Lazar said. “I just turned twenty-eight.” He gave her his address for the form and told her to check boxes for sessions she thought might be interesting. “It’s all the same to me, and I’ve got to go now.”
“I’ll make sure Jan sees this first thing.” Under Lazar’s form, Caridad found one with her name on it. She would sign them up for the same sessions. No reason for her to navigate SPEW on her own.
“Say, thanks for doing this. I look forward to meeting you at the conference.”
After hanging up, Caridad returned to the break room. She tore out the page on which she’d started a letter to Esperanza and ripped it in half, then into quarters, before shredding the paper into unreadable strips that she stuffed into the wastebasket. Caridad poured herself a cup of coffee and then wandered into the chilly office she would share with Lazar and Micah, remembering the typewriter she’d seen earlier.
Dear Mama, Felicia, and Esperanza,
I hope all of you are well and enjoying your time with Miles. Thank you for getting him to write to me. You don’t know how much I appreciate your having him this summer. It won’t be long until Harrison recov- ers. Already he seems better. Just this morning, he was well enough to get out of bed to make me a hearty breakfast.
Last time I called you, I mentioned that I’d found a full-time job with a nonprofit agency. Today is my first day. So far, the work is neither too hard nor too easy—it’s mostly confusing, as any job is at the start. I’m sure I will soon figure out my responsibilities and find satisfaction in the work. Already it’s a huge relief not to have to drive all over for temp jobs.
I miss you all and think of you often. Please write or call me when you can. Kiss Miles for me and make sure he really is brushing his teeth and not just telling you he has. Give Mimi a hug for me and tell her I miss her like crazy.
Love,
Dah-Dah
The next day, Caridad arrived at the Gainesville office with a peanut-butter sandwich and apple tucked into her bag, along with a hooded sweatshirt. She was determined to finish decoding the grant. In doing this, she would learn her duties and begin performing these. Jan again sat at her desk and flipped through a magazine, but Brittany was nowhere in sight. Caridad asked if the little girl had recovered from ringworm. Jan shook her head. “She’s with Memaw today.”
Caridad pulled on her sweatshirt almost as soon as she stepped over the threshold into the office she’d been assigned, but within minutes, her fingers ached from the cold and moist chuffs of her breath became visible. She soon gathered up the grant and writing materials to move to the break room.
“Told you,” Jan said when Caridad reappeared in the reception area. “That office is an icebox. Waste of energy, if you ask me.”
“Can’t it be fixed?”
Jan shrugged. “That’s a maintenance issue.”
In the break room, Caridad again set out the grant and resumed where she’d left off. She had nearly reached the tenth page when she gave up on the project. Instead, she’d attempt to read it, taking notes only when necessary.
After several minutes, the door flew open. A lanky man in his early twenties stood at the threshold, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He wore an overcoat over a light gray suit. “You’re not reading that crap, are you?” He tilted his chin toward the grant. “Can you believe they gave her money for that? My lord, they should have locked her up in a remedial writing class over at the alternative school.”
“Micah?” Caridad said.
“That’s right, and you must be the woman whose name I will butcher if I try to say it.”
“It’s Caridad,” she said.
With his padded coat, muffler, mittens, and hat with earflaps, he looked like an overgrown kid dressed up to go to church in a blizzard. He raised his fine eyebrows, his brown eyes shining above his long pink-tipped nose. “Carry Dad?”
Caridad winced. “Close enough.”
“How about I call you Carrie?”
“That works,” she said. “Did you buy the car? Yesterday?”
“Oh no-o-o-o. What a bust. I was expecting an eyeballer, but it was a total come-on.”
“Eyeballer?”
“Dealer slang for a flashy thing, a sweet-looking sports car, but crazy affordable, at least according to the ad,” Micah said. “Of course, once I get there, the dickhead—now I’ve got what you call a well-integrated personality, so I curse the same in public as in private—so the dickhead tells me it’s sold, if it ever even existed outside of some hound dog’s wet dream in the first place.”
“Sorry about that,” Caridad said.
“That’s not the worst of it. Once I’m there, the dealer goes slasher on me, like I haven’t been buying cars since I was eighteen, like I’m some fucking grape.” Micah’s eyes widened in outrage. “I didn’t even want the car for me. I have me a damn car. I was looking at it for a guy I know who’s going to pay me half what I save him off the sticker price.”
“Well,” Caridad began uncertainly, “maybe next time.”
“To-day.” Micah slapped the classifieds on the table alongside the grant. “I’m going to find a car for the guy to-day. I’m determined. Nothing’s going to stop me, unless of course, you don’t want me plugging a phone in here to make my calls. I’d do it in our office, but I already had pneumonia once this year.”
“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” Caridad looked forward to having company, and another body would likely generate more warmth in the room.
“You aren’t seriously reading that thing?” Micah indicated the grant. “You should bring a newspaper. I’ve been here a month, and one thing I learned right away is to keep occupied until Peabody-Lunsford figures out what in heck we’re supposed to be doing.”
“So you have no idea—”
Micah shook his head. “Not a clue. PL has only written one job description—Jan’s.”
“Pee-Ell?”
“Short for Peabody-Lunsford,” Micah said. “There’s supposedly something in the grant about us, but I’ve been here a month, and I haven’t found it. I’m trying to get old PL to buy us a television, but until then, bring stuff to keep busy. Got any hobbies?”
Caridad nodded. She again replaced the grant in its folder and flipped to a blank page of notepaper. While Micah called dealerships in and around Atlanta, Caridad wrote letters to Miles, Mimi, Phil, and Miles again. She thought about writing another to her sisters and mother, but she had just mailed the one she’d written the day before, so instead, she started a sonnet about convicts bearing oxidized drums into a mist-shrouded ravine.
Days later, on a stormy evening in June, Caridad sat with Harrison at the kitchen table summarizing Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded for him. Thunderclaps rocked the house and lightning illuminated the bay windows with incandescent flashes. Harrison, in his black kimono, jotted notes onto index cards, sipping wine as Caridad listed characters and outlined the novel’s plot. She retold the story of the teenaged heroine resisting the advances of her new master, a man entrusted with her care after Pamela’s former mistress, his mother, had died. Pamela writes about her struggles to her parents, who are unable to help her. When her master intercepts and reads her letters, he falls in love with Pamela and romances her until she agrees to marry him. Caridad thumbed through the novel, reading aloud quotes she’d marked for Harrison. Her favorite of these appeared near the ending: “I know not how it came, nor when it begun; but creep, creep it has, like a Thief upon me; and before I knew what was the Matter, it look’d like Love.” Over the course of the epistolary novel, Pamela places great value on virtue and truthfulness, often signing letters to her parents, “Your honest daughter.”
Harrison snorted when Caridad told him this. “Ironic!” He reached for the wine bottle to refill his glass. “She sounds like a proper temptress, a scheming little wench.”
“She’s only fifteen in the novel. She’s an innocent—”
“You’re the innocent, darling.” Harrison’s eyes glinted under the glow of the overhead fixture, an indulgent look softening his face. “Trust me, Pamela’s working an angle from day one. He comes from money, and she wants a piece of the action. Fielding had a field day—pardon the pun—with the book when he wrote Shamela.”
Caridad pushed back her chair and rose from the table. “If you already know what the book is about, why did you ask me to read it?” He grasped her hand and stood. “Don’t be cross. Not everyone catches the irony in it.”
“But it’s not an especially ironic book. That’s the thing. It’s about skewed power dynamics between master and servant, one a poor girl and the other a privileged man who isolates her from her family, who doesn’t care that she’s lonely—”
Harrison stopped her mouth with a kiss and then withdrew to say, “Oh, darling.” His breath was hot and sour, and the triangle of snowy hair revealed by his loose robe smelled briny beneath the mentholated salve. “Don’t you wish we were done with all this?”
Though certain her idea of “this” was different than his, Caridad nodded.
“Done with all the reading, the papers, the tests.” Harrison closed his eyes as if envisioning such freedom. “Don’t you wish we could stop worrying about the future?” he asked. “You know what? We should make a baby.”
Caridad stepped back to read his expression. Was he drunk? “How does that make any kind of sense?” she asked.
“Think about it, darling. If you got pregnant, my parents would be out of their minds with joy. Their first grandchild—why, they’d set us up for life!”
“That is not one bit funny.”
“I’m not joking,” he said.
“Then it’s a bad idea for too many reasons for me to go into right now, but the first that comes to mind is that you’re not well.” After a battery of tests, only the psychologist ventured a diagnosis for Harrison’s condition, prescribing an antidepressant called Ludiomil to treat it.
“It’s just depression. You can say it, darling. I don’t mind. It’s not contagious—”
“What about heredity?” Caridad said. “You told me your father has depression, and his father, too. Why would you risk passing this on to a child?”
“It probably isn’t even clinical,” Harrison said. “It’s probably more anxiety than depression, some existential angst or ennui.”
“You say you don’t want to bring a cat into this, and then you suggest we have a baby?” Caridad gawked at him in disbelief. Harrison assumed the expression he wore when imitating Lennie from Of Mice and Men, adopting the slack jaw and empty eyes of an overgrown dullard, a lummox. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink while you’re taking those pills.”
“How dare you.” His face darkened. “Do you have any idea how insulting that is?” He grabbed the wine bottle and his glass before stalking off. Within seconds, the bedroom door banged shut, shaking the walls like another thunderclap.
The second week of July, attendees of SPEW gathered in the ballroom of a downtown Atlanta hotel for the plenary address that opened the conference. The presentation was given by a specialist in Native American substance-abuse prevention, an elderly white woman who wore a rawhide headband and long gray braids that rested on the beaded yoke of her buckskin regalia. The woman began by burning sage near the podium. A sweet herbal aroma wafted through the rows of folding chairs, reminding Caridad of Thanksgiving dinners at Mama’s. Murmured voices blended into a low hum as more people shuffled in, claiming seats. Caridad set her handbag on the empty chair to her left, saving it for Lazar Chagall. She’d not yet met him, and she was curious, so she’d contrived to sit near him; Micah and Jan were on the right of Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford, who sat beside Caridad.
Most of the seats in the vast chandeliered room had filled by the time the braided woman finished burning sage and commenced a Native American prayer, but stragglers still trickled in. When a slender man with gingery blond hair appeared in the entryway at the front of the auditorium, Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford waved her arms overhead as if directing a plane to land. “That’s Lazar Chagall,” she told Caridad. “Now our team is complete.”
Lazar wove his way to the seat near Caridad, nodding at Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford as he passed. The braided woman spoke in a high reedy voice, welcoming the conference attendees before launching into her speech. After a few minutes, the speaker’s voice dropped until it was inaudible despite the podium’s microphone. Lazar glanced at Caridad’s feet and leaned to whisper in her ear. “Nice shoes.”
Caridad wore black ballerina flats, the only shoes she could endure wearing all day since the accident. “Thank you,” she said in a low voice.
“They look comfortable,” Lazar told her.
As the speaker continued, Caridad stole a few glances at her new colleague. Lazar was only slightly taller than she, and he wore a pale blue dress shirt and an espresso brown suit with tan pinstripes. Lazar smelled minty and new. He was clean-shaven, and his fair hair was flattened with gel, his suit well pressed, and his shirt crisp, but his brown leather shoes were soft with wear and scuffed at the toes. He caught her eye and grinned. Caridad then fixed her gaze on the braided woman in front earnestly delivering a speech that no one could hear.
At her side, Lazar sniffed the air. “Turkey?”
“Sage,” Caridad said in a low voice.
Lazar grinned. “Thanks.”
Session after session, Caridad and Lazar, sometimes joined by Micah, sat quietly in the break-out rooms as “prevention specialists” hammered home ideas about increasing protective factors and reducing risk factors in communities and schools. Despite their various charts, handouts, and slide-show displays, they all seemed to be saying the same thing, so after the first few minutes of each presentation, Caridad would swallow back a yawn or two. Then she’d ease her notebook out of her handbag and dig out her pen.
Dear Felicia,
Thank you for signing Miles and Mimi up for ceramics at the recreation center. Mama tells me you’ve paid for the three-week session and you’re driving the kids to the classes yourself. Summer vacation is your time to recuperate from the school year, so I really appreci- ate that you’re doing this.
All is well here. My new job is interesting, and while the woman I work for is a bit peculiar, my coworkers seem fine. I’m now at a work-related con- ference, and I have a bit of downtime, so I thought I’d write to you. The conference is in Atlanta, and the agency is providing rooms for us in the hotel where it’s being held. I’m a bit worried about leaving Harrison on his own these few days, even though he is doing better with the medication he’s been prescribed . . .
Jan returned to the office in Gainesville after she got the conference paperwork turned in and collected employment forms from Lazar. Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford also disappeared following the morning’s plenary session, but she rejoined the consultants for the banquet luncheon, her black hair freshly dyed and coiffed. She sat with Caridad, Lazar, and Micah at a round table near the center of the ballroom-turned-dining-area. PL dug her spoon into a bowl of banana pudding before starting the main dish—a chicken breast with wild rice and green beans. She asked the consultants what they’d learned at the conference.
“Risk factors,” Micah mumbled, his mouth full of chicken.
Caridad took her cue from him. “Protective factors.”
“Prevention,” Lazar said, “is the key to stronger communities and schools.”
Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford dabbed her mouth, crimsoning her linen napkin with lipstick, and she smiled. “Communities and schools—what I want to know is who took the schools out of communities?” she said. “Still, there’s much to learn here, and I hope you all are absorbing worthwhile information.” A black woman wearing a lavender hat bedecked with artificial flowers, ribbons, and a twist of tulle waved the director over from across the hall. PL rose from her seat, saying, “You’ll have to excuse me. The big-hat women are very powerful here.”
Micah pointed to the notebook protruding from Caridad’s bag. “This one’s absorbing up a storm of information.” He turned to Lazar. “Have you noticed her scribbling everything down in a fury?”
“A mighty notetaker,” Lazar said.
A mighty letter-writer—Caridad flashed on Pamela. She smiled and sipped her iced tea.
“Are you going to eat that?” Micah indicated Caridad’s pudding with his fork.
She regarded the pale gelatinous mass and shook her head. Lazar pushed his bowl toward Micah. “You can have this, too, if you want.”
On the way to the next session, Lazar invited Caridad and Micah to join him for a drink in the hotel bar after the conference adjourned for the day. Caridad accepted, but Micah said he had plans to meet his fiancée that night. As the three made their way through the corridor past the many milling conference-goers, Caridad searched for a restroom. She caught sight of Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford deep in conversation with a woman donning a large scarlet hat with black feathers just outside a ladies’ room. Caridad nodded at both before entering the pink tiled-room where an olive-skinned woman with graying hair was sponging the countertops. She met Caridad’s gaze in the mirror and smiled as if in recognition. “Buenas tardes.”
At the start of the next session, a panel presentation, Caridad whipped out her notepaper and pen.
Dear Mama,
I miss you with all my heart . . .
After the welcome dinner and keynote address, Caridad and Lazar marched in a great parade of conference-goers toward the lounge. They claimed a booth some distance from their noisy colleagues now thronging the long bar. Despite the crowd, a cocktail waitress soon appeared at their table. Lazar ordered a beer and Caridad asked for a glass of Chardonnay.
“Who knew,” Lazar said, “that substance-abuse prevention specialists would stampede for drinks at the end of the day?”
“It makes sense,” Caridad told him. “All this talk of abstinence makes a person thirsty.”
Lazar smiled at her, his gray eyes wide. “Caridad,” he said. “That means charity, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right. Do you speak Spanish?”
“I do,” he said. “I worked in Santo Domingo for two years before I moved here.”
“What did you do there?”
“Peace Corps,” he said. “But before that, I was a dual major in college—Spanish and sociology. I’ve always loved languages, and Spanish is my favorite. When I found out your name, I was hoping you’d speak Spanish with me. It’s been such a long time since I practiced that I worry I’ll lose what I’ve learned.”
“I bet your Spanish is better than mine. I haven’t spoken it much since I was a child, but I can practice with you if you like,” Caridad said. “But first, tell me about your name. I’ve never met anyone named Lazar before.”
“It’s Hebrew,” he told her. “It means helped by God.”
“So are you . . .”
He nodded, and the waitress reappeared to set their drinks on the table. When she retreated bearing her heavy tray of drinks to another table, Lazar said, “Micah’s name is Hebrew, too, though I doubt he’s Jewish. His name means one who resembles God.”
“You know it wouldn’t be so bad if that were true. Think of what we’d save on cars if God were like Micah.”
Lazar gave her a puzzled look, and Caridad explained about their coworker’s hobby. They talked about Micah and Jan and Mrs. Peabody-Lunsford for a few moments until Lazar said, “Hablame en español por favor.”
Over the next hour, they spoke at first in halting and then in fluent Spanish about previous jobs, family and friends, the men and women they admired most.
“Tell me,” Lazar asked Caridad in Spanish, “who is the greatest man you know?”
“Pues,” said Caridad, thinking of Leslie and wondering how to put it in Spanish that the greatest man she knew—her ex-husband—was, in fact, now a woman. “Es dificil a decir.”
The bar had emptied some, and the waitress returned to deposit their check on the tabletop. “Oh, it’s getting late.” Caridad reached for her handbag, but Lazar insisted on paying since he’d invited her for a drink.
“Ask me next time and you can pay,” he said.
They left the bar and meandered toward the lobby, still speaking to one another in Spanish. Caridad appreciated that she was eye level with Lazar. Gazing up at Harrison cramped her neck.
“It’s really not that late,” Lazar said when they reached the elevators. “Would you like to go somewhere?”
Caridad stood with him before the elevator, the burnished metal doors projecting a quivery image of them both as if they were underwater, submerged in a silvery sea. She hadn’t told him she was married, and because she disliked jewelry, Caridad rarely wore her rings. Her conscience pricked her now, and she felt wavery, lambent as her reflection. This was no lightning bolt, but it was something sparkly and thrilling. How easy it would be to step out with Lazar into the neon-lit Atlanta night. “I know not how it came, nor when it begun; but creep, creep it has like a Thief upon me . . .” Another Caridad, an earlier version, would have swept through the revolving doors with him, spinning out into the city on his arm. But this Caridad, near thirty, had a husband who was ill, a son who needed stability, and a job she intended to keep.
“Maybe a jazz club,” he said, “or a show?”
“I have to call my husband,” she told him, “and then I’m just going to turn in.”
“Oh, okay.” Lazar blinked several times and took a step back. “Yes, right—long day.” He pushed the elevator button for her. “I need to get my bag. I haven’t even checked in yet.”
The elevator’s doors parted, and Caridad stepped inside. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yep.” Lazar issued a quick smile and pivoted for the front desk.
The doors closed and Caridad rode up to her room on the top floor, thinking of the stationery she’d found in the writing desk—thick cream-colored pages embossed with the hotel’s insignia. She pictured the faux Tiffany lamp atop this, its glow on the green blotter, a soft circle of light.