It’s Sunday afternoon and the dining room bustles with visitors unpacking shopping bags, mostly of food but other gifts, too: fresh T-shirts, magazines, and flowers to brighten the soul-crushing color scheme of this place. Flowers are Allowed provided the vase is plastic and the stems are without thorns. The obese girl’s parents come with a big, pink teddy bear for their daughter who, it seems, doesn’t appreciate the thought because she throws it in the trash while they watch. After having heard, by now, several renditions of Howie’s tale of his attempted suicide and Pam’s heroic role in preventing it, Bunny had imagined Pam as Wonder Woman, but Pam the person is five feet tall, built like a fire hydrant, frizzy brown hair streaked with wiry gray strands in a ponytail held together with a pink scrunchie. She sets down her grocery bags as if they contain the weight of the world. Mrs. Cortez pays no attention to her two adult children as they try to make small talk with her. The woman visiting Teacher looks to be his sister, maybe even a twin sister. Chaz’s mother has brought a Tupperware tub of lasagna for his lunch, and she fusses over him as she would if this were Sunday dinner at home, while his father sits there seemingly as broken as his son. Chaz’s father might also be a cop in Inwood because he is wearing shoes that Bunny associates with policemen.
Thus far, in Bunny’s time here, Andrea has never had a visitor. The same goes for Underpants Man, and Jeanette.
Bunny takes careful note of Josh’s friends, three of them, sitting around the table with him like college buddies shooting the shit over a pitcher of beer. Or, maybe they were childhood friends, a group of four boys who made a pact—blood brothers—to be friends forever, no matter what happens. Friends forever, Stella, hits Bunny hard.
Albie rushes to her and hurriedly puts the shopping bag down on an empty chair. “The trains were a mess.” He sits and slides his chair close to Bunny’s chair. Their knees touch, and her weeping subsides into a whimper. When Bunny dries her eyes with the palms of her hands, Albie is struck by how innocent she seems, and as if he were speaking to a child, he asks, “Do you want to see what I brought you?”
From the shopping bag, he retrieves four Cadbury bars—two with almonds, two without—and sets them on the table, along with a box of crackers and a jar of Peter Pan Creamy peanut butter because all-natural peanut butter comes only in glass jars to be recycled. Bunny says, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Albie asks. “Sorry about what?”
“I mean thank you,” Bunny says. “Thank you.”
From the same bag, Albie next takes out a packet of three legal pads and six black felt-tipped pens. Uneasy, but cautiously optimistic, Albie asks, “Are you writing?”
“Not really,” Bunny says.
“You’re making paper airplanes?”
Bunny rewards Albie’s question with a smile. “I’m just writing stuff down. Stuff I don’t want to forget.”
In another shopping bag are books from home. “I just grabbed whatever off the shelf,” he says. But Albie did not just grab whatever off the shelf. He selected the books with great care, eschewing contemporary novels lest she use them as a measure of her own failure. For obvious reasons, he rejected Jean Rhys and Ernest Hemingway; and Virginia Woolf—don’t even think about it.
Bunny will re-read books she loves, three or even four times, but, although it is one of the rare opinions she’s kept to herself, Pride and Prejudice and The Pickwick Papers are not books she loves, or even likes. The third book in the stack, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, pleases her far more.
“I seem to recall your saying you wanted to read that,” Albie says, “or am I misremembering?”
“How would I know?” Bunny asks. She places Voyage of the Beagle on top of the legal pads and pushes the other books away as if they were a meal with which she was done. “You can throw those out on your way home,” she says.
Later, when Albie leaves, Bunny puts the chocolate, the peanut butter, and the box of crackers in a brown paper bag, on which she writes her name with the black marker there for that purpose. Then, she stashes the bag in the cabinet over the kitchen sink. The cabinet handles are grimy, tacky to the touch.
Out on the street, one block away from the hospital, Albie drops Pride and Prejudice and The Pickwick Papers in a trash can. Then he calls Muriel and asks her, “Do you feel like a drink?”
“Why? Do I look like a drink?” Well aware that her joke, such as it is a joke, is lame, Muriel doesn’t wait for a laugh. “Sure,” she says. “How about Crow’s in a half hour?”
Halfway to the subway, Albie changes his mind. The trains are spectacularly unreliable on Sundays. Instead, he hails a cab.