I opened my manila folder. It occurred to me that I’d timed my testimony at exactly five minutes. I didn’t know how to cram it into three. I shuffled the pages. My hands trembled. Glaring video lights. “Thank you … for this …”
My skin went cold. My chest felt funny. Oh Lord, I thought. Unto dust —
But it wasn’t a pain or a flame or a squeeze. My nipples! Hell yes! My nipples had raised their little heads! Anxiety, chill … the old nerves stirring! God bless them!
I grinned, idiotically, at the portly commissioners. They studied my stain. “… this opportunity … to be with you … I mean, speak with you …”
I sneaked a peek back at Jean, smiling broadly. She looked stricken. Haley, gripping her headphones, glared at me: How could you embarrass me like this?
“My wife and I … have always wanted a home … in a historic …” I returned to my folder. The pages had fallen out of sequence now and my hands were too shaky to put them in order. In the earlier confusion and our haste to leave the house, had I locked the front door? Had I left our home open to intruders?
Tucked among my papers was Haley’s sketch of the Levin place. It must have slipped in when the cat brushed my arm. Ham-fisted, I held it high. The page rattled. My throat had gone dry. “My daughter,” I croaked. “My daughter loves this place. Please don’t tear it down.”
Snickering, behind me. Titters. I turned. The inside of my shirt snagged on a sticky ridge.
A sea of ashes. Father Matt stopped moving his pencil on a scratchpad. He glanced up and beamed triumphantly. The Wards bowed their heads, respectfully ignoring my distress.
Jean’s face shifted from dismay, like the day she’d grieved for her father, to pale confusion, settling finally into a sad, soft smile, as if to say, You did your best, it doesn’t matter, it’s okay.
It’s more than okay, I thought. Wait’ll we get home.
Haley wagged her head — not in disgust, I realized, but as if we’d shared a joke, then she grinned at me, at her sketch, and gave me a quick thumbs-up. I returned the gesture and waved her drawing so she, and all the room, could see. At least a couple of the commissioners nodded in a friendly way. I heard the chairperson rapping the end of my time, felt my nipples hard against my shirt, and smiled at my fresh-faced gals.
Anna Lia
Just after dawn, Houston simmered with humidity and light fallout from a cinder-cone eruption near Tamaulipas, Mexico, several hundred miles south of the Texas-Mexico border. Libbie wasn’t sure of the distance. Dusty with drifting ash, the sky looked grainy and dull as she made her morning commute. “It’s grim out there, folks; gray as fatback gravy,” quipped a DJ on her radio. He warned his listeners not to wash their cars with soap. Something in the ash reacted with the suds and took the paint right off.
At eight o’clock, Libbie pulled her VW van into a faculty parking lot at the University of Houston. The van was covered with ash, but she didn’t worry about the finish. Long ago, the orange paint had faded to pink and gray. The bumpers were scraped and nicked, and small cracks webbed the windshield like a palm reader’s map of someone’s busy future.
Libbie set the parking brake: an owl-like screech. She checked her briefcase for the English proficiency exams she had to grade this morning. Twenty-six students, most of them Japanese, were hoping to pass the test and be admitted into the university next term. All afternoon, Libbie knew, they’d pace the hallway outside her office, chattering, butchering their l’s and r’s, nervously awaiting their results.
She got out of the van and opened its sliding side door. On the back seat lay her wedding dress, a white satin gown lightly embroidered with silk. This morning, she’d picked it up from the tailor and spread its sleeves on the seat so she could admire it in the rearview as she made her way to work.
A few years ago, if her friends had predicted she’d marry again, on the dark side of forty, in a fully traditional Catholic ceremony — after an annulment and all — she’d have laughed out loud. None of it sounded like her. But Hugh’s enthusiasm was infectious (“Let’s both do it right the second time around”). For two months now, as they planned the wedding and reception together, they’d been giddy.
Libbie folded the gown and slid it into its box under the long back seat so no one would see and steal the dress. Then she inspected her face in the driver’s side mirror. She’d had her hair cut for the wedding and still wasn’t used to its mini-length. Brusquely, she patted a wave back into place. Too much creeping, godawful gray, she thought. Menopause, here I come. She grabbed her briefcase and locked the van.
The thin Spanish moss that swayed on the campus oaks reminded her of sassy braids, loosely bound — the kind she wore in eighth grade to attract the ninth-grade boys. She smiled. She had hair — and age — on the brain this morning. Squirrels hung in frenzied stillness on the trees’ rough bark.
By the white stone fountain in front of the administration building, she ran into Carla Lanham, a colleague in the Language and Culture Center. Carla looked as if she hadn’t slept. She strode toward Libbie, squeezing in both fists the elastic waistband of her skirt. Her frosted blond hair marched up her head in soft, trembling spikes.
She told Libbie, “Cancel your classes.”
Libbie laughed. A let’s-play-hooky joke: turn the tables on our students and blow them off for a change.
The air around the fountain was stale from the chemicals in the water that turned it a jazzy, vivid blue. Carla wasn’t smiling.
Libbie set down her briefcase. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s Anna Lia,” Carla said. “There’s been an accident. Danny called me about an hour ago.”
A cold breath blew down Libbie’s spine. “What happened?” she said. “How bad?”
“Don’t know. Danny wants us to meet him at the apartment. Call off your classes. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot.”
Libbie’s legs wouldn’t move. In the harsh sunlight the classroom buildings were dingy and drab. The concrete walls looked pitted, uneven.
“Go on,” Carla said softly, squeezing Libbie’s fingers.
Libbie’s limbs tingled. Needles and stings. She ran inside the Roy Cullen Building, across a cobbled path from the fountain, and taped a note to her office door informing her students that their test scores would be ready tomorrow morning. “I regret the delay,” she wrote.
“Jane, I have an emergency — I’ll be out for a while,” she told the secretary in the LCC office. “Can you post notices on my classroom doors? Thanks.” She checked her watch. The apartment was twenty minutes east of here; Libbie had timed it once when she’d driven Anna Lia home after school.
She sprinted back outside, several pounds lighter without her briefcase, which she’d left on her desk. By now the parking lot was full, with old-model Hondas and Mitsubishis: no-frills faculty cars. What a shabby profession I’m in, Libbie thought, seeing the cars. Forty-two years old and still living paycheck-to-paycheck.
She squeezed behind the van’s steering wheel and unlocked the passenger door for Carla, who was standing on the warm asphalt chewing her nails to the quick. The rush-hour traffic was still stacked up on Wheeler; no immediate openings in the nearest lane.