I stand there at the corner, watching until I can no longer see the army-green coat for all the people, until I can no longer hear the baby’s cries. A woman bumps into me and at the same time we say, “Excuse me.” I cross my arms, feeling naked in the brisk air—more fall-like than spring-like—and, turning onto Halstead, hurry to Stella’s. I’m wondering if the girl will show, wondering whether or not she knows where Stella’s is, whether or not she even heard me.
I scurry into the familiar diner and the hostess who greets me says, “No coat tonight? You’ll freeze to death,” as her russet eyes look me up and down—my hair in a frenzy, my clothing insufficient for the weather. I clutch an overpriced quilted handbag, paisley and plum, as confirmation, perhaps, that I am not a vagrant. I have a home. As if the burden of being homeless isn’t enough—the lack of food and shelter, of clean clothing—there’s the horrible stigma attached to homelessness, the disgrace of being thought of as lazy, dirty, a junkie.
“Table for one?” the hostess—a striking woman with snow-white skin and almond-shaped eyes—asks, and I say, “Table for two,” forever hopeful, and she escorts me to a round, corner booth that faces out onto Halstead. I order a coffee with cream and sugar and keep watch out the window, as people trek past, city slickers on their commutes home from work, twenty-year-olds en route to a cluster of college bars on Lincoln, their laughter penetrating the drafty windows of the diner. I watch the eclectic city life meander past the window. I love to people watch. Sleek men in charcoal suits and thousand-dollar shoes beside grunge band wannabes in thrift-store clothing beside mothers with posh jogging strollers and old men hailing cabs. But I hardly notice any of them tonight. All I am looking for is the girl. I think that I see her time and again. I’m sure I catch smidgens of her colorless hair, darker when it’s soiled and wet; of the nylon of her ineffectual coat; an untied shoelace. I mistake briefcases for her leather suitcase; imagine that the squeal of tires on wet pavement is the baby crying.
I receive a text from Jennifer that she’s arrived home from work and the girls are doing just fine. I scan my emails to waste time: most are work related, some junk mail. I check the weather: when will the rain end? No end in sight. The waitress, a fortysomething woman with the most luscious red hair and waxen, winter skin, offers to take my order but I say, “No thanks. I’ll wait until my group arrives,” and she smiles gently and says, “Of course.” And yet, for lack of anything better to do, I skim through the menu and decide on the French toast, but also decide that if my group never shows, I’ll settle for coffee. If the girl and her baby don’t arrive by—I check my watch—seven o’clock, I will pay for the coffee with an ample tip for the waitress’s time and retreat home to my chick flick and popcorn, and my overwhelming concern for the girl and her baby.
I people watch. I watch patrons come and go. I watch them eat, drooling over generous portions of German pancakes and hamburgers with waffle fries. I absolutely hate to dine alone. The waitress returns and refills my coffee and asks if I’d like to continue waiting and I say that I would.
And so I wait. I must check my watch every two and a half minutes. Six thirty-eight. Six-forty. Six forty-three.
And then she appears. The girl and her baby.
WILLOW
“Heidi was the first one in a long time who was nice to me.”
That’s what I tell her, the lady with the long silver hair, too long for someone her age. Old ladies are supposed to have short hair. Grandma hair. Short, wrapped tightly with hair curlers, the way Momma would do Mrs. Dahl’s hair when I was a girl, with the hot-pink curlers she’d plug in to warm, then sit for a half hour or more, painstakingly wrapping the dark gray, brittle hair around the curlers, then plaster it with spray. We’d wait, in that tiny bathroom of ours (my job was to hand Momma the pins), listening to Mrs. Dahl go on and on about how they’d artificially inseminate the cattle on their farm. I was eight years old and so I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I sounded out the words they spelled, words like s-e-m-e-n and v-u-l-v-a.
“Then why’d you do it?” she asks. The lady with the long silver hair, combed straight. And big teeth. Like a horse’s.
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “Or her family.”
She sighs, leery of me from the moment she walked into the cold room. She hung back, by the door, just watching me with gray eyes from behind a pair of rectangular glasses. She’s got thin skin, like tissue paper, used tissue paper, crinkles everywhere. Her name, she says, is Louise Flores. And then she spells it for me, F-l-o-r-e-s, as if it’s something I might need to know.
“We’ll start at the beginning,” she says, sitting on the other chair. She sets things on the table between us: a recorder, a stopwatch, a pad of paper, a felt tip pen. I don’t like her one bit.
“She wanted to buy me dinner,” I say. I’ve been told that being up-front will go a long way with the silver-haired lady. Louise Flores. That’s what they said, the others who were here: the man with the chin strap and mustache, the cutthroat lady dressed in head-to-toe black.
“Mrs. Wood wanted to buy you dinner?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Heidi.”
“Well, wasn’t that nice of her,” she says bitterly. Then writes something down in the pad of paper with the felt tip pen. “Ever hear the saying ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?”
When I stare off into space, ignoring her, she prods again, “Huh? Have you? Have you ever heard that saying: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?” And she’s staring at me with her gray eyes, where there’s a reflection of the one fluorescent light off the rectangular glasses.
“No,” I lie, letting my hair fall in my face so I can’t see her. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you. That’s one I know. “Never.”
“I see we’re off to a great start here,” Louise Flores says with an ugly sneer, and presses a red button on the recorder. Then: “I don’t want to talk about Mrs. Wood though. Not yet. I want to go back to the beginning. Back to Omaha,” she adds, though I know good and well Omaha isn’t the beginning.
“What’ll happen to her?” I ask instead. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I tell myself, honest to God, I didn’t.
“To whom?” she asks, though she knows good and well who I mean.
“Mrs. Wood,” I say flatly.
She falls backward, sloping into the angles of the chair. “Do you really, truly care? Or is this just an effort to waste time?” She stares at me, hawkeyed, like Joseph used to do. “I’m in no rush here, you see,” she adds, crossing her arms across herself, across a crisp white blouse. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” and yet there’s a bite to her voice that suggests she does not.
“What’ll happen to her?” I ask again. “To Heidi?”
I imagine the warmth of that nice home, the feel of the soft bed, as the baby and I lay together under the brown blanket that felt just like the soft fur of a bunny rabbit. There were pictures on the walls, there in that home, family pictures, the three of them, pressed close together, smiling. Happy. It always felt warm in there, a different kind of warm, one you felt from the inside out, not the outside in. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not since Momma. Heidi was about the closest I’d gotten to Momma in eight whole years. She was kind.
The lady’s smirk is smug, her gray eyes lifeless, though her thin lips compress into a phony smile.
“As the saying goes, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” she says, and I imagine Mrs. Wood, in an orange jumpsuit like me, that kind smile washed off her face.
HEIDI
The girl stands there, on Halstead, before the door of the diner, peering through the glass. Not sure if she wants to come in. She’s come this far and yet she hasn’t quite made up her mind. I see through the glass that the baby is crying, still, though not disconsolate. More of a whimper. She has the baby swaddled in my raincoat, lying horizontally on her tummy as best she can manage with the leather suitcase in one hand. Good girl, I think. She was listening. She lays a hand on the door, and for an instant I’m no longer terrified that she won’t show, but suddenly terrified that she has. My heart scurries and a whole new quandary comes to mind: what will I say to her now that she’s here?