A dirty name for the rabbit. What a thought. "Nothing so interesting."
"So, Sabine, we love the bunny, we do. He's a lot of company for your father, but we'd be much happier if you came home and took him back."
"Is he bothering you?"
"Not the point. We want you to come home now. We miss you. We worry about you. Everyone at Canter's asks, 'Where is Sabine, when is she coming home?' What do we tell them? What in god's name is keeping you so long out there in cow-land?"
Sabine took a sip of her coffee and stared at the empty kitchen where one man had been murdered and poor Bertie had had the back of her head split open. "That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question."
"Well, give us a hint. Are you finding out everything about Parsifal you ever wanted to know?"
"I am, really. He had a bad time of it. A whole lot worse than anything he could have made up. He and his sister, Kitty, were very close. She's told me stories. At least I can understand now why he wanted to change everything about the past, give himself a new background and start over again. I don't feel like he was lying to me anymore. It didn't have anything to do with me."
"So what is so bad about these people that he had to completely reinvent himself?" Her mother's voice had the tense edge Sabine knew. It came over her just before she started making demands.
"It's not these people. It's not anything that's going on now. There were a lot of problems with his father, and his father is dead."
"Come home, Sabine."
"I will."
"When?"
"Bertie's getting married next week. I addressed the invitations. I feel like I need to stay for the wedding. After that I'll come home. I promise."
Her mother kept the line silent for a minute to let her daughter know it was not the answer she was looking for.
"Mother?"
"Hum?"
"There was something else I wanted to ask you. I don't know why I've been thinking about it. I've had a lot of time on my hands. The days out here have been incredibly long." Sabine couldn't seem to get any further in her line of questioning.
"What is it you want to know?"
"Where did you and Daddy meet?"
"You already know that. We met in Israel."
"You didn't know him before that? You never knew him in Poland?"
"Why are you asking me this long-distance? We live five miles away from each other. You can ask me when you get home."
Sabine twisted the phone cord. Because Parsifal had never told her anything all the years when he was right there, either. "I've got no problem paying the bill. You were both from Poland."
"It's a country, Sabine. It would be like saying, You were both from California."
"Did you meet him in Poland?"
"Yes."
"Did you know him when you were young?"
"I didn't know him. I met him. I met him in a train station. That was all."
"That was all? You didn't know him, but you remember meeting him in a train station. Did you speak to him?"
Her mother coughed, maybe to let Sabine know that such conversations were detrimental to her health. She would be in her own kitchen. Sabine's mother always answered the phone in the kitchen. She would lean against the counter, stare out the window, and wait for the hummingbirds that dipped into the red syrup in her hummingbird feeder all year round. "It was the first time we were moved, not later. I had dropped the sack with my lunch in it. There was a large crowd and I hadn't held on to the bag tightly. Your father saw me sitting in the waiting area and he gave me half his sandwich. Then we were put on separate trains. That was all."
"That was all? You met him that once and then you didn't see him again until you were in Israel?"
"Correct."
"And then what? You recognized him, all those years later?"
The line was quiet again and then she heard her father's voice in the background. "Ruth?" he said.
"I'm fine," she said. She must have put her hand over the receiver. When she came back her voice was clear again. "That sandwich meant a great deal to me," she told Sabine. "It was the last truly nice thing anyone did for me for a while. That, and your father had a very nice face, so I thought about him some. It was like your Nebraska in that way, there was plenty of time."
He did have a nice face. It was her own face. She knew what he would have looked like then. She knew how kind he would have been, how he could offer something without it seeming at all like charity. He would have convinced her that he had never eaten a whole sandwich in his life. That she would be helping him, truly, by taking half.
"So where did you see him again?"
"In Jaffa. You know this story. He was working on a road crew and I was at a strawberry farm."
"And he saw you walking down the street and he asked if you were from Poland, and you said, 'No, I'm from Israel.'"
"We each knew who the other one was, but we never said anything about it. Things were different back then. People weren't so big on talking everything out. We had dinner together that night."
"You must have been so happy to see him."
"I was very glad your father was alive."
Glad that her father was alive, that he had given the sandwich, that she had accepted, that they were somehow reunited, that because of that Sabine was in Nebraska now. "Do you ever talk about it with him, that time?"
"Not now. Not anymore at all."
"Do you think about it?"
Her mother considered this for a moment. "Only enough not to forget it completely. The trick is to almost forget it, but not completely. So now I've told you that." She cleared her throat. "The fascinating story of my life. Do you want to tell me why you asked?"
"I want to know everything." Suddenly Sabine longed for her mother, longed to be with her, to hold her and be held by her. "I don't want to be outside anymore."
"You have never been outside," her mother said kindly. "You were born in the center of the world. No one has ever left you out for a minute. Now do you want to say hello to your father?"
"Yes." Sabine told her mother good-bye. She wished she could tell her other things, but she had embarrassed her enough for one day.
There was a pause, the handing off of the receiver. "Sabine-Love," her father said. "You've made your mother cry. Did you tell her you were staying out there with the cowboys?"
"I was asking her questions about you."
"Then I should assume these are tears of joy?"
"Exacdy," Sabine said.
Bertie wore her hair down and did not mention the twelve neat stitches in the back of her head. If anyone inquired about them she would say only that they itched occasionally. She didn't bring up Howard Plate's name or complain that any wrong had been done to her. She sat at her same chair at the kitchen table and made a specific point of reminding Sabine that she said she would come to her classroom and show off her shuffling skills, as if to make clear Bertie harbored no ill feelings towards certain chairs or shuffling. If anything, Bertie appeared happier after Howard pushed over the table that sent her head cracking into the wall. She spoke of nothing but the wedding now, hemming her dress or checking back in with the soloist. She was thrilled by the envelopes Sabine had addressed for the invitations. In this new life in Nebraska, where time had not only stopped but occasionally seemed to creep backwards, Sabine was happy to pour herself into the job and made every letter in every word a tiny piece of art. Bertie said she wanted to ask everyone to give the envelopes back to her so that she could put them in her wedding album.
But no one thought that the impending wedding or the sharp blow to her head were the cause of Bertie's sudden happiness. Since the accident she had not spent another night at home. She was there every day, picking up her clothes, sometimes staying for dinner, but by the end of the evening she had made her furtive departure, never exactly saying that she was leaving, so that Dot inevitably spent five minutes looking for her before realizing that she was gone.