Major Lindholm sat at the kitchen table. Coffee steamed in a cup held loosely in his right hand. He had a newspaper in the left, but was frowning over it at his wife.
As I entered, he looked around and put a smile on like a mask. “Hope we didn’t wake you last night.”
“Nathaniel did, which was just as well, or I would have woken with the worst crick in my neck.” We went through the requisite pleasantries while he supplied me with a cup of coffee.
Do I have to explain the glories of a fresh cup of coffee? The deep redolent steam rising from the cup woke me before the first gloriously bitter drop even touched my lips. Not just bitter, but caressing waves of dark alertness. I sighed and relaxed into my chair. “Thank you.”
“What about breakfast? Eggs? Bacon? Toast?” Mrs. Lindholm pulled a plate out of the cupboard. Her eyes were only a little red. “I have some grapefruit.”
How far inland had Florida’s citrus groves been? “Eggs and toast would be lovely, thank you.”
Major Lindholm folded his paper and pushed it away from him. “That’s right. Myrtle mentioned that you were Jews. Come over during the war?”
“No, sir. Oh—” I looked up as Mrs. Lindholm set a plate with eggs and toast in front of me. The eggs had been fried in the bacon grease. They smelled very good. Damn it. I used the act of buttering my toast to collect my thoughts. “My family came over in the 1700s and settled in Charleston.”
“Is that so?” He sipped his coffee. “I never met a Jew before the war.”
“Oh, you probably did, but they had their horns hidden.”
“Ha!” He slapped his knee. “Fair point.”
“Actually, my grandmother…” The toast and butter required all of my attention. “My grandmother and her sisters still spoke Yiddish in the home.”
Mrs. Lindholm settled in the chair next to me and watched, as if I were an exhibition at the museum. “Well, I never.” A little frown deepened the creases in her forehead. “And did they … well, you said Charleston, did they have Southern accents?”
I turned up the accent, which I’d learned to tone down in Washington. “Y’all want to come over for Rosh Hashanah? Well, mazel tov, y’all!”
They laughed until tears streamed down their faces as I went through the Yiddish I knew, with the Charleston accent turned on high. It hadn’t sounded strange when I was growing up. I’d just thought that was the way Yiddish was pronounced, until we started going to synagogue in D.C.
Nathaniel appeared in the doorway, moving with a little more ease. “Something smells good.”
Mrs. Lindholm jumped up and fixed a plate for him. The major talked genially about nothing. We were all pre tending so desperately that nothing was out of place. But the newspaper lying on the table showed a picture of New York City, transformed into a misshapen Venice, where the streets were watery canals framed by windowless skyscrapers.
Finally, Major Lindholm looked at the wall clock, which read ten till nine. He pushed back from the table. “Well. We should be getting on.”
Nathaniel jumped to his feet. “Thank you for breakfast, Mrs. Lindholm.”
“My pleasure.” She kissed her husband on the cheek. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to instead of the back side of a newspaper.”
He laughed, and it was easy to see why she’d fallen in love with him. “What do you ladies have planned for the day?”
“Well…” She picked up his plate and Nathaniel’s. “I thought I’d take Mrs. York in town to go shopping.”
“Shopping?” I picked up the other plates, following her to the counter. “I’d been planning on going in with Nathaniel.”
She tilted her head and stared at me as if I’d suddenly spoken Greek. “But you both need new clothes. I washed yours, but they really can’t be salvaged for anything, except maybe yard work.”
Nathaniel must have seen my stricken look, but didn’t understand it. I wasn’t worried about money. The world had just ended and I was being sent shopping. “It’s all right, Elma. Colonel Parker gave us a clothing allowance until we get my employment status sorted. So take the day and go shopping. There’s nothing you can do at the base, anyway.”
And that was the problem. There was nothing I could do.
Mrs. Lindholm pulled her Oldsmobile to a stop in front of a store in downtown Dayton. The awning over the storefront had a rip in it, and the windows of the shop had a thin grit coating them. They framed a display of smart dresses in vivid jewel tones. I got out of the car and looked down the street at the people going about their lives, as if nothing had happened yesterday.
No—that wasn’t quite true. The little clusters of people in conversation seemed to stand closer to each other than might be normal. The flag over the barbershop next door stood at half-mast. And the same grit that clung to the store window dusted everything. I shivered and looked up at the odd ochre haze in the sky.
Mrs. Lindholm saw my shiver and misinterpreted it. “Let’s get inside before you catch your death.”
“Oh, I’m getting good at outrunning death.”
Mrs. Lindholm’s face blanched. “I’m so sorry! I forgot about what you went through.”
Sometimes my humor doesn’t work to diffuse a situation. This was one of those cases. “No, really. It’s fine. It’s just … I’m the one who should apologize. That joke was in poor taste.”
“No, it’s my fault.”
“Really—no. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I was being thoughtless.”
“I—” I stopped and narrowed my gaze. “I should remind you that I’m Southern, and you’ll never win a politeness battle with me.”
She laughed, and people down the sidewalk turned to glare as if she had begun cursing in public. “Truce?”
“Absolutely.” I gestured to the door. “Shall we go in?”
Still laughing, she pushed the door open and set the shop bells to tinkling. The saleslady, a black woman in her late sixties with pristine white hair, stood next to a radio, listening intently. At the sound of the bells, she looked around, though her gaze lingered on the radio.
“… the fires from the Meteor strike yesterday have spread to cover three hundred and fifty square miles…”
She smiled, as if she’d just remembered how to do it. “May I help you?” Then her gaze rested on me. Her frown was not obvious—just a tensing of her smile.
All the ground-in dirt that no amount of washing could remove from my sweater grew to cover me. I must look homeless. Mama would be ashamed of me. I swallowed. I wanted to go back out to the car, but that would inconvenience Mrs. Lindholm, so I just stood, paralyzed, by the door.
Mrs. Lindholm gestured to me. “My friend was in the East yesterday.”
In the East. At the euphemism, the saleslady’s eyes widened and her brows peaked with pity. “Oh—you poor dear.” And then curiosity followed, like a predator drawn to blood. “Where were you?”
“The Poconos.”
Mrs. Lindholm pulled out a navy blue dress from the rack and held it up. “She doesn’t have anything except the clothes on her back.”
A middle-aged white woman appeared from between the racks of clothing. “You were really there? You saw the meteor?”
“Meteorite. A meteor breaks up before impact.” As if anyone cared about scientific accuracy. I think this might have been the last time I corrected someone. “Meteorite,” for whatever quirk of the English language, sounded almost cute. “But no, we were three hundred miles away.”
She stared at my face as if the cuts and bruises would give her a map to my specific location. “I have family back east.”
“So did I.” I snatched a dress from the rack and fled to the changing room. The louvered door shut behind me, shielding me from their view, but not from their hearing. I sank onto the little padded bench and pressed both hands over my mouth. Every breath hurt, fighting to be given sound. 3.14159265 …