Now, standing out on the street under the glow from the Cluck-U Chicken at midnight, wearing her old bathrobe, she started crying for her father all over again. She cried so hard that she couldn’t breathe. She gulped noisily. Then she cried because Rudy had deserted her and her boss had fired her for no good reason. She moved on to cry about those babies which wouldn’t be happening in the imaginable future, and because there was no one anywhere to take care of her. Finally, she cried because her niece Annali didn’t have a father and because children all over the world were starving. It felt like she had to cry for all the things she hadn’t let herself cry about since the last time she’d cried. This was why Pru didn’t cry often, especially in front of other people. It was such a wracking, gruesome affair.
When she ran out of things to cry about, she stopped and looked around. She felt quite calm. The guy in the chef’s pants was still standing there, staring at Pru as though she were a car that was giving him trouble.
“Is that it?” he said, hopefully.
“I think so,” she said. She did a little check, to see if another sob was on the way. When one didn’t come she said, “Yes. Seems to be.”
“Well, I don’t know what your ex did, but whatever it was, he must be a jerk.”
She wanted to agree, to give him specifics on exactly how much of a jerk Rudy was. But somewhere in her gut she knew that Rudy hadn’t been entirely without good reason for dumping her. Not entirely. Something was lacking in their relationship, something he probably deserved. She was too tired to think about it now. Later, when she would sift through all this, she’d have to look at it then, and she had the feeling she wasn’t going to be too thrilled with what she saw of her own behavior.
“My name is John Owen,” the man said, putting out his hand. Pru looked at his face for the first time. Small eyes and a square chin, a bit of stubble. Of course, he’d be handsome, in addition to being kind. She relaxed a little when she saw the wedding band on his finger. If she was going to meet a handsome man in this pathetic state, best that he should be unavailable.
“Prudence. Whistler,” she added, because she didn’t know if “Owen” was a double first name, or a last name. She shook his hand. “Thanks for stopping to help me.”
“You’re welcome,” said John Owen. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. I never watched much television, anyway.” She hadn’t gotten to finish The Godfather. That was a loss, right there. Well, she could get the DVD and watch it on her laptop, in bed.
Bed. It seemed that she couldn’t wait another minute to get there. She turned and walked up her steps, with as much dignity as she could muster, in her ratty old slippers.
JUST BEFORE DAWN SHE WOKE UP FROM A DREAM WHERE she was falling from the sky. In the dream, she had jumped out of an airplane only to discover that the pack on her back held not a parachute, but a bologna sandwich. She watched in horror as the bread and the bologna floated away, the slice of yellow American cheese falling uselessly to the ground like a thick yellow blanket. It was a dream Rudy would have loved.
Pru got up and opened the window, letting in the humid night air. It was raining lightly. She could hear the bums below having an argument. Their voices were drowned out by the rumble of a passing bus, the peel of its wheels on the pavement. She remembered that her sister Patsy had gone around the house burning some kind of herb when her boyfriend, Jimmy Roy, took off for the Antarctic, just after Annali’s second birthday. Pru hadn’t seen her doing this, but it wasn’t hard to conjure up the image of Patsy stomping around their mother’s little house waving the smoking sheaf of dried leaves, in the military boots and overcoat she preferred at the time, looking like some kind of New Age angry villager.
In general Pru found her sister’s belief system to be a bit specious and random, a sort of half-baked mishmash of pseudo-Oriental beatnik mysticism, but right now watching something go up in flames didn’t sound so bad. And if it drove Rudy’s presence out of the apartment, all the better. She went into the kitchen, but all she could find was some old garlic salt and a bottle of Mrs. Dash. Somehow she didn’t think you were supposed to burn Mrs. Dash in your apartment to rid it of ex-lovers’ spirits. And anyway, it had been Rudy’s. He liked to sprinkle it on his scrambled egg whites. Since becoming hot, Rudy watched his weight with the vigilance of a teenage girl. Egg whites, not yolks. Brown rice, not white. Sauces on the side, please. He’d grown more and more vain, spending long hours at the gym, looking askance at Pru when she ordered the occasional cheeseburger and fries.
“Please,” she would say. “I happen to know you were raised on Hostess Ding Dongs.”
“Exactly,” said Rudy. “Which is why our kids will eat nothing but spelt.”
“And no TV, right?”
“Oh, no. There’s nothing wrong with television. Why, that’s the best part of being a kid!”
They used to talk like that all the time. They’d already had fights about baby names. She wondered how much of that had been because they’d been unhappy. Had they really wanted children together, she wondered, or had it only become a way of filling up the empty
