She hadn’t gotten more than two minutes with Patsy on the phone. Her mother kept telling her that everything was fine. Pru worked on ignoring the ominous voice in her head, the one that said something had changed with Jacob and that another shoe was looking to drop.
They walked past the Kozy Korner on the way home. She sneaked a glance in the window, but John wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“You want to stop in?” McKay suggested.
She sighed. “No.”
“What’s going on with you two, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Do you remember that scene in Airplane! where the guy with the flags is waving a jet into its gate, then someone asks him where the bathrooms are, so he begins gesturing in the other direction?”
“So the jet crashes into the airport. Yes.”
“That’s how it is, with him. I think I’m getting these signals, you know, and it turns out he’s just looking for the toilet.”
THE MORNING THAT PATSY AND ANNALI WERE TO LEAVE for Rehoboth, Pru was at her usual seat in the café, watching John do the morning puzzle, when her cell phone rang.
They were already halfway through Pennsylvania. Patsy talked so fast that Pru was having a hard time understanding her, but finally understood that she wanted help unloading the U-Haul. She wasn’t “completely sure” when Jacob would be there. When Pru pressed her, Patsy admitted that she hadn’t spoken to him “in a couple of days.”
“Just turn around,” Pru said immediately. “Go back home.”
“Honey,” said Patsy, “I don’t have a home to drive back to. To the ocean, right, Annali?”
“You can stay at Mom’s. She’s got room, until you find a new place.”
“Honestly,” Patsy said. “He’s just busy at the hospital, is all.”
“Busy at the hospital? So busy he can’t call you, right when you’re supposed to be moving?” John looked up from his crossword.
“Listen, I’m not saying that everything’s perfect,” said Patsy. “Maybe he did get cold feet. But trust me, okay? I know him.” Pru could hear Annali singing along to the soundtrack to Grease in the background. We made out, under the docks! “Anyway, can you come up? I might need help getting the trailer unloaded, if I can’t reach him tonight. I’m supposed to have it back in the morning, or pay something like a thousand bucks on it. I can come and pick you up.”
“No,” said Pru, “you don’t want to drive that thing into the city. Just get to Rehoboth. I’ll meet you there.”
“What happened?” said John, when she’d hung up.
“Patsy,” said Pru. “She’s moving here, with a U-Haul full of their stuff. And now Jacob’s not showing up to help, and she just told me it’s been days since she’s even talked to him.” Her mind was racing. She had to get to the bus stop, to check the schedule . . . no, she would rent a car. There was a Hertz on Fourteenth . . .
“Jacob’s the guy she’s been seeing, right? The doctor?”
She shook her head. “This is bad. I don’t know what to do.”
“I can drive you up there,” he said. “Ludmilla can handle things here until dinner. I’d have to be back then. But we can get the big stuff unloaded, don’t you think?”
Normally, she would have found a dozen different reasons not to accept the favor. It was always easier for her to offer help than to accept it. But she was so grateful that she wanted to throw her arms around him.
In the van, they didn’t talk, but listened to the public radio station. Pru found herself looking at all the cars on the BWI Parkway, hoping to see a look-at-me blue convertible going in the same direction.
John turned off the radio. “Where’s Annali’s father, in all this?” he said.
“Jimmy Roy? My mother says they haven’t heard from him in a while. I guess he’s kind of a burnout. I always liked him, though. I think he means well.”
“Were he and Patsy married?”
“No. They were part of this big circle of friends, and the plan was they’d all raise Patsy’s baby together.”
This was one of her sister’s more dubious schemes. Pru had met the friends, left-of-center hippie types, who had read Proust and On the Road and could talk about Cocteau’s Orpheus and often had to pool their money to buy a twelve-pack. They would jump in a car and head down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Jimmy Roy was the one with the most responsible job, working in the automotive department of Sears. Pru liked them well enough, but she was certain that Patsy’s vision of a communal life was doomed.
Sure enough, the friends kept partying while Patsy took childbirth classes and scoured tag sales for a secondhand stroller. With a month left in her pregnancy, she began to understand that she was going to be not the biological mother of a child raised by a family of parent-friends, but left to feed and educate and worry over a child all on her own. Pru flew to Columbus to help her pack up her few things and drive home to their mother’s house, two hours away. Within a week, Patsy had found a house down the street to rent, and later, when Annali was six weeks old, a job teaching language arts at a private school for girls in Akron. The very house and job she’d just given up, to be with Jacob, who was currently nowhere to be found.
“The father should be there,” John said, with so much vehemence that it surprised her. “Jimmy Roy. They need him.”
“He was, in the beginning. All the time,” Pru said. “He’d come up to my mother’s at least every weekend. But then he had an accident on his motorcycle.
