Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

“But you didn’t know what?”

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“How long did this go on?”

“Oh, a month or so I’d say. Obviously something had happened.”

“Did she seem scared?”

“Not exactly. More like anxious, I guess. But not scared. I even asked her about that, if there was anything I could help her with. She just said no and then got off the phone right away.”

“And you have no idea what she was doing?”

“Afraid I don’t.”

From the center drawer of my desk, I took the restaurant receipt. Handed it over to her.

She smiled. “I’ve seen several thousand of these over the years.”

“Take a closer look at it, would you? Her brother put some significance on this that I haven’t been able to decipher.”

She studied it. “The date—I was in Chicago that whole week. I had a lot of vacation saved up.”

“So that isn’t your ticket?”

“No. The initials for the waitress are CG. That’d be Callie George. Very nice young woman. And there’s a 10 in the upper right hand corner.”

“I noticed that. What’s that signify?”

“What we call a ‘friend’ discount. If you wait on a relative or close friend, you’re allowed to give them a ten per cent courtesy discount.”

“You think there’s any way Callie might remember who this ticket was written for?”

“Well, it might be her friend or my friend. We switch stations a lot. I take hers on her nights off and she takes mine. So we pretty much know each other’s courtesy discounts. I can ask her when I see her today. I’m on my way to work now. I can call you from there if you want me to.”

“I’d sure appreciate that.” Then: “This has sure been helpful.”

“Well, I guess I was right to be worried, anyway. She always thought she was so—tough, I guess you’d say. That’s one of the reasons she was so interesting to be around. She always had all these little plans going. You know, ways she could take advantage of this person or cheat that person, things like that. Never big things. Never like robbing a bank or anything. And I was fascinated. I thought she was sort of cool. But then the more I got to know her—she started to scare me. I’d always assumed she was putting on the toughness to some degree. But she wasn’t. She really enjoyed tricking people. And that’s when I started pulling back.”

“But you kept calling her.”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“I could use a laugh.”

“I was trying to get her to go to this Bible class I take once a week. I got dumped by this guy—and this class saved my life. I’m not a real religious person but it gave me some perspective. I thought maybe it would help her, too. I planned to arrange it so we’d go on separate nights. I didn’t want to see her any more. But of course she wouldn’t go. She just thought the whole thing was a joke. She said, ‘God, you really are a farm girl.’ She’d always said that I wasn’t as unsophisticated as I thought.” She shrugged. “We didn’t end up very well. I still feel sorry for her, though. Having a brother like that—” She checked her watch. “Well, I need to get to work, I guess.” She stood up, offered a slim hand. We shook.

A few days ago, I would’ve thought about asking her for a date sometime. She looked bright, earnest and sweet. But somehow as we’d been talking, I began to realize my need to be with a woman. And the woman who kept coming to mind was Mary.

I saw Janice Wilson to her car and said good-bye.

EIGHTEEN

THERE WAS ANOTHER GATHERING downtown. On the steps of the Catholic church. No candles because it was daylight. Everybody in kind of a hurry because it was the end of the day and home sure did sound good. The spouse, the kids, the food, the TV, the furnace kicking in and sounding good and smelling good as it did so—heat having its own very particular smell—no wonder they said there was no place like it.

Again it was a cross-section of people, the old woman wearing the bulky winter coat she’d bought ten years ago, threadbare now; the young businessman in his camel’s hair topcoat and white silk scarf; the day laborer with his Oshkosh winter jacket, the collar lined with union buttons; the prim middle-class housewife in her smart royal blue dress jacket and dark blue jaunty hat; and the ancient Negro man, a face rutted and ruined by so many small losses and humiliations and modest dashed dreams that there had to be a few moments here and there when the notion of nuclear destruction didn’t sound all that bad.

A priest today, not a minister, a young and modern-minded one who wore a black turtleneck instead of a Roman collar, jeans instead of trousers, and played a guitar instead of read from the Bible, a Woodie Guthrie song I liked just fine except that I didn’t see its relevance here, given the occasion I mean, the world maybe going to blow up soon.

But that was my problem. I sit in a courtroom and mentally wander off about where I’ll have supper tonight. I sit in a church and think not of Jesus but about what comely ankles the woman in front of me has, which I happen to notice right below me whenever we’re kneeling down. Or I stand in front of a church and play music critic, thinking not of the holocaust that might soon befall us but of what a poor choice of songs the young priest chose for the occasion. I’m a regular pip, I am.

There were probably two hundred people here. There’d been no word from the Russians. Everybody was in a “what if” mode. What if the Russians did this, would we then do that? And so on.

The ceremony ended with everybody singing the Our Father, the priest leading us in the Protestant version because this was a Protestant town and he wanted to be polite, which was understandable.

As I walked back to my office, I heard somebody groan behind me. It was a very particular sounding groan. More like a moan, I guessed. I’d heard one like it only once before. When my Uncle Bill was having a heart attack.

I turned to see Abe Leifer again, only this time he was grasping at his left arm and starting to pitch forward to the sidewalk. His face was dead pale. His mouth was open in to scream but he had neither the time nor the strength for it. He grew whiter by the moment.

We were near the corner, where there was a police call box mounted on the support column of the street light. I ran to check Abe first.

Then I was shouting at a farmer in a John Deere cap, “Use that call box! Get an ambulance!”

He looked confused at first. Then he looked as if this might be some sort of gag, with a cameraman hiding somewhere. Candid Camera , the show that trapped people into doing dumb things and filmed them doing them.

I was no expert at mouth-to-mouth but I gave it a try.

Beth Leifer sat on one side of her mother and I sat on the other. This was the waiting room outside the surgery.

Helen Leifer would be all right and then she would not be all right. Beth was a pretty, thirtyish woman with intelligent gray eyes and a smile that was as gracious as a papal blessing. Her husband Del and I shot baskets a lot on the outdoor court at our old high school. Beth wasn’t smiling now, of course. She was trying to keep her mother in an optimistic mood. I was pretty sure she was trying to accomplish the same thing with herself. The doctor, a man named Fred Knowles, was big, cold, gruff. He’d interned with Himmler.

There was a clock down the hall. Abe had been in surgery more than an hour now.

I said, “I’m going down the hall to the bathroom, Beth.”

“We’ll be fine. Take your time. Get a cup of coffee if you like.”

“Would either of you like one?”

“I’d sure appreciate one. Mom can share mine.”

“I’m not even sure I could hold down coffee, the way my stomach feels.” Helen and Abe had been married forty years. Impossible to imagine what Helen was going through now.