We didn’t have a whole lot of money, there in that prefab home just outside Ogallala, but Momma, she sure loved to shop. Of course we didn’t have the money for the kind of stuff she wanted to buy, so instead she took Lily and me to the fancy stores just so she could try on dresses and stare at herself in the mirror. This was one of those things we did when Daddy was away, though Momma said, “don’t ever tell Daddy,” ’cause she didn’t want him to feel bad. But Momma talked a lot about one day. One day she was gonna have that salon of her own instead of cutting hair in that bathroom that belonged to Lily and me. One day we were going to get a bigger house that hadn’t been premade. One day she was going to take us to some place called the Magnificent Mile in a city known as Chicago. Momma told me about it, about this Magnificent Mile. She talked about it as if it was a fairy tale, and I wasn’t really sure if it was real or not. But Momma was sure. She talked about stores with names like Gucci and Prada, and what she would buy in those stores if she could. One day. She had a list of those things, what she wanted to see before she died. The Eiffel Tower, Audrey Hepburn’s gravesite in some small town in Switzerland, the Magnificent Mile. We didn’t have a lot. Even at eight years old, I knew that, though there wasn’t ever a time I wished for more. I was happy there in that prefab home near Ogallala, and even though Momma talked all the time about her one days, I didn’t ever want a thing to change. Momma used to say, “We don’t have much, but at least we have each other.”
And then one day, we didn’t even have that much.
CHRIS
Heidi has this need to make everything right. She recycles to a fault. Cans and bottles, the newspaper, batteries, remnants of aluminum foil. She returns hangers to the dry cleaner; rips me a new one when I come home with a plastic shopping bag instead of remembering to bring a reusable one from home. I hear her words, haunting me in my dreams, her metallic tone parroting: That’s recyclable, in the off moments I attempt to slip an envelope or a scrap of paper into the garbage can of all things. Our milk comes in glass bottles which are reusable and insanely expensive.
In our home, trespassing spiders are never killed but rather, relocated to the balcony or, in the case of inclement weather, to the basement storage units where they can reproduce among cardboard boxes and unused bikes. Smashing them with a shoe or flushing them down the toilet would be simply inhumane.
It’s the reason we have two cats. Because she found them as kittens under the Dumpster behind the building. What was left of their mother lay nearby in a bloody tangle, the rest of her serving as fodder for a stray dog. One day Heidi carried them into our condo, each one of them only a pound or two, dirty, covered in shit and garbage, their bones showing through sporadic fur, and declared, “We’re keeping them.” And as is the case with most things in our marriage, she didn’t ask. She told me. We’re keeping them.
I named them One and Two because Odette and Sabine (yes, both girls; I am indeed the only Tom in this household of Queens), as Heidi suggested, sounded plain dumb. Feral cats don’t deserve human names, I told her. Especially not fancy French ones. One is a calico, chatte d’Espagne, as Heidi says. Two is all black with longish hair and neon eyes. Bad luck. Evil. The thing hates me.
And so it came as no surprise to me on Saturday morning when I rolled out of bed that there she was, standing in the middle of our living room, displaying her saddest “orphaned kitten” eyes. She’d just finished up a phone call and was going on and on about the poor girl at the Fullerton Station. It was nearly ten in the morning, but from the darkness out the window, you might have guessed it was five, maybe six o’clock What I had in mind for the day, after an exhausting trip to San Francisco, was sitting in the leather recliner, watching endless hours of professional basketball. But there was Heidi, clearly up at the crack of dawn, clearly having digested too much caffeine. She was in her robe and slippers, clutching her cell phone in the palm of a hand, and I knew there was more to this story than she was letting on. This wasn’t just about a homeless girl she’d seen. There must be a hundred thousand homeless people in Chicago. Heidi notices them, don’t get me wrong. She notices each and every one of them. But they don’t keep her awake at night.
“That’s why God made homeless shelters,” I say. Outside, there is rain. Again. The TV stations are flooded with reporters standing on roads and highways that are underwater. Dangerous and impassable, they say. Even the major expressways—portions of the Eisenhower and the Kennedy—are closed down. Apparently we’ve entered a state of emergency. The news cameras pause on a yellow street sign: Turn Around, Don’t Drown, it says. Words to live by. A dripping reporter in a golden poncho stands in the Loop getting whammed by rain (as if seeing the rain on TV rather than listening to the way it pelts the windows and roofs of our homes will drive home the point) warning that even a few inches of rapidly flowing water can carry a car away. “If you don’t need to travel this morning,” she says, giving a concerned look as if she actually gives a shit about our safety, “then, please, stay home.”
“She doesn’t do homeless shelters,” Heidi replies in a knowing way, and it’s then that I understand. Heidi didn’t just see this girl. There was an exchange. A conversation.
What she’s told me thus far, or what I’ve dragged out of her involuntarily, is that she saw a young homeless girl beside the Fullerton Station, begging for change. A young girl with a baby. I arose from bed and came into the living room—my mind on one thing: TV—to find she’d just finished up a call on her cell, and when I asked who she was talking to, she said, “No one.”
But I could tell it wasn’t no one. It was clear to me that it was someone, someone that mattered to Heidi. But she didn’t want me to know. This is what happens to men who travel all the time, I thought. Their wives cheat on them. They rise from bed first thing in the morning to carry on clandestine conversations with their lovers while their husbands are catching some much-needed sleep. I spied my wife: guilty, frenzied eyes, suddenly not as chaste as I knew Heidi to be, and asked, “Was it a guy?”
I thought of Heidi, last night, of the way she pulled away from me in bed. Was he here? I wondered. Before me? I didn’t get home until after eleven, to find Zoe AWOL, Heidi in bed, and I remembered when Zoe was little, the way she and Heidi would create welcome-home banners and plaster them with stickers, drawings, photos and whatever other frilly little embellishments they could find, for when I came home, and now, five or six years later: nothing. Only the cats were waiting for me beside the front door, their annoying squawks not a warm welcome but rather an ultimatum: Feed us or else... The tiny stainless-steel bowls that Heidi never forgets to fill were empty.
“Heidi,” I asked again, my voice losing patience. “Was it a guy?”
“No, no,” she responded immediately, without hesitation. She laughed, nervously, and I couldn’t tell if she was lying, or if my suggestion put her dirty little secret into perspective. Some covert affair or...
“Then who was it?” I demanded to know. “Who was on the phone?” I asked again.
She was quiet, initially. Debating whether or not to tell me. I was about to get really pissed off, but then she grudgingly told me about the girl. The girl with the baby.
“You talked to her?” I ask, feeling my heart decelerate, my blood pressure decline.
“She just called,” Heidi replies. Her cheeks are flushed, either a symptom of caffeine overdose or she’s embarrassed.