Ending by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online

he asked. “In the parking lot?”
    “Of course,” I said, looking for his name in my head. “Francis,” I said finally, with relief.
    He squeezed my arm. “Good girl!” He looked down at the toys in my arms. “For your kids?”
    “Yes,” remembering that cold night and the homely comfort of the station wagon and his voice.
    “Well,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m visiting a buddy. Someone from the office. The same guy actually. I had to bring him some papers …”
    I handed the stuffed animals and some money to the cashier and Francis waited until I had the packages. He walked out into the lobby with me, where children not permitted on the upper floors waited restlessly to be taken home. Families whispered their private news in corners. A woman was asleep in a molded chair, with two shopping bags held in the slack grip of her knees.
    “I’m glad that I have this chance to thank you,” I said to Francis. “And you were right. Nobody can do anything to make it better. It’s just that now I can talk about it.”
    “How long does he have?”
    “Weeks. Maybe months. See, I can talk about it as if it isn’t true.”
    “You have to protect yourself. You have to do something to get through it.”
    “I don’t have to do anything. Things happen no matter what I do.”
    “I know. You look thin. Are you eating? Do you take care of yourself?”
    I felt uneasy, almost threatened by his concern. I shrugged. “I’m all right.”
    “Could I buy you a cup of coffee? Could we sit down and talk for a while?”
    It was not an unreasonable suggestion. Coffee. Facing a man across a table, someone healthy and stable and interested. But what was his interest? I looked up, trying to assess him, but his face had that same intense and friendly expression. He was giving, and asking for nothing back. Yet I felt the way I do with handsome and insistent salesmen. Drugged, mesmerized by the sales pitch. Afraid that I will weaken and buy something I don’t want, couldn’t possibly use, for the sake of the transaction itself. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m tired. My baby-sitter has to be in early on school nights. This is for the children from him—from Jay.” I raised the gift packages. “I want to give this to them tonight.”
    Francis laughed. “You have a lot of reasons.”
    “All true.”
    “All true,” he echoed. He walked alongside me as I went out into the parking lot. His stride was long and athletic and I had to walk quickly to keep up with him. “You’re here every day,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
    “Yes.”
    “It becomes a way of life after a while,” he said. “My mother died of cancer. She died in slow motion and my father forgot what he had done with his days before she was sick.”
    “I know.”
    We had come to my car. “Don’t forget who you are,” he said, and I felt a great impatience to get away. Suddenly his sympathy was a burden, his friendly scrutiny painful.
    He put his hand on the roof of the car and leaned toward me as I sat there. “If you need …” he began.
    The salesman, confident, intimate, offering easy terms, no cost, no obligation. I put the key into the ignition. “No no,” I insisted, and I pressed my foot on the accelerator, drowning out the sound of his voice.
    “… if you ever do,” I heard him say, and then I released the brake and drove away.

13
    F OR THREE YEARS JAY had been compiling material for a photographic essay on life in the city. He worked on it slowly, with the pace of a natural process. He kept everything—the photographs he thought he would include, and a growing manuscript of captions—in a folder in a drawer in our bedroom. The script was simple and artless: the dialogue of the people in the photographs, the names and numbers of the streets. Jay said that even if he never published it, even if he didn’t finish it, the effort seemed to be the proper atonement for all the meaningless crap he recorded for