Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [45]
“No, I don’t think his hair's shorter.” Cathryn tucked a rebel lock of hair behind her ear and looked at her watch. “Time to punch in.”
I followed in her wake as she strolled over to the center station, her perfume drifting behind her.
White Linen. My mother wore it for years. After her funeral, their house overflowed with people Dad invited for lunch. We couldn’t fill the emptiness in our hearts, but we were going to fill our stomachs. My brother told me to find Dad and tell him he’d better start praying he could turn water into wine because the bottles were emptying faster than the food trays. I was grateful for an excuse to de-hostess myself and escape from the swarming nests of conversations. I’d started self-medicating the pain with Robert Mondavi, one of Mom's favorite wines, in the limousine on the way to the funeral home earlier that morning. The constant drone of people's voices and the scent of apple pies and seafood gumbo had become suffocating.
Weaving through knots of aunts and uncles and vaguely familiar cousins to find my father, I passed someone wearing Mom's perfume. An explosion of memory. “Mom?” I thought I had whispered. She had to be there someplace. Where? “Mom?”
My Aunt Sheila materialized in front of me. She lifted my wine glass out of my hand, parted the sea of faces, and led me outside. For months after that, the scent of White Linen paralyzed me.
Now I trailed behind the scent, fully aware my mother would never appear. And not here, for sure, with meals on trays. I didn’t learn until after Mom died the reason our family never ate at cafeterias. They didn’t serve alcohol.
“Let's go to dinner early. The basketball crew's going straight there, so we’ll just meet them,” Cathryn said.
“I just had ice cream. For a change, I’m not all that hungry.” By next week I wouldn’t have to eat the ice cream—I could just apply it directly to my thighs. The three meals a day plus desserts were beginning to equal wiggles in new places on my body.
“So get a salad. We can talk about your new crisis. The new volunteer won’t check in for an hour. I can’t leave you here alone,” she said.
“Right. I might impale myself on a sharpened pencil while you’re gone.”
“Or bash your brains out with that novel you thought you were going to read.” She grinned and headed to the elevator.
Cathryn stirred her iced tea with her straw. She bowed her head to pray. After the first couple of days, I began to think praying over the food wasn’t such a bad idea. She looked up, fanned her napkin out on her lap, and buttered her wheat roll. “Can you please explain to me, why, if you didn’t want visitors, you asked your husband and friend to visit?”
“I liked the idea of visitors. And I didn’t actually invite them. I just didn’t tell them not to come.” The omission defense theory. Rationalization worthy of a sixteen-year-old. Now I understand my students trying to explain to me that I didn’t tell them they couldn’t work together on their papers.
I pointed at Cathryn's dinner. “You know, I’ve never fried chicken at home. Carl said it made too much of a mess. And the fried smell stayed for days.”
“Is that why you don’t want to see him? Because of never having fried chicken?”
I dissected the veggies in my salad. They weren’t very perky today. “Now that would be dumb. Of course not. Watching you eat reminded me of that. Does everything have to mean something?”
“It usually does. Look, let's …” the rest of her sentence fell off into the voices of the crew returning from basketball. Theresa pounded Vince's back and chanted, “Oh, yeah, we beat you. Oh, yeah, we beat you.” I couldn’t hear Vince's comeback, but whatever it was, both Theresa and Annie laughed.
“Annie laughing. Now that's not something you see everyday,” I said.
Cathryn looked across the cafeteria at the group and grinned. “You’re right. That is new,” she said, slid her plate over, and looked at me. “Back to you. Bottom line. Visiting time is one hour. I think you can handle