Ask for Me Tomorrow

“I’d like to get back to my murder now, if you don’t mind.”

“Do that.”

“Thank you,” said Violet Smith.

She waited until she heard Gilly go down the hall and open the door of her husband’s room. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the number she had just checked in the directory. The voice that answered was one Violet Smith greatly admired, so soft and sweet and the opposite of Gilly’s.

“Hello?”

“Is that Mrs. Lockwood?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Violet Smith, your friend from church.”

“Oh, of course.”

“You said you’d like me to come over sometime for a little chat.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think this is the time, Mrs. Lockwood.”

It took Marco an hour to eat a meal that would hardly have nourished a sparrow.

Sometimes Gilly sat with him in silence, feeding him his sparrow-sized bites and watching him chew so slowly and awkwardly that she felt her own teeth grinding in frustration. Sometimes she turned on the TV, which Marco didn’t like because he had trouble seeing with only one functioning eye; and sometimes she just talked, dipping into the present or cutting up the past into small digestible pieces.

Consciously or not, she left out a few things about her past and added a few. In the main, though, it was pretty straight talk. During the months of her husband’s illness she’d covered a great many of her fifty years, but more and more her conversation was about those she’d spent with B. J. For the past week it had been almost exclusively about B. J. She talked of falling in love with him right away, bingo, at first sight. She never believed such a thing could happen, to her of all people. He wasn’t much to look at, he had no line of fast talk, he couldn’t play games or dance very well or any of the things that might draw a woman’s attention. And he was married. Happily married, or so his wife claimed when she came to Gilly and told her to leave him alone. Leave him alone. How could she? As long as B. J. was alive in this world she could never have left him alone.

The sick man listened. He had no way of stopping her except by going to sleep or pretending to, and he seldom did either. Gilly had such an impassioned way of talking that she could make a visit from the plumber sound like an earthshaking event. Gilly’s plumber wouldn’t be handsome or witty or charming, but he would have an indefinable irresistible something. She couldn’t bear to let him go — but at twenty bucks an hour she had to.

“I’m giving Reed a few days off,” she said. “He’s getting restless and bossy, he needs a change. I’ve put in a call for a substitute nurse. I’ll ask for two if you think you need them.”

The forefinger of his right hand moved. One would be enough.

“Just one then. We can manage. I usually give you your shots, anyway. Do you need another right now or can you wait?”

Now.

She was very expert at it, better than Reed, who was inclined to hurry, as though he had a ward full of patients waiting for him.

“There. That will help you chew. Let’s try the fish. It might be better tonight. I asked Violet Smith to pour a lot of booze on it... When Reed gets like this, you know, sort of pushy and insolent, a little holiday snaps him back... B. J. and I were going on a holiday when— But I’ve bored you with that story a dozen times, haven’t I?”

Yes.

“I went out and bought this marvelous motor home as a surprise for his birthday so the two of us could drive up to British Columbia, where my folks came from. I called it Dreamboat and I had the name printed on it as a custom touch. Well, you know what happened, don’t you? B. J. added a custom touch of his own. Tula her name was, not as pretty as Dreamboat. Neither was she. All I can really remember about her is a lot of black bushy hair and greasy skin. Oh yes, and her fingernails. She kept them painted bright-red but her hands were always grimy. How she got to B. J. I don’t know. The why was easy enough. She was hungry. She wanted to live like in the movies and there was only one way to do it. So she did it. In the end she lost him, too, not to another woman but to a con man named Harry Jenkins, can you beat it?”

No, he couldn’t beat it, or tie it, or come close. He could only listen.

“It’s funny when you think about it — Henry Jenkins took B. J. from Tula the way she took him from me and I took him from Ethel. We just sort of passed him along from one to another like a used car. Even Ethel, Ethel the Good, she probably took him from somebody else. There was always someone waiting, wanting to use B. J. Where did it all start? The day he was born, the day the car came off the assembly line... Come on, try the mashed potatoes. Violet Smith makes them with real cream.”

He wouldn’t. She didn’t.