Ask for Me Tomorrow

“I couldn’t talk to you freely this morning because I didn’t want Smedler or that witch in his office to overhear.” A smile swept across her face like a summer storm, leaving it refreshed, softer. “The old devil has the place bugged, you know. What did he tell you about me?”

“Very little.” Go along with her, Smedler had said. I’m sure she won’t ask you to do anything too indiscreet. And whatever it is, you’ll get some money and some experience out of it and we hang on to her business. She’s one of our golden oldies. “I don’t think he has his office bugged, by the way.”

“No? Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be ethical.”

“Tell that to Smedler sometime when I’m around. I’d love to watch his face come unglued.” She put the manila envelope on a leather-topped table. Then she sat down in one of the four matching chairs and motioned for him to sit opposite her. “I’ve played a lot of games at this table, bridge, Scrabble, backgammon, Monopoly. This one will be new.”

“What’s the name of it?”

“See for yourself.” She turned the manila envelope so he could read the letters, printed on the front: B. J. PHOTOGRAPHS. CERTIFICATES, ET CETERA. “Let’s just call it B. J., for short.”

“And the rules?”

“We make them up as we go along... Did Smedler tell you about B. J.?”

“No.”

“Did anyone?”

“Charity mentioned him.”

“I have to watch you, you really are evasive. What did she say?”

“That he was your first husband, B. J. Lockwood, and that he was long gone.”

“Long gone. Yes, he’s long gone,” she repeated, almost as if she were tasting the words to identify their flavor. Spinach soufflé? Peanut butter sandwiches? Sour grapes? It was impossible for an observer to judge from her expression. “Eight years, to be precise. We’d been married five years and things were going along fine. Maybe not storybook peachy keen — we weren’t kids, he’d been married before and I’d been around here and there — but certainly a whole lot better than average. At least, I thought so.”

“What changed your mind?”

“He did. He took off with one of the servants, a Mexican girl no more than fifteen years old. She was pregnant. B. J. always wanted a child and I refused for a number of reasons. His family had a history of diabetes and frankly my side of it wasn’t too hot either. Besides, you don’t start having kids when you’re in your late thirties, not unless your maternal instincts are a hell of a lot stronger than mine.”

“What was the girl’s name?”

“Tula Lopez. Whether B. J. was the father of her child or not, she persuaded him he was and he did the honorable thing. B. J. always did honorable things, impulsive, stupid, absurd, but honorable. So off the two of them rode into the sunset. It was what they rode in that burns me up — the brand-new motor home I’d just bought for us to go on a vacation to British Columbia. I was crazy about that thing. Dreamboat, I called it. On the first night it was delivered here to the house B. J. and I actually slept in it, and the next morning I made our breakfast in the little kitchen, orange juice and Grapenuts. A week later it was goodbye Dreamboat, B. J., Tula and the rest of the box of Grapenuts.”

“What do you want me to do, get back the rest of the Grapenuts?”

She didn’t smile. She merely looked pensive as if she was seriously considering the proposition. “It’s hard for me to make you understand the position I’m in. How can you? — You’re young, you have choices ahead of you, alternatives. Nothing’s final. You get sick, you get well again. You lose a job or a girl, okay, you find another job, another girl. Right?”

“In a general way, yes.”

“Well, I’m fifty. That’s not very old, of course, but it cuts down on your alternatives, narrows your choices. There are more goodbyes and not so many hellos. Too many of the goodbyes are final. And the hellos — well, they’ve become more and more casual... I’ve lost one husband and I’m about to lose another. I’m depressed, scared, sitting in that room with Marco, listening to his breathing and waiting for it to stop. When it does stop, I’ll be alone. Alone, period. I have no relatives and no friends I haven’t bought.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good. It will help motivate you.”

“To do what?”

She ran her fingers across the letters on the manila envelope as if it had turned into a Ouija board and she were receiving a message. “I’d like to see B. J. again. I think — I have this strong feeling he’d like to see me, too.”

“And my job is to go looking for him?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“No.”

“Or whether he’d want to contact you if he is alive.”

“No.”

“He and the girl, Tula, may in fact be living happily ever after with half a dozen kids.”

“No.” She moved her head back and forth, slowly, as if her neck had suddenly become stiff. “They only had one, a boy. He was born crippled.”

“Where did you hear that?”