Love Saves the Day

The taxi passed a green apartment building awning, beneath which a woman held the hand of a chubby, diapered infant, clearly in the early bowlegged days of learning to walk. Laura thought of Prudence’s funny little kitten waddle in her mother’s kitchen, Prudence rising on fuzzy, unsteady legs to snatch some treat or tidbit from Sarah’s outstretched hand. The cab was racing down Second Avenue now, past Baby Bo’s Cantina. Sarah had loved their quesadillas. They’d been a Sunday ritual for her, along with the fried plantains she’d known Laura enjoyed and had made a point of having when she knew Laura would be coming over. Laura had noticed when Sarah stopped bringing the quesadillas home, sharing the sour cream and pulled chicken with Prudence. But she hadn’t thought to ask why.

A garbage truck turned a corner to emerge and stop in front of them. The cabbie slammed the brakes, flinging Laura—still leaning forward—against the Plexiglas partition separating the front seat from the back. Rubbing her forehead, she was about to make another impassioned plea for him to go around the wretched thing, but the driver was already looking over his left shoulder and sliding into the next lane. They made better time after that, easing into the rhythm of the lights and making it through a few yellows at the last possible second. St. Mark’s Church, where she and Sarah had gone every New Year’s Eve to listen to all-night poetry readings, flew by on their right. At Second and Ninth they passed Veselka, where she and Sarah had sometimes treated themselves to borscht in the summer, mushroom-barley soup in the winter. The restaurant and the church remained, but Laura would never go to either of those places with her mother again.

With one loss, Laura realized, others multiplied. Suddenly she wanted her mother with a desperate want that sat on her chest and wouldn’t let her breathe. She wanted to feel her mother’s arms around her, to press her face into the graceful bend between her mother’s neck and shoulder and inhale the comforting scent of her mother’s hair. More than anything, she wanted to hear her mother sing. She hadn’t heard Sarah sing in sixteen years, not since that June day when Laura was only fourteen.

But she would never hear her mother sing again. For the first time since Sarah died, Laura truly understood—felt all the way down to the pit of her stomach—the awful finality of the word never. She would never hear Sarah’s voice again. She would never have her mother’s comfort again. She hadn’t felt the loss as deeply as she should have because Prudence had been there, a living piece of her mother that was still with her. And now she didn’t know if Prudence would survive the day.

For months Laura had been unable to cry for her mother’s death. For one dreadful moment, she felt herself on the verge of breaking down completely, right here in the back of this cab. She bent forward to put her head between her knees, willing herself to hold it together.

With a squeal of rubber against wet pavement, the cab skidded to a stop. “Twelve dollars, miss,” the driver told her. Laura handed him a twenty from her purse and hastily murmured, “Keep the change.” She drew the jacket of her suit over her head to protect it from the rain as she ran from the car and down the short flight of metal stairs to the basement-level entrance of the animal hospital.

The waiting room was tiny. Blond-wood floors and recessed lighting created what probably had been intended as a warm, comforting atmosphere. But it was the kind of gray, rainy day when even lighting the lamps seemed to enhance the gloom rather than dispel it.

As Laura shook the rainwater from her jacket, she saw Josh pacing the small room. He had turned a stranger’s face to her that morning. It had been like that other day all over again, when her mother had turned on her with a stranger’s eyes and slapped her across the face. Worse than seeing their home destroyed, worse even than losing Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum, had been seeing a person she didn’t know wearing her mother’s face. It had seemed impossible that she and Josh could ever again speak to each other kindly, with love in their voices, after the things they’d said.

But Laura could see at once that all that had been put aside, at least for the moment. Josh’s face was as taut as her own, his eyes red. “Josh,” she said. She quickly crossed the room to where he stood and, without thinking, put her hand on his arm. She felt the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt. “Josh, what happened?”

“It was the lilies,” he said, and Laura’s heart turned over at the haggard look on his face.

“What lilies? What happened?”