been so intimidated by the subway map printed in ten colors, Don later joked, he would have stayed a divorced single father forever.
Now, all kinds of people can meet each other. At sixty, my mother is still beautiful. If she were a flower, she would be a solitary orchid in a rock garden. The police officer told Jill that his own mother, a widow in her seventies, had signed up for online dating.
“He was implying Kumiko could have gone to meet a man. He has no idea what she’s like.”
Jill was thirteen when my mother and I came to live on her father’s farm. I haven’t told her everything I remember from Tokyo.
“I’m at my wit’s end,” Jill says. “Even if Kumiko comes back, I don’t know what to say to her.”
“I’ll come home,” I tell her.
It’s the second Monday in July. The small college where I work in the dean’s office is on summer break. I quit my high school teaching job in Wisconsin in 1996, moved to Boston to study multicultural education, and got a job as a curriculum specialist to promote cultural diversity. Then the economy changed. Now, I spend most of my time going over enrollment statistics and telling faculty members that their classes will have to be canceled.
There are affordable flights starting the day after tomorrow. Before calling Jill back, I dial the only other number I know by heart. My husband is the reason I stayed in Boston instead of returning to Wisconsin, where advocating for diversity would have made a difference. He is also the reason I’ve been avoiding my mother. I didn’t know how to tell her that I don’t live with him anymore.
TWO
Sam and I met on a winter evening after a snowstorm. Dressed in a light jacket and carrying a violin in a leather case, he looked stylish and jaunty. His red hair stuck out from under his grey beret. I was wearing my army surplus down parka and wielding an orange snow shovel. Although I’m only five feet one and barely a hundred pounds, that parka made me feel invincible. I had just dug out the back end of my car, a maroon Ford Escort Jill took to college and later passed on to me.
“I’ve been wondering whose car this was,” Sam said. “I live in this building.” He pointed to the brownstone in front of us.
“Me, too,” I told him. “I drove this car twelve hundred miles from Wisconsin to move here.”
He stuck out his hand. “I’m Sam. Glad to meet another Midwesterner.”
“I’m Lily.” Our handshake was muffled by his leather glove and my wool mitten.
“I grew up in Minnesota, and my car is almost as old as yours.” He pointed two parking spaces ahead, but all I could see was a snow mound. “The Toyota MR2 with the rust spots.”
I had noticed the sports car. Its dashboard displayed a card from the City of Cambridge Vehicle Inspection Office: a red letter R for “Rejected.”
“The one with the failed inspection notice?”
Sam tipped his head back and laughed. “So you saw the scarlet R. I have to get the rust spots treated before I can drive the car again.”
“Why?”
“The inspector said the sharp edges left by the rust could hurt a pedestrian who brushed against the car in a parking lot.”
“That’s ridiculous. What if a drunk pedestrian walks into your car and breaks his nose?”
“I’m sure the City of Cambridge would give us each a ticket.”
Sam played fiddle in an Irish folk band and shared a large apartment in our building with his bandmates. I told him I was renting an efficiency studio, going to graduate school, and waitressing at an organic restaurant.
A cell phone started ringing in his jacket pocket. “Nice meeting you,” I said and went back to shoveling.
When I finished mine, I dug out his car as well. A week later, I found a bouquet of tulips on my doorstep and a thank-you note signed, “Sam, the Minnesotan.” There were forty apartments in our building, and the mailboxes only listed our last names and initials. The following evening, though, Sam knocked on my door carrying a bottle of wine.
“How did you know which apartment was mine?” I asked.
“I asked the super where the efficiencies were by pretending to be interested in renting one,” he answered. “On the mailboxes, yours was the only initial L. I figured you were divorced or else you’re a secret agent with a Nordic alias.”
“Larson is my stepfather’s name. Is that weird?”
“No. I’m German and Dutch. My last name is Schmidt. Everyone assumes I’m Irish because of the music and the hair.”
As I stepped back to let Sam in, my cat leapt onto my shoulder. “This is Ozzie. He was born on a dairy farm in Denmark, Wisconsin.”
“A Holstein cat,” Sam laughed. Ozzie was white with black splotches, though that’s not why I’d picked him out. Among the kittens in the barn, he was the one who purred the loudest. My mother had never allowed a cat inside our house, but I was twenty-two and leaving home. I wanted to save at least one kitten from being crushed by the hay baler or trampled by a cow. Ozzie and I lived with Jill and Josh in Green Bay while I finished my last semester of college and taught high school English. Then the two of us moved east.
“Like you, Ozzie is a musician,” I told Sam. “He sang nonstop on our car trip across the country. The state of Ohio was an entire cat opera.”
Ozzie died two months ago at nineteen. Sam still occupies the co-op apartment his parents helped us buy in 1998 when we got married. Since last August, I’ve been living in an attic above a secondhand furniture store. The space has no kitchen, but toward the end of his life, Ozzie could only eat boiled chicken. I bought a two-burner hot plate at a hardware store and put it next to the bathroom sink, where I can cook a meal for one. I haven’t decided if I will ever go back to our old apartment.
Things started going wrong with Sam and me when his band, the Bog Queen, broke up. Like us, his bandmates were approaching forty. They were tired of being on the road for days playing the bars and Irish festivals. Unable to put together another band, Sam tried and quit several day jobs. Our birthdays are just thirteen days apart. We went camping in the White Mountains last August to celebrate our fortieth. He stopped in the middle of a day hike and asked me if it was too late for us to have a child. “It’s the only meaningful thing I can think of to do,” he said.
When Josh was a baby and I was a teenager, I often wished a tornado would hit the barn and sweep the whole family out of our misery. Whenever I heard about mothers and fathers who forgot their babies in the backseat of a freezing car, or worse, who shook their infants until they were brain-damaged, I didn’t think, as most people seem to, How can they do such a thing? I learned to love Josh only after living with him when he was no longer a baby and he and Jill had their own place in Green Bay. Before we were married, I told Sam how babies scared and repelled me, and he said, “That’s okay. I’d rather be a musician than a father.” Now he was changing his mind to give himself something to do.
“That is the most selfish thing you’ve ever said,” I blurted out. A week later, Ozzie and I moved out. Since then, Sam has said he doesn’t
