Free Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Page B

saying. “Passionate like that. Can you blame me?” She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the ceiling.
    “I wanted him to fight for us,” she said, making figure eights in the air with her glass, and then she gave a sudden punch, like she was in some kind of rally. Some of her wine spilled out and went sailing onto the floor.
    “Fight, fight, fight!” she said. “For anything. It didn’t matter what.”
    I said, “I wanted that too,” but she didn’t hear me. I wanted her to fight for me. I used a paper towel and my foot to clean up the wine puddle.
    “I wanted him to tell us not to go and to really take a stand about it,” she said. “But he wimped out. Like everyone, he got wimpy on me.”
    “Then why did you fall in love with him?” I asked. “If he was such a wimp.”
    She put her glass down, glared at me like I’d misunderstood everything.
    “He changed,” she said. “I thought I knew what he was after. In the beginning, when I worked at La Grenouille, he sent back my sweetbreads. No one had ever done that. He said rosemary was a moth deterrent.”
    She put back her head again.
    “And he was the first man bold enough to order for me at a restaurant. He was his own person then, so into wood. He used to get totally lost looking at a barstool. You wouldn’t believe it. But then, eventually, his interest became me. I was pregnant and he wouldn’t get off my back. If it had stayed like that, I would have left him right then and there. But things ebbed and flowed. I’ll tell you what, though. If he’d liked my sweetbreads, he wouldn’t have had a chance in hell.”
    I refilled her glass. It was 7:05. She wasn’t done. I wanted her to say something about how my needing her was different from my father’s needs. I was her daughter. That kind of need was necessary, biological, heartening. There were a million words I wanted to put in her mouth, but she said none of them. At 7:30, she lifted her head, disconcerted, flushed.
    “Didn’t you say you had to go somewhere?” she said.
    “No,” I said. “It’s okay.”
    By then, I’d taken off my coat. My back was cold with sweat.
    “You go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
    “All right,” I said. I put on my coat. I didn’t even want to go anymore. He wouldn’t be there. I’d be ridiculous.
    As I was walking out the door, my mother called to me. “Lorca?”
    I stopped, turned around.
    “I must have done something very right,” she said. “You’re the best little listener.”
     
    I sprinted all the way to the bookstore, which was no big deal except that there had never been more people on the street and that made it impossible to run. They looked at me like they didn’t know which direction they should go and then they didn’t go in either one. They just stood there, with bags of groceries held out like broken wings. Eventually, I started running in the street, staying close to the parked cars and scooting back up on the curb when I saw the lights of a bus.
    I burst into the store with my hands tingling from the cold. I raced toward the stairs and noticed that the elevator doors were open, about to close. A walrus of an old man was fiddling with the buttons. I got in.
    “Terrible weather,” the walrus said, firmly reparting his hair with both hands. His belly was so big that he leaned back even when he didn’t.
    They taught us in school that if you’re ever in an elevator with a pervert, you should shake and scream like you’re covered in ants. They said, “Preserve yourself, not your dignity.”
    Right before I got out of the elevator, my heart started purring. Just for a second; I couldn’t help it. Sometimes, no matter how hard I tried to keep my hopes down, they popped back up like a turkey timer.
    He was gone. Blot was gone. I could see that before I stepped out of the elevator. I didn’t even have to move my head. His desk was right in front of me. No coat. No stray pens or tissues. There was a neat stack of books