Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Quindlen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76785-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

I bought Robert the game he wanted for Christmas and hid it in the crawl space above the second floor. I bought Cindy a small sweet landscape I saw in a poster shop at the mall, and Mike Riordan a nylon jacket for running on rainy days. I bought presents for all my patients, although we weren’t supposed to: a computer game for Jennifer, full of dragons and demons and a female superhero in a breastplate; a book for Melvin on smart investing and a romance novel for his wife; and, for Mrs. Levitt, a three-year subscription to People magazine. Christmas was coming, and I had enough money to buy presents. No one asked for the rent; I didn’t get a phone bill. There were calluses on my heels from my running shoes. When the phone rang now I just answered it, listened to the home-care agency ask about taking on a short-term assignment, Cindy ask whether I wanted her to drive me to school for soccer practice, the school to ask if Robert could take Tylenol for a headache. Twice it rang and no one was there. That happens to everyone, I told myself. To everyone.

“You all right?” Cindy said one morning in the library.

“I’m not sleeping real well,” I said.

“Ladies,” Mrs. Patrinian said, “not too loud please.”

“You tried taking melatonin?” Cindy said. “One of the moms at Gymboree swears by it, says she can’t even manage to stay up for the news now.”

When we went back to her house that morning she made me muffins and searched her medicine cabinet for sleeping pills. “Nothing but under-eye concealer, hon, but to tell the truth you could use it,” she said.

“Do I look that bad?”

“You look tired. Sort of frail. I don’t know, some men like that look.”

“Some men like single women in their twenties with no kids.”

“You just stay away from those men, and keep on running around that track.”

“You got a one-track mind,” I said.

“Ha, ha,” Cindy said.

I told Cindy about Grace, and a little about our parents, although I placed them all in Wilmington, Delaware, along with two older brothers and the accountant from whom I was divorced. I changed the subject Gracie taught from American studies to English literature, and I never mentioned Hunter College. I told her that my father had died of cancer, not of the emphysema he’d picked up as a New York City firefighter, all those buildings with asbestos insulation and two packs of Camels a day. I told her my mother was a secretary, even told her that she was the secretary to the head of a labor union. Soon I knew all about Craig and his pool business, about how Chelsea was afraid of thunderstorms, dogs, and insects, and how Chad was afraid of nothing, about Cindy’s mom, Helen, and how she was one of the people who discovered that the Avon bath oil repelled mosquitoes, since the farm had more mosquitoes than crops. She was a second-generation Avon lady, Cindy was; she showed me the story in the Avon annual report about her and her mother.

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