“Who?”
“What is this?” Jim said. He recognized the shrillness in his voice. It was just like hers. “Even if I tell you, you won’t know them. You don’t know anyone here except for me, do you?”
Eve didn’t say anything. She just sat there, waiting. Wasn’t this what he’d brought her here for? To tell her? But Jim could not think of what to say exactly, or how to say it.
Finally he said, “Can we go to dinner now?” He felt exhausted. He felt like he could sleep for days without waking up. He imagined doing just that, crawling into bed and going to sleep. When he finally woke up, she would be gone, back in her own house with Debbie’s picture smiling out at her, comforting her.
“Are you still a good cook?” Eve said, her voice soft.
“Yes.”
“Cook me dinner then. It’s our last night.”
HE GRILLED CHICKEN coated with Dijon mustard, and potatoes. He tossed a big salad. They sat outside on his small patio to eat. Eve admired his garden, the lush tomatoes and baby lettuce. Jim drank too much wine on purpose.
“You know what’s a shame?” his mother said. “That I have to fly back. I’m terrified.”
“It’s safer than driving in a car,” he told her. He had told her that before she came too.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Well, it’s true,” he said, trying not to sound irritated.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said. “How do you think those people felt when that bomb went off and they fell out of the sky?”
“What people?”
“All those people on that Pan Am jet. Flight 103. And right before Christmas. I saw all those mothers on TV who had lost children.” She took a big breath. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing.”
Drunkenly, Jim threw his arm around his mother’s shoulders and placed a too-wet kiss on her cheek. “Well,” he said, “you’re stuck with me no matter what.”
She laughed. “Stuck,” she said. “Hardly. You’re the one stuck with me.”
The image of those unclaimed bags, circling, suddenly popped into Jim’s mind again. He frowned, and the arm he’d tossed so casually around his mother tightened into a hug.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “No one wants to bomb a plane to Chicago.”
She hugged him back, hard. “Oh, Jim,” she said, “you’re wrong. Bombs fall all the time. Unexpected. If people knew when they were going to drop, they’d avoid them, avoid getting hurt. Those people on that Pan Am plane, you think they would have gotten on had they known?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He held his mother at arm’s length. She seemed ready for anything. But hadn’t she just told him that a person wouldn’t walk into a situation where a bomb was going to drop? He got up and moved toward the door that led inside.
“Where are you going?” Eve said.
He smiled at her, happy that she was sitting here on his patio at dusk, happy that tomorrow she would be gone.
“Dessert,” he said. “The grand finale.” And he went inside to get it, vanilla ice cream with cherries. He would come back out, pour cherry liqueur on top, then hold a match to it until, right before their eyes, it burst into flames.
“SO,” JIM SAID as they stood together at the airport waiting for his mother’s flight to board, “Aunt Dodie will pick you up? She’ll be there waiting?”
Eve nodded. She had on a different pantsuit, a lemon yellow one with a pin of a clown on the lapel. Despite the bright color, the cheerful pin, she looked older, worried. Even when she smiled up at him, her frown did not disappear completely.
Jim watched a young couple kissing goodbye. The girl seemed hungry, starved even. His mother turned and watched too, as the boy kneaded the girl’s rear end, pushing her into him greedily.
“Young love,” Eve said, and turned away. Her frown deepened.
Jim could not take his eyes from them, from the curve of the girl’s neck as she tilted her head, from the boy’s slender fingers pressing her flesh. He wore a Yankees baseball hat, she wore floral leggings.
“Jim,” his mother told him, “don’t stare.”
But he continued to watch. What would become of them? he wondered. They would grow up, fall out of love, never feel this way again. Or they would get married and grow to hate each other, forget this day when they could not bear to say goodbye. Maybe he would board this plane and it would get blown up. Maybe he carried the bomb himself.
“You’re being rude,” Eve said.
Jim sighed and turned away from the couple. His mother seemed to have shrunk in these few minutes since he last looked at her. She looked old, frail.
“Oh,” she said, “I hate to fly. I’ll never come to see you again, unless you move closer to home.”
“I won’t,” he told her softly.