I put my head down in the diner, and Jenny stroked my hair for a while. She told me I was going to be fine. That a man was not worth it. That she would always be there for me. And then finally she whispered, “You really need to take a shower.”
On Christmas Eve I drove by my old house. The dog next door had a limp now. It barked at my car as I drove by and I slid down in my seat. Thomas’s truck was in the driveway, and there was a red Toyota Tercel next to it. I did not recognize the car. It could not be another woman. It could not be that already. The light was on in the living room and the bedroom, and the rest of the house was dark. I imagined the TV screen flickering as Thomas flipped channels. The cornfields behind the house were flat, they were nothing now. There was snow everywhere, and it disappeared Nebraska.
I cried when I got home, and then I slept long into Christmas Day. I woke up sometimes and saw light and tiny particles of dirt twinkling and drifting through my apartment and they were gorgeous and then I could not breathe and I would go back to sleep. It was a solid day of me and sleep and everything falling all around me, the layers of dust and dirt and air and misery weighing me down.
I did not get out of bed until my sister came the next afternoon, and she would not leave until I answered the door. She wanted to show me her new cell phone. She had made videos of all her friends and boyfriends and I stood in the doorway and let her flip through them all. They had their own language, she and her friends all seemed smarter than me. She would graduate from high school next year. No one knew what would happen to her, but I still thought she was already so far ahead of me. I had never felt behind before. This was the first time in my life I even understood what falling behind even meant.
I went back to bed. Early the next morning, there was another knock at the door. There was Timber, Papi standing silently behind him, holding a bag of food and a stack of magazines that people had left behind at the restaurant. “Something to keep you company,” said Timber as Papi handed them to me. We hadn’t talked much, Papi and me, but we both were warm to each other. He sat next to me on the bed and put his hand on my head. “Do I have a fever? Am I hot?” I said. He snapped his hand back and made a face like he was getting burned, and he smiled at me. “I think you will be fine,” he said. He left me a take-out tin of eggs scrambled with green pepper and cheddar cheese, wheat toast, and a few slices of banana and orange. Everything was warm, even the fruit. “I will bring you coffee later,” he said.
I looked up but did not say anything. I could hear him, but nothing was getting through the haze around me. It felt like the whole world was bright headlights and there was this early morning fog in my apartment and I wasn’t going to see anything until it was too late, the car would be right in front of my face.
“Should I call a doctor?” said Timber.
Somehow words came out of me. “I am going to be fine,” I said. I watched as the words pushed their way through the fog. They were colored fluorescent pink.
“You have to get out of this apartment,” he said. “It’s making you sicker.”
“I have to sleep now,” I said.
“Promise me you will come down tomorrow,” he said. “First thing.”
“I promise,” I said.
I slept another day. I was growing to love my bed. Everything was much easier under the covers.
And then my mother showed up, dressed to the nines. She cut a nice figure, my mother. I loved it when she wore her hair up like that, all neat and pinned. She looked French, or something. I had forgotten what she looked like out in the world; I only knew what she looked like at home, miserable and messy. At home we are all always different. She pushed past me when I answered the door. I guess she wanted to see who I was now. She kicked a foot through the papers on my floor. The dust hovered heavy in the air. My mother sneezed. There were garbage bags of old food cartons in the corner. I had meant to take them down but I had not found the time. I had been very busy. I wanted to tell her this: I have been very busy. But how could I explain what I had been doing?