The Cavalry
Marilyn
Marilyn sat in the cafeteria, frowning at the bacon. The scrambled eggs were a little dry, but they did not seem inedible—though she knew they were not the fresh eggs she’d grown accustomed to eating. But the bacon was worse. It was pale and limp, as though someone had run out of time halfway through cooking it.
She lifted a piece, which sagged over her fingers before she could take a bite.
A movement caught her eye, and she looked up to see Lynne standing over her table.
“Is it too much to ask that the bacon be cooked?” Marilyn asked, her voice dripping with judgment. “I swear that’s reason enough to go on the lam from this place all by itself.”
She had been trying for humor, in the hope of defusing the tension she felt between them, but a quick glance at Lynne’s face revealed that the woman was not the slightest bit amused.
“That was meant as a joke,” she added.
“Too soon,” Lynne said.
“Sorry.”
“We’re having a meeting. Your presence is required.”
Her voice was enough to rob Marilyn of what little appetite she had managed to muster in the first place.
“Before I even have breakfast?”
“Yes. Now, please.”
Marilyn rose, and followed Lynne out of the cafeteria. She found herself nursing a distinct sense that she was marching to her own execution. To an old-fashioned gallows, perhaps, or a sharp and menacing guillotine. In her peripheral vision she could see table after table of other residents, mostly with their mouths full, staring at her as she passed. Based on the expressions on their faces, they seemed to think she was on the way to her demise as well.
She followed Lynne down the carpeted hall, her heart pounding.
They stepped into the office together.
Marilyn’s eyes focused first through the window. It was a lovely early-summer morning, and there was a flowering tree of some sort just outside the window, with a carefully tended grassy green slope beyond. It would have been a much nicer place to be, which was probably why her eyes had gone there.
She pulled her gaze back into the room. Boris sat on the leather couch. Behind the desk sat an official-looking older woman Marilyn had never seen before.
“Sit down, Mrs. Clements,” the woman said.
It made Marilyn’s heart race faster, which made her a little dizzy.
She lowered herself into a chair in front of the woman’s desk. Lynne stood with her back up against the office door, as if Marilyn might make a run for it at any moment.
“Let me get right to the point,” the woman said. Her voice was full of authority and devoid of any lightness or humor. “We were hoping to get this cleared up a bit more quickly. You’ve been back at our facility long enough. That is, it seems like time enough has passed to have someone bring the money back here . . . if it’s true you still have it. If the problem is only transportation, let us know. I can send someone out to pick it up. But if you don’t still have it, you’d best come clean about that right now.”
Marilyn opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Another slight wave of dizziness passed through her and moved on.
“I’ll take your silence to mean you don’t have it.”
Marilyn had a quick flood of thoughts and impressions, mostly involving the very real possibility of incarceration, and how much she didn’t want it. It helped her muster words in her own defense.
“I might still be able to get it. Most of it. I spent some, just living on it. But I was very frugal. I lived with a single mother and babysat instead of paying rent. I only spent what I absolutely had to for my own personal needs. I had most of the money when I was arrested. I could have gotten it and brought it back then, but the police handcuffed me and dragged me out of there. The money was hidden in my room. I had somebody go over to get it, but the woman I was staying with had dumped all my belongings at the curb, and found where the money was hidden. And she took it.”
“Then you can’t get it back. And this is now a matter for the police.”
Marilyn’s eyes darted outside again, and she tried to breathe normally. She was not entirely successful.
“I was working on having somebody get it back from her. I’m not sure how that’s going.”
“We’ve reached the end of our patience.”
“Yes,” Marilyn said. “I sensed that.”
A knock sounded on the office door. It was loud, and made the door rattle. Lynne had been leaning her back against it, and it startled her forward.
She turned and opened the door just a crack.
“We’re in a meeting,” she said.
The voice of a woman on the other side of the door said quite a bit, but not at a volume that allowed Marilyn to make out most of the words. But she thought she heard the words “He won’t take no for an answer.”
The door opened wide, and Janet from the reception desk walked in. She had that little boy with her.
Marilyn struggled for his name. At first it evaded her. But then she thought of the book. She remembered that if she knew the title of the E. B. White book, she knew the name of the little boy.
“Stewart,” she said. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“I took the bus,” he said.
He walked past her chair and stood leaning his belly against the woman’s desk.
“I have money,” he said, and pulled a huge wad of cash from his shorts pocket. “I have five thousand four hundred thirty dollars. Here, I’ll count it out for you.”
“That won’t be necessary, young man,” the woman said. Marilyn still had no idea who she was, but she was clearly higher in rank than anyone who worked every day at Eastbridge. “Boris, come here and count this cash, please.”
Boris stepped in. Stewie stepped backward, until he was standing near the arm of Marilyn’s chair. They all watched in silence as the money was counted.
“Five thousand, four hundred and thirty dollars,” Boris said. “Confirmed.”
“Wait,” Marilyn said. “How is that possible? Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s wonderful. But how is it possible? I only had a little over five thousand two hundred left.”
“I put some to it from my egg money,” Stewie said. Then he turned his attention to the woman behind the desk. “I can bring more, if I know how much more you need, but I just don’t have it right now. I make pretty good money from my egg route, but it’ll take me a few months to get the rest. But I’ll bring the rest, if it’s not too much, and if you’re willing to be patient that long. I could get it faster, except I give half my egg money to my sister, Stacey, because she supports the family and she needs it. And I don’t want to break my promise to her. But please, please trust me and don’t put Marilyn in jail. Please?”
The woman’s face changed as he spoke. Marilyn watched the changes. The softening. The sudden presence of empathy. Her heart still hammered, unable to catch up with the rapidly changing developments, but her mind knew she was not going to jail.
“You don’t have to give me any more of your egg money,” Marilyn said. Her voice sounded a little shaky to her own ears. “I’ll talk my children into making up the rest.”
“You really love your grandmother,” Boris said. “Don’t you?”
The boy opened his mouth to speak. Marilyn knew him well enough to know he would be utterly honest, and admit that they were no blood relation.
She cut him off.
“I’m only his adopted grandmother,” she said. “But, yes. We’re very close.”
“That was nice, what you said in there,” Stewie said.
There were sitting on the same bench where she and Betty had sat the day before, looking down over the man-made pond and fountain. This time the ducks were wildly active, chasing each other about and flapping their wings. Fighting, maybe, she thought. Or maybe mating. The line between those two had always struck her as a bit unclear, and not only in the animal kingdom.
“It’s all true,” she said. “You’re very much my hero right now. You came in here like the cavalry. I couldn’t be much happier about it.”