Dr. Stober looked over his glasses at her, one hand on the newspaper page he’d been about to turn. “No,” he said.
A normal person would have said, “Why?” but Dr. Stober, she increasingly felt, was unusually indifferent to the distress of others. This had not been obvious when she first rented the house to him, perhaps because he was younger then, and his wife had not yet died.
“I woke up this morning and she was gone. I thought she was in labor.”
Dr. Stober received this news without expression or comment.
“I hope she’s all right,” Sonia said. “I can’t understand where she would have gone.”
“Perhaps to a friend’s?” Dr. Stober said, and neatly turned the newspaper page. “She doesn’t normally turn up here until nine.”
Aldine never visited friends, but Sonia didn’t see the point of telling this to Dr. Stober, who seemed impatient to continue reading the newspaper.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Sonia said, thinking for the twentieth time that Dr. Stober always managed to make it seem that he was the landlord and she was the tenant, rather than the other way around.
“I’m sure she’ll be back any second,” Dr. Stober said, eyes on the paper, and Sonia turned to open the door, expecting just before she heard it the little tinkling bell that warned Dr. Stober of arriving patients, a cheerful trembling of brass against brass that she thought for some patients must forever be associated with bad news badly delivered.
A square of paper lay in the stubbly grass, and Sonia bent to retrieve it merely to tidy up.
Dear Dr. Stober,
I am borrowing your car to take a friend home. I’ll bring it back as soon as possible. I hope you will not mind.
Aldine McKenna
Sonia was astonished at Aldine’s misreading of Dr. Stober. He was exactly the sort of person who would mind, and mind terribly. Few people wouldn’t. The midnight borrowing of an expensive car by a pregnant, penniless, unmarried girl? And how can taking without permission be called borrowing? The girl might call it borrowing and Sonia herself might not call it theft, but everyone else would. She had to concede—to herself, privately, if not to Dr. Stober—that the girl she had perceived as a young and less fortunate version of herself might actually be a reckless and foolish person who brought along trouble wherever she went.
Sonia didn’t like walking back up the steps into Dr. Stober’s office. She knew that he would be furious, and she supposed he would blame her for introducing Aldine into the house. She stopped to consider, briefly, the curled dead cottonwood leaves on the lawn and porch. She stopped to read the note again. She examined, as a calming exercise, the blue horizon, ribbed in the distance with bony clouds. Her mouth felt dry and her left shoe pinched. She put her hand to the heavy door and braced herself for the brass tinkling of the bell.
She was not wrong. He came to a boil fast.
“Borrow it?” he asked, incredulous. He bent over so he could peer through the lace curtains at the empty parking place on the street. He stared a long time. “This is inconceivable.”
He said several times that he could not believe it, simply could not believe it, and then he asked her to tell him again how she’d come to know this foreign girl and why she thought it would be charitable to let her sleep under the same roof, work in his office, handle the files of his patients? “She’s probably a gypsy!” he said. “A gypsy with a whole pack of other gypsies riding around in my car this very instant.” He glanced again out the window. “You’ll have to go with me to the police station.”
“Why don’t you wait and see? Give her time to bring it back?” Even to Sonia, it sounded crazy.
Dr. Stober gave a little explosive laugh. “Give her a big head start, you mean? Bigger than the one she already has?”
“I’m sure she means it,” Sonia said, forcing herself to picture the sweet, honest face of the girl she liked, not the conniving gypsy of Dr. Stober’s description. “She wouldn’t steal,” she insisted. “She could have taken it a long time ago, when she wasn’t so near her confinement. Why didn’t she go then?”
“Free medical care, I imagine,” Dr. Stober said. He was gathering things up and setting them down, looking for something.
Sonia wasn’t sure why she felt so defensive of Aldine, but she did. Perhaps it was her own judgment that she wanted to defend. “If she doesn’t bring it back, I’ll be responsible.”
“What in the hell do you mean by that?” he asked. He’d found the papers he wanted and was stuffing them into a satchel.
“I mean that I’ll pay.”
Dr. Stober laughed incredulously. “For the car? Why would you do that?”
Sonia couldn’t think how to formulate her reasons for Dr. Stober. She’d imagined her life taking a new turn with Aldine in it: a substitute daughter and grandchild, a late compensation for what had been denied her in marriage. If Aldine brought the car back, Aldine would come back, too, and Sonia wouldn’t live alone in the back part of her childhood home as an increasingly frail and unwanted landlady. Dr. Stober surely suffered similar visions of his fate: no wife, no children, an empty house, year after year after year.
“She’s like a daughter to me,” Sonia said, not looking into Dr. Stober’s face as she said it, fearing his laugh. “If she doesn’t bring it back, I’ll stop charging you rent.”
“You’ve been hoodwinked,” he said, not laughing this time, but his voice still contemptuous. “You’ve been fooled.”
“Then let me be the one who pays.”
Dr. Stober was quiet. When she forced herself to look at his face, he massaged his throat and said, “Wait for her to return it, huh? Like a library book?”
He set the satchel on his desk and looked up at the clock. “It’s almost time for my first patient. Perhaps you should leave before I change my mind.”
85
In the morning, the sun was almost too bright. Aldine felt dizzy looking at things in the room, which were exaggerated by the strong winter sun and her pure pleasure in being here. It was as if she were now living in a world dipped in ammonia and wiped clean: the skin of Ansel’s hands, the hair on his arms, the blue cotton of the body-warmed quilt, the brass bed, the flecked mirror, the irises of Ansel’s eyes when he opened them and saw her staring—it all shone, it all glittered. “Good morning,” she managed to say.
He pulled the blanket higher and held her tighter. “Good morning,” he said, warm, dry lips to her neck.
The cold air reminded them, in time, that they were hungry. Ellie had meant to leave nothing edible behind, but Ansel followed mouse droppings to a burlap bag of white beans tucked into a dark cupboard corner. Only a handful of beans remained. Ansel said they could be washed and cleaned, but it was barely a meal, and after soaking and boiling, tomorrow’s meal at that. It was Aldine who thought of Sonia Odekirk’s house. “She said no one was living there, not even her hired man,” she told Ansel.