Peril

MORTIMER

He watched Dottie as she made his usual breakfast of bacon and eggs. She seemed to roll rather than to walk, a huge round ball of a woman draped in the same tattered housedress she’d worn for years. Or was it the same? Mortimer didn’t know. He didn’t know Dottie either, he realized suddenly, and now there would never be any time to discover who she was at the moment or had been all these years. The pain in his guts made it clear that they would not grow old together. He would not be with her during her final illness, and so there’d be no one beside her bed when she drew her last breath. How sad that seemed to him now that she would die alone, that after having given her so little, he would not be able to give her at least the comfort of his presence when the light dimmed and the room grew cold.

They’d met someplace twenty-eight years before. A party of some kind, he recalled, probably having to do with a game or some other sporting event. He’d explained how the odds worked and she’d smiled and smiled and tried to look fascinated though he doubted that she’d given a rat’s ass about a single thing he’d said. How thick he must have been not to have known that she was only trying to make him feel comfortable, or like a big shot, or whatever way a homely girl thought she ought to make a guy feel so he’d take an interest. Still, it was sweet of her to have tried to make him feel good about himself, Mortimer thought. But then, she’d always been good to him, he supposed, never one to bitch all that much, never one to complain when he wasn’t around. Just a decent person, Dottie was, a woman with a big, kind heart. The salt of the earth, he told himself, his wife was the salt of the earth.

“Dottie,” he said quietly.

She didn’t turn from the counter. “Yeah.”

“Dottie.”

He heard the plaintive sound in his voice and knew that she’d heard it too, because she turned toward him slowly, a quizzical look in her eyes.

He smiled quietly and patted his lap. “Come here.”

She didn’t move but simply stared at him wonderingly, a slice of white bread in her hand, a pink plastic knife in the other. “I’m making lunch,” she said.

“Come here,” he repeated.

She came forward reluctantly, bringing the bread and knife with her, and sat down on his lap.

“Dottie,” he repeated. He could feel her great weight on his legs, the vast round bulk of her, soft and doughy, like holding a huge sack of flour.

“Dottie…” he began again, but the words stopped in his throat and he could only stare at her mutely, a strange sense of failure descending upon him as he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do for her, nothing that would comfort or protect. It was too late. And so he simply patted her back softly and said, “Get up.”

She looked at him oddly.

“Get up,” he repeated, now remembering the one person on earth he might still help in some way.

“Morty, what’s the matter with you!” Dottie asked.

Mortimer gave no answer, but merely strode into the bedroom, pulled out the top drawer of the bureau, and dug around in a tangle of socks until he found the pistol. “I gotta go,” he told Dottie as he came back out of the room.

“You ain’t having lunch?”

“No,” he said. He yanked on his coat and the old rumpled hat and fled out into the dreary corridor, then down the unpainted stairs, floor after floor, the stabbing pain in his abdomen increasing with each step until he burst out into the crisp autumn air, all but running now, dodging traffic as he crossed Eighty-sixth Street, then stopped dead and drew in a long, shaky breath, his gaze rising up the lightless windows of his building until it reached the terrace of his apartment, where he saw Dottie standing in her old faded housedress, peering down, searching for him in the crowd.

He fled into a nearby shop, and from that vantage point watched his wife give up the search and shrink back into the apartment, where he imagined her at the kitchen counter again, smearing mayonnaise on a piece of white bread.

Even now he wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to say to her as she sat on his lap. Dottie, you know I love you, right? No, that wasn’t it, because he didn’t really, and never had. Dottie, I got some bad news. That couldn’t have been it, because he wasn’t at all sure she would find the news of his impending death all that difficult to take.

Then suddenly he knew what he’d wanted to say: Dottie, is there anything I can do… That was what he’d intended to ask her. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? A dumb question, he thought now, which was why the answer had come to him so quickly, No, asshole, there’s not a damn thing you can do for her.

The pistol sagged down in his jacket pocket, and as he felt its weight he thought again of Abe. Abe had done him the only favor that mattered to him now. He said he would hold on to the fifteen grand and give it to Dottie when the time came. He was a friend, Abe, and even though fifteen grand was nothing, a lousy year’s rent, still when he’d asked Abe to hold on to it, Abe had agreed without the slightest hesitation. He curled his fingers around the handle of the pistol. Okay, then, he thought, one good turn deserves another.