Not far away on Waterman Street, there was a Whole Foods where Joy had always shopped, but Charlie didn’t dare go there because of his growing fear of familiar faces popping up and all the questions and condolences that were sure to follow. In the short while since he had returned home, people had come knocking on the front door—sometimes this was followed by the sound of heavy footsteps walking to the rear of the house and more knocking on the back door. That knocking, those footsteps, the accompanying deep voices in clipped conversation—all of it had caused Charlie to clutch The Pig tight and carry it with him to the narrow bathroom beneath the stairs, where he waited, his heart thrumming like the engine of the Oldsmobile, until whoever they were had gone. The last time it happened, he snuck to the backyard afterward and removed the key hidden beneath a patio flagstone, to prevent anyone who might find it from coming inside.
And so, the lack of basic sundries and his dread of Whole Foods led him to hunt down Joy’s old address book from the desk in her art room. In it, he found the number of a woman they used to know who wiped cafeteria tables and mopped floors over at Central High, but who had also cleaned their house a few times when Joy threw out her back. Tünde—that was the woman’s name, though a pack of those miserable, wise-ass, shit-for-brains students he was once paid to keep in line had taunted her with the nickname the “Hungarian Barbarian.” That name for her, like so many of the names they came up with for the faculty, including the name they came up with for Charlie, had a cruel but uncanny accuracy about it. In Tünde’s case, those brats had nailed it with the combo of her ethnicity and great height and broad shoulders, which, despite her pretty face, left her looking like some rough-and-tumble female wrestler.
When he picked up the phone to call Tünde, the line was dead. Had Joy arranged for the service to be shut off while they were away too? He could not recall, since he had left so many of those details to her, particularly after he’d begun having what she referred to as his “little mental slips” a few years before. Charlie might have used his cell, but in yet another “little mental slip,” it had been mistakenly left behind in the bathroom of a Florida gas station in the earliest hours of the trip home. It was just as well since he hated the way that thing kept buzzing in his pocket. Without a landline or a cell, his only option was to wait until dark, pull on a hooded sweatshirt, and walk the neighborhood with his head down until finding a pay phone—yes, an actual pay phone—that stood like a mirage in front of the Shell station on Wickenden Street. As he fished change from his pockets, Charlie stared at the page torn from Joy’s old address book. His wife, forever doodling, had drawn a thunderbolt over Tünde’s name and a squiggly line through her number, though thankfully it was still possible to decipher.
“Halo.”
When she answered in her thick accent, that lone word filled Charlie’s head with so many memories from his days back at that horrible school. He remembered watching the woman, examining the unusual beauty of her high cheekbones and long blond hair yanked back and twisted tight into a braid, as she silently mopped the filth from that cafeteria. All the while, those kids in their concert Tshirts and ripped jeans taunted her, shouting in the voice of a ringside announcer, “In this corner, we have the Hungarian Barbarian! Standing at a hulking six-foot-one and built like a brick shit-house, the other ladies in the ring better get ready for an ass-whooping like they’ve never seen!” Tünde always ignored their mocking in such a weird and trancelike way it was as though she did not hear them. That is, until a day came when some creep of a student added something new to the routine: launching a plastic cup in her direction. The cup missed, but a metal fork quickly followed and would have hit her squarely in the face if Tünde hadn’t batted it away with the fastest of reflexes. Charlie assumed she would simply go back to mopping the way she always did, but this time Tünde exploded into a burst of broken English, waving her mop in the air like a weapon. Moments like that, it was all Charlie could do not to march down the long hall to Joy’s classroom—so serene and colorful it was as though she taught at a different school altogether—and tell her it was time to begin their dream life as retired snowbirds sooner rather than later. Instead, he’d stuck to the plan and dutifully escorted the offending little bastard to the principal’s office. And when he walked back to the cafeteria to check on Tünde, he found the woman mopping the floor in that same trancelike state, as though nothing bad had happened at all.
“Tünde?” he said now. Other than The Pig, it was the first Charlie had spoken to anyone or anything in days. As a result, his voice had a foggy, disconnected quality, one he tried to remedy when he said, “This is Charlie Webster. We used to work together at Central High School here in Providence.”
Thus began their conversation. At first, Charlie sensed that the woman felt wary of him phoning out of the blue after so many years and at such a late hour. But he pressed on, asking how she had been and listening to an answer he did not fully grasp on account of her muddled English. At last, Charlie circled around to the point of his call: “I was wondering if you would come by, hopefully even tomorrow if you’re free, and clean the house and do some grocery shopping for me?”