Dear Heart

2. Wendy

2

Wendy

She didn't sleep well, and finally kicked her covers off at six to try to paint for a while. Her brushstrokes were vivid, angry slashes of dissonant color. Frustrated, nerves tattered at the edges, she showered, forced herself to eat a granola bar for breakfast, and left the apartment at eight, walking around the block to where she'd parked the Road Runner.

It was still cherry red, still had its black racing stripes, and when she put the key in the ignition, it turned over like a dream, deep-throated and bold in the quiet buzzing of the Friday morning, rumble of its tailpipes bouncing off the building fronts around her.

It didn't seem possible, she reflected, as she made her way toward Queens, dew beaded on the windshield. She was back in New York, and Ollie was back in New York, and last night's encounter at Denver's didn't feel coincidental, not if Ollie was still at the old Patton & Son.

So he was home in Queens. How had he known to find her in a crap bar in Brooklyn? Was he following her? Why hadn't he ever answered her emails?

Five years. It had been five years, and she hadn't realized, until now, until she'd laid eyes on him again, that it didn't hurt any less, that gaping hole he'd left inside her heart when he'd fallen off the face of the earth. It was too big, suddenly, the loss, and the wondering, and the shock of being with arm's reach of him again. She couldn't pull up to the shop like this, tears standing in her eyes, her breathing a hitched, erratic rhythm in her lungs.

She ended up at Highland Park. Runners of all sorts, from serious athletes to moms with athletic strollers, were already on the paths, breath steaming in the cool morning, the slap of their sneakers a sort of ordinary comfort. There was a stoop-shouldered man with a friendly smile selling coffee and Krispy Kremes out of a cart, and Wendy bought a small black coffee, and meandered down the sidewalk until she reached her favorite bench. She didn't know why she'd expected it to look or feel different, but it was the same slatted wood of her childhood, a little more weathered, perhaps, but as familiar and comforting as Mrs. Patton's cooking.

Mrs. Patton, she thought, chest clenching with remembered loss. If she had to trace the fallout back to a particular moment, it had to be Mrs. Patton's death, didn't it? Mr. Patton had been so adrift, and business at the shop had been bad, and she remembered Ollie's sweet face lined with worry, and grief, and the adult strain of responsibility. So early, much too early.

"I have to do something," he'd told Wendy, squeezing her hand so tightly it had begun to hurt. "We can't make the money we need with the shop. We can't. And Gramps is dead, and I...I...Wendy, I joined the army."

She'd gasped then, and she gasped now, mouth hot from her coffee, face stinging with the cold.

They'd been eighteen, and Ollie had been looking down the barrel of a bright future, full of art, and wonder, and all the dreams they'd whispered to one another in the dark of their bedrooms, hope a flickering, shining beacon just beyond the window.

But then had come the army, and then nothing.

And now Ollie was back in Queens, and Wendy couldn't breathe.

She put her head between her knees and breathed deeply, thinking about her heartrate, about lowering it. She shouldn't be so shocked and helpless, she thought. It had been five years; she shouldn't have been so affected.

But what did you do when you realized too late that the person who was your whole heart had thrown himself into war, and all you could do was hope that he survived?

~*~

She pulled up to Patton & Son at ten after ten, the last of the dew spiraling up toward the sun in humid trails, a cool autumn afternoon sweeping in with a tumble of sourceless leaves and the honking of car horns. It had been years, but the shop was still flanked by the café and dry cleaners; bleached, colorless pennants snapped in the breeze. There were no cars parked in the spaces in front of the garage, only a dusty Harley. And the doors were cinched tight.