Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

box.”
    “Please. Gimme some credit.”
    “And what do we do if the current Mrs. Lemke answers the door?”
    That threw her for a moment. “Then … we’ll deal.”
    “ You’ll deal.”
    “Fine. Whatever.” It hadn’t occurred to her, actually, that Lemke might have been Alexandra’s married name. This opened a whole new range of possibilities.
    “Are you down with this?” she asked. “I can do it on my own.”
    Otto brought his chair down with a thud, clapping his hand around the box of ashes.
    “Why don’t we ask her ?” He held the box out as if he were Hamlet addressing the skull of Yorick. “Alexandra, are you down with this? Do you wanna go to Tandy Street?”
    “Fuck no,” he said, assuming a high-pitched voice that was nothing at all like Alexandra’s gravelly growl. “Tell that pesky cunt to leave me the fuck alone. I’m over this shit. I need my beauty sleep.”
    Shawna laughed. “Stick with the monkey, kid.”
    “And tell me, Alexandra, do you think Shawna will go to Tandy Street anyway, no matter what we think?”
    “Fuckin’-A! She needs an end to her motherfuckin’ story.”
    “Very funny.”
    “And she’ll probably wanna scatter my cremains all over some stranger’s motherfuckin’ yard.”
    His intuition amazed her sometimes.

Chapter 24
Personal Effects
    T here was a rosy dawn on the day of Mary Ann’s hysterectomy, so she took that as a good omen. DeDe was arriving at six a.m. to drive her to St. Sebastian’s Hospital; the surgery would be at eight. She’d asked Ben and Michael—ordered them, in fact—not to get up early on her account and to go about their usual workdays. She didn’t want a fuss made unless (or until) she actually needed one. It had been a stupid instruction, driven largely by superstition, so she was glad to see the guys had ignored it. She was locking up the garden house when she found the floral-patterned gift bag on the doorstep.
    Inside, bundled with a curly pink ribbon, was a T-shirt that read PINYON CITY: THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE . She’d seen these shirts at the general store, so Ben must have bought it when he came back from snowboarding at Kirkwood. Unless, of course, Michael had grabbed it on a whim when he went to get those Neolithic marshmallows for their hot chocolate. Either way, the subtext of the gift made her smile. The guys weren’t taking no for an answer. They were marking this passage in her life—her womb voyage , as Dr. Ginny had once called it—whether she liked it or not.
    She opened the door again, and left the T-shirt on the bed, since she’d have no use for it at the hospital. It was nice to think of it waiting there upon her return. They really were her angels, those two. She’d been dead right about coming here. Darien, with its treacherous crosscurrents of pity and gossip, would have been intolerable.
    Locking up again, she crossed the garden with her overnight bag and stood on the sidewalk in the clarifying light, waiting for DeDe to whisk her away to whatever came next. She felt almost buoyant, hanging in the balance like this, since she’d lost the weight of her usual distractions; everything she needed for this journey had to come from inside of her now. It was that simple. She wasn’t even bringing her laptop to the hospital, and, even more tellingly, hadn’t laid eyes on her Facebook page since they got home from Pinyon City. She was her own woman now, for better or worse.
    D E D E’S WELL-BRED LITTLE A UDI WAS new, and Mary Ann found comfort in the virginal smell of it. If we could just keep driving, she thought, concocting her own pushing-sixty version of Thelma and Louise . Let’s just stay here forever in this clean, well-cushioned place, listening to John Mayer on the Blaupunkt, while we gab about our favorite hill towns in Italy and all the silly things we’ve ordered online. DeDe had been fastidiously avoiding the topic of the hour, and Mary Ann had so appreciated that.
    “Do you see much of Shawna in New York?”
    “Once. Once I saw her.”
    “Oops.”
    “It’s not bad. It’s just … nothing. I don’t blame her. I’d feel the same way myself. I don’t have any claim on her.” She gazed out the window, marveling at the girth of the passing street trees; it wasn’t the buildings here that told her how long she’d been away but the forests that had grown up around them. “It’s funny,” she added, “her dad doesn’t hold a grudge anymore. He sees how wrong we were for each