Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti

Her hand rested on the top of a book, which was facedown on her lap. It must have been a good one—it was open not quite halfway, and I knew that in the last few weeks she hadn’t been able to read anything, to me a more frightening sign of her depression than almost anything else. I turned my head sideways to read the title: Life Times Two by Charles Whitney. I eased it from her hand. My eyes caught on the words.
I saw her twice that day, the woman I will call Rose, because that’s what she was to me. Beautiful, perfect, eventually brutal in protecting her gentle self against my own destructive tendencies. It was on August 14, 1945, V.J. Day, amidst riotous celebration on the streets of New York City that I saw that flash of the crimson skirt that caught my eye in the crowd. It was a cinema moment—I saw the flash of the skirt, looked up. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me. With that look, something had been decided. My whole life, though I didn’t know it then. I dropped my cigarette, ground it into the street with the toe of my shoe. A definite action was called for, some final punctuation, and that was the most definite action I could think of. Then she turned and disappeared into the crowd.
I saved Mom’s place by folding in the book jacket flap inside the cover. I carefully removed her glasses from her head. If she woke right then, her eyes would only see the me she thought she knew, not the me I was.
My mother stirred. “Ruby?” she said sleepily.
“Shhh,” I said.
I pulled the quilt over my mother and then I turned out the light.

“Ruby, we don’t do that here,” Joe Davis said. He was wearing his shorts with all of the pockets again, and a Sea World T-shirt with a leaping whale on the front.
“What do you mean you don’t do that here? You don’t have one of those little boxes you go in and we can talk through the window?”
“Catholics do that.”
“Oh.” We sat in Joe Davis’s office, where I’d gone the next day after I’d finished work at Johnson’s Nursery. I’d never been there before. I’d expected his office to look, I don’t know, more churchlike. He had a desk that appeared to be used only to stack things on, as well as two worn chairs and a coffee table, an ugly gray filing cabinet with a fishbowl on top, with one fish swimming around a fake castle in water that should be changed. The place was fullof books, not only stacked on the desk but also in shelves along the wall. All kinds of books, too. Not just religious-looking ones, but books on baseball and oceans and sea kayaking, slim books of poetry, mysteries. A mug of tea sat on the coffee table, with the tea bag still inside and the string draped over the edge, and there was a pencil cup with only one pencil and a large chunk of coral, white and wavy. The only evidence that I was in a minister’s office was the crucifix over the door and a picture of a sad-faced Jesus in a flowing white robe and sandals. Even this was hung with a picture of a desert and one of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Why there were never any cheerier pictures of Jesus I’ll never know. I realize he had a rough life, but it didn’t send the rest of us a very good message about the joys of living, if you ask me.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Joe Davis said. He really did look sorry, too. “You don’t have to confess, though. You could just tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I liked the idea of the box,” I said.
“I could hide behind my desk.” Joe Davis leaped up. He went behind his desk, ducked behind a particularly large stack of books. “How’s that?” His voice was a little muffled.
I laughed. “You’re going to knock those over.”
I saw a hand rise up, slap down on top of the books to hold them down. “Okay, shoot,” he said.
I laughed again. His head poked up over the books. “I’m waiting,” he sang in a pretend-annoyed fashion. “Actually, is it all right if I come back and sit down? My knees hurt with