Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Page A

buzzing yesterday after everyone left, the asking for masgouf. I remembered our daughter. This wasn’t her on the phone now, I’m no idiot. But, for a moment, I wondered if someone was trying to reach me. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, hadn’t even thought it through, but I felt that this was my moment. My moment was about to be gone.
    “No,” I heard myself saying. “No. Don’t hang up. This is me. It must be me.”
    “Ma’am?” Robert asked. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
    He seemed so kind, so concerned that he had taken time out of my day, that tears flocked behind my eyes. If only he knew. Just last week, I’d spent an entire morning poaching eggs, one after another, trying to get them exactly right. I wanted to give Joseph something perfect, to remind him of us. I’d gone through a dozen and hadn’t gotten the hang of it. I was out of practice. It broke my heart. For days, the apartment reeked of sulfury hot springs. Before I could stop myself, I was saying, “Thank you.”
    Don’t be pathetic, Victoria,
I thought, and I kept quiet so I wouldn’t thank him again.
    “For what?” he said.
    “Nothing. Yes. I am Chef Victoria. About those cooking classes—they’ll be held where? What did the flyer say?” I was trying to be professional. I thought again about dying alone.
    “Well, it didn’t,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling. It gives your name and number and time—Monday night at seven—and there’s a lovely photograph. I believe it’s of you. Is it? But there’s no location I can find.”
    “This Monday?” I was shouting at him. I didn’t mean to.
    “That woman,” I said. “I’ll kill her.”
    He laughed like he had a beard. He was a nice man. I imagined children climbing on his shoulders and neck. Her children.
    “Yes, this Monday. And obviously,” he said, “Dottie put
you
up to this.”
    “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” I said. Now I was being casual. Casual was good. “But we’ll have the class here, at my apartment. What’s today?”
    “It’s Saturday,” he said.
    I gave him my address. For a moment, it occurred to me that I could have it all wrong. I
was
getting way ahead of myself. He could have been a con artist. A seducer of old ladies.
Well, then, let him,
I thought. Let him.
    Before I knew it, I was taking down the location of the flyer and asking if he’d seen any other ones. And he was offering to write the specifics of the classes on the flyers he’d seen. And I was consenting. I was hopeful.
     
    Later, when I imagined our daughter seeing me in that photo, I wanted to call the whole thing off. It wasn’t worth my dignity. Or was it?
    I hadn’t ever envisioned where she lived exactly, only that it was in a large barnlike house with explosions of lavender and wildflowers everywhere, a place where kids left their bicycles in the middles of driveways and played soccer in the street. But now, for the first time, I wondered if perhaps she lived just down the block somewhere. Let’s say in a lovely prewar with heavy moldings and a robin’s-egg-colored foyer. She’d always been there. And we—as if we deserved credit for it—had always been here too. With her. For her.
    Thinking of the photo, thinking of her, I wished I could have been lovelier in the picture, with a longer neck, in black-and-white, my hand and chin tilted in an artful way. There were women like that. Still, I thought, this was a beginning. Like an anonymous package, a missing-person poster, a message in a bottle. I wanted to be found. And maybe she did too. This flyer, it might be the sign she’d been waiting for.
Here I am,
I thought.
I’m so sorry. Find me,
I thought.
Please.
    Our child, Joseph’s and mine, was a girl. The nurse told me when I woke up. They’d already whisked her away. I imagined her as an adult, shiny dark hair getting in her eyes, wiping the counter around her sons’ cereal bowls with a kitchen towel as they looked at her adoringly,