But He's Waiting For Me...

       Eloise woke up to the sound of the phone. “Who on earth would be calling me at this hour?” she asked aloud, stumbling out of bed.

      It was her mother, the only person who usually called at all. “I just wanted to let you know,” she said. “That we’re celebrating your sister’s birthday at La Fontaine on Saturday and, um, if you’re up to coming, it would mean a lot to us.”

  “No,” Eloise said, checking the clock. “I already told you, I don’t do birthdays anymore, and I don’t have time to talk right now because he’s waiting for me, but I’ll call you back later, maybe.”

She hung up without waiting for a reply and quickly started her morning ritual. Every day, it was the same pattern—she would wash and blow-dry her hair, put on a brightly colored dress and carefully apply lipstick and mascara before heading to grab two coffees at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru; after all, he was waiting for her and he might be worried if she were late even one day.

The phone rang again, and Eloise checked the number—it was the ob-gyn again, and she decided to deal with Dr. Grecco later, knowing he was probably going to give her the same lecture as usual about how she had to gain weight since a woman who was seven months pregnant shouldn’t weigh 109 pounds, especially since she had started her pregnancy at 135 pounds.

It had been a few months since the phone rang regularly, and the calls had dwindled away when Eloise just stopped answering them. No, she didn’t want to go to the flea market with Nick and Diane, and no, she didn’t really feel like hosting a coffee date at her house with Beth. She was tired of telling people no and tired of the strange, awkward silence she was met with when she told them that he was waiting for her.

She left the house quickly, leaving the door unlocked and the porch light on, just in case. If he came back, he might be confused if he couldn’t even get inside the house and she didn’t want to chance that, leaving it unlocked all the time so he knew he could come inside without fumbling for a key.

Eloise made the familiar trip to buy coffee and cigarettes before going to meet up with him; although she couldn’t smoke anymore because of her pregnancy, the cigarettes were for him, and she figured that Dr. Grecco probably wouldn’t hound her over the one iced coffee she allowed herself to have each day. Usually, he was glad if she got anything inside of her at all—she knew she looked emaciated and that no one could tell she was seven months pregnant, but it wasn’t on purpose; she just couldn’t keep anything down, these days.

Turning right on Turk Hill Road, she got excited, humming along with Tony Orlando on the radio and watching for the small sign she usually missed, mostly because the letters were worn and the sign was partially obscured by wild ivy growing nearby. Today was good, she thought triumphantly; she hadn’t missed the sign and wouldn’t be even a second late.

“Tom!” she shrieked, parking the car and running towards him. “I’m here, I’m here! I know I’m sometimes late, but not today, and I remembered your coffee and your cigarettes.”

She lay a blanket down in front of the grave at St. Lawrence O’Toole Cemetery, gently cleaning the tombstone, kissing a rock and placing it on top to signify that a visitor had come, and tucking his cigarettes and his coffee next to the painted rocks and statues she had left there each day since his funeral.

Most people had stopped looking for Eloise months ago—she wasn’t at the park or the bowling alley or the school much these days, but Tom—Tom always noticed if she didn’t come and Tom was always waiting for her. In a world where no one knew what to do with a thirty-three year old pregnant widow, at least there was still Tom, always there and always looking for her.

She brought out her radio to play Jim Croce for him. “Remember,” she laughed aloud. “Remember when we used to say you should quit teaching and just become a Jim Croce impersonator instead? That would have been really fun.”

Eloise knelt down with her Clorox wipes to clean the headstone. “We can’t make it look like no one comes here,” she clucked, fussing over him and pausing to count the colored rocks she had left on top of the tombstone each time she visited, which was every day. Sometimes, she would notice that someone had taken one of Tom’s rocks, but she didn’t do anything about it, afraid that if she took the rock back off someone else’s grave, one of Tom’s new neighbors might be upset with him and there was nothing he hated more than that. He had even taken offense when Raoul, the man who lived next door, told them their shared fence was covered in poison ivy and that he would pay half the cost to remove it.

“He thinks we don’t have any money?” Tom had glowered that night at dinner. “I told him no thanks and ripped it out for free with a pair of gloves. A man just doesn’t go around insulting another man’s lawn like that.”

“Tom, I think he was just trying to be nice and also didn’t want his kids getting poison ivy,” Eloise protested, defending Raoul, but Tom waved her away dismissively, saying that she didn’t understand the silent language men spoke to each other and that to criticize a man’s lawn or to suggest that he didn’t make enough money to care for it properly was to demean his entire personhood.

“Anyway,” Eloise said, trying to think of things she forgot to tell Tom yesterday. “Well, the baby is still doing fine. She’s smaller than the other two were, but Dr. Grecco said it’s because of, like, me needing to eat more, I think. Please don’t be mad because I’m really trying, it just doesn’t stay down. And I brought the last sonogram picture I got, here she is. I think I’m going to name her Lenore and I know we didn’t discuss it, first, but I really think you’d like that name. She looks like you, doesn’t she? I know it’s blurry, but that’s definitely your nose right there.”

She lay back and sighed. “Hey, Fred,” she waved at a grave across the way. “I didn’t stop for flowers today or I would have left you and Rosie a couple of them, but next time, I promise.”

Turning back to Tom, she remembered her mother’s call from earlier. “You aren’t even going to believe this," she said. “But my mom? She’s literally so insensitive that she called to invite me to come to my sister’s birthday party at a restaurant. I told her that she knows full well that I don’t DO birthdays anymore, no offense. Except yours, of course.”

And it was true. On Tom’s birthday, Eloise invited the entire family and all of their mutual friends, who came mostly out of politeness, to stand around the cemetery and watch Eloise present Tom with wrapped gifts and a giant cake from Shop Rite with “Happy 36^th Birthday, Tom” written on it. “Tom gets to be thirty-six forever,” she would announce as she lit the candles on the cake. “One day, I’ll be older than him and he’ll think that’s really weird, you know? Okay, everyone, let’s blow out the candles together, for Tom!”

Awkwardly, the guests had surrounded the cake, limply blowing out the thirty six candles for a man who would forever be thirty-six years old. Tom was deeply religious while Eloise was not, so she would often follow the cake-cutting with the only hymn she knew—“The Ballad of Johnny Appleseed”, a song she had learned as a child from going to a Quaker sleepaway camp in New Jersey.

 “Come on, guys!” she cried. “The Lord is good to me! And so I thank the Lord! For giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple seed, the Lord is good to me.”

  When Eloise had told friends and family that she was no longer celebrating anyone’s birthday or any holidays at all, she had specifically meant those that Tom couldn’t attend, but anyone could attend Eloise’s holidays at St. Lawrence O’Toole—the small Christmas tree she would place in the snow and surround with gifts, the Easter egg hunts with pastel eggs she would hide near trees and behind tombstones, the birthday parties with a cake and triangular hats and The Ballad of Johnny Appleseed—those were all holidays that were allowed. Thanksgiving was allowed, too, since Eloise would go to her mother’s house and take a serving of food for her and for Tom and go eat turkey alone with him in the cold November afternoon at the cemetery.

Guests had visited often in the days and weeks following Tom’s death, but Eloise refused to say or hear the word “died”, covering her ears when anyone accidentally said it in front of her. Tom wasn’t dead. He was just lost, probably, and would find his way home through the unlocked door or from the porch light that burned day and night, sending him a message that people were waiting for him.

When people came over, Eloise would take them outside and show them Tom’s vegetable garden and the pool Tom built himself. “See?” she proclaimed with triumph. “He’s obviously coming back because he knows I don’t understand what chemicals to put in the pool and he also doesn’t trust me with his yellow squash, he grew those himself and he wants me to cook them a certain way because they’re organic and he wants to make sure we get all of the nutrients, and what if I picked them too early by accident?”

“Eloise,” Kim had said slowly. “I think it’s already too late to use the squash, they don’t seem ripe anymore.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Eloise snapped, turning away from Kim. “Tom picks the squash when they’re ready, not me, and they’re not picked yet.”

“Yeah,” Kim snapped. “Because he died, Eloise. I’m sorry, but he did.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not coming to your house and saying that Jimmy died,” Eloise hissed.

“Jimmy didn’t die,” Kim said, her voice softening. “And I’m sorry that Tom did.”

“Oh, shut up, Kim,” Eloise snarled, her lip quivering. “It was obviously a mistake, and I told everyone that when the police came and told me they found him at work. I told them it was someone else and it was, Tom just got lost or something but it wasn’t him they found that day and I told the cops they should probably go find a real widow because she was looking for her husband while mine is fine.”

Eloise didn’t see much of Kim or of anyone else after that. Mostly, she only saw her parents, her children, her therapist, and Dr. Grecco.

“How many months along are you?” her therapist, Joanne, asked, once, and Eloise wracked her brain, trying to think.

           “What month is it?” she asked.

           “Um, February,” Joanne said gently.

“Oh,” Eloise said, pulling her hands inside of her sleeves. “I don’t like February anymore but I think that means I’m seven or eight months along, I guess.”

“I hope that’s not true,” Joanne said. “You’re so thin that I can’t even see a baby bump.”

“I don’t remember,” Eloise snapped. “A person can’t remember every single thing and you know I need you to text me to remind me when it’s Tuesday so I can come to see you, so don’t ask me anything about times or days or months.”

There was only one day and one time and one month Eloise could remember, and it was 5:37 PM on Thursday, November 30^th, because that was the day, the month, the hour and the minute that Tom died.

“You know,” Eloise’s mother had said during the Cemetery Christmas Party. “Tom might be gone but you’re still here, Eloise.”

“Tom’s not gone,” Eloise said impatiently. “He’s just away for awhile, I think, but I’ll see him again and I’m going to give him a piece of my mind for making me worry like this and sit out here in the snow while everyone else is inside by a fireplace.”

“Get a grip,” her mother said, finally having enough. “You were at the funeral, you saw him in the casket, you go to his grave every day and you still pretend he’s actually here when you know full well that he isn’t and you should be keeping your appointments with Dr. Grecco instead of spending all day at the cemetery.”

“Go away,” Eloise had snapped, edging away from her mother. “You don’t know what you’re talking about and you better just get out of here if you want to say things like that to me.”

“There are people who love you and who are alive to love you,” her mother said, backing away. “Don’t push us away in favor of a dead man who can’t return your love.”

Eloise didn’t care if everyone else wanted to be ignorant. They all had their people and Tom was Her Person. She kissed his tombstone three times, like she did every day, and promised to be back tomorrow with more coffee and more cigarettes and maybe a new statue just in case people thought no one was taking care of Tom anymore.

When she drove away, she kept singing Jim Croce, just alone this time.

“Operator, oh, could you help me place this call?

'Cause I can't read the number that you just gave me

There's something in my eyes

You know it happens every time

I think about a love that I thought would save me…

But isn't that the way they say it goes?

Well, let's forget all that

And give me the number if you can find it

So I can call just to tell 'em I'm fine…”

“I am fine, Tom,” she interrupted herself. “Just for the record, even if no one else thinks so, I’m fine. And I’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and please remind Fred and Rosie that I won’t forget their flowers again, they’re really such good neighbors to you…”