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Or sit in the apartment lobby with all her bags again—another humiliating option.
She had flicked on her blinker to get on the highway headed in the correct direction when she noticed the light glowing on the name of her current highway through the dark—Stevenson Expressway.
Mrs. Milek, the Mrs. Milek who deserved the title, lived off the Stevenson. Karl had taken Vivian near here for the family dinner. Mrs. Milek didn’t like her, would probably be happy the marriage was going to fail, but she would also probably give Vivian a place to sit until Karl got off work and announced what he planned to do with her. Mrs. Milek’s open suspicion was preferable to the doorman’s smarmy obsequiousness. At least Mrs. Milek was honest.
Moving from one mostly white western town to another mostly white western town had taught Vivian that she preferred the children who were hostile to the ones who asked, oh-so-politely, if her dad was the cook at the Chinese restaurant—every western town, no matter how small, had one. Then they snickered, “I didn’t know Chinese people did anything but work in restaurants,” to their friends while pretending they thought she wasn’t listening. Only they hadn’t said “Chinese people.”
Vivian didn’t like thinking about either of those two types of kids because it did a disservice to the vast majority of her classmates for whom she was only ever “the new girl” and who never got to know her because she always moved before she stopped being the new girl. For whatever reason, her father had managed to keep himself out of trouble for her last two years of high school, and she’d actually made the leap from “the new girl” to “Vivian.” Even after he gambled away her college fund, they’d stayed in Jackpot so she could graduate from high school with friends.
After a couple wrong turns and one minor skid, Vivian found the house she was looking for. The lights in the living room were on, and the television flickered through the curtains. She sat in the car trying to convince herself that driving from Chicago to Reno was a good idea, then shook the nonsense out of her head and marched to the front door. When no one answered the bell, Vivian knocked. Still no one answered. It felt as though somebody was in the house, and a car was even in the driveway. Vivian looked at the clock on her phone, then pounded on the door. When no one answered after two minutes, she tried the knob. The front door was locked, so she went around to the side entrance.
“Mrs. Milek?” she called through the door as she eased it open. “Mrs. Milek, are you here?”
Canned laughter floated through the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. She followed the laughter, hoping to find Mrs. Milek engrossed in the television or on the phone with one of her children and simply ignoring the door.
The first thing she saw was a pool of coffee seeping into newish beige carpeting. Then she saw a coffee mug. The sound of vomiting rolled from the hall into the living room.
“Mrs. Milek?” Vivian eased her way down the hall—not wanting to leave her mother-in-law if she was sick, though not willing to burst in on the woman while she was vomiting. “Are you okay? Mrs. Milek?”
“Who’s out there?” The question came out in a huff.
“It’s Vivian, Karl’s wife.” Vivian risked Mrs. Milek’s privacy to look in the bathroom. Her mother-in-law sat on a rug in front of the toilet, wiping her mouth with one hand and holding her back with the other. Vivian swallowed her first question—the answer to “are you okay?” was clearly “no.” Instead she asked, “Can I help?”
“It’s just the flu.” Mrs. Milek’s breath caught on the next words, like she’d been running a marathon rather than sitting on the floor. “A little rest and I’ll be fine.”
Middle Kingdom had been adamant that every employee learn to recognize the signs of a heart attack and be able to provide bystander CPR or administer a defibrillator shock if needed. Nausea, back pain and shortness of breath were all signs of a heart attack. “Do you have chest pains?”
“No,” Mrs. Milek wheezed. “Not any longer. It’s just the flu.”
