by Sally Saylor De Smet

I’m on my last author’s edit for Ivan’s Wife. I’m enjoying the last edit as I examine the words with a different “eye.” It is not purely mechanical – it’s from the heart too. The novel has well-developed characters but it also has some “passing” characters – those people who come in and out of your life and sometimes leave a lasting impression. I’ve known a few people like that also – some good and some not so good—but they leave a lesson, and sometimes regrets. The desire for missed love burns the longest.

My protagonist, Dimitri, fortunately speaks his mind without reservations.

In this scene, Dimitri is talking a walk after a particularly difficult day. He encounters an interesting older lady who instinctively knows the right thing to say: 

An excerpt from Chapter Thirty-Two of Ivan’s Wife

I sat on a bench beside an older woman with a carpet bag full of yarn. She pulled out some knitting needles and began working on a blue scarf. I pulled out a cigarette.

The lady was cute. She wore a yellow knit hat framed with white spiral curls and spectacles too big for her petite face. Every few seconds, she sniffed and pushed them up her nose. Her hands were so swollen at the knuckles that I wondered how she could make the loop-de-loops to weave the yarn together.

“Making a sweater?”

“Yes, indeed. For my nephew. He lives in New Orleans, so I’m trying to finish it before the post office closes. Takes five days to get there, don’t ya’ know. You got young’uns, son?”

“No…I don’t.”

She turned and gave me a once-over. “Let me have a look at ya…come on, now. Take off those sunglasses, young man. Let Aunt Gina see your face.”

“Pardon me?” I asked, laughing at the absurdity.

She turned my chin to face her. “You got a wife, don’t ya?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there ya go. You got a young’un coming soon enough. You have a job, son?”

“Well, yes. I’m on my way there now.”

“Good…good,” she said, returning to her knitting. “You got kind eyes. You’ll make a good father. I can always tell. Just be nice to the miss and watch the drinking. Set a good example, and you’ll be fine.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her my wife had banned having a baby. “How do you know I drink?”

She turned and gave me a look that could only be described as a “mother” look. I’d seen it on the faces of my friend’s mothers. Kind of a “do you really think you can lie to me, boy?”

It made me smile. “You got me. Some people stuff themselves with chocolate or cry until their blood vessels pop. I drink.”

She gave me a stern, one-eyed squint. “And some people pray, young man.”

“Right.”

“Who do you have?”

“Have?”

“Someone you’d listen to if they were here.”

“My mother and brother,” I replied, not wanting to open that particular can. “How do you know so much?”

She tucked the knitting into the bag and turned to me. “I was never blessed with a husband or young’uns, so God gave me the time to mother whoever needed it. You’re troubled, boy. That’s why you sat next to me instead of the empty bench across from you. You have sad eyes, but there’s a lot of light, too. What’s bothering you, son?”

I put my shades back on and crossed one leg over my knee. I’d always been drawn to mature women, no doubt a never-ending search for a mother. “I have spells. Always have. Bad ones.”

She slid the carpetbag to her elbow and looked at me with searching eyes. “Spells, aye? What happens during these spells?”

“I hear music mostly. It’s run or die.”

“I see,” she said, still holding me in her gaze. “My grandmother had a terrible fear of spiders. Hear tell she would freeze and pass out if she saw one. Turns out a black widow had crawled into her crib and bit her on the cheek. Once she found out, the spells stopped. Once you figure out what’s scaring you, yours will, too.”

I felt like the air in my lungs had thickened. It was like there was a direct line between the lady and Alexander. “My brother said the same thing.”

She pulled the blue knit scarf from her bag and wrapped it around my neck as she stood to leave. “Here. I made this for my nephew, but you need it more. Remember, you don’t always have to find the answers. Sometimes, they come to you if you ask the right questions. And stop your worrying. Worry is like a rocking chair. It’ll give you something to do but won’t get you anywhere.”

Her words were like chicken soup injected into my veins. I watched her hurry to the post office, her carpetbag tapping against her paisley dress, reaching every so often to adjust her glasses. Her presence was like being wrapped in a blanket of optimism, a fairy godmother without all the glitter. I rubbed the scarf she gave me and got up to find a bus for Cielo’s.