Kara Was Here. William Conescu

birthday.

      Hadn’t Margot just gone to a funeral last week? Did she really need to subject herself to this?

      Margot deposited the first load of groceries on the kitchen counter, then checked her computer to see if Mike was online. She’d started keeping her laptop on the breakfast table so he could keep her company if he was available. No word yet today. It was three in the morning in Okinawa, but when he was on night shifts he’d often check in before or after, or sometimes he’d text her on a break.

      She was lucky, in a way. Women who dated men in the military didn’t always have so much access to them. But she and Mike talked all the time—by instant messenger, text message, even phone or Skype. And he was in Japan, thank God, specializing in communications, which Margot understood to mean he spent a whole lot of time sitting safely in a room staring at a monitor. There were worse places he could be and worse skills he could have. She knew she shouldn’t complain.

      But she still worried about him. And although she usually heard from him several times a week, he didn’t actually reveal much about his life. Boring, he always insisted, so no great loss—but it was a loss. When she tried to ask him what he was doing, or if he knew for sure when he’d be able to talk next, or whether he was doing anything dangerous, Mike would often change the subject and start asking about Uncle Bernie. “How’s Bernie doing?” “I heard from Bernie the other day.” “Say, what’s your Uncle Bernie think of the Yankees this year?”

      If anyone really was monitoring these conversations, which Mike insisted was possible, they might think Mike had a touching affection for this uncle of Margot’s. But in fact, Bernie didn’t exist. He was an invention Mike used to dodge questions about his work. At first it was funny. (“What do you do all day?” “Not much. Bernie get laid lately?”) She pictured Bernie as the little old man who worked the register at the kosher deli over in Plainview. But sometimes Margot didn’t want to talk about Bernie, or even herself. Sometimes she wanted to know things.

      There was one thing she made Mike promise he would tell her—whether he was allowed to or not. If there was ever a threat of his being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he promised to let her know. It wasn’t his plan, he insisted, and there was little chance the Army would send him there from Japan. But Margot worried, so before he left they agreed on a code word: “eggplant.” If he ever mentioned eggplant, that would mean a reassignment was on the horizon. Now Margot couldn’t eat eggplant. She could barely stand seeing it at the grocery store. It didn’t occur to her until after he’d left that she should have chosen a food she already disliked.

      Six months, three weeks, and five days until his return. Margot had installed a countdown program on her laptop. A few months after he went away, Mike had promised Margot he was coming back to New York and wouldn’t reenlist. In not too long, “eggplant” would just mean eggplant—maybe she’d even start eating it again. Uncle Bernie would be happily put to rest. She and Mike would finally be conversing in the same time zone, even the same room. It seemed so luxurious—the idea of his being there, in touching distance.

      If he were here now, Margot thought, he could help her unload all these groceries—the bricks of cream cheese and bags of brown sugar, the flour and cartons of eggs. If he were here now, while she was loading up the fridge, he might say, “Boy, that does sound like an odd funeral,” or, “Nah, you don’t need to go to another memorial,” or, “Maybe it is time we had a baby.”

      Margot had started feeling the maternal tick-tock a few years ago, and moving into this neighborhood hadn’t helped. “More Than Muffins” had taken off while she was temporarily staying with her father, and by the time she’d moved him to a retirement facility and sold his house, she realized she couldn’t afford to move back into an apartment. She was taking in too many orders. She needed to bake cakes and muffins at the same time, have cookies and pies in the works simultaneously. So instead of moving to an apartment in Brooklyn or Queens, she bought a house on Long Island with a large, tax-deductible kitchen where she put in two double ovens, a giant refrigerator, and enough counter space for—well, you could really never have enough counter space.

      All the houses in her neighborhood were too big for one person, and most had at least two children inside and parents who looked at Margot with what felt like a mixture of confusion and pity. So sad that the muffin lady is all alone, they all murmured to each other. She’d be so much happier with kids. Maybe someday, they were saying, she really would have more than muffins. Margot could hear them through the walls.

      Kara had given her a hard time about the move. You’re finally free to be young again, and you’re giving it up, she’d said. But by the time Margot got her father settled in Florida and bought the house, she already owned an embroidered apron with her company’s name on it. She’d become the fucking muffin lady, there was no denying it. She was a long way from her days as Cougar Cominsky.

      She couldn’t believe Brad had called her that.

      You do something once, whatever. You do it twice in a row, maybe it’s cute, it’s funny. It’s a coincidence, it’s the craziest thing. But if you sleep with three football players in the weeks before the team hits a sudden winning streak, so help you God, it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life. Not that Margot had been ashamed at the time. She thought it was funny when Reggie or—what was his name?—turned out to be a football player too. Another freshman, no less. When she got back to the dorm the next morning, she woke up Kara and Brad and told them all about it. And it was that weekend—not that any of them normally followed sports—that the team had its first win in a month. Reggie had his picture in the school paper, and somehow, in certain circles, Margot became known as Cougar Cominsky, the football team’s newest mascot and secret weapon.

      Badges of pride are different when you’re twenty. Today, Margot was known for her cranberry/white chocolate dessert muffins. At least in certain circles. She needed to make six dozen this afternoon, which was just as well, because she didn’t need to be thinking about football players or Mike or Kara.

      What was she going to do about Collin’s memorial thing? The idea of making small talk with Mullet and Collin and Kara’s other druggie friends held no appeal. In fact, to Margot’s knowledge, Kara and Collin had been on non-speaking terms for the past year. Why was he doing this, and how had he gotten Margot’s phone number anyway? Well, Kara did have a tendency to shed her possessions, so maybe she’d left an address book behind. Or maybe Mullet had provided it. Lucky for Margot.

      Engaged? Was it possible? Margot still couldn’t make herself believe it.

      Mullet had his goddamned Space Invaders video game running half the night. I can still hear the explosions going off in my head.

      That was the only thing Kara had said about the man during their last phone conversation two weeks before she died. No reference to feelings for him, the possibility of an engagement.

      Could Kara have been hiding the relationship from Margot? But why bother? Could it have come on suddenly? Very suddenly. It seemed hard to believe. And even so, could Kara have become engaged to the man—or to anybody—and not have told Margot?

      Margot needed to clear her mind. To busy her mind. And she was familiar with the art of self-distraction. She’d become something of an expert when she was taking care of her parents, and these days it could make her insane when Mike was unexpectedly “out of touch,” as he liked to put it, for a week or more. Or when he jumped. God, she wished he wouldn’t do it, but he earned an extra something per month if he maintained his certification to parachute out of a plane. It was such a tiny amount, in the scheme of things. She wished she could tell him she could replace that income catering an extra bar mitzvah now and then, but she couldn’t say that, and he probably liked it even though he said he didn’t. He hadn’t jumped since before the holidays, thank God, but the times he did, she was up all night baking. Coffee shops across town were forced to try a new walnut/olive scone—“Yes, olive. Humor me,” she’d say—and butternut squash pound cake. She couldn’t sit still until he messaged her that he was all right.

      She would never have stayed with Mike if he had decided to enlist while they were