Mattress City USA was tucked off a busy road in a strip-mall that included a gas station known for car-jackings, a down-at-heel florist's shop, and a daycare with grease-paint drawings of rainbows, stars, and demented looking children obscuring its windows. As Ellen parked in front of the store, she considered turning around and going home, but she needed a job, and Mattress City USA was hiring. The Sales Assistant position, according to the listing in the newspaper, required "no experience," a major plus. The only other "no experience" listings in the paper had been grim: junk hauler, late-night receptionist at a storage warehouse, janitor at a funeral home. Ellen's therapist, Judy, had stressed that finding a summer job was imperative if Ellen wanted to go to college in the fall. Judy wanted Ellen to find purpose, bolster her sense of self-worth, make new friends. These were important first steps, Judy insisted, before Ellen could stretch her wings and fly.
Inside the mattress store, Ellen presented her resumé, a single page with generous spacing, to a man sitting behind a metal desk with a nameplate that read Mr. Isayas Meseret. Ellen studied Mr. Meseret as he read her resumé, trying to guess his age – thirty, maybe? – and tracking the movement of his dark eyes, the lift of his brows, the graceful length of his nose. Standing in front of Mr. Meseret's desk, she felt a tug, the kind she used to feel when she fasted, the sense that God was urging her on, that he wanted her to be here, in this exact place. It'd been so long since she'd felt God pulling her anywhere, she'd started to think He'd given up on directing her life. What a relief, to have Him back in the driver's seat. For a long time, Ellen had been clutching the wheel, skidding off the road, careening close to the cliffs of despair.
Mr. Meseret explained that the pay would be minimum wage, no benefits, and was Ellen okay with that?
"That's fine," she said. "I'm still on my parents' health insurance."
Mr. Meseret smiled and asked when she could start.
*
Ellen was nineteen years old and lived with her parents in a wealthier, leafier suburb several miles to the west of Mattress City USA. Their neighborhood had no sidewalks and long driveways and ranch houses in shades of taupe and olive tucked onto wooded lots. Some evenings, Ellen and her parents played Scrabble, sitting at the blonde-wood kitchen table, or she and her mother watched Antiques Roadshow or Poirot on PBS. Ellen had had plans to go to college – she'd been accepted early admission to Notre Dame, her dream school – but then she'd had some trouble with her brain – that's how she planned on phrasing it, if anyone ever asked – and had been forced to defer for a year. The trouble with her brain was a touch of depression, a hint of anxiety, a splash of OCD, and a heavy dose of anorexia mirabilis, not that Ellen would ever tell anyone that. The word anorexia gave people the wrong idea: a vapid girl starving herself to look like a runway model, counting out grapes and almonds, weighing herself five times a day. But Ellen had never cared about whittling away her body, only about glorifying God. This is what she would say, if anyone ever asked. But so far, no one had.
*
Her first day at Mattress City USA, a Tuesday, Ellen wore a navy-blue skirt suit, nude nylons, and black pumps. Midway through the morning, her toes ached and the suit jacket and blouse clung to her damp back; it was late May, already hot. But she was glad she'd dressed up. Mr. Meseret wore a crisp white shirt, red tie, and a pair of pressed gray slacks. Mattress City USA was not the kind of place where employees wore branded polo shirts and wrinkled khakis, and Ellen appreciated this formality in dress. She thought of Dominic: his tweed jacket, his leather shoes, the half-bent Dublin pipe he spent hours polishing. Whenever she saw him, now, she turned her gaze away and tried to remember St. Lucy, who'd plucked her own eyes out to discourage a suitor who wouldn't stop admiring them. Not that Dominic admired Ellen's eyes, or even looked into them. He acted like he was afraid to gaze at her directly, as if she were Sodom, burning bright. Or maybe he didn’t see her at all, and this possibility, to Ellen, was even worse.
She must have been frowning, thinking of Dominic, because Mr. Meseret was peering at her, brow furrowed. He apologized for the warmth of the store, the noise of the street, the slowness of business. He explained that Tuesdays were bad days for mattress sales. Mondays, Saturdays, those were the hot days. But, Mr. Meseret said, the good news was, the mattress business was recession-proof. People always needed mattresses.
"Except for the Japanese people," Mr. Meseret added, after a pause. "They don't sleep on mattresses. Did you know that?"
Ellen thought of the mission trip to El Salvador she'd taken when she was sixteen. For two weeks, she'd slept in a green-and-yellow hammock strung between two trees. By the end of the trip, she'd adjusted to the gentle sway and creak of the hammock in the night breeze, the way the fibers cocooned her body, the close, moist smell of the cotton. When she'd come home, browned by the sun, arms sore from helping to build a well, she'd asked her parents if she could install a hammock in her room. They'd laughed and said no.
She decided not to mention hammocks now, not wanting to seem like a know-it-all.
"Would you like some water?" Mr. Meseret asked. "Coffee? We have instant. Not very good. I bring my own."
"Oh," said Ellen, "I don't really drink coffee."
Mr. Meseret looked affronted. "But that's because you haven't had Ethiopian coffee, have you?"
Ellen admitted she hadn't. Mr. Meseret said that tomorrow, he would bring her real Ethiopian coffee to try, and then they'd just see.
The next morning, he handed her a travel mug of steaming coffee. Ellen, not wanting to offend, took a sip as Mr. Meseret watched, eyebrows raised.
"It's good," said Ellen, feeling as if she'd drunk tar. "Mm."
"See!" Mr. Meseret cried. "I told you. I'll bring more tomorrow."
To be polite, Ellen took another sip whenever Mr. Meseret looked at her, trying not to grimace each time. By ten o'clock, she'd finished the whole mug and was vibrating, head spinning merrily, heart thrumming like a plucked guitar string. The next morning, when Mr. Meseret offered her another mug of coffee, she drank it without hesitation, eager for the Tilt-a-Whirl feeling to hit, to carry her through her day.
As Mr. Meseret promised, business soon picked up. On Thursday, several customers came in, each with a specific request: an extra-long twin with a rubber sheet, a queen-size with a pillow-top, an adjustable California king. Mr. Meseret listened intently to each customer, nodding, his hand on his chin, before demonstrating an array of choices, pointing out the pluses and minuses of each selection. The customers seemed enchanted by Mr. Meseret: his smooth voice, his practiced eye contact, the elegant way he swept his hand over the mattresses, like a magician conjuring doves. Mr. Meseret sold five mattresses on Thursday, and the mood in the shop was buoyant. Ellen's teeth chattered from caffeine and she felt alive, filled with the triumph of Mr. Meseret's sales, and, she was sure, the Holy Spirit, whose presence she'd been feeling more and more, like the return of sensation to a damaged limb.
*
Ellen had been devout since her first Communion, when she'd allowed Father O'Brien to place Christ's desiccated body on her waiting tongue. Rules and rituals had appealed to her even as a preschooler, when she insisted on a precise bedtime routine, crying if her mother forgot a step. Catholicism offered Ellen surety, a way to check the quality of her soul against a list. By high school, she was saying the Rosary every Wednesday and protesting peacefully in front of Planned Parenthood, carrying a sign that read "Save the unborn NOW" with a big, red glitter-glue heart ballooning around the word "unborn."
Senior year, wanting to take her faith to the next level, she started attending Traditional Latin Mass at St. Anthony's, covering her hair with a black mantilla. Settling the dark lace over her hair made her feel connected to her ancestors, as if she were reliving their faith, returning to her roots: adobe churches filled with guttering candles, a spangled Virgin hovering above the hilltops. She didn't understand most of the Latin spoken during mass, but she understood the feeling, the swelling of the holy spirit inside her stomach. In the incense-filled church, she felt light as air, a vessel for God.
And, thrillingly, St. Anthony's was full of other young people swept up by the fervor of Catholic conviction: the SALTYs (St. Anthony's Latin Traditional Youth group). The boys wore porkpie hats and suspenders, tweed coats and brogues. The girls wore broomstick skirts and denim jackets, silver crosses or gold miraculous medals glinting at their throats. The SALTYs met every Thursday night in the multipurpose room for prayerful reflection and intense, almost manic flirting. Ellen, who'd never felt fully part of a group before, had finally found her people, and the feeling was magical, powerful, like being enveloped in Christ's strong arms, a thing she imagined with some frequency.
That spring, Ellen embarked on her annual Lenten fast and, spurred on by the SALTYs, took things farther than ever before. No meat, of course. But also: no chocolate. No sugar. No carbs. No fat. No indulgences. By the time Easter rolled around, Ellen was down to a diet of plain, fat-free yogurt and Special K cereal, and had lost fifteen pounds. When she saw herself in the mirror, she was impressed by her own severity, how she'd gone from being a blurry watercolor to a stark pen and ink drawing. She admired the hollows of her cheeks, the sharpness of her shoulders, like angel wings waiting to sprout. God, she knew, would recognize her sacrifice. Anyone, after all, could give up chocolate or cookies. But not just anyone could give up everything.
Ellen's mother commented, appreciatively, that Ellen was like St. Catherine of Siena, who'd lived on nothing but the Eucharist alone for years. Neither Ellen nor her mother mentioned the rest of the story, how St. Catherine of Siena had become paralyzed and then died of a stroke at age thirty-three, the same age as Christ when He died. Ellen didn't want to die. But if she did happen to die, she thought, maybe she, too, would end up canonized: St. Ellen of McLean. There were worse things, she reasoned, than to die for God. At night in bed, her teeth chattering and her knees knocking together under the covers, she imagined the Holy Spirit entering her body, and felt warmed from within. When Lent ended that year, Ellen did not partake in her mother's Easter lamb roast, or eat the jellybeans her father tried to pour into her palm. No, she carried on fasting, until she was down to the weight of a large golden retriever, and her parents stopped being impressed by her devotion and started being alarmed by her cadaverous appearance, the way her joints creaked when she walked.
Ellen spent nine months in a facility – if anyone asked, she'd decided she'd call it a "spa" – where she was re-fed, weighed, measured, evaluated, therapized. In the facility, she made beaded jewelry, did gentle yoga, and ate puddings of every flavor. The girls at the facility called the pudding crapioca and they all hated it. Ellen hated everything about the facility: the digital scales, the clipboards, the cooked applesauce smell of the halls, the interminable group therapy sessions in which girls either wept and wailed or sat in sullen silence, skeletal arms crossed over glockenspiel chests. Much later, though, after Ellen was released, she came to miss certain things about the facility: the way she was buffered from the real world, its heartbreaks and disappointments. She even came to miss the pudding: its softness on her tongue, the way it put up no resistance as she swallowed. As if she were hardly eating, at all.
Once her periods had returned – a mortifying milestone Ellen wished could have been kept private from her parents – she was allowed to transition to outpatient care. In her exit interview, the therapist recommended that Ellen reconsider her involvement with the SALTYs, but Ellen balked. The SALTYs were a rare and precious group: young people who were devoted to Christ in soul and body. And besides, one of them – Dominic – was her boyfriend.
Dominic was gangly and blond, with an ever-present whitehead that seemed to move around his face, from chin to end of nose to cheek. He wore suspenders, smoked a pipe, and had many strong and well-articulated arguments against the follies of Vatican II. He and Ellen had dated, chastely, for nearly two months before Ellen was sent away. Their courtship had consisted of attending Thursday night SALTY meetings, during which they held hands, plus occasional trips to the movies or the all-night diner near St. Anthony's, where Ellen sipped serenely on soda water. They talked of their futures: Dominic wanted to become a professor, or perhaps a public intellectual. Ellen wanted to travel, to help people. She told Dominic about building the well in El Salvador, the way the children had laughed and shrieked when the clean water had gushed onto their hands. Dominic smiled and said he loved Ellen's heart. Ellen knew they were destined for each other. But by the time she was sent away, she and Dominic still hadn’t kissed. Dominic said kissing was an invitation to sin.
"I don't trust myself with you," he'd said one night, pressing his sebaceous forehead against Ellen's as they sat in her car after a SALTY meeting.
"I trust myself," Ellen had said. "I wouldn't let anything happen."
"You think that now. But once things got rolling, well." Dominic had spoken with the world-weariness of a boy who'd already dated several other SALTYs, including Anne D'Amato, who wore exceedingly tight turtlenecks, her silver crucifix nestled on top of large, cotton-swaddled breasts. Dominic knew all about temptation.
He'd emailed her frequently while she was away, filling her in on the latest SALTY gossip, regaling her with tales from his freshman year at Marymount, where he was studying theology and religious studies, and extending his fervent prayers for her recovery. He signed every email "xoxo," which Ellen interpreted as a signal of his continuing ardor. Dominic didn't have social media – he was staunchly against most technologies postdating the 1960s but made grudging exception for email – and so Ellen relied on his emails to know what his life was like. She learned he was still living at home in McLean, commuting to school. He enjoyed his classes and being surrounded by other Catholics, even though, he reported, some of them were tepid in their faith. Ellen liked to imagine him sitting in a wood-paneled lecture hall, his pipe tucked into his pocket, a pencil held loosely between his blunt fingers.
In the throes of fasting, Ellen had wondered if God was calling her to be a martyr, but in the facility, she realized she had a purpose on Earth, and it was to be with Dominic. When she fell asleep each night in her institutional bed, she no longer pictured Jesus wrapping her in his warm embrace. Now, she imagined Dominic, his long arms pulling her in, her head resting on his chest. She could practically hear his heartbeat next to her ear.
*
Mr. Meseret brought his lunch to work, which he heated in the microwave in the storage room, filling Mattress City USA with fragrant notes of garlic and palm oil. He offered Ellen food, pointing to each item and naming it: injera, doro wat, fuul. The first few times, Ellen turned him down, claiming she had allergies, but Mr. Meseret insisted, each time, that Ethiopian food contained no allergens.
"It is the purest food in the world. Name me one Ethiopian with allergies. See? You can't do it."
Ellen could see that Mr. Meseret would be hurt if she didn't taste his food, so finally, she allowed him to spoon a little bit of each dish onto a paper plate for her. The consistency of the doro wat reminded her of crapioca, and she experienced a pang of nostalgia for her time in the facility, that other life that had contained its own sense of possibility, the anticipation of being released. She ate Mr. Meseret's food, taking tiny bites at first, while he watched, smiling.
"Yum," Ellen said, relieved to find she wasn't lying.
"Here, have more," said Mr. Meseret, scooping another dollop onto her plate. "This is very healthy for you."
In the facility, the nurses had filled her up with crapioca and mashed potatoes and beef stew, logging every mouthful on her chart. The re-feeding process had been clinical, an equation meant to raise her heart rate, restore her menses, thicken her bones. But now, watching Mr. Meseret spoon food onto her plate, she felt like she was being fed for the first time since she was a child. As they ate, she watched his mouth, and her gaze fixed on a fleck of beef stuck on his lip. He had nice-shaped lips, she thought. Not thin, but not girlish. She licked her own lips, and Mr. Meseret touched his mouth, wiping the food away. Ellen imagined herself reaching out, brushing his lips with her fingers. This thought was wild, exhilarating, bordering on sinful. She knew she should probably ask God for forgiveness. Instead, she studied Mr. Meseret's shoulders, trying to make out their width under his neat, white shirt. He was shorter than Dominic, but more muscular. More formed. A man, she thought.
At the end of the day, as Ellen gathered her things, Mr. Meseret asked if she had any plans for the evening. Ellen's caffeinated heart beetled against her ribs, until she looked at Mr. Meseret's face, friendly and open, and realized he was only being polite, not asking her on a date.
"Oh," Ellen said, "just a meeting I go to. Every Thursday."
"Ah," said Mr. Meseret, nodding, serious. "I see."
"It’s not AA, or anything," Ellen added, flushing. "It's a youth group. For church?"
Mr. Meseret beamed. "How wonderful. Well. God bless you."
*
Ellen was released from the facility just before Christmas. The SALTYs had planned a prayer vigil at an abortion clinic in Alexandria, followed by lunch at Noodles & Co. Ellen decided not to tell Dominic she was coming, thinking she'd surprise him. She arrived at the clinic at nine o'clock sharp with her "Save the unborn NOW" sign, quivering with anticipation at seeing Dominic after nine months of separation. Snow flurried as she waited, sign aloft, in front of the clinic, a dowdy brick building hemmed in by a carpet store and a neon-lit vape shop. A chubby teenager and her mother glared at Ellen as they trudged into the building, and Ellen found she lacked the heart to shout prayers at them. She waggled her sign, hoping her presence would be enough to spark change in their hearts, then felt guilty, wondering if her time in the facility, her re-feeding, had dampened her hunger for Christ. She lifted her sign higher and began chanting the Magnificat, quietly, to herself.
She was midway through the Magnificat – He has filled the hungry with good things – when she spotted the SALTYs coming down the sidewalk. And there, hanging towards the back of the group, was Dominic, his head tilted down towards Madison McCoy, a short, freckled girl who, Ellen happened to know, was only a junior in high school. Dominic, who did not see Ellen, was holding Madison's hand.
The last year of "xoxo" emails from Dominic spooled through Ellen's head as she stood on the sidewalk, immobile with shock, still holding her sign aloft. "Madison and I checked out a talk on canon law and marriage validity last night – pretty cool!" "Madison's organizing a prayer vigil at Planned Parenthood in DC, too bad you can't make it!" "Madison's uncle has connections at the National Shrine and we're getting a private tour, how sweet is that?" The clues were there all along. And Ellen, like an idiot, like a stupid, pathetic moron, had ignored them. She stood frozen, her sign becoming damp with snow, the glitter-glue heart starting to dribble downwards.
"Ellen, hey!" one of the SALTYs called, waving. "You made it!"
But Ellen turned and began walking away, head down, blinking away tears and snow. Another SALTY called after her, but Ellen didn't stop until she reached her car. Later, at home, she realized she no longer had her "Save the unborn NOW" sign. She didn't remember dropping it, didn't remember anything except the sight of Dominic holding Madison McCoy's hand.
For months after, Ellen could not bring herself to return to Latin mass or SALTY meetings. She folded her black mantilla and placed it in the back of her underwear drawer. Every Sunday, she attended regular mass with her parents, her bare head lowered, the word of God pouring over her like sand, not entering her, not filling her. But after surviving a long, fastless Lent and a quiet Easter spent with her parents, her mother heaping dry lamb onto her plate, Ellen felt a familiar tug in her chest. God wanted her to return to the SALTYs, her people.
Her parents and Judy were concerned about a relapse, but Ellen insisted that she needed socialization, that to live in isolation was poisonous to her mental and spiritual health, that she couldn't be expected to go on like this, friendless and, worse, Godless. How did they expect her to be ready for Notre Dame in the fall if she couldn't even handle a church youth group? When Judy asked, gently, how Ellen would handle seeing Dominic with his new girlfriend every Thursday night, Ellen shrugged.
"It doesn't bother me," she lied. "I've totally moved on."
Ellen was welcomed back by the SALTYs, who gamely pretended that she looked no different, that she hadn't been absent for over a year, that she and Dominic had never been a couple. It was as if the last fifteen months of her life had never happened, and this felt right to Ellen, who wished she could ball up that portion of her past and hurl it into the trash: the group therapy, the crapioca, the humiliation of Dominic's rejection. Now, she thought, she could start over, actually totally move on. She would find something – or someone – new, better. She would remake herself from scratch.
*
After an exhilarating day at work – she'd sold her first mattress, with no assistance from Mr. Meseret – Ellen headed directly to St. Anthony's, still jittering from Mr. Meseret's coffee, her hands trembling as she opened the door to the multipurpose room. She steeled herself, preparing to see Dominic and Madison in their usual corner, fingers intertwined, giggling, whispering. Rumors swirled of their imminent engagement, as soon as Madison graduated high school. But tonight, Madison and Dominic were sitting apart: Madison with a group of other girls, Dominic in the corner. He didn't look at Ellen as she took a seat across the table from him. His eyes were downcast, fixed on the nubby green carpet. Ellen's hands shook in her lap and she clasped them together, as if praying.
During the meeting, Ellen didn't follow the conversation – something about papal authority – because her electric brain was jumping from thought to thought: had Madison and Dominic broken up? She knew she shouldn't wish for such a thing. Surely, to pray for another couple's breakup was unchristian – but was it? What if God's plan was for her and Dominic to end up together, and his breakup with Madison was a necessary step? She couldn't stop her eyes from drifting to Dominic, as if the clues to their destiny would be written on his face. She studied the wispy blond mustache he was cultivating, his long, languid fingers stroking his pipe, the way he hitched one grasshopper leg over the other. Maybe he'd look up and see her and realize what a fool he'd been not to wait for her, to let her slip away. But when Dominic did finally look at her, his expression was blank, as if he were gazing at a tree or a lamppost. He gave her a tepid smile, the kind you'd give an old lady on the bus, and then flicked his eyes away. After the meeting, Dominic unfurled his long body from his chair and left the room without looking again at Ellen.
That night, unable to sleep, Ellen's brain churned. To soothe herself, she imagined being held by Jesus, but soon, she was imagining kissing Dominic, letting him push his tobacco-scented tongue into her mouth. No, she thought. No. Jesus, with his flowing hair and gentle eyes, floated back to her, arms wide. But when she tilted her face up to His, she found that she was not being held by Jesus, at all, but by Mr. Meseret. And now she was pulling Mr. Meseret's head towards hers, opening her mouth so wide she could almost devour him. His breath would be flavored by coffee and mint. She closed her eyes and let herself taste it.
*
At work, Ellen gathered pieces of information about Mr. Meseret like a magpie collecting bits of shiny string. He wore no wedding ring and kept no photos on his metal desk, but an ornate silver cross dangled from the rearview mirror of his Camry. He never wore the same tie two days in a row. He never sat on the mattresses, hardly touched them, at all, except to dust their surfaces, lovingly, once a day. He brushed his teeth in the employee bathroom after lunch each day, emerging in a minty waft. He wore a light cologne, woodsy, hardly noticeable unless you were standing right next to him. He had slender forearms, which he occasionally revealed on hot days, rolling up his sleeves precisely three inches, as if measured with a ruler. He'd only taken a personal call once at work, excusing himself to the loading dock
From this information, Ellen concluded that Mr. Meseret was single. Never married. She imagined he lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the gray interior of Arlington, in one of those sagging brick buildings with dried-up fountains that she passed on her way to work. He spent his weekends cooking vats of doro wat and attending church. She'd looked up the nearest Ethiopian Orthodox church, had even driven by one evening after work. The church was across the street from a strip mall with an Olive Garden and a CVS, and had red brick, white trim, neat landscaping, and a single, white steeple. None of the bulbous domes and latticed crosses Ellen had expected. She'd idled in front of the church until a woman draped in white had emerged from the front door and squinted at her car.
*
The Notre Dame admissions office had called several times that summer, leaving increasingly curt voicemails, asking Ellen to please confirm her enrollment in the fall. On a hot day in mid-July, Ellen felt her phone pulsing in her suit jacket. When she saw University of Notre Dame Admissions on the screen, she shoved the phone back in her pocket. Later, she went to the storage room and listened to the voicemail, which informed her that the university would not allow her to defer a second time, and they needed her decision before the end of the month.
Leaning against the water cooler, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself at Notre Dame: sitting in the library, the rainbow-stained light flickering over her textbooks, or pushing a plastic tray down the rails of an echoing cafeteria, or huddled in snowy stands, cheering on the Fighting Irish. But she could only picture some other girl, some young, hopeful teen with an uncomplicated past. This other girl, this simple soul, would thrive at Notre Dame, fit right in. But Ellen? If she went to Notre Dame, everyone would want to know why she'd deferred, and what would she say? She imagined herself saying the words she'd planned: bit of trouble with my brain, and time in a spa, and all about glorifying God. But the lines sounded hollow, a false front. The other students, normal and whole, adept at sniffing out weirdness, would see right through her, pity her, reject her. Maybe, Ellen thought, she would spare herself the misery. Maybe she just wouldn't go.
Maybe she'd stay here, live a different kind of life. She could imagine how this other life would unfold: she and Mr. Meseret, after working together for months, would share a kiss in the parking lot. He would bring her to his church, where she would drape herself in white and smile demurely. She would, slowly but surely, learn his language. After they were married, she would move into his bachelor's apartment and enliven the place with a woman's touch, adding vases of flowers and curtains and throw pillows. He would teach her how to cook doro wat and brew strong coffee. They would have children, sprightly, bilingual children, who would grow up in a home scented with garlic, palm oil, coffee, mint. They would go to work together every morning and sell mattresses. On their vacations, they'd travel to Ethiopia, where they'd help people: building wells, planting trees, distributing food and soap and medicine. Ellen would speak Amharic, shyly at first, until the words became her own. She would kneel in the dark, soft soil of Mr. Meseret's homeland and turn the dirt over with her hands, planting seeds. She would be happy.
Maybe Notre Dame was not her dream school, after all.
*
In late July, business slowed down. Mr. Meseret spent the days pacing and sighing. One morning, he said, again, that the mattress business was recession-proof.
"People always need mattresses," he said. "Except the Japanese."
Ellen, who'd been bending to fluff the display pillows on the mattresses, straightened.
"And the Salvadorans," she said. "They sleep on hammocks."
Mr. Meseret blinked at her. "Ah. Yes, of course."
"I did a mission trip there. We all slept in hammocks. Mine was green and yellow, with little tassels. Actually really comfortable, once you get used to it."
"Oh, yes?" Mr. Meseret, who was standing at the front window, turned his gaze back outside, where the traffic juddered by, no one stopping in for mattresses.
Ellen plumped one of the pillows. "I want to do another mission trip, I think. A longer one. Or maybe, actually, work for an NGO. I just want to make a difference."
"Hm, very nice," murmured Mr. Meseret, before resuming his pacing, up the central row of mattresses and back down.
Ellen, still holding the pillow, searched for a way in, a bridge to cross into Mr. Meseret's life. "Does your church ever do mission trips?"
Mr. Meseret frowned. "Yes. Some of the older ladies, they do that type of thing." He paused in front of the window again, gazed out. "Ah, what a slow day. But business will pick up, you know. It always does."
Ellen debated saying something else about service, and helping people, but decided not to, knowing Mr. Meseret's response would only disappoint her.
In the heavy golden light filtering through the shop windows, Ellen watched him and noticed, for the first time, the gray hairs at his temples, the feathery lines around his eyes. He was not thirty, she realized. Closer to forty. She wondered how often he went back to Ethiopia. She wondered if he'd ever built a well, if he knew how to assemble a pump, dig a deep hole. She wondered if, when he prayed, the Holy Spirit swept down on him like a hawk, or whether it bubbled up slowly, like water rising from the ground, or whether, when he prayed, he felt nothing at all, the way she sometimes did. But she would not ask. Some questions, she decided, were best left unanswered.
When all of the pillows were fluffed, and there was nothing left to do, Ellen sat down on one of the mattresses, a Serta king she'd admired the whole summer, its top a smooth expanse of silvery-white. She perched on the edge for a moment before letting herself fall back, her head landing on one of the pillows. She looked up at the ceiling, a grid of plain white squares, except for one missing, revealing a dark latticework of pipes and ducts, another world suspended above the sales floor.
She would go to a place she was needed, she decided: a place her troubles would seem so puny, no one would bother asking about them. She would make herself an instrument, a conduit for good. She would pass out food and measure out medicine. She would hammer and dig. She would kneel in the dirt, turning over fresh earth, and pour in seeds. She would send Dominic an occasional, dashed-off email. Doing great! Better than ever. Or – no, she would be too busy for that. She would never think of him, at all, and when, years later, his name would come up, she'd say, truthfully, Oh, Dominic! I haven't thought about him in ages. She would hardly recognize the person she once was, that lost girl tumbling through her own life, waiting for someone to catch her, to hold her close.
Mr. Meseret, still peering out the window, had not yet noticed Ellen lying on the mattress. She wondered what his face would look like, when he turned and saw her: arms splayed, eyes closed, dark hair obscuring the cloud-white pillow. Was this how St. Catherine of Siena had lain, before her death? Had she waited like this, paralyzed, for whatever would happen next? A shiver ran down Ellen's body. The Holy Spirit. Or else, perhaps, just a shift in air currents, the ancient HVAC coughing itself to life.
