Keller got to JFK hours before his flight. He remembered, finally, to buy a plush rabbit for Jenny, who collected stuffed animals as ardently as he collected stamps. He checked his bag, the rabbit snugly stowed inside it, and picked up his boarding pass, then found a bar with a TV tuned to local news. He ordered a Diet Coke, and of course the third news item reported a new link between sugar-free soft drinks and cancer. The barmaid evidently heard the item herself, and glanced at Keller even as he was looking her way.
Neither of them had to speak a word. She scooped up his glass, dumped its contents, rinsed it, and looked inquiringly at him. He pointed to a bottle of beer, which she uncapped and placed before him, along with the glass. He reached for his wallet, but she shook her head and walked off to serve somebody else.
The beer lasted Keller for most of an hour. He was waiting for a particular news item, not really expecting to hear it, but disappointed all the same.
Waiting was always the hardest part.
Around seven thirty he realized that a sandwich and the better part of a croissant didn’t amount to a full day’s rations. He moved from the bar to a nearby table, where he ordered a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp and a second beer. The salad wasn’t bad. Neither was the beer, but half of it was plenty.
He could see and hear the bar’s TV from where he was sitting, so he got another go-round with the sports and weather and various fires and traffic wrecks. And nothing much else.
Just as they were about to call his flight for boarding, he took out his cell phone and called Dot. “I’m heading home,” he said.
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t know why I sent you in the first place. I’ll send back the money.”
“No, don’t do that,” he said.
“No?”
“Not just yet,” he said. “Wait three days and see what happens.”
“Three days?”
“Maybe four.”
“Four days. I could do that. I mean, they don’t know you’re on your way home, do they?”
He ended the call, stopped in the men’s room. Was the phone compromised? Even if it wasn’t, what did he need with it now? He took it apart, snapped the chip in half, and did other things to render the thing inoperative. He dropped the different components in different trash receptacles and went to board his plane.
“She’s going to love this,” Julia said, brandishing the rabbit. “Not only is it wonderfully soft and squishy, it’s from her daddy. Why don’t you go put it in her bed and she’ll find it when she wakes up?”
Was there anything more beautiful than Jenny sleeping? He tucked in the rabbit at her side and returned to the kitchen, where he looked at his wife and found an answer to his question.
“I’m a rotten husband,” he said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”
“You came back in one piece,” she said. “That’s good enough. Did you bring a story to get me all excited?”
“Not quite yet.”
That puzzled her, but she let it go. “Not a problem,” she said. “Tonight you won’t need a story. You know what they say about absence? Well, it’s not just the heart that grows fonder.”
“Now, here’s a stamp I’m happy to have,” Keller said, lifting Gabon number 48 with his stamp tongs. “If you just take a quick look, you’d think it was the same as this one here. Denomination’s the same, five francs, colors are the same, and you’ve got the same picture. That’s a woman of the Fang tribe, and isn’t she pretty?”
“Pity,” Jenny agreed.
“When I was a little boy, I had some of these stamps. Well, ones just like them. The low values. You see this stamp? It shows a warrior, also of the Fang tribe, and he’s a man, and very fierce. But I saw the fancy headdress and always thought he was a woman. Funny, huh?”
“Funny.”
“Now what makes this stamp different,” Keller said, even as he slipped the stamp into the mount he’d cut for it, “is the inscription. It says ‘Congo Français,’ and the other one says ‘Afrique Equatoriale,’ so it belongs to the first of the two sets. It goes in the last blank space on the page, one I’ve been looking to fill for years now. There. Doesn’t it look nice?”
“Nice ’tamp.”
“Gabon was a French colony in West Africa,” he told her. “It issued stamps until 1934, when it was merged into French Equatorial Africa. Now of course it’s an independent country, but Daddy’s collection only goes to 1940, so his Gabon stamps stop in 1933.”
“Maybe Daddy’ll take us to Gabon someday,” Julia said. “You know what we ought to get? A globe, so you could show her where all the countries are. I can see how you thought the warrior was a woman. Though you might have noticed that he’s holding a couple of spears.”
“A fierce woman,” he said. “A globe’s a good idea. That’s probably what I should have bought instead of the stuffed rabbit.”
“Well, globe or no globe, don’t try to take the rabbit away from her. She’ll tear your arm off.”
“Rabbit,” Jenny said.
“A bunny rabbit,” Keller agreed. “One of your better words, isn’t it? Now, these stamps are interesting. They aren’t very pretty, but there’s a great story that goes with them. See, they’re from German East Africa, which was a German colony before the First World War.”
“Like Koochoo, which Daddy told you about, except even your mommy can tell where this one’s located.”
“Kiauchau.”
“Gesundheit. I was close, wasn’t I?”