Anna

This has nothing to do with Joe really. It's about that young Polish couple that moved into the abandoned old farmhouse last summer.

In my first year of college, one of my first writing assignments was to write a story based off a writing prompt. I wrote it, got a good grade, tucked it in my filing cabinet and in time, forgot all about it.

But since our last move two years ago, we’ve been gradually gearing up for some renovations on an outbuilding that had been used as the storage catch-all. I pulled a stack of old papers and stories out of a bin a few weeks ago, and have been going through them little by little.

I re-discovered the story I’m about to share with you among those papers. I had forgotten what a lovely story it turned out to be, and it’s kind of made me want to dive back into short story writing again. Maybe I will.

At any rate, please enjoy…

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Anna

This has nothing to do with Joe really. It’s about that young Polish couple that moved into the abandoned old farmhouse last summer. Once, the farmhouse had been the pride of Joe’s small town. But now, twenty years later, it stood in such a sad state of neglect and disarray, it was almost painful to look at. The paint was peeling. There was a big hole in the porch just in front of the door. The shutters flapped around on their hinges on a windy day, and the whole property had become a habitation for stray cats and little boys with contraband cigarettes.

But, as Joe was known to say, “It’s not any of my business. I’m good at minding my own business. I figure as long as I keep my own house painted and my garden tended, I’m doing okay, and the rest of the neighborhood can go to pot if it wants.”

And Joe would have been true to his word, it’s certain, if events had not conspired against him.

They came early in the morning. Joe was at the stove frying his egg and toasting his bread for breakfast when he heard and felt a large vehicle pass in front of his house. Joe’s cup rattled in its saucer on the table, splashing a few drops of coffee on Anna’s favorite tablecloth, and her picture on the wall trembled and got all crooked.

Joe went to the window and pushed the curtain aside, the curtain Anna had made. There was a moving van in front of the farmhouse. A young man jumped out of the cab, walked around to the passenger side, and lifted a young woman out. She was little and blonde and looked too young and fragile to be carrying that belly bump still obvious under her baggy sweater. The two of them stood in front of the house just staring, dismay written all over their faces. Joe could see a tear slip down the girl’s face. The man turned to her and rattled away in some language Joe couldn’t understand. He stroked her face with a finger and hugged her. He opened the back of the truck, pulled a folding chair out, and made her sit in it. Then he grabbed a box from the truck and carried it to the house.

All of the sudden, Joe’s nose began to twitch and he whirled around.

“Doggone it!” he yelled.

Smoke was billowing up from the frying pan where his egg used to be. He coughed and spluttered and threw a window open and the front door too. Joe gave grace over toast and coffee for breakfast without an egg.

That morning, Joe heard the young man trudging back and forth outside for an hour. Joe found himself looking out the window from time to time to see how the poor fellow was getting on. Eventually, the little blonde left her chair and went into the house, stepping carefully around the hole on the porch.

Joe frowned and shook his head.

“Good way to fall. Anna wouldn’t like it.”

And then a few minutes later, “Anna’d take some soup over.”

An hour later, Joe had made some…soup. He tasted a spoonful and wrinkled up his nose. Then he shrugged.

“Not bad,” he remarked.

He held the pot in his knobby hands with oven mitts and took it over. They hadn’t brought much with them. The truck was empty, and everything was inside already. Joe walked gingerly up the steps to the house. They creaked something awful and he winced. When he knocked, the blonde girl opened the door. Her eyes got big and she looked nervously at his bushy, black eyebrows.

“I brought soup,” he said.

Her husband came up behind her and said in good English, “Thank you! You’re kind. Won’t you come in?”

Joe peered inside without moving his feet. The inside of the house looked about as bad as the outside. There wasn’t any place to sit but one old crate and the folding chair. The girl looked up at him, her face pale and drawn with fatigue.

“You come on over to my house,” he said, waving his chin in that direction. “We’ll eat there, and you can put your feet up.”

The man stared for a moment and then said, “Yes. At your house. Thank you! Come, Anna.”

At the mans’ words, Joe jerked around to look at her.

“Anna?” he asked, gruffly.

Anna’s eyes got bigger.

“Yes, I’m Anna.”

Joe stared a moment longer then grunted, “Come on. Watch your step.”

They walked over to Joe’s house in a single, awkward-looking file, Joe marching in front with the soup with Anna and her husband bringing up the rear.

“I’m Joe,” he said once they were inside.

“I’m Karol,” Anna’s husband said. “We come from Poland.”

“What for?”

“I have a job here,” Karol replied.

“Where?” Joe demanded in his blunt fashion. “There aren’t any jobs here.”

“Oh, yes,” Karol nodded. “Not here in this town. I’ll drive an hour to work to get there.”

“Every day? That’s nuts.”

“I know it’s a long drive, but Anna grew up on a farm and she really hoped to live somewhere with less noise and more community. And anyway, I may work from home some. You have good internet here.”

“Don’t know anything about that,” Joe shrugged. “Doing what?”

“Huh?”

“Your job. What do you do?”

“Marketing.

“For who?”

When Karol answered the last question with the name of some new-fangled company, Joe dismissed it with a wave of his hand, “Eh, I don’t keep track of all that stuff.”

Anna’s eyes took in the house and wandered over to Anna’s picture on the wall. Joe saw her looking and reached over to straighten it.

“Who this?” Anna asked in a a soft voice.

“My wife.”

“Where is she?”

“Been dead five years.”

Anna’s blue eyes got big and round again as she said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Her name was Anna,” Joe said and then looked down at his soup. “Let’s eat.”

Joe fixed the porch. They needed a new porch, but couldn’t be bothered with it until the house was settled. So Joe laid some board over the hole, careful to overlap it a good ways with sound porch, and nailed them down. He helped them get the kitchen and the bedroom cleaned and settled.

“My Anna always said that the kitchen was the most important room to get straightened,” Joe told Anna.

She nodded, “Yes, I agree.”

After everything was put together, things got back to normal again for Joe. Only, not quite. There was a faint smile that played about his mouth a lot now. Over the next months, the curtain got so worn out with him always pushing it aside that he just took it down for good. He folded it in thirds and laid it across the top of Anna’s upright piano. The sound of Karol and Anna talking and laughing together made a nice backdrop to his evening meal. Sometimes he could hear Anna singing in Polish as she washed the dishes, her voice drifting out the farmhouse window and through his. He would watch her when she went outside with a basket of clean laundry to hang up on the line, his face taut and anxious until he saw her safely inside again. He watched as the bump got bigger and bigger.

“Boy or girl?” he murmured to himself.

Karol drove a company car, but decided he wanted to buy his own after a while. He told Joe that he found one on Ebay for a good price.

“Ebay?” Joe asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s a website where people auction things off,” Karol explained. “It’s a really good price.”

“Did you test drive it?”

“Well, no. It’s in…”

“How do you know it’s a good car?”

“I don’t know for absolutely sure,” Karol explained, “but if people aren’t honest when they sell cars on there, they can get in big trouble. So, it’s pretty reliable to buy on there.”

“Huh.”

Karol scratched his head and shuffled his feet.

“Well, I have to go to Vermont to pick it up,” he finally said.

“Vermont!”

“I’ll catch a flight out there and then drive the car home,” he explained quickly, “and I wondered if…I hoped…”

“Spit it out.”

“Well, Anna’s two weeks away from her due date, so there should be plenty of time before the baby comes, but I’m still a little worried about leaving her alone for a couple days. Would you watch out for her while I’m gone?”

Joe agreed to that, beaming. Then he cleared his throat and rubbed his nose.

“Go on. I have work to do,” he growled.

Karol left the next day. Joe spent the evening pacing the floor and glancing out the window at the farmhouse before he finally succumbed to his sleep-heavy eyelids and took himself off to bed. But shortly after he had drifted off, the phone rang.

“Yeah,” he answered groggily.

“Joe?”

It was Anna, and his name came out with a gasp. “I’m having contractions.”

“How long?”

“Since a little after Karol left this morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me!”

“I thought it was a false alarm,” she said, gasping again. “But I don’t think it is now.”

“I’ll be right over!”

Instantly awake, he jumped into his clothes and went as fast as he could get his old bones to move.

He found her in the bedroom, all doubled up and sweaty on the bed.

“Sweetheart,” he said, rubbing her back, “It won’t help to tense up like that. Can you not lie flat?”

“Oh, I can’t,” she moaned.

The bed was wet and Joe frowned.

“My water broke,” she explained. “Sorry.”

“Oh, for all the saints!” Joe shouted.

“Yes, we must pray,” she mumbled.

"Did you call an ambulance?”

“No.”

“Oh, for goodness sake. Stay here. I’m calling the hospital.”

“I can’t move. How would I go anywhere? Here, just use my cellphone,” she said, throwing it toward him.

He picked it up, befuddled.

“Just dial and press the button with the picture of the telephone.”

“Oh, alright.”

Joe called 911, and when he explained the situation to the lady on the other end, she told him she’d dispatch an ambulance right away, but that the baby might come before they got there. So she told him what to do. He smashed the phone up against his ear while the lady talked him through it. Anna’s pains were getting worse, and every contraction brought her closer to delivery.

“Has she crowned yet?” the dispatcher asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re going to look between her legs and tell me if you see the top of the baby’s head.”

“Oh, gosh,” Joe murmured, going white. “I’m sorry, Anna.”

"Sir?”

“Yes, yes,” Joe said. “Yes, I see its head.”

“You got a blanket or a clean towel close by? It’ll be soon.”

Anna pushed and screamed, her eyes filled with pain.

“There, there, darlin.’ It’s going to be okay,” Joe said, but his voice shook and the distance between his eyes and his bushy brows increased by an inch or two.

Anna worked and worked, her face all contorted. She had Joe’s hand in a death grip. He looked down in amazement at her small hand and wiggled his fingers around to pump some blood back into them. Little by little, the head came, then the shoulders, and then the baby slid out all at once, bloody and slippery into Joe’s hands. It was a boy, and he balled up his tiny fists and wailed. Anna smiled.

The lady on the phone laughed and said, “Music to my ears! Just sit tight. The boys should be there any moment.”

And so they were. They bundled Anna and the baby and took them off to the hospital to make sure everything was as it should be. Joe called Karol on the cell phone and told him the news. The new dad was worried and happy and incoherent, and after several minutes of babbling, Joe told him to just get home quick already and hung up.

The next morning, Karol got back with his new car and went to pick Anna and the baby up from the hospital. Joe got a phone call from him in the evening.

“Joe,” Karol began, the grin in his voice carrying loud and clear, “can you come over right away? We have something to tell you.”

Anna was sitting up in a chair holding the baby when Joe got there. Joe grimaced as Karol pumped his hand up and down.

“We wanted you to know,” Karol said, “that we’ve decided to call the baby Joe after our good friend.”

“Thank you, Joe,” Anna said, her eyes shining.

Joe put a hand to his eyes and rubbed them savagely, complaining about the dryness in the air.

He went home and sat down by the window in his easy chair. He looked up at the picture of his Anna and the empty wall beside it where no children were.

“You’d like Joe, Anna,” Joe said aloud. “And there might even be more little shavers in a few years.”

His voice was husky.

It was getting dark, and he saw the light turn on in the farmhouse bedroom window. He watched Karol walking back and forth in front of the window with baby Joe in his arms.

“I’m not minding my own business very well, am I?” Joe remarked.

“But that’s not so bad, is it, Anna?” he asked, looking up at her for approval.

Joe closed his eyes, thoughtfully, as Anna smiled down at him from her perch on the wall, as she had always done. As she always would until they next saw each other again.

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Hope you all enjoyed that.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

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