More tomato than woman, Roberta powders her puffy red cheeks while her daughter stomps in and out of the bedroom. Ruth has overslept. She marches back and forth, nightgown swishing as if performing an ancient ritual, a time-honored tradition that if executed correctly will miracle a pair of clean underwear into her possession at five minutes to seven on Monday morning. Ruth is tall, fit like her father, but her heavy feet make the mirror quake, rippling Roberta’s reflection.

“I cannot be responsible for your laundry,” Roberta says, though she is already searching for a smallish pair of her own, stashed in the back of the drawer—a relic from a skinnier year—unlike the restrictive pair she’s squeezed on in an attempt to appear more plum than hothouse variety and to ward off another incident like the one that took place at Ruth’s chorus concert last night.

The shades are still drawn, and the light thrown from the vanity mirror creates the illusion of a Friday night. That she might be primping for a secret date at Dowe’s on Ninth. Pinning up her hair, spritzing Chanel into the crevice of a plunging neckline instead of navigating through Fort Pitt Tunnel traffic to teach four sections of comp in a cardigan and polyester pants. Because no one suspects them, Roberta imagines tomato women have the best kind of affairs. Soft mouths and ripe tongues, breasts the size of infants’ heads. That there are men who want to hold their hands. Sit next to them in booths and kiss their necks. Call them baby in public places. Young men. Virile men with names like exotic flowers.

Something silky catches on her ring, and she tosses a black bikini-cut into the hallway. Ruth huffs—stretching out the elastic waistband like an accordion—oblivious to the miracle that has been bestowed upon her. She slinks into the bathroom, and Roberta takes one last glance in the mirror, hoping to find freckles instead of veins like red whiskers. Because the underwear fit, Roberta suspects Ruth is also vowing to exercise more. To get to bed earlier. To stop stepping over the piles of clothes—to wash, dry, and fold all of the laundry that night in exchange for making it through another day without being mistaken for her mother.

After dropping Ruth at the bus stop, Roberta chain smokes out the window en route to the business college where she teaches English Composition from a standardized syllabus. The grass is stiff with frost, just as the weather people predicted last night before ding-donging ominous bells and cutting to commercial. Before Roberta leaned over to kiss Rick good night, and he said, “You stink. Like smoke.”

Heat blows from the vent onto her feet, and traffic is converging from four lanes to two. Roberta drops her cigarette into a bottle of water and clutches the steering wheel. She thinks of the angular woman, the marathon-running mother, who congratulated her outside the auditorium of their daughters’ middle school. “I hear you have good news,” she said, studying Roberta’s mid-section as if it might speak on her behalf.

“Thanks a lot,” Roberta said, smiling because that’s what tomato women do. “But I’m afraid this is all me.”

Creeping along, dutifully waiting for a gap in traffic—for someone too busy checking his phone or shaving to notice the lapse between his SUV and the one in front of him—Roberta remembers the way Rick used to race up the fringe to the front of the line, cutting in just before his mother’s Chrysler crashed into the mountainside. When they were seniors at West A., he’d once driven all the way home from school in reverse, and it was Rick who taught Roberta how to parallel park. How to drive by letting go of the steering wheel, his foot still pressed to the accelerator. “You’d better grab it,” he’d say. “I need a break.” She never once saw him read the sports page then, and he regularly kissed her with an open mouth, seemingly trying to swallow her (more vanilla soft serve than tomato) in front of perfect strangers at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Three Rivers Stadium and The Original O Hotdog Shop. They had sex with their mouths on the hood of the Chrysler and sex without condoms on her mother’s washing machine. They did it at night and in the morning. Outside at the race track and inside the women’s restroom at Raccoon State Park. Once when her mother was juggling bills in the next room. By the time they got married five years later, Rick had outgrown his taste for danger just as Roberta was beginning to acquire her own.

On the Pittsburgh side of the tunnel, traffic widens to four lanes and Roberta pops a mint, sprays herself with cheap perfume. She parks the car and hugs her satchel like a bullet-proof vest. Power-walks the lot, muttering about the twenty bucks it costs to rent the space between two yellow lines in a garage that manages to be dark and frightening even at 9 a.m. The full-time instructors park for free.

The elevator doors open and a group of students crush in behind her. The tight enclosure and the closeness of their bodies in proximity to her own reminds her of the mosh pits Rick loved when they were sixteen and first dating. As soon as the speakers began to vibrate, he rushed the stage—leaving her alone in the seats. Often the bands were named after infectious diseases: Bad Brains, Anthrax or other doomsday outcomes—Cannibal Corpse, Mega Death, etc. Even after her father left and came back, she preferred music to be Easy Like Sunday Morning, like Barbra Streisand and Joni Mitchell, but she liked the way Rick smelled of stability, of luxuries like fabric softener and dinner, so she fastened safety pins to her jeans and practiced scowling in the mirror.

She wonders if there are other women her age, patient girls who waited in the seats turned wives and mothers and adjuncts—late bloomers to rage—who, if given the chance now, would push and shove their way to the pit. Bang their heads until their bangs went limp as Kurt Cobain’s.

The students smell of stale cigarettes, and she breathes them in, envious of the freedom to reek of their ill-conceived life choices. She considers making reference to the mosh pit thing, but it’s quite possible that it isn’t a thing anymore. They are all toting backpacks and wearing puffy jackets, and someone’s sleeve is preventing the elevator doors from closing.

“Chilly out there,” she says as the doors open and close and open and close until a man she recognizes emerges from underneath one of the puffy hoods.

“I’m out,” her student says, heading for the stairs. Someone steps into his place, and the doors seal shut before she can follow.

Earlier in the term, Lucille, the keyboarding instructor who has been around since shorthand, cornered Roberta on the back steps. “There’s an ex-con in your next class,” she whispered. Weren’t most of them? Roberta wanted to ask, but instead, she issued a stately nod. “You’ll know him when you see him,” Lucille said.

“Thanks a lot.”

Walking the hall toward class, she decided that Lucille had obviously not read the Blue Bird study. The one where teachers were assigned two groups of students: one labeled the blue birds, or something similarly nice—like pretty birds, smart birds—while the other, though equally proficient in all subject areas, were labeled Dodo birds or something similarly damning. The results were not surprising. Who would want a Dodo for a pet? Besides, Lucille wasn’t concerned for Roberta’s safety so much as anxious to reaffirm that she was privy to information about which Roberta could only absorb residual whispers. Even if she couldn’t remember exactly who’d conducted that study, Roberta was determined not to notice which one he was. But as she rounded the bend, her eyes went straight for the marbles.

His name is Eli, and behind his stare, Roberta can see the iron bars. His hair is neatly sectioned into territories and held in place by elastics adorned with marbles. In lieu of an albatross, he drapes dollar signs from heavy chains.

It doesn’t matter if he is an actual thug; what matters is that everyone assumes he is and genuflects with thug respect. Clearly, it gets him off: pimp-limping across the front of the room—interrupting class, pager pressed to his lips—saying something about “The delivery” and “Do they want a half or a whole hoagie? Salami or Corned beef?” Roberta is uncertain if he is speaking in code or yanking her chain, but she decides it cannot continue.

Mid-metaphor exercise, Eli’s pager beeps, and he pushes back his chair.

“Eli,” Roberta says. “Sit.”

He smirks. “Naw.”

“What part of speech is that?”

“It ain’t even that serious,” he says into the phone. “I’ll be right wit-choo.”

“Gesundheit.”

“Look—just chill, baby.”

“You want to finish that call? Give me a metaphor.” The kid in the front row whose favorite color is lavender starts to chuckle, then thinks better of it. “Feel me?” she warbles. “Know what I’m saying?”

Usually the “adult learners” get a charge out of Roberta slouching, shuffling through the aisles, demonstrating the sloppiness of colloquialisms. But on this morning, the sun reflecting off the bronze tint of a parallel skyscraper, she believes she can hear them gulp instead. If they were ten-year-olds, they would issue a collective Ooo as if to say, She’s pushing your buttons, Marble Head; what are you going to do about it?

Eli looks around the room and shrugs his shoulders. He sidles through the maze of desks toward her.

“Hey, hey,” she says. “I’m chill.” Eli hovers over her, his eyes black and shiny as the marbles on his head. She holds her ground, cheeks flushed but unflinching. Eli steps back and laughs, covering his mouth the way the guy pointing the gun always laughs in the movies, right before pulling the trigger.

“Every day is like my birthday,” he says, tucking the phone into his pocket. “I’m just tryin’ to get cake.”

Roberta straightens her skirt and says, “Close enough.”

The sun is a shawl, resting on the shoulders of the horizon as she drives home. Her students mostly ride the bus, or worse, two buses, to Homewood or Monroeville and other destinations east of Gateway Center. She is thankful for her car, even as traffic heading west clogs at the Tenth Street bypass. At this time of day, anyone could be idling on this bridge. The dean or neb-nosed Lucille or Rick, so she holds the cigarette between her fingers for a long time without lighting it. There is a homeless man standing to her left. She senses his movement before he appears at her window, but she shrieks at the sight of him, anyway. He is holding a cup and smiling, and she has no money because who keeps paper money anymore, so she opens the window and offers him a cigarette, and he accepts. “Nice,” he says, and winks at her. Traffic moves, and quickly she drives away. She sees him in the rearview mirror, running toward her, and she shifts lanes, lights up, and inhales, feeling a kinship with this man as if he understands that smoking isn’t the worst thing, not even close, and thinking they are probably the same age and how it could happen to anyone, and maybe if it happened to her she would fall in love with that wink and they would work the bypasses and music festivals together, sleeping in alleyways where the steam from city kitchens gathered and pooled over them like a warm blanket.

She exhales and thinks about her students, imagining what they might eat for dinner. If they live with their grandmothers or with their children in apartments like hives. Eli has mentioned having a daughter, and Roberta wonders if her students talk about her at home the way she talks about them. If they leave things out the way she does.

On the suburban side of the tunnel, she thinks about how Eli laughed at her in the hallway after class, about how she assumes people are always picturing her as a tomato with feet but that they can surprise you. Fishing for her keys with one hand while attempting to balance the thermos, a stack of actual books, and her satchel with the other, he said, “I gotchu,” and lifted the strap from her shoulder. She let him follow her down the elevator into the dark garage, and they didn’t speak, but as she leaned into the trunk, she sensed him studying the view. He is her student, and it is hard to know for certain if she is excited by him, specifically, as she is unable to dismiss the visceral reaction her body has to chivalry in general. To kindness. So her hands shook as she fantasized about the two of them climbing inside. Eli whispering baby baby baby as she pulled the lid shut.

She smokes one last cigarette, worried the SUV on her tail is taking down her license plate, reporting her to the bad person’s bureau. The highway is flanked by rock-faced cliffs secured by wire netting. Beyond the jutting stone, there are trees and tall weeds and maybe hidden caves lined with moss, private places to which a person could escape—grassy summits camouflaging her like a member of the Family Von Trapp.

Outside the dining room window, their red maple has turned yellow. It is Wednesday, so over a plate of Swedish meatballs, Roberta shares the details of her victory. “Tryin’ to get cake?” Ruth asks. “That’s what you’re so excited about? He’s ripping off Lil’ Wayne!” Roberta refills Rick’s wine glass then her own.

“Where do you suppose Ellen’s mother got the idea that I’m pregnant?” Roberta says to Ruth while Rick licks his finger and dabs at breadcrumbs on the table. “She said Ellen told her I had good news.”

“Maybe she was just being polite. Making conversation,” Ruth says.

“I’m sure you can imagine how that must have made me feel.”

“Dad! Mom is playing the victim again.”

“I don’t think it needs to be the end of the world,” Rick says. “But why don’t you take a break? Let us handle the dishes.”

After flooding the counter-tops, father and daughter retire to the basement. Rick is a builder, so they spend hours watching home improvement programs on TV, conducting “field research” while Roberta hunches over the dining room table, bleeding on a stack of essays until she hates words. How many times must she spell it out? Literature is timeless, and all references to it should therefore be expressed in present tense verbs, but perhaps her students simply cannot separate books from the long distant past, and so they might as well already be extinct. Maybe everything she has ever thought or taught is incorrect. Maybe nothing matters but money and good looks. Maybe she should watch more television. Tune into HGTV, a land where everyone owns a home on a clean street, and, like her, is perpetually fixated on remodeling her life, secretly wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to rebuild.

Roberta waits until their breathing changes, calling out their names to be certain, and when she is satisfied they’re both asleep, she sneaks out the back door. She blends into the darkness, puffing, listening to cats fighting or fucking—it’s a fine line. She inhales. The sound of the filter burning comforts her like cracking open the spine of a book. She thinks of the story she’s just read about a man and his daughter who has gone missing told through the letters they write to one another but never receive. Roberta loves reading other people’s letters and burying the ones addressed to her in the bottom of her sock drawer. Notes Ruth has written when she’s been rifling through Roberta’s purse for evidence. You lied to me. I told you about the smoking man who visited my class. I told you about the hole in his throat, and you said you would quit. I am too sad to talk to you.

When Roberta was a child, nearly every adult had a sixth finger, counting his cigarette as a natural appendage, but she never appreciated the smell or being trapped in the backseat with all the windows up and her father’s Pall Mall, billowing, burning red in the ashtray. Until he took off for Oklahoma City during the only tornado ever to touch down in the Pittsburgh area and afterwards she spent months with her nose pressed into the tobacco-stained upholstery, waiting for the green wind to blow him back.

She lights another, peering out into the backyard where during a full moon she would be able to see the shed Rick built. She acknowledges his work ethic and the way the women who hire him regard his tool belt, ogle his sweaty back while their own husbands wander around in air-conditioned offices all day strapped into purposeless, tool-free belts. Roberta tries to see him this way. To remember the perfect roundness of Ruth’s infant head and not the terrible sounds it used to make. To forget how free she felt when she left. How she wore the same sweatpants for a month, contact lenses plastered to her eyes from sleeplessness. How four weeks of Ruth’s life passed. Days Roberta spent sleeping in a motel, wielding a sledgehammer in dreams. Feverish from infected breasts, heavy with wasted milk, she watched Mister Rogers in the morning and reruns of The Cosby Show at night. Bought a carton of Pall Malls and practiced blowing rings of smoke as if they might travel on in her stead to Oklahoma. She ate what she wanted, and no one saw except the pizza man, whose arms were full of holes like caves.

Rick’s hands are steady and he was good to take her back. It is good to be at home with Rick and Ruth and their piles of laundry and the darkness beyond the back door when they are both finally asleep.

Inside, she tiptoes to her purse. Tucks the evidence into a zippered pocket and takes a sip of wine. She holds it in her mouth for a long time before allowing it to seep like a secret down her throat.

Eli’s phone stays in his pocket, but it still rings. Sometimes he stands too close. When he shows up with his hair hanging in twists she says, “What happened? Lose your marbles?” He does not laugh, but his expression changes as he reads what she’s written at the bottom of his essay: “You have some talent. It’s hard to tell how much yet because we’re only beginning. Let’s explore it.” His head seems to change shape, soften as if it might be made of clay. She wants to tell Rick about Eli’s essay. About his incarceration and release date. She wants to show him the part where Eli stands on the free side of the bars pressing a palm to his best friend, Lip—the man who pulled the trigger. The man who will spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime they committed together, side-by-side, when they were only eighteen. “Saying good-bye,” Eli writes, “was like leaving home.”

She wishes she could tell Rick about her co-workers whispering accusations into the dean’s ear—thanks to whiskey-nosed Simon, one of the full-time English instructors, who has seen them together in the parking garage and begun wondering out loud why all of the teachers, except Roberta, have petitioned to have Eli expelled, but then she’d have to explain why she has been seen loitering next to her car in the parking garage and why she hasn’t been riding the bus instead, the way he suggested to save money in between the sports page and the deed transfers and the late night weather report.

When the dean finally materializes, poised to observe Eli and Roberta’s interaction with him, the students have their heads buried in a mid-term—dutifully immersed in five pages of subject/verb and pronoun/antecedent agreement. He paces the room, one highly polished click after the next. Shakes his head as if the silence were a dead skunk then leaves.

Roberta rides the elevator to the ground floor and treats herself to a donut for lunch. When she returns for the afternoon class, Simon stops her in the hallway. He is infamous for sneaking up behind her, making sure she’s locked the doors and erased the boards.

“Good news,” he says, not attempting to hide his teeth.

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have to deal with that punk kid anymore. The dean kicked him out.” She has the urge to push hard into her navel, to press her flesh tight to her spine.

“But he was making progress. He—”

“You girls,” he says shaking his head. “Silly, stupid, girls.”

Roberta marches to the dean’s office intent on tendering her resignation if he doesn’t agree to bring Eli back, realizing as she turns the corner she’s been counting the clicks of her heels. Twenty-one clicks to discover his door is closed. She paces on tip-toe and waits. Listens to a woman crying on the other side—probably pleading for a chance to retake a test or make-up an assignment. Roberta has heard so many excuses: sick babysitters and broken down buses. Once, a woman in her late thirties claimed she could not submit her essay on time because she’d been kidnapped after school on Friday and returned safely too late Sunday night to get started. Sincerity is scarcer than proper comma usage, and she hears chairs skidding in reverse like tires across rumble strips. Before the door opens, Roberta flees.

The window is smeared with fingerprints, fingers which appear to have been slathered in Vaseline or something worse before clawing the length of the glass. At first there were the familiar marquees of Heinz Hall and the Benedum. Dowe’s on Ninth with its glitzy awning to ground her, but now the buildings they pass are short and boarded and foreign to her. There are no green spaces to admire on this route. No trees or tall grasses, only block after block of blurry gray hoods: men, women, and children hiding inside caves of their own creation. Her stomach churns, and there are people standing in the aisles with their puffy coats brushing against her seat, but no one turns toward the sound. They are all wearing headphones like Ruth’s: giant, pulsing earmuffs. Roberta feels uncomfortably warm just looking at them, so she lines-up her finger tips with the greasy prints on the window and pulls, but it won’t budge.

Without a cigarette to divert her attention, she catches a whiff of broiled hamburger, even with the windows sealed shut. More than one of the diet books she’s read warn against eating meat and starch in the same meal. Apparently, the stomach refuses to digest both things at the same time or each requires its own special treatment, so the stomach picks the easiest thing, the potatoes or rice or noodles, and processes that, leaving the meat to rot in one’s intestines. This is exactly the kind of laziness she despises, not to mention the groaning, the self-righteous Ohs her stomach is now issuing as she scans the sidewalks for Eli. Oh, you’ve ditched your afternoon class? Exited the building as if choreographed to suspenseful music? Oh, you’ve boarded a bus? Do you even know where he lives? And what exactly do you suppose you’ll say to him, assuming you ever find this disgruntled student with a violent rap-sheet? “I’m sorry I was too chicken shit to confront the dean, but I’d like to make it up to you by getting fired. Maybe I could be your private tutor? Meet your daughter and tell you about mine over a plate of your grandmother’s famous barbecued ribs”? Oh, just yank the cord, Roberta. You know you can’t resist the smell of grilled beef. Yank it!

When the hostess approaches, Roberta takes short, shallow breaths so as not to appear winded. A thin woman can gasp for air and people will assume she’s been jumping hurdles in the parking lot. A thin woman need not worry about the state of her makeup nor the condition of her hair after walking five blocks uphill through smog and mist. A tomato woman, however, should neither cut her hair too short, lest it look like a stem, nor grow it too long so it becomes confused with a mane. And it follows that a tomato woman must not appear winded lest she inadvertently prompt management to phone an ambulance. “Table for one?” the hostess asks.

“Yes,” Roberta answers, suddenly thrilled by monosyllabic words. “One.”

She situates herself into a booth and thanks the woman for her menu. A quick survey of the room hints that she has been seated in the singles section of this Eat-n-Park. The other solo diners sport deep creases in their foreheads, a fact she cannot ignore because they are staring at her as if to say: You are facing the wrong direction. She isn’t ashamed to eat alone, but she makes a show of checking her phone as if she is above caring about booth protocol. There are no messages. Perhaps she has entered a dead zone, or maybe there were dozens she accidentally deleted on the walk.

“What’s up?” the waitress asks. Roberta hasn’t had time to decide on anything, but then this girl has not asked for her order.

“What’s up?” Roberta says, reminded of her students and the perilous state of the English language. “That’s perfect. Wonderful.”

“I know you,” the girl says. “You gave me a C.”

“You must be mistaken,” Roberta says, hoping to stall long enough to remember her name. The face is familiar, but it’s been five years of faces.

“I had to quit school.”

“My daughter told her friends I’m pregnant so they wouldn’t think I’m just fat.”

“I work three jobs so I can get my daughter back.”

“Denise!” Roberta says. “You earned that C.”

“You and I both know that isn’t true.” Her hair is different now, and she was younger then, but Denise is correct. She missed too many classes to have passed the course. “Do you want something?”

“Something, yes. Maybe I could have a minute?”

Roberta opens the menu then closes it. She needs a cigarette, but she left the box in her car along with the rest of her life. Her booth is lined by a wall of windows, ceiling to sill, and beyond the glass there are rounded bushes mulched for winter, a fern tree bedded at the root with black plastic. Someone has taken the time to landscape this tiny plot of land, to squeegee the windows and wipe the sills clean. Roberta thinks of the simple pleasure of erasing the chalkboards, of the way Denise sat in the front row of the first class Roberta ever taught, the baby inside her pushing against the desk. How she often arrived early, allowing for extra time to wedge into the tight confines of her work space while interrupting Roberta’s cheek-powdering ritual. “Why would you want to be more white?” she once asked, and Roberta gave Denise a C because she didn’t invent excuses or over-explain. She told the truth even when it would have been easier to let it rot in her gut. A fresh pot of coffee is brewing and the scent of a new day fills the air. When Denise returns, Roberta orders a cheese omelet with raisin toast.

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” she says.

“Me too.”

In open air, her phone comes back to life. A green dot pulses from the depths of her purse, punctuating the early dusk with messages waiting to be retrieved. Standing in the line Denise assured her would lead to a bus bound for Gateway Center, Roberta is thankful for the drizzle—for an excuse to keep her bag closed. An anxious energy emanates from this huddle of wet bodies. Mothers nudge hooded sons forward at the sound of a diesel engine approaching, and when a delivery truck appears instead of the bus, they do not relax their shoulders. Their knuckles remain white against grocery bag handles, clutched tight to their ribcages—masking the shapes of their purchases as if they fear being judged for the soup they’ve bought on sale or the brand of soda. The absence of loud and small talk is palpable; even babies stifle their cries, strapped into narrow strollers as puddles collect on the flimsy canopies above their heads.

In this part of the city, there are no special lanes. No arteries engineered to ferry commuters away from rush-hour traffic. Traces of exhaust seep into the cabin as the engine idles, and Roberta imagines a lifetime spent on this bus. The idea appeals to her: a stasis of darkness and anonymity and fume-tinged thoughts. Music drifts in from someone’s car, and if there are words—she cannot make them out. Only a pair of guitars like harps—like fingers through her hair. She thinks of Rick. Of their separate vehicles and the things they might find to say to one another in such snug confines. She conjures the weight of Ruth’s head, resting on her shoulder the way the girl in front rests her head against the window—dreaming, Roberta suspects, of a backseat. Of a mother and father who would navigate for her, adjust the heat while she dozes safely away.

Somewhere in the distance is Dowe’s. The Benedum. Roberta closes her eyes and wonders about Eli. If he will be waiting in the parking garage, marbles sweating beneath unreliable fluorescent lighting or if, like her, he is making his way home.