Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich Page A

said “Ta da!” He bet she had. The cop had called for backup and, before she knew it, there were so many grim-faced men and women in uniform, you might have thought she’d knocked over a bank, and taken a dozen hostages.
    Joe took her back to his place. He wanted to yell at her. He didn’t. He wanted to ask her how she could be so stupid. She didn’t have to steal things. It wasn’t like she was starving. He didn’t say that either. He made her tea while she used his shower. She came out of the bathroom dressed in his red robe, her hair wrapped up in a towel, and they sat at the kitchen table and drank tea and didn’t talk much. Later he tucked her into his bed and sat for a while watching her sleep.

    Maggie was so angry, she was vibrating and humming like a robot about to explode and splatter machine parts all over the landscape. The two of them were stomping down the street and people were getting out of their way.
    “You’ve got to go back to your shrink,” Joe said.
    “I won’t.”
    “They’ll send you back to jail.”
    “Let them. I’ll bust out.”
    “Then they’ll just shoot you, Maggie.”
    “Good!”
    She snatched the hat off a passing woman and pushed it into Joe’s hands. The woman didn’t notice.
    “Hey!” Joe said. He stopped, but Maggie kept moving. He hurried to catch up with her.
    She took a watch from a passing man and gave it to him. She bumped another man, said oh excuse me, and then gave Joe the man’s wallet. They hadn’t stopped moving. Maggie grabbed a purse and pushed it into his arms. He was carrying a lot of stuff now. All they needed was for someone to notice and start yelling for the cops and he’d be standing there with his arms full of stolen goods.
    “Maggie, for Christ sakes stop this.”
    She shot a hand into a man’s coat, did a little dance with him that left him looking dazed, and then handed Joe the man’s tie and shirt and kept walking.
    They passed a hot dog cart and she gave Joe a jumbo frank with sauerkraut and they kept walking. She snatched the glasses off a bald man and the pearls from a woman with a cane.
    “Stop it, Maggie!” Joe yelled.
    “What do you want from me?” Maggie said, still so angry there should have been smoke billowing from her ears. “I didn’t take her cane. And you know I could have.”
    They rushed by a man on a bench reading a newspaper. Maggie snatched out the sports section and slapped it onto the pile of stuff Joe carried.
    In the distance, sirens screamed and he was sure they screamed for him. He stopped dead in his tracks. “I can’t go on like this, Maggie,” he called after her.
    She looked over her shoulder and said, “So stay where you are!”
    After she’d turned the corner, but before the patrol car flashed onto the scene, Joe deposited the things she had stolen from the pedestrians into a trash barrel. He turned the other way and tried to blend in with the crowd.

    Joe lost track of Maggie while she was doing time. He had written her often in the beginning, and she had always answered—funny letters. You’d think from reading her letters she was having a great time in jail. He wasn’t fooled.
    She’d served about half her 18 months when her letters stopped. He called the jail. Was he family? Well, not exactly. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He kept writing for another month. Then he stopped. He was pretty sure he would have heard if she’d died in jail. It wasn’t like they lived in such a harsh place you could die in jail and not be mentioned in the daily papers.
    He liked to think she was getting help. Maybe in jail they’d make her see a doctor who could figure out why she had to steal things. Maybe she would change. Maybe she already had. Maybe she’d gotten to a place in her life where a guy like Joe just didn’t make sense any more.
    The month of her release came and went. He hadn’t been sure of the exact date anyway. He couldn’t just hang around the jail waiting for her to come out.