Charlie pressed the receiver to his ear, listening to all that nothingness shrieking back at him. How had he forgotten that it was disconnected? How had he forgotten so many things? He dropped the phone and let it fall to the floor. At the same instant, Tünde scrambled to her feet and came after him. Before she could close the distance between them, he darted to the opposite side of the table. Same as that morning, they stood across it, eyeing one another, but this time, Tünde reached out and grabbed the only remaining thing on that table: she grabbed The Pig.
As she raised it in both hands high above her head, there was a single frozen moment on that chilly March morning on Arnold Street in Providence, Rhode Island, when all the faces in the kitchen—The Pig’s face, Tünde’s face, and Charlie Webster’s face too—were wild with gaping eyes and flared nostrils and mouths full of gritted teeth. In that instant, as The Pig paused in the air above Charlie, he did his best to brace himself for the sight and feel of his wife’s remains—her ashes, her tiny bits of bone, everything but her soul—raining down upon him. But really, how could anyone prepare for such a thing? And in the end, when The Pig hurtled in his direction and bashed against his skull, shattering instantly and sending Charlie’s body slumping to the floor, it didn’t matter because he saw and felt none of what he expected. Rather, Charlie heard what sounded like the heaviest of hailstorms pelting the roof of a car. It was a sound that amplified all around as he blinked open his eyes to see—not ash, not chips and slivers of bones—golf balls spilling from the shattered hull of The Pig. Dozens of them—in oranges and reds and blues and greens and whites—thudded against the wet kitchen floor, rolling away in all directions. When they came to a stop at last, the only thing he heard was the thumping of Tünde’s boots moving away and the slamming of the door.
*
Early in Charlie and Joy Webster’s retirement, back when they first signed the deed on their new apartment in Fort Lauderdale, they had not much more than a mattress ordered from an 800 number and a few stray pieces of furniture they’d managed to haul south in the Oldsmobile. A great deal of time during those initial weeks and months were spent shopping for a sofa and chairs and nightstands and lamps and all the many possessions people acquire to fill up a place and make it a home. Since they were always careful to stay within a budget, the couple took to exploring consignment shops in and around their new city. Something about hunting through those old things with the idea of putting them to new use gave them an unexpected thrill. If they had thought much about it, Charlie and Joy might have realized that so much of the cast-off furniture had likely belonged to other couples who came to the Sunshine State with the dream of making a fresh beginning in their later years. But when that beginning turned into an inevitable end, the things they owned wound up in those drab shops with colorful names like The Prissy Hen and Shades of the Past.
One afternoon, their search led them as far north as Palm Beach, where they found a shop on Highway 1 called True Treasures. Most of the furniture in the place looked like something an old movie star might have owned in a sprawling house high in the Hollywood Hills. As Joy wandered among those curiosities, she stopped to poke fun at the more outrageous pieces, like a four-poster canopy bed with a glittery silver headboard and so many layers of fabric that she dubbed it the Elizabeth Taylor Sleeper, or an endlessly pillowed sectional sofa in clashing geometric patterns that she called the Joan Crawford Couch. None of it fit their taste, but that was okay since half the fun was laughing about the things that were difficult to imagine being anybody’s taste. In the midst of all that, they laid eyes on a simple, soft blue wrought-iron table and matching chairs tucked in the back of the store. The set would fit perfectly on their little terrace, it was decided, and money was handed over to the clerk. While Charlie stood at the counter arranging the delivery, Joy wandered to a shelf overflowing with dishes and vases and ashtrays.
“Look,” she said.
Charlie turned and saw her pointing to an object high on a shelf. When she pulled it down, he realized it was a bright pink ceramic cookie jar made in the shape of a pig. Never once had Joy mentioned the nickname those kids called him back at Central High School, and yet he wondered for the briefest of moments if she was making some joke about it for the first time by showing him this pig. But at the end of the long hallway where the oasis of her art classroom had been situated for so many years, Joy had managed to isolate herself from much of the unpleasant happenings at that school. Chances were, she never mentioned the name because she had never even heard it, which was just fine by Charlie. And so, he determined that she had pulled down the pig-shaped cookie jar simply because it called to her in that way certain objects have of calling to people. The moment became something akin to a person passing the window of a pet store and deciding they had to take home the puppy or kitten glimpsed on the other side—not at all necessary, but somehow completely necessary at the same time.
“This big guy is pretty cute, huh?” Joy said.