Kendra
KENDRA HAS SPENT MUCH of the day putting little white stickers on what she plans to keep, carefully placing them up under the furniture where they can’t be seen. Each one has her initials and a number that makes it look like she has cataloged everything in the house. What she has cataloged, of course, are the things worth having—the expensive things—some of them things they bought from the woman who sold them the house but most from a local estate auction where the pitiful old guy was clueless about everything. “That belonged to my wife’s grandmother,” he would say, and then cried in a way that was shameless. Kendra tried to be kind, but it was hard the way he looked, his face all red and twisted and unattractive, and besides, she was so excited about what she was getting for practically nothing. Persian rugs and massive antique sideboards and wardrobes. The man had no idea what his belongings were worth and she was just grateful that the son he kept referring to had remained in Chicago and not come to oversee everything, unlike, of course, the daughter of the woman they bought this house from. She was all business and knew just what she was doing and of course she was someone who remembered Ben from school even though she was a little older. Everyone in the whole dump town knows who he is. “He wanted to be a magician, right?” the woman asked, and laughed. She had one of those big blotchy birthmarks on the side of her face and Kendra spent the whole time wondering why in the hell she wouldn’t at least put some makeup on it to try to hide it. Who cares if she lives in Cambridge and teaches at Harvard? She was the kind of woman Kendra has a hard time being around and she certainly did not enjoy the time mother and daughter spent roaming the house and reminiscing. The daughter had paused and stood for a long time in what had been a hideous dark study and stared out the window where an old split-level used to be. Now there’s a giant contemporary with a three-car garage, which is a huge improvement, though Kendra didn’t say that. “We had some good times here,” the woman said, her fingertips pressing the big glass window. She looked like she might cry and Kendra was relieved as hell that she didn’t. She should go see a dermatologist and move on. Kendra was ready for them to get out of her house. It was that very afternoon she went to the estate sale and cleaned up. Kendra has always been lucky about being in the right place at the right time. Of course you make your luck and this is what she is in the process of doing. She is making her luck, making her own fortune happen.
She’s not quite ready to drop the bomb on her husband, but this way she will be prepared when the right time comes. She likes knowing the stickers are there; she likes the secrecy of her other life and the way that it is taking root and blossoming. It makes her feel powerful. She will keep the house, of course, she’d be a fool not to, and if she could get away with it, she’d go ahead and change the locks before Ben even knows what is coming. How can he not know what’s coming? And yet it seems he doesn’t. She will keep the house and she will keep the child, though of course she is hoping he will also want her for huge chunks of time like the weekends so she can have the time she needs to herself. The judges almost always go with the mother on this and she has made sure that she has met and had some kind of witty conversation with every judge in town. Her plan is to keep this as an investment, a little B&B oasis in the rundown middle of this dried-up boring town. And then she will live in a newer place like the Meadows, where she will have access to tennis courts and golf course and pool, not that she would use them, but that’s the traffic she likes to see. Of course, she does love the old Brendle mansion on the outskirts of town—a real plantation. But that will be after the more public evolution of her life with Andrew Porter once he is also divorced. Andrew is a heart surgeon. She loves to think that sentence, to say it when she is all by herself like in the shower: And this is Andrew, Andrew is a heart surgeon. “He brings people back after they really do disappear,” she told Benjamin right after they met him. “He really is brilliant and really does have a profession.” Everyone else calls him Andy but she prefers he go by Andrew. Names are important. Like she has always called Ben “Benjamin” and told him a million times how much better he would be received in the community if he went by his full name instead of Ben or, God forbid, the Bennie that some of his old redneck friends fall back on. Bennie and the Jets—that was what his pony league football team called themselves because he was the quarterback and unfortunately there are still enough of those guys hanging around this godforsaken place that they see him and call out his name. He has so many stupid nicknames she doesn’t even pay attention, who cares? Kendra grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she has often wished she had stayed there or ventured northward. She is someone who should be in DC or New York and always thought she would be.
Kendra Burleigh Baker. The Burleigh, of course, a play on the tobacco her family was once famous for. She has even thought lately that once she is established in her brand-new life, she might go by Burleigh or even B. Leigh, which would also be real cute. Then she would always have a reason to tell about her family history. A name is important. She called herself Kenni all through college and flirted with calling herself Dra just to go for something really different, until Ben, who then was just one of the many boys asking her out, said it would be hard not to add “ma,” Dra Ma, and the whole hallway of girls in the dorm started laughing. Probably the only reason she even looked at him twice is because everybody else had a crush on him. That’s how immature she was, as hard as that is to believe. All the girls were attracted to how different he was at their school, a lone kind of hippie type in a sea of starched drunken preppie boys, and he said he was in law school. All she really wanted was someone affluent who could whisk her off to a fine plantation and treat her like a queen.
If she had known that all Ben really was was a dopey amateur magician and a film projectionist, well, who would ever choose that? He thinks of himself as an artist but she is so much more the artist. Anything he has ever done, it’s because she said it was a good idea. If there is a real artist in the house, she is it. It was her idea, after all, to have big murals painted on the dining room and living room walls, hills and sun like you might be in Tuscany, but anytime they have had a party and someone compliments how beautiful it looks, he just says, “Thanks,” like it was his goddamned idea and not hers. “How hard is it to just say, ‘Kenni is the artist around here.’ How hard is that?” she has asked a million and one times, but of course he never hears a word she says. If it was something said by that crazy woman who was his friend a hundred years ago and now sells hot dogs and helps people die, he would listen.
“How dare you,” she recently said to him after overhearing him tell Abby how much he admires the freak. “What is there to admire about her? She is plain and unattractive in all ways. People talk like it’s amazing she’s been married so many times, but the amazing part is that anybody ever wanted her. Who would even want to marry such a loser?” She was about to comment on her hair and how if she were sick in the bed and had to look at that mess, she would just as soon die, too, but he was out the door and in his car, saying he was going to work. Work, her ass. Redoing an old movie theater and getting senior citizens in once a week is hardly real work. For all she knows he spends time with that crazy woman even though she has told him that he better not. “How embarrassing would that be?” she asked, and got right up in his face. Several times she has wanted him to hit her because then she could photograph it and have some good ammo for when they get down to the real business of splitting everything up.
He’s the one who grew up here but still didn’t know the people they really needed to know. She told him how she could see and understand the strata of the town so much better than he could because she was an implant. Of course she meant to say transplant, but she said implant, and he has never let her forget that. He brings it up every time they argue, in fact, and she sees that as a kind of harassment, certainly something worth mentioning to her lawyer when the time comes. Of course she knew the correct word was transplant. She accidentally said implant, and he in all his smart-ass glory said: You and all the other boobs. She is the reason they are even on the A list in town; she got them invited to everything so they could meet all the right people. It’s what she came from, after all. She had not grown up that way, but she was supposed to have and that was a well-known fact. She couldn’t help that her grandfather lost everything in the depression. That loss did not change the blood that coursed through her veins and the long line of wealthy important people she descended from. And of course meeting Dr. Andrew Porter had changed all that. He didn’t belong in that town any more than she did and yet there he was. He was originally from Raleigh with parents who had deep roots in one of the better parts of Alabama and his wife was from Pennsylvania, and though Kendra wanted to be like and possess so much about her, she also really didn’t care for her. Those are the hardest friends to have. Those you just know you should have when really you detest them. Ben said she was jealous and that she needed to be more careful that her jealousy and coveting didn’t show, which pissed her off beyond belief. She didn’t speak to him for days after that. The truth was all those expensive clothes were wasted on Liz Porter. She did not have the body for designer clothes like Kendra does. Liz has the look of a rich girl but an ordinary-looking rich girl and that’s where someone like Kendra comes in. She is someone who can pull off having it all.
She and Ben went to dinner at their house one night, and everything switched just like that—a lightbulb glared in full romantic glory above her head. That night was the beginning of it all. After that, everything in her life looked shabby and cheap. She wants a huge bathroom with steam showers and heat lamps and a heated floor. She wants a bathroom so huge that there would be room for someone to come in and set up a massage table—so much better to have them come to you than to go down to that one dreadful place in town offering massages, the Big Chill, an operation run by a woman who used to work as an assistant in a smoke-out facility, which some say doubled as abortion clinic/whorehouse. No one with a brain would go there for a massage, and Kendra has a brain, a beautiful brain, and a good heart and a beautiful body or so she has been told by Andrew, who actually gives a damn, so what else matters? She would rather dive into that awful snake-infested river than go to such a place even though Liz Porter has been and reported back that it was a lovely little spa—massages, facials, pedicures. The girl who did her toenails was a darling, tattooed all over and smart as a whip. They only play music from the sixties and seventies and they burn patchouli incense. “It’s cute,” Liz Porter said. “I love retro.”
Well, Kendra loves retro, too; of course she does, but only retro that is worth her time. Like she would love to own a ’68 Mustang convertible, which Andrew says she will someday. “You have to be patient,” he whispered in her ear just recently; they were at the hospital gift store where she was pretending to buy something for a sick friend. He followed her back to a corner filled with cheap kid things like Beanie Babies and coloring books and he cupped her ass with one hand and pulled her in close for one hard second before turning back out into the world and complimenting the ancient woman at the counter on her fine selection of pediatric gifts.
Kendra wants her own dressing room with little globe lights all around a great big mirror. Maybe she will even have a three-way mirror with a platform like at Nordstrom. She is someone who really should be in New York or Chicago or Boston instead of here where you can’t even find what Oprah recommends you buy to use and wear. She is by nature, a beautiful woman, everyone tells her so. Her hair is blond and only in recent years has needed the benefit of highlights—she is a perfect size 4 and small enough that she can wear three-inch heels and still keep all the men in the room—even the shortest ones—feeling manly. Part of it is the good fortune of nature, but there is also a lot of care and maintenance that goes into it.
She picks up a rawhide bone and throws it in the trash. She keeps finding them everywhere, sick little reminders. That damn dog, pissing if she yelled at it, and she had no choice but to yell at it, so ill trained and f*cked up. She has no time for dredging up all kinds of sympathy for f*cked-up creatures. That’s another thing she told Ben about that crazy friend of his; who even has time for f*cked-up people when there are so many good ones? That stupid dog would have ruined all these wonderful rugs that came from that sad old man and there was no way that Kendra was going to let that happen. She still can’t get over the good deal she got—and she got the good deal, she is the one who dealt with that pathetic guy so sick with grief to let all those nice Persian rugs go along with a huge mahogany sideboard and a baby grand piano. She said as much to Liz while doing her “Oh, do you really like this?” routine, which she has more than perfected only to see the drop in Liz’s expression, the wash of compassion, and that pissed Kendra off and made her add, “Bless his heart.” Of course Liz can act all compassionate on his behalf because she has always been handed everything in life without having to do anything to get it. Kendra, on the other hand, has been robbed in life, the fortune that should have accompanied her good family name long compromised.
Kendra can’t imagine any death or tragic event that would make her unaware of rugs worth thousands of dollars, that is, if they aren’t coated in dog piss. The rug in the living room alone was appraised at over twenty, and when Liz Porter came over and oohed and ahhed, Kendra knew that finally she had something Liz wanted. Liz with her plain, plump rich girl look—and that is where money makes a huge difference. An overweight body in cheap clothes is just as hideous as it sounds, but you can take a plump girl and squeeze her into expensive clothes and it does make a difference. Elegant pearl dripping sausages, Kendra thinks. Nothing is going to hide what is unattractive, of course, but a person can distract and it is clear Liz has been raised and groomed to do just that. Liz even knelt right there in Kendra’s living room, tasteful black skirt riding up the heft of her thighs, while she rubbed her hands over the threads, admiring the intricate patterns—she even knew about this particular kind of rug and had little boring stories to tell about the poverty-stricken people who wove them over a century ago, like anybody cared to hear that. The dog came in about then and Kendra yanked her onto the back porch and locked the door. She was not about to have that goddamned mongrel pissing around with Liz Porter in the room. Liz Porter had two King Charles spaniels, which they had driven to DC to buy, and she had also been to Fairfield Spa down in Savannah several times when her husband thought she looked tired. Of course, she can go and enjoy herself at patchouli stink-hole cheap massage; that’s slumming for her. She can afford to slum because she is married to Andrew Porter. She has a husband who is worth a shit. She told Ben how Liz Porter went to a weeklong spa and sometimes flew to New York just to see a show and buy new clothes. “That’s the kind of man she’s married to,” she said.
“The kind who likes to get rid of his wife?” He waved one of his stupid wands over her head and then pulled a dead rubber chicken out of his sleeve. He had a wreath of ivy on his head and was carrying a sheet he planned to wear like a toga to introduce his upcoming triple feature: Ben Hur and El Cid and Cleopatra.
“Oh, ha ha,” she said. “He’s a heart surgeon and still manages to do all that needs to be done, including being a real husband.” She had said that several times but lately has had to stop saying it given what is going to happen very soon. Now she is trying to be coolly polite and only arguing back late at night when she knows Abby is asleep and he has had enough to drink that he won’t fully remember. The last time she said something like that, Ben had said, “So maybe he can give you a heart, like the Tin Man.” And then he laughed and laughed, fell back on the bed with his dirty shoes still on, and laughed. “Oh, that’s right,” he sputtered. “The Tin Man actually already had a heart—won’t work then.”
“You are just jealous,” she said, but then stopped because Abby was there in the doorway with that stinking Dollbaby. Abby had tied one of Kendra’s nice retro Vera scarves she got on eBay around the mutt’s neck, and it got Kendra’s attention off of her sarcastic husband and back to the dog and her daughter who never tries to do anything to improve her looks even with all of Kendra’s help and suggestions.
“If we have to have a dog,” she said, “at least get one I won’t be ashamed to walk! One that looks like a dog.”
And with that Ben mumbled that she should get a job and buy her own f*cking dog.
She told him that a job was not in their marital agreement, that the marital agreement was that he would use that business degree he got or finish that law degree he used to get her to marry him. When she decided to marry him, he was going back to school and in the interim he was in business with his old roommate and friend, a terribly unattractive boy who had no social skills and terrible hygiene but was flat out rolling in dough. Her moment of reckoning was when she realized that Ben was not in it for what she thought. Ben talked the ugly idiot into cutting ties with his demanding (and extremely successful) father and doing his own thing.
“Hey, man,” she heard Ben say. “Life is short. And if you want to work in forestry, that’s your choice.” The two were drinking beer out on the back stoop of their dump rental house and passing a joint. “And you sell yourself so short, man. C’mon, you think all you are is what your dad gave you? You don’t see who you really are?”
The puffed-up p-ssy was crying by then and Kendra had wanted to take a broom and sweep them both out into the yard like the wasted strays they were.
“Look at you, man,” Ben said. “You actually read Ulysses, and you’re the only one who got an A in that class. And you knew how to rewire the sound system, remember? What about all your great ideas? You’re a geek, man. The world is yours on a silver platter.”
She knew then that everything she wanted had gone right down the tubes, and to make it worse, she was already pregnant with something that had not been her idea. Before she even had the chance to say she didn’t want it, he had all but given out cigars, so proud of himself. She was holding a piece of Wedgewood china, a gift from one of her mother’s friends, and she threw it against the wall.
They still get postcards from the old friend, long ago reunited with his dad and making a mint. “You deserve a share of that,” she has said. “You need to be more assertive—like call him up and say, ‘Hey? Remember me? I’m the only person who even treated you like a human and could stand to be around you,’” but he couldn’t hear her.
“Hey, man, good for you,” she heard him say into the phone when the guy called from some European vacation or the huge summer home he and his wife were building over on Bald Head Island. And his wife was beautiful—young and beautiful—and hadn’t even had a baby yet.
“He owes you,” she said, often enough that he told her she reminded him of that fairy tale where the greedy wife keeps sending the poor husband out to wish for bigger and bigger until they wind up with nothing. “Or the one where the man gets so pissed off at her nagging that he uses his last wish to wish the big sausage got stuck to her face for a nose or something like that—remember that one? I love that story. Abby would love that story.”
“I am the last person to be greedy,” she said. “There is not a greedy bone in my body. I just want you to be appreciated for your own part in him being the success he is. Without you he would have killed himself or something, or should have.”
“Here it is.” He pulled out a postcard from his drawer. “Here is what you’ve been searching for. It says, ‘Thanks, man. You have been such a good friend to me.’” She grabbed and tore it, and he told her to produce a similar artifact from her drawer. He said, “Let’s see who thinks you’re nice.” She could tell he was getting ready to light into her but then froze in the way he always does when Abby enters the room. And there she was, a mini carbon copy of him. Everybody said that, too, and it infuriated her. Oh, she’s the spitting image of Ben. Kendra’s blond hair and blue eyes were lost in the mix and so was her body. Abby has dark wiry hair and a chunky little body, and what kind of mother would she be if she didn’t make her lose weight? Of course she needed a regimen for exercise. Doesn’t the child see when they try on clothes in the junior department how they all fit her mom? Shouldn’t that make a kid want to lose weight and improve her looks? But instead she is his child and as a result doesn’t care who her friends are and doesn’t care what she wears. She just doesn’t care about anything except that goddamned dog.
And the child doesn’t appreciate anything either, like this party for instance. She will go on and on about a stupid f*cking disappearing chamber and doesn’t even notice all the time Kendra has spent researching First Ladies and planning the party. Well, someday it will all be behind her. In fact, just the other side of the birthday party is the meeting she has been waiting for so patiently for months and after that everything else will fall right into place. Something is definitely about to happen. Tomorrow night will mark the beginning of a brand-new life.
She’ll likely have to give up her gym membership so as not to run into Liz anymore, but that’s okay; it has gotten so hard these days to continue being nice to her, smiling and acting like they are actually friends. Liz even whispered about what she was planning for their anniversary, and oh, won’t Kendra have some fun with that one? She plans to buy the exact same nightgown and robe set that she watched Liz buy—talk about compare and contrast. Andrew won’t know what hit him. As for Abby, she will come around someday, and she will see why her mother had no choice but to run away with Andrew Porter. They will probably move northward; why wouldn’t they? His children are old enough to get on a plane if they want to visit, and even though they are quite a bit older, she can imagine they will make room for Abby someday. A few years of private school and personal trainers and the child will look back and think thank God. Then she will finally see Kendra for who she really is, a good mother and a smart woman with a plan. The one thing Kendra will not ever let her know about is the disappearance of Dollbaby and what really happened. Kendra likes to think that Abby will grow into the kind of woman who could laugh about it someday, that she will be the kind of woman who would understand why her mother had no choice but to do what she did, but that’s a little trickier. It will be hard enough to successfully convince the kid her dad is a total loser (without saying a word of course). Very few people are skilled enough to handle such subtle trickery, but Kendra considers herself a professional. Ben thinks he’s a magician? Oh my, just watch her make him disappear. Just watch him stand and wonder what in the hell hit him. You want to see what’s up her sleeve? You want to see what’s in her hat? She reaches and plants another sticker under the bench of the baby grand.
“I suspect you’re someone with quite a bag of tricks,” Andrew Porter whispered in her ear that very first night they met and she told him that she was indeed and that if he was very good, she just might let him see what’s up her sleeve.
“I’d rather see what’s up your skirt,” he whispered, a little drunk for sure but not too drunk to know what he was doing. And then Liz walked up and asked if Kendra wanted to go with her to the little girls’ room. Oh, the stupid little girls’ room and all the stupid little girls in there. Kendra has never liked other girls but learned early to pretend that she did so she could get closer to the boys she was interested in. She has always thought of herself as a Scarlett O’Hara type and does believe that the end always justifies the means.
She puts a sticker under the art deco lamp in the hall and nearly trips on the dog bowl that Abby has left there in hopes Dollbaby will be home any day now. Impossible, of course, and now on top of everything else, she has to deal with that. She will make up something, tell all about the phone call she got—so so sad—Dollbaby wandering way out in the county, hit by a car. If she had known the child was going to be this torn up and spend days searching, she would have just said right up front something like Dollbaby got hit by a car. But then it would have potentially been her fault instead of the way she planned it, which was to say Dollbaby got out of the fence Ben built for her. How’s that for a disappearing chamber? How’s that for some f*cking magic?
Notes about: Willis Morgan Hall
Born: March 13, 1921 Died: March 14, 2007, 5:20 p.m.
Holderness, New Hampshire
Willis Hall died of throat cancer in the old farmhouse where he had spent his whole life, where every room smelled of the sweet cherry pipe tobacco he smoked for years along with cigars and, ten years prior, cigarettes. He was known in his handsome early years as the boy who would imitate the Philip Morris ads or say “Hey, good looking, got a cigarette?” and had met two of his three wives with that line. All three of his ex-wives were with him at the end. He joked that he and the king Yul Brynner played had a lot in common. They both should have quit smoking sooner and they both had lots of wives gathered at the deathbed. The only time he was ever away from home was when he was in the service. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, which he liked to say was indeed just as bad as it sounded. Bulge is not a nice word, he said. Used most often for what is unattractive—eyes and stomachs—or what is pornographic, you know? Every year some schoolchildren would pop up with questions for a history project and he gave them just enough for a story, just what they needed. The cold and the filthy conditions, the way that battle hit them worst just when they thought they were almost out of the woods.
The ground was still covered in snow though the days were just enough longer that it felt like spring was coming. One wife noted that he always said he loved this time of year when everything was thawing and muddy, the plants starting to stir and break the soil. He said he felt so sexy in the spring. “He told you that, too?” another wife asked, the youngest of the three, though they all looked about the same age and could have been sisters, and they all laughed.
“How can you not love him?” the other wife said. “Who wouldn’t fall for him? Sweet as sugar, aren’t you?”
“Easy to fall, but hard to keep him,” another said. They all were remarried, and though he had girlfriends, two who had brought casseroles, only the wives were present that day at dusk. It was his favorite time of day, they said. He liked dusk and he liked well-made shoes and he loved Angie Dickinson especially as Pepper the Police Woman; he liked Martini and Rossi, which Angie advertised and of course she was the reason he also started eating avocados, which were often not easy to find in New Hampshire. All three wives said—at different private times—how they had wanted life with him to work but that he was stuck there, not even willing to take a vacation. Not willing for his wife to work and be gone all day. In the summer he might venture out a little bit, eat out locally, go to the occasional movie, but once the snow fell, that was it, he stayed put. “And,” the third of the three had said, sadly shaking her head, “there is a lot of snow in New Hampshire in the winter.”
The only photograph in the room is one of himself as a child, his mother and father on either side lifting him by the arms up and over a mound of snow as tall as he was. When asked about his parents, he said they were wonderful to him. His mother once told him that everyone loved him so much, all the girls in town loved him, how would he ever choose a wife? “It was hard,” he said, and laughed. “I would love for my mother to know how wonderfully difficult that choice proved to be.”
When asked to tell about the charm he seemed to have over everyone, how he had managed to have three ex-wives who love him dearly, he said his favorite power tool had always been silence. “I’m their mirror,” he said. “And they always come back for one more look.” Toward the end, when in and out of a deep drugged sleep, he gripped my hand with a strength that surprised me and said stay.
I will think of him every time I smell tobacco or peel an avocado or hear mention of Angie Dickinson or the word bulge. I will continue to marvel at his ability to reflect back to people what they need to see and how it seemed he needed nothing. I asked permission to take one of his many empty tobacco tins, thinking I would keep things in it, earrings, loose change, but the smell is still so powerful I keep it capped like a genie for a time I might need to conjure the memory of Willis Hall, a good-humored selfless spirit I didn’t really know at all beyond what he reflected back on whoever was talking to him at the time.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Willis Hall
Smoke and snow and snow and snow. Sometimes a cigarette can keep you warm—that tiny bit of light, red glow, smoke breath warm within, or you can pretend it does. The Ardennes are not unlike the White Mountains or the Green Mountains, or you can pretend that—snow, rock, trees—but so far from home. And cold. Cold hands, warm heart, his mother said, and she said one, two, three, jump, and he was up and over a mound of snow—a mound, a bulge, a hill of heavy falling snow, and a forest so dense, too dense to see, and snowing, breath smoking. The young man beside him can’t go anymore—Stay, he says—his wounded feet torn and raw so he sinks down into a burrow of roots and waits and waits and smokes when it is safe to smoke, breathes in and breathes out, and now he’s cold, ice cold to the touch. Breathe in and breathe out and sometimes don’t breathe at all, stay and hold his hand, wrap his feet, this identical boy in age and uniform. The safest choice is not to move but to breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out and sometimes don’t breathe at all. Sweet as sugar, his mother says. Cold hands, warm heart. Cold hands, warm heart.
Stanley
STANLEY STONE CAN’T COMPLAIN. He lives in a little apartment with a good bed and good light. The windows of his bedroom face west so he sees the sun setting over the woods near the interstate. He’s got two sons, one a successful software salesman in the Midwest and the younger one, Ned, a health and PE teacher at the local elementary school. Ned does a little acting with the community theater and he leases a field just outside of town and now is known for having the best pumpkin patch in the county. And it’s good that he is finally known as the best in something because that is a long time coming. He was a kid who was always in trouble but had finally graduated and seemed to have gotten it all together. Once upon a time, he had a nice smart wife and was the assistant principal of a high school over in South Carolina, and then next thing they knew, she left him and he had to pay her a lot of money, got a DUI, and on and on and on, everything in his life falling apart like a house made of limp worthless cards.
He also slept in Stanley’s bed for three weeks after Martha died, and even though Stanley protested and cussed and said some pretty awful things, he found that hearing Ned’s breath those nights was maybe the greatest comfort he has ever known. Stanley couldn’t sleep with the emptiness, the cool sheets, the way the clock face wasn’t blocked by her silhouette and glared out at him with its old glowing green face. He could not sleep with all the thoughts of all he had not done in their life together.
Not only did Ned stay, carefully turning off the lamp by the chair where Martha always read and then climbing in when he thought Stanley was already asleep, but he never told, never mentioned it, not even these times recently when Stanley has been hard on him and once again said harsh and judgmental things he doesn’t really mean to say, an old habit that is dying hard. After his wife left him, Ned was a spiral out of control. “So you lost a baby,” Stanley had said to him. “A lot of people do. You get over it.” But Ned could not get over it. He was worse off than his wife and she was having a hard time of it, too. Stanley told how Martha had a miscarriage between the two boys. Such a common thing. He didn’t say, Stand up and take it like a man, but he wanted to say that. There was a part of him thinking that was the right thing.
“It’s not the same, Stanley,” Martha had said, her hand on his arm feeling like the weight of a big stinking dead albatross. “Their baby was born. Their baby had a name.”
“And their baby had an awful genetic disease that would have been miserable to live with and cost them more than they could ever have afforded.” He tried to make her see his reason, but she wouldn’t even look at him at that point. “It’s called survival of the fittest. It was not meant to live.”
“It was your grandson. It was your namesake.”
“Foolish to name it. What were they thinking?”
“They were hoping, that’s all. Hoping.” Martha stood her ground on that one, and even though he told her that she needed to stay out of their lives and let them tend to it themselves, she was right there, buying the casket and arranging for the service, and yes, he felt like a shit to think it, but all he could think is how he wished it had been born dead or born too early or any number of other scenarios than what they had, a scene at a hospital where the two grown-up parents fell apart and were no better than children themselves. The girl’s parents showed up and Ned let them do all the comforting and then it was done—over. The marriage was over and he was stuck with a mortgage and alimony until she got on her feet. And all that time Ned kept himself functioning just above a stupor. When confronted, he said it was the one thing he knew how to do until he slammed into a station wagon full of high school girls on their way to a pep rally. He didn’t kill anyone, but he could have; everyone kept saying it was an absolute miracle that he didn’t given how fast he was going. People who saw him tossed through the windshield said he seemed to bounce like rubber off onto the shoulder, that the drugs and liquor that were killing him had actually, in that moment, saved his life.
And so he did his time. Months in the hospital, a rebuilt pelvis. A plate in his head. A scar along his right eye that looks like he got in a knife fight. He got a couple of months in jail because he had been warned too many times by too many people and then a lot of community service and what Stanley now is able to laugh and say was the hardest service of all—going with Martha to church every single week. She was the one who suggested he forget about the pressures of administrative positions and think about teaching. “You have always been good with kids,” she told him. “You could coach. You could do driver’s ed.” As soon as she said it, she caught herself. “Maybe not driver’s ed. But . . .” She paused and Stanley could tell she was choosing her words carefully. “You could do a course with kids, you know, to talk about what can happen.” And that’s what he did and in no time it seemed he was on the right path; he worked hard and he checked in with Martha several times a week to talk about what all he was doing. She listened about the pumpkin patch long after any normal person with a normal threshold for boredom could’ve stood and yet there she was, the two of them so closely knit together by then that Stanley could do as he pleased and not have to deal too much with either of them. He was working hard and getting pretty sick of it. There was very little he enjoyed and he realized this the day there was an electrical storm that blew the power out and he could not watch the evening news. The evening news. That was what he looked forward to.
Ned’s older brother, Pete, had breezed through without a single problem; they see him on major holidays and Stanley gets presents along the way. Pete was easy, a no-nonsense unemotional boy, the opposite of Ned, who was the kind of tantrum-throwing child Stanley had no patience for. People always talked about how good Martha was, how sweet, and yeah, he could give her that, but what all those people didn’t know was also how passive and withdrawn she was. Yes, she was there for Ned, and yes, dinner was almost always on the table—sometimes microwave shit in later years but there nonetheless—and the clothes did get washed and she did almost always go to church and to bridge club, but even before Martha got sick there was a low-grade despondency, a depression that Stanley was probably responsible for, too. He tried to make it better in the early years. He bought flowers every now and then. He never forgot her birthday, but still something was always missing in their life together.
People didn’t go running into therapy every five minutes back then, but he suspects if they had, someone would have told him that he was a really shitty father—a really shitty man, in fact. He had done so much wrong and yet on the surface he looked like a man who had done a wonderful job with everything. When Martha complained of her weariness and fatigue, he made jokes. When someone at church had suggested that she might have Epstein-Barr, he told how he knew a fellow named Epstein in the service—Epstein’s Bar and Grill—food guaranteed to slow you down so you have to take to the bed or have a blinding migraine that lets you off the hook to do pretty much anything. Sex? What in the hell was that?
But then she got cancer and no one denied the reality of that.
Stanley wasn’t there enough. He knows that now. Truth is he knew it then but just didn’t have the guts to stand up and deal with it. He was so focused on his business. He did what was expected of him. It was like standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Every now and then, you actually feel patriotic and like you might give a goddamn, but usually it’s just a pain in the ass to have to stand when you’ve worked your ass off and feel tired. Just do what is expected in a way that numbs the world. And he stayed there, humming along, worked on a few church committees, advised the city council, did the Boy Scouts a couple of years, took a sack of toys to some poor family across the river at Christmas. When he looks back now he wishes he could recall some of the faces there waiting, but he can’t. He was thinking of things like how his muffler didn’t sound quite right or what in the hell was he going to buy for Martha when she didn’t need another goddamned thing cluttering the space. It already drove him crazy, that wall of knickknacks that rattled when you came through the living room. Things rattled all over the house. She loved little Limoges boxes—expensive-as-hell things commemorating this or that and to this day he regrets the way he cleared a shelf with the brush of a hand, leaving everyone silent for days. He remembers that with great clarity, the landing of every splintered shard of porcelain, but he can’t remember a single child receiving from his a*shole hands the only Christmas gift of the year, something Martha or someone at the church had bought and wrapped. Boy: age 8. Wants a skateboard but really needs clothes. Girl: age 6. Wants a kitten but understands she might get a Polly Pocket doll instead. Really needs shoes and a coat and underwear. He found these slips of paper in her purse, right there with grocery lists and a coupon file—pieces carefully clipped but obviously never used.
He and Martha had not planned what they would do in their old age; like everything else, he had assumed they would deal with it when they got to it, muddle on through. There was plenty of money. He had made sure of that, but somehow he had always assumed she would be the one left to deal with everything. The day she died—that awful day he had to sit there and tell her it was okay to die—he knew he had to figure out and execute his own plan immediately. He didn’t want to wait until he got sick and slapped into an old folks’ home somewhere. It would be like Pete to just come get him and check him in to some really nice spot near him and then drop by once a month. But Stanley wanted to stay home. He grew up here and he has lived here for seventy-nine years and he wants to die here. The past decade has brought Ned back to life, remorseful and reformed and not willing to leave Stanley’s side, but very much alive. Ned wants to be the son Stanley has always wanted him to be, though even Stanley would be hard-pressed to say what that might entail. And though Stanley would not have given anything for Ned’s presence all those nights he lay there beside him, it was also his own time of reckoning. He had been a bad father and he could not let Ned feel all the responsibility himself. Ned was vowing to stay put, live with him, do things together, and that’s when Stanley began hatching the idea of what he would do. What he had to do. He would tell his sons first that he wanted to live in a place like Pine Haven and then when they successfully reminded him of all the times he had said he would never live in such a place, he would convince them that he needed to be there, needed the assistance and the secure knowledge that someone—a medical person he would stress—is always close by. He knew not to list physical problems because that would have meant many hospital visits and tests. No, the easiest was just to create his own dementia, confess that he was having trouble remembering things and then focus on something—wrestling—in a way that was obsessive and exhausting. He has never acted a day in his life, but he took the role and has done quite well with it. The hardest part was giving up driving but small sacrifice if it buys him some time alone and forces Ned to move on. Everyone seems convinced and for the first time in years Stanley feels a real sense of solitude. People usually say peace and solitude but he’s not there yet. The peace is yet to come and maybe it never will. Maybe a lack of peace is what comes to someone like him who never was able to give the right thing at the right time. Someday he will let Ned know the truth; someday, when Ned has more people in his life and Stanley is closer to the end, he will list his many regrets and all the ways he feels he failed as a father. “We’re even,” Stanley will say. “It ain’t a pretty picture, but we’re even. And you,” he will add, “you are young and have a whole life ahead of you.”
Some of those nights when Ned lay there beside him, Stanley would inch his hand close enough to feel the warmth of his son’s body. How many nights could he have so easily reached for Martha’s hand. Once she was diagnosed, it seemed wrong, false somehow. Though of course he did hold her hand at the end, he was so sorry that it came about because she was dying, that she would see it that way, the result of her dying. And he did love her. She was a good person, a kind person. She was a friend, a companion, and perhaps that’s all it was. And perhaps that was all someone like him was capable of. Oh sure, trace it back to hard parents, hard living, but how awful to come to the end and see that all you’ve been is another goddamned link in the chain that keeps out the happiness. And Pete is just like him. Everyone thinks he’s so successful and great, a chip on every square. And yet for all Stanley knows Pete could be as empty and hollow as that cheap chocolate Easter Bunny that poor weird child from next door was giving out last month along with Girl Scout cookies.
When he was a much younger man, he liked watching wrestling. It was a guilty pleasure and something he would never have wanted Martha or his colleagues to know any more than he would invite them in when he read Playboy and allowed his hand to satisfy in a way that Martha never had and never would. There was something in the reckless abandon in both acts that he loved and admired. He liked the way big burly men strapped themselves into nothing more than a jock, peroxided their hair or got big tattoos and then came out like animals sprung from a cage. He thought how it must feel good as hell to scream at the top of your lungs and hurl your body into somebody built like a concrete post, to breathe heavy and pound and slam and sweat. Yeah, it did have a lot in common with his sexual fantasies in those days, though the fantasies were all about women—strong, tough women. Not to diminish the sweet corn-fed-looking ones, the tea-cake service ladies and Martha was definitely one of them, but he liked the fantasy of a woman who could grip his wrists and hold him in place. He liked women like he saw on Roller Derby, but God knows that was a century ago.
It was the Saturday night after Martha died. Pete and his family had come and gone, done all the right things and all that needed doing.
“I don’t need you here, Ned,” he said. “What’s your problem?”
“I want to be here for you.” The boy’s voice cracked like he might’ve been twelve and there he was a forty-five-year-old divorced reformed druggie schoolteacher studying to be Curly in a low-rent production of Oklahoma, a show Stanley thinks is only rivaled in stupidity by Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Who cares what the surrey looks like or how goddamned high the corn is. Martha ate all that shit with a spoon and he was as tolerant as he could be, but a man has his limits for sure. He sure hated to see Lois Flowers decline so quickly and have to live over in the nursing wing, but he had sure as hell not missed those sing-alongs at dinnertime. She either sang ridiculous jazzed-up show tunes or beautiful old songs that nearly broke his heart.
“Don’t pity me, Ned. It’s unbecoming to both of us,” Stanley had said. “And you’ve done your time. Use your ‘get out of jail free’ card and just go away.” He went in his bedroom and slammed the door; he tried to read but couldn’t and there wasn’t a sound. He imagined Ned just stood there frozen long after the fact, like a snake will do once you startle it. Ned coiled up and ready to strike, only Stanley knew that was not true. Ned was a different man; the anger and the bitterness and the weak victim wash he’d lived in all those years, all dried up. So many nights, Stanley got himself to sleep with a tortured litany of all of his failings. He was a shitty father. Embroider it on a pillow. And he was a shitty husband. Paint it on the overpass of the interstate. And the God he prayed to on behalf of others was not someone he even knew or believed in. When Martha’s hospice volunteer, a young woman he sees coming and going out of the nursing building here at Pine Haven, came to their house, she told Stanley that Martha needed his help.
“She needs you to help her go,” she said. “She needs you to tell her it’s okay to die.”
“But it’s not okay to die,” he said, and he said it loud, so loud he is sure that Martha heard him even though she had been in a coma for days. Her breathing changed and there was a restlessness, limbs twitching.
“Please,” she whispered, and gripped his hand. “Help her.” It was just the two of them there. Pete was with his family at the Holiday Inn and Ned had gone to the grocery store and so he went and sat down, took Martha’s hand in his own. “Tell her,” the woman prompted and stepped back from the doorway. Outside the birds were singing and the winter sky was a clear pale blue, the color of those little boxes she bought when the boys were born. He leaned in close to Martha’s ear and whispered that he loved her and that he would miss her but that he understood it was time for her to go. And her eyes opened like something in a horror movie and that was the end. It was just like that. It was just that fast.
That stare. He tried to think of everything else in the world except that stare, but it kept coming back and waking him, shocking him out of the traces of light sleep. Regrets and regrets and then he heard the door open and then felt weight on the other side of the bed. And then Ned was there, defying him, disobeying him, stretched out in Martha’s place. Stanley faked sleep, letting his breath lighten, but with Ned’s presence his mind was able to wander, allowing him to step into a ring and beat the shit out of everything that he hated in his life. He would wrestle it all to the ground. He heard the announcer say so: Stanley Stone—hard as a rock, heart of granite and blood as cold as marble.
After a week of Ned lying there at night and their quiet breakfasts together that had become something Stanley looked forward to, he began thinking up his plan. He would slowly start to slip. He would ease himself into character, an actor on the stage. He would be obsessed with wrestling and just rude enough to keep people at a distance. He would not shave every morning and get a regular haircut as he had done for the past fifty years. He would convince his sons he couldn’t remember things like cholesterol medication or taking a shower; he would make them believe with great conviction that he needed to live in one of those retirement places and then everyone would be on his own, and if Ned had any chance of making it in life, he’d have the freedom to do so. It was a project that took many months, but it was successful. At first they were amused by their dad watching television. Other than the news and occasional major sport events, he had never watched television even when Martha begged him to join her. He learned a lot from watching television and he also had Ned drive him to Raleigh when the Wrestling Federation came to town, busloads of people screaming and cheering for the Undertaker and the Hardy Boys. He bought himself an Undertaker T-shirt and started wearing really short shorts around the house. He liked the way the Undertaker looked like Johnny Cash on steroids and so that’s what he thought of himself. He was Johnny back from the dead. He was the Undertaker dressed all in black.
It worked. He convinced them, and here he is—a nice little apartment with a great big bathroom designed for if and when he needs a wheelchair; three good meals a day, great cable television. What’s not to like? Ned still comes every day to check on him so Stanley makes sure to do something that keeps Ned at a distance and believing that this is the right and best choice. When Ned is around he always says rude things, which means he has to do it when Ned is not around as well, which is harder to do but necessary to keep everyone fooled. He has thought that if he had to, he could begin to dress like a wrestler—tight shorts and tank tops and such—but he is hoping he won’t have to go there. It has been hard enough for him to get used to doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable; occasionally, he has enjoyed it, but usually it just wears him out. He points to women with oxygen tanks and tells how he is responsible for their tragic circumstances, how he took their breath away. He burps the alphabet at the dinner table about once every two weeks, usually right after grace has been said over the PA system, which leaves some of the more confused ones staring up as if God himself had said, Eat.
“How far can you get?” Toby asked one night, saying she once burped her way to m but it made her throw up so she hadn’t tried it since. “Z, of course,” he said, and he told her he is a man who always finishes what he starts.
“We got some new mares in the stable,” he told Ned recently, and waved his arm around the dining room, his pointed finger stopping to rest on that woman from Boston—Rachel Silverman. “There’s a tough broad,” he said, and resisted when Ned tried to shush him. “We got ’em all here on the ranch. A couple of high-stepping ponies, a hell of a lot of nags gone to glue, but that new one’s got some fire in her, haunches like a sack mule, but you can’t have it all now, can you?”
“Dad, let’s go to your room,” Ned whispered, and though Stanley would have liked nothing better, so aware of the young woman who had been Martha’s hospice volunteer in the doorway, to have shown reason at a time like that would have possibly undone too much hard work. He saw Ned and the young woman exchange embarrassed smiles; she knew who he was, but who knew if Ned would remember her. Ned was sobbing like a baby the afternoon Martha died.
“That’s the one I’m planning to mount,” Stanley said, and whispered to Ned, “Here I am, big Billygoat Gruff ready for some action.” He pumped his hips and surveyed the reaction around the room. The young food attendants giggled, something they would probably get in trouble for later. Most of the women just blushed and glared at him, Marge Walker rising from her chair like she was going to take action. Toby was the one who laughed. She was puffing on a fake cigarette and was standing close enough to hear what he had said.
“My money says she’ll throw you right off,” Toby said, and puffed harder, flicked the holder like there might be ashes on the end. She looked at Ned. “This your old man?” Ned nodded. “He’s a hoot.” She turned to Rachel who was wearing what looked like a black business suit with pink tennis shoes; it was her first month there. “Did you hear that, umm, what’s your name again?”
“Rachel. Rachel Silverman,” she said. “And I would most definitely throw him. I would throw him away.”
“You hear that, Rocky? She’ll throw your old white ass to the mat.”
“I love nothing better than a good bucking.” He winked at her, feeling so self-conscious and ridiculous he had to fall back on something he had planned to do at awkward times, which was to raise his arms and imitate that silly dance people used to do to that song “YMCA.” He could not count the number of times in his life when he had watched grown intelligent people do the alphabet to that stupid song and look like a bunch of silly idiots.
“Me, too,” Toby said, and laughed great big, kept puffing. “Buck away.”
“Dad, really.” Ned pulled Stanley on toward his apartment and Toby followed. “Yesterday he said he wanted to do a wrestling demo,” she said. “He says if he does I can be his manager. Name’s Toby. Toby Tyler.” She put her hand out and went back down the hall. Clearly she is his best audience member, not to mention a really good person.
“That’s one of my good friends,” he told Ned. “They say she’s queer but who knows and who cares? You know the Village People were queer. Remember that dance I was just doing?”
“Yes, Dad.” Ned said, and gripped his arm tighter.
“You aren’t queer, are you, son?” Stanley asked. “Been a long time since I’ve heard of you gettin a piece.” He knew he had gone too far, but sometimes he had no choice but to make him leave. “I’ll be damned. My son is a queer.”
“Would it matter?”
“Not if you’re happy. Mighty slim pickings in this town, though.”
“I’m not gay, Dad. I was married, remember?”
“Lots of gay people get married,” he said, and stopped to adjust his belt, avoiding going into his apartment. The show is so much harder to pull off when it is just the two of them. “They call it a beard.”
“I like women. I just haven’t met one.” Ned’s vein in his right cheek was showing, always a good sign that he would have to leave very soon or else lose his temper, which it seemed he had made some kind of pact or oath not to do.
“Well, there’s a cute one works here. Go on over there and find her. She’s the one who came when your mom died.”
Ned turned and Stanley realized he had sounded way too sane. “She tries every day to get me to f*ck her and I keep telling her that I’m only interested in old p-ssy.”
“Dad.”
“Really. Someday when you get to be old you’ll understand, but what I have told her is that I got a young son who I bet would like to pin her to the mat. Oh shit, look at the time. It’s time for the rumble. I taped it. The Royal Rumble so either you got to go now or you have to promise to sit and not speak for the whole time.” Stanley stopped making eye contact and turned on the television as loud as it would go. Ned stood in the doorway a few more minutes and then finally said he would be back later. “I love you, Dad,” he said, and closed the door. And every day is the same. Same show. Same ending. He will have to do it again later this afternoon, but at least it is getting easier and it seems Ned does talk to more people these days; he’s a little more outgoing and one day the hospice girl even asked Stanley how his son was doing.
Stanley is glad Ned has finally bought his own place, a little house on the way to the beach. Still, he knows that the boy’s real idea of home is locked up in that house on the corner of Fifteenth and Winthrop. His heart is locked there, too, even though that house is gone as of a year ago, a Food Lion in its place. The boys were furious at him for selling so quickly and everyone lectured him about how he knew better than anyone how a person shouldn’t make major decisions like that in the aftermath of death, but he knew he couldn’t stand to look at it; he knew it would make it even harder for Ned to find his way, that he’d be like some old alley cat making his way back to the door again and again and again. The place felt terrible after Martha died, like he couldn’t even breathe, so he did everything quickly. He had her prize rosebushes lifted and given away, her favorite planted at her grave, which he has not visited since going there with Ned to plant it. But now, ever since Sadie Randolph invited Stanley to close his eyes and wander his own home, he has not been able to stop the journey. There is not a night to pass that Stanley doesn’t make his way through that house, the afghan and television and peace lilies. Martha always wanted a greenhouse, an expanse of light and glass to brighten the dark hallway. When she got sick he almost did it but then didn’t. Why bother now? he could imagine her saying, and wouldn’t that have been an awful ending? Why bother now that I won’t live through winter, now that we need all the money for this awful oxygen machine and the morphine that keeps me looped and reaching for things nobody else can see.
But now he lets himself imagine the joy he might have seen if he’d surprised her with what she really wanted, unasked, just given—a gift.
“Oh, Stanley, it’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” And the sound of her voice in his head is more painful than anything he has ever allowed himself to imagine. He winces and is glad to open his eyes and find Ned gone. He doesn’t want Ned to get to the end and feel bad, sorry for all that he missed in life. He wants him in there with the thick of it—swimming, diving, claiming his own life and giving to it with all the gusto he has. Ned has done his time. He has more than earned a new life.
Stanley turns down the dark hallway where the greenhouse would have been and he stands in the doorway. There is the dog he promised and never got. The notebooks of numbers that would say when they could afford to do this or that—the stack of travel books on Martha’s bedside table, carefully marked with a Post-it to remind him of all the places they never went. Bermuda. She just wanted to go to Bermuda; you can practically see Bermuda from here and yet they never got there.
Just yesterday Toby knocked and popped her head in, Rachel Silverman right there behind her. “Stanley? Where are you? Outer space?” Toby is one of those people who is always cheerful and he can’t help but wonder when she breaks. What does it take to bring that old girl down? He knows there is something. You can’t live this many years and not know the weight, the pull of some regret.
“Yes. Outer space,” he said, too tired for the show. Just too damn tired.
“You look sad.” Her voice was so level and calm—a depth that sounded so good to his ear. The last thing he wanted was for someone to see him cry, to blow his hard-earned cover.
“Of course I’m sad,” he said, and went to open his bathroom door. He stepped in and took a deep breath. “I’m sad there’s no guns in this goddamned place so I could pick off some old a*sholes who need a mercy killing.” He left the door open while he peed.
“I told you he’s testy,” Toby said. “But I still like him. We’ll come back another day, though. Sadie says if anybody in town can answer all your questions, Stanley is the man.”
“We’ll see,” Rachel said. “He’s not very dependable and not very nice and truth be told, I’ve probably had enough drama for one life.”
He had his hand on the knob to steady himself. He likes her. He doesn’t want to like her, but he really does.
“Well, I don’t have many friends here,” Toby said. “So I figure if I get the people I like to get to know and like each other maybe we can have a movie group or a book club other than that shitty book club they have here on Thursday night. I taught English literature for forty years and I am sick and tired of reading romantic sagas and inspirational how-to mess. Break out the good stuff.”
Rachel laughed and Stanley leaned just a little to the left so he could see them in his mirror, still waiting politely in the doorway. “I would love to join your club,” she said. “You and Sadie are the only sane people here as far as I can tell.”
“Don’t I know it?” Toby asked. “Do you ever chew or dip?”
“Chew or dip what?”
“Snuff, cigar. Sometimes I take a little dip or a chew, get a good buzz. I know it’s not very popular or ladylike, but I used to smoke like a stack—three packs a day and I still love to get something going in my system, you know?”
“Actually, I do know,” Rachel said. “I smoked a hundred years ago.”
Stanley wanted to open the door and say, You’ve come a long way baby, but even he was tired of his own show, so he just flushed and waited for them to leave. He eased the door shut and turned on the radio. He likes to listen to NPR. He likes the news and Garrison Keillor and he likes listening to classical music, the notes swaddling his mind without words, sopping up all that haunts him as he eases his tired aching body into his chair. And now he’s here again. Rachel Silverman passed by earlier going wherever it is she goes every single morning and every late afternoon. He watches her move across the parking lot and then dip into the shade of the arbor. He watches until he can’t see a trace of her and then he closes his eyes and allows himself to enter the house on Fifteenth and Winthrop. He walks down the carpeted hall to Ned’s room, pale blue walls and the heavy pine furniture Martha picked out for the boys; he finds Ned in there studying and tells him he should take a break, they should do something fun, something they’ve never done before. And when they pass by his toolshed and Stanley sees where Ned has painted an airplane and written his name, he says: Wow, would you look at that? And he doesn’t get angry at all. Really, when you back up and take a good hard look at it, there is nothing to get angry about and the way Ned looks at him from inside that soft kid body—a cowlick in his sweaty boy hair and a laugh that shows his teeth growing in at all angles—breaks what is left of Stanley’s heart.