Early Warning

1979

LILLIAN WENT TO the window in the living room, the one that looked out over the driveway, and watched Arthur. He was standing with a shovel in his hand just where the driveway curved down to the road. His back was to the house, and she couldn’t tell whether he was resting, or whether he had stopped shoveling. The house was utterly silent — she had turned off the TV after watching The Edge of Night, a show that Arthur thought was ridiculous but that Lillian watched because Rosanna had, every day. It was getting dark, and Lillian squinted. Finally, she went to the hall closet, got her coat, wrapped it around herself, and opened the front door. By the time she got to Arthur, he was shoveling again, and Lillian thought he looked all right. She said, “Okay. You want pork chops for dinner? We have some.”

Arthur turned and looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Pork chops are fine.” His tone meant that he would pick at them.

“Or I could make spaghetti with clam sauce. You liked that.” She shivered. Arthur took the two sides of her coat and crossed them more tightly, then turned up her collar. As he did so, he looked brighter. He kissed her. He said, “I did like that spaghetti. I’m almost finished here. What time is it?” He no longer wore a watch.

“A little after five.”

“Do you feel something?”

“What?”

“Do you feel our estate here, Belly Acres, rising up at every corner to enfold and suffocate us?”

“There is a lot of upkeep,” said Lillian, keeping her voice low, neutral. “You should”—but she had suggested that Arthur hire someone to help him before, and he had refused, so she said—“at least find a service to plow the driveway.”

“The thin end of the wedge,” said Arthur. “Ten years ago, I would have shoveled four inches of snow off this driveway in an hour, running and singing the whole time, and now I had to stop every few minutes and catch my breath.”

Lillian shivered again, though it wasn’t very cold, and said, “Maybe you should actually see a doctor.”

Arthur shook his head, as she knew he would. He hadn’t seen a doctor in years. I’ve had enough of that, he always said.

“What if I, your wife, want you to see a doctor?”

“You’re out of luck.” Then he turned her toward the house, putting his right arm over her shoulders and carrying the snow shovel in his left hand. They tromped up the driveway. He said, “I do feel sixty today, though. Every minute of it. When Colonel Manning was sixty, he walked thirty miles a day, keeping a list of wildflowers and birds that he saw on his march.”

“How old was he when I met him?”

“Sixty-six.”

“He had a twinkle in his eye.”

“Somehow,” said Arthur, “he did. Must have been a trick of the light.”

“You have a twinkle in your eye.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

While she was cooking dinner (green beans, too, with browned butter and almonds), they did their daily worrying about Debbie, Dean, and Tina, a prophylactic. Lillian talked to Debbie every day. Debbie told her about Carlie, Kevvie, Hugh, and the dogs. At the moment, the only thing wrong was that one dog had ear mites. Lillian and Arthur agreed that this was not worth worrying about. Dean had broken his wrist in a game of pickup basketball with eight guys who were taller than he was — he had gone for a rebound and hit his hand on the rim of the basket (pretty impressive), and would be in a cast for four more weeks. Lillian said, “How many broken bones is that over the years now?”

Arthur thought for a minute and said, “Eight, if you count the ribs as two.”

“Maybe this will teach him a lesson.”

“What lesson, though?”

“That he isn’t seventeen anymore?”

“I was hoping Linda was going to teach him that lesson.”

“So was she,” said Lillian.

Now for Tina. Tina had taken up the blowtorch. She lived in Seattle. She had sent a picture of herself, in her entire protective outfit, blowtorch in her right hand, hair gathered in a neat ponytail, gloves, helmet, standing in front of a slab of glass maybe an inch or more thick, three feet by four feet. She burned beautiful patterns in the glass, sometimes in the shape of animals or plants, but more often in astronomical designs — the solar system, the moons of Jupiter, six galaxies rotating in the distance. Her boyfriend, who still made his own cosmological paintings, then lit these so that the light came in from the edges somehow and illuminated the heavenly bodies. She’d shipped Lillian and Arthur a piece for their thirty-third wedding anniversary called Virginia Cowslips. In the note, she had written, “Hope you don’t find this too sentimental. I was in a funny mood.” Lillian did not find the image of her daughter bent over a blowtorch at all sentimental, but the piece was very pretty, and Lillian had put it on the dresser in their bedroom. Lillian said, “No news is good news for Tina.”

“No news is normal for Tina.”

“She’ll tell us if she gets pregnant. Even Janet told Andy when she got pregnant.”

They paused to worry about Janet for a moment. Andy had come back from Iowa City oohing and aahing as if she had never seen a baby before; to Lillian, Emily’s pictures looked like those of a normal baby and, indeed, of a Langdon baby, but, having somehow looked past her own babies, Andy was stunned by the new one.

Lillian said, “We could worry about Michael.” Michael had wrecked the car he shared with Richie — DWI, girl in the hospital for a week with a broken pelvis, and Michael himself, not wearing a seat belt, ramming his knee into the key in the ignition and painfully damaging the joint.

“Why bother?” said Arthur. “Worrying about Michael would be an existential exercise.”

“Jesse? Annie? Gray? Brad?”

“They have their complement of worriers,” said Arthur. “I don’t see any positions to fill.”

“I guess it’s time to eat, then.”

Arthur set the table, and Lillian dished up the food — always too much. She looked at Arthur out of the corner of her eye. He was the one she worried about: underweight, short of breath, ever alert (now it was the Iranians again). When she woke up to find him staring out the window at three in the morning, he would say that he just couldn’t sleep. When she asked what he was thinking about, he would say, “The fact that I can’t sleep.” Sometimes she thought he might have been awake all night, but he didn’t yawn or act tired in the normal way, just more wound up. Was he different or worse than he had always been? Lillian had no idea. Maybe she was the one feeling her age, not Arthur. Maybe he seemed a little strange to her because they were diverging in some way that she couldn’t pinpoint. She consciously dragged her gaze away from his plate (he had taken three bites, put down his fork, picked up a piece of bread) to her own, and said, “This turned out nicely.”

“Yes, it did.”

She didn’t ask why he wasn’t eating it. She said, “Maybe we should worry about Henry.”

“You mean because he took a semester’s leave of absence, moved to New York, and is living in the East Village, and no one has heard from him since before Christmas?”

“He’s forty-six years old. He shouldn’t have to check in if he’s going to be out after midnight.”

“Even if it’s been evident for a year that he is kicking over the traces and making up for lost time?”

“I have principles,” said Lillian.

“Name one,” said Arthur.

“What, me worry?” said Lillian.

Arthur laughed. When he did so, Lillian put a couple more beans on his plate. He seemed to like those.

—

JOE WAS HUNGRY after his appointment at the bank, and so he went to the Denby Café, sat down at the counter, and ordered a grilled ham and cheese. He was thinking about the interest he was going to pay on the seed he was about to buy, and whether he should forgo the loan and use most of his savings (but he didn’t want to do that). He knew what Lois was going to say, and Minnie, too, but both options made him nervous. How he had gotten to be one of the luckiest farmers in the area was pretty clear, and not only to him — Minnie had a good job, Lois had both a job and a store, the farm was paid off. Their house was like every kit house — strong, solid, and well put together — and Gary’s old house, buttoned up for the time being, was built to last, too. Did he need a new tractor? That depended on whether he cared about sitting on a seat or in a cab. On the seat, it was dusty and noisy, but he felt that he was seeing more. A cab would be quiet (not to mention cool), but if you were sitting in a cab, why be a farmer at all?

Then Dickie Dugan bumped into him, and he turned around. Dickie thrust a soiled check under his nose and laughed. Bobby Dugan had died a few months earlier — what had the paper said, that he was something like sixty-four, which didn’t seem all that old anymore — and the list of wives (three) and kids (nine) was pretty amazing. Dickie was the oldest boy. The check was for two hundred thousand dollars — not much in some ways, but impressive as a number being handed around the Denby Café. The Dugans had about three hundred acres just off the state highway. The check was signed by Frederick Sanford, CEO, Enterprise Pork Producers. Dickie said, “This is going to be a hog hotel, folks. Air-conditioned suite for every sow.”

Farmers at various tables were shaking their heads a little — only a little, because nobody liked there to be a fight. Then Russ Pinckard, who was something of a joker, shouted, “All the Dugans being replaced by Hampshires? What’s the difference?”

Dickie flushed, but smiled. He said, “You watch for us on the TV, Pinckard! You heard of The Partridge Family? Wait till you see The Dugan Family!”

“More like The Addams Family!” shouted Russ, and about half the assembled farmers laughed. Marie, who was carrying the coffeepot, shook her head and said, “Shush up, now!”

A hog-confinement setup at the Dugans’ made sense in a way, since the place was flat, the soil had never been much good, and the road to Usherton and eastward was right there. The Dugans had made it through the Depression, just barely, and there were so many kids now that they ran wild. On the other hand, Dinky Creek ran right through the back sixty acres, and from there into the river about three miles away, and to the east the landscape flattened and the river started meandering — good spot to deposit any hog detritus. But that was far away from Denby, and Joe had no doubt that the confinement builders would do something about the waste from hundreds of hogs, if not the sights and sounds.

Joe drank his coffee and talked about this new ethanol idea, basically adding corn-based alcohol to gas (“Drink it or drive it, your choice!” joked Russ Pinckard). What was the price of seed, whose ground was ready to plow, who had a new tractor and why, if the world was starving, wasn’t the price of corn and beans a little higher, and would a lawyer like Culver in the Senate really do what was best for farmers, or did he care, for that matter, and would Jepsen be any better? After an hour, he went out, got into Rosanna’s Volkswagen, and headed home. The weather was still cold and the ground still hard — the way it was in early spring when everything seemed held in place, and ugly, too.

D’Ory and D’Onut were sitting by the gate of the dog pen, staring at him as soon as he got out of the car. They knew not to bark, but they allowed themselves a little bit of a whine as he approached. D’Ory was graying around the muzzle, but D’Onut was young and slender, only two years old. When Joe opened the gate, D’Ory came out and D’Onut went over to her favorite tennis ball and brought it to him. She was such an avid fetcher that she never greeted him without an offering. When Jesse was home, she ran with him everywhere. She was a good gun-dog, and, even when Jesse was gone, lived in the hope that there would be something to fetch.

Joe never minded leaving the café. But now, following the dogs into the lowering steel-gray clouds, he felt lonely again. When he walked through the field behind the house, he could look in all directions and see nothing but his own two barns — the larger one, where he kept the workshop and the tractor at his parents’ old place, and the smaller one here, where he kept the seeder and the cultivator and the other implements. Walter and Rosanna had always said that after the Depression, or after the war, after something or other, people would start farming again — it was a healthy life and the best way to raise kids. But in Joe’s lifetime, no one had ever come back. That Jesse was taking a fifth year to complete his B.S. might be a sign that he wasn’t coming back, either. Joe didn’t know if that was bad.

A few days ago, Jesse had called from Ames, supposedly just to say hi, but after Joe talked to him (“Yeah, Dad, I got two A’s and two B’s, and Professor Holland says I’m doing really well on the scours research”) and Lois talked to him, then Minnie talked to him. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, and Joe stood quietly on the landing above her, out of sight, and listened. She said, “Oh, you mentioned her.” Then, “I know you did like her.” Then, “You hadn’t told her you were planning to farm? What did she think you were going to do?” Then, “Well, farm life is hard for some girls. It’s isolating. Not like when I was young.” Then, “Well, of course you’re disappointed, but it’s better to find out now.” Then, voice lowered, “Well, I’m sorry, Jesse. My heart goes out to you. No, I won’t say anything.” Joe had tiptoed up the stairs and gone into the bathroom, where he turned on the water and sighed several deep, deep sighs.

Now he stared out over the empty landscape, the fields still dark and frozen, the trees bare and shaking in the wind (a wind that was numbing the tip of his nose). The dogs had their noses to the ground — the ground was endlessly fascinating for a retriever, the tracks of deer, raccoons, mice, rabbits, birds, and even a turkey or two. Opa had raised them on stories of flocks of turkeys, flights of ducks, waves of prairie chickens, and even cougars slinking past the window in the night, heading for the sheep in the pen (always, according to Opa, to have a pleasant conversation about the meaning of life). Joe imagined D’Ory and D’Onut sniffing layers of tracks heading in every direction, from all past eras. But Joe was a man, not a dog, and what he couldn’t see, he couldn’t perceive. He was lonely, and he knew that his loneliness had nothing to do with Lois or Minnie. He looked at his watch: two-forty-five. He let the dogs lead him on.

—

WHEN MICHAEL DECIDED that he was getting married, Richie could hardly remember who the girl was, even though Michael swore he had met her — Loretta Perroni. She was just about to graduate from Manhattanville College, she was really smart, and her dad owned a hundred-thousand-acre cattle ranch in California. “Dark hair?” he said over the phone.

“Most of the time,” said Michael. “It was blond when I met her, but she dyed it back.”

“Long?”

“Really dark hair and blue eyes. She’s short. When you met her, you pretended to rest your elbow on the top of her head.”

Richie said, “You’re going to marry her? You’ve known her, like, three months.” Susan, the girl Michael had been in the accident with, had broken up with him once she was back on her feet, and Richie knew that Michael was lucky he wasn’t being sued. Michael himself had been shaken enough at the time to go with their mom to AA for a few weeks. It was Richie who had stopped double-dating, because he and Ivy decided to move in together — bed by eleven, because Ivy enjoyed her job at Viking and wanted to succeed. Her goal was eventually to have her own imprint. Richie spent half his day showing office space, and half his day writing ads, finding out the status of new construction, and servicing renters. Mr. Rubino hardly ever came in. He could take a four-hour lunch, or put on his sneakers and go for a run in the park. Sometimes he read two or three newspapers in one day. Michael was now a trader. It was said (by Michael) that Jim Upjohn loved him, that he had great instincts. Obviously, thought Richie, marrying into a hundred thousand acres was another of his great instincts.

The first thing that happened was that Loretta’s parents, Ray and Gail Perroni, flew in from California to meet his mom and dad. His mom took Mrs. Perroni to the house. His dad took Mr. Perroni first to the office, then to lunch at the Century Club. That night, Richie and Ivy were to drop by after dinner (the Waldorf), for dessert. Ivy said that the prospect of crème brûlée was her only incentive, since she disapproved of rich people, but Richie knew that she was dying to meet and observe the strange ducks from the West Coast (she had never met Loretta or traveled farther than Philadelphia).

At the Peacock Alley restaurant, Richie could see them all at the table, his parents and Michael sitting across from the three Perronis. It was a bizarre sight, because the older Perronis, slender and weathered as they were, were hardly tall enough for their feet to touch the floor. Ray stood up to greet them; he came to Richie’s shoulder and Ivy’s eyebrow. But his face was darkly tanned and deeply wrinkled from the middle of his forehead down, and his hands were square and strong and maybe as big as his head. He was wearing cowboy boots. Mrs. Perroni looked just as weathered. She said, “Well, you boys do look alike, don’t you? Had a mare foal out a pair of twins just this spring. I went out in the morning, and the mare was standing by the gate with the tiniest little filly at her side, so I went looking around for the placenta, because you have to make sure it’s complete, you know, and, oh, I found it, all right. Inside it was another little filly, but she was dead. They must have been identicals, which is rare in horses, because they had the same cowlicks. That foal could barely reach her mama’s teats, but she made it. She’s going to be a nice animal, I think.”

Loretta, staring at her mother, said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Mom!”

Mrs. Perroni leapt to her own defense. “Well, it’s an interesting story.”

“Yes,” said his mom, in her usual distracted way, “it is.” Richie smiled to himself, pulled out Ivy’s chair, which was right beside the minuscule Mrs. Perroni, then went around the table and sat down beside his dad, who seemed to have turned to stone, he was so self-contained.

Things had moved quickly, because the first thing his mom said after they ordered dessert was “Well, what is it today? May 18? I guess Loretta and Michael, of course, want a June wedding, and the only Saturday they can get in June this year is the 23rd, so we have five weeks to put it together.” Richie now understood without being told that Loretta was saving herself for marriage, and nothing Michael might have done or said would change her mind.

“Oh goodness. Easy as pie,” said Mrs. Perroni.

And it was, because the Perronis had all the money in the world and knew every single person in Carmel and Pebble Beach, California, and it was as if the waves rolled apart, and all Michael and Loretta did was walk between them to the door of the Carmel Mission (the second in California). His dad flew them out: Richie himself, best man; Ivy, one of eight bridesmaids; and his mom. They left at 6:00 a.m., stopped in Des Moines to pick up Uncle Joe, Aunt Lois, Aunt Minnie, Jesse, and Annie, and landed in Monterey at noon. From there, they were driven in a stretch limo to a huge hotel on the ocean. Aunt Lillian, Uncle Arthur, Debbie, Hugh, and the kids had arrived the night before. Janet, with Emily and Jared, showed up in time for lunch beside the pool (the golfers were out in droves), and then Aunt Claire, Gray, and Brad (though Uncle Paul could not get away) in time for dinner, a huge buffet. Uncle Henry had promised to come, but called at the last moment to say he was stuck in Chicago. Aunt Eloise showed up for the rehearsal dinner, having driven down from San Francisco “just to have a look,” but she seemed rather at home, especially after Rosa, Lacey, and Rosa’s husband, Ross, the violin-bow maker, arrived. Apparently, Ross was very famous; all the Perronis’ guests went up to him and threw their arms around him; even the hotel staff smiled at him and shook his hand. The wedding party took up a floor of the hotel, and everyone stayed up talking. Aunt Eloise and Ivy went off in a corner and chatted about John le Carré and Henry Kissinger, and Uncle Arthur said, “Who are they, again?” which caused Aunt Eloise to take Aunt Lillian off into another corner and have a serious talk with her. His mom stayed with Emily, carrying her, kissing her, sitting her in chairs and on beds, bouncing her on her silk-clad knee. Ivy never looked at the baby at all.

The wedding was at four. The mission was a long, pale building set against a hillside not far from the ocean. Richie could smell the garden of flowers through the open doors all through the ceremony. The Langdons sat in four rows of pews on the groom’s side of the church, and when everyone had to kneel during parts of the Mass, they gave each other covert glances, leaned forward, and did not make the sign of the cross. Aunt Eloise sat through the whole thing and kept her mouth shut, as did Ivy, but Rosa and Lacey knelt and bowed their heads. After the ceremony, they took a bus along the winding, breezy roads back to the hotel, where the reception, for three hundred guests, was in a golden room with a huge set of windows that looked out onto the bay. Loretta, who Richie now understood was an only child, and therefore spoiled rotten, according to even her own father, wore her mother’s dress, updated slightly. It had a huge skirt and a twelve-foot train, and was covered with lace. Ivy kept whispering, “That dress is ridiculous!” All the bridesmaids were required to wear gloves to the middle of their upper arms, and black gowns. Once again, according to Ivy, ridiculous. Most of the men wore cowboy boots. Everyone was friendly. People kept coming up to him and saying, “Oh, you’re the twin! Are you the lefty?” There were two congressmen there, four state legislators, the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, as well as Nancy Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Doris Day, and three other actors Richie only sort of recognized. They all stared at his mom, who was wearing a beautiful Chanel suit. But there were lots of other people, too, who weren’t dressed any better than Uncle Joe or Aunt Lois, and who ran around dancing and laughing, so much so that Ivy had to go upstairs and change out of her long skirt. The champagne was Veuve Clicquot, and Richie had plenty, but he saw Loretta stop Michael after one glass, and Michael was smiling. So a miracle had happened after all.

The next afternoon, once Michael and Loretta had gone on to Maui, everyone got into a bus that took them to the Angelina Ranch. It was a long ride, even after they entered the gate. A hundred thousand acres was ten times the size of Uncle Joe’s farm, 156 square miles, all contiguous, all running up and down hills, over fields, into arroyos. In the seat in front of him, Uncle Joe was staring out the window at the pale-golden hills and the occasional groups of cows and calves. Next to him, Ivy was reading a manuscript. Across the aisle, his mom and Janet were talking about Emily. His dad was sitting in the first row of the bus, hunched forward, listening to little Mr. Perroni and the bus driver. Aunt Eloise and Aunt Lillian had decided to “forgo” the trip to the ranch, Aunt Eloise to go to the beach with Rosa instead, Aunt Lillian because Uncle Arthur seemed very jet-lagged. Lacey’s boyfriend had shown up, so they had gone into Monterey, and Ross was sleeping off the party. Richie heard Rosa say to his mom, “No, no booze. But he hasn’t seen that many people all in one place since the last Dead concert he went to, in 1969. It sort of freaked him out.”

The weather, warm and sunny by the coast, was now hot. All the windows of the bus were open, and everyone’s hair was blowing in the breeze. Ivy had to hold her pages flat with two hands. She looked at him and said, “I prefer Central Park.” They drove.

At last they turned in past a tall gate, crossing a metal grate in the road. The bus went up a hill through some huge trees that twisted in startling shapes. When they crested the hill, they looked down on the most beautiful house Richie had ever seen. He poked Ivy with his elbow and pointed. She said, “Oh, nice,” and went back to reading. Spanish-style, long, two stories, a balcony running most of the length of the second story, painted a pinkish color, with dark beams and a tile roof. The main door, dark wood, was two stories high. An adobe wall extended from each end in a big oval, embracing a courtyard. Water bubbled out of a dish that the hands of a fountain statue were holding aloft, then flowed down its arms, around the laughing face, and over its body, to disappear again into a pool at the figure’s feet.

Everyone piled out of the bus and went into the house. Though it was hot outside, maybe ninety-five degrees, it was cool inside — the window openings were a foot deep. The first thing they did was follow Mrs. Perroni into a large dining room, where they were given a Mexican brunch, including all kinds of food with hot sauce and tortillas that Richie had never eaten before, but also plates of peaches and apricots, melon and cantaloupe, blackberries and raspberries in heavy cream. There was also corn, like they had at home and in Iowa in the summer, but it was roasted in the husk, so that the kernels were brown and sweet; Aunt Lois and Uncle Joe ate three of those apiece. His mom carried Emily around the table, picking up bits of things and offering them to her with the tip of her finger. She did this as if she knew what she was doing, something that surprised Richie. He glanced around, but no one else was staring at her — the least motherly woman in the history of the world, fifty-nine years old and still built like a teen-ager.

After that, Mr. Perroni walked them all over the house, up the uneven stairs and down the uneven hallways, opening doors and peeking into rooms, looking at chandeliers and paintings and displays of dried flowers and a broom made of branches. At the end of the downstairs hall was a painting of Jesus gazing upward, and at the end of the upstairs hall was a painting of the Virgin Mary looking downward. Both, according to Mrs. Perroni, were from Spain, and she had seen ones by the same painter in Oaxaca, which was a city in southern Mexico with a cathedral plated in gold. “Alta California could never afford that!” said Mrs. Perroni.

The Angelina Ranch had started out as Angelina Rancho, a mere sixteen thousand acres given to a Mexican soldier in 1835. A battle in the Mexican-American War had taken place right over there — they could see the site from the window of the master bedroom. Three Americans and two Mexicans killed, but the Americans preserved their horses, and managed to get themselves to Colonel Frémont. That family had lost all their money, so, when Mr. Perroni’s people came over from Switzerland at the end of the nineteenth century, they bought this rancho, with its old house, and another one, which had never had a house, the Rancho Rojas, just across the river, and that was that. It was a hard life at one time — everyone out rustling cattle at the crack of dawn, including Gail herself, who was from Los Angeles and had never seen a live cow before she married into the Perronis, but it didn’t take long to learn if your livelihood depended on it, and in the end it was easier than writing for Hollywood, which was what her father did — had they ever seen Rubies for Rent? Or The Wide River? Well, no one had. They went for a walk.

For a week after they came home, Ivy was annoyed with Richie for being too impressed with “life in the Old West.” She said that she’d half expected there to be a shootout, just for show, and she’d taken four showers to get the dust out of her skin. Anyway, what did it matter? Michael and Loretta were planning to live in New York, just like everyone else, so that Michael could get rich and Loretta could pursue her child-development degree. Everyone had a dramatic history. Ivy’s own grandfather had been rescued, as a child, from a pogrom in Odessa, had passed through Ellis Island when he was eight, had his name translated from “Dov Grodno” to “Dave Gordon.” And hadn’t Richie told her his mother’s great-grandfather kept his crazy wife in a tiny little cellar with a trapdoor in the apple orchard, or something like that? Compared with all of this, servicing rentals was rather uninspiring. Or safe, said Ivy. Let’s just be glad we’re safe.

—

ON THE DAY Claire filed her written petition for dissolution of marriage and paid her fee, she went from the courthouse to the grocery store, where she bought a chicken and some potatoes for supper. Then she drove home in the chilly dusk, thinking of her new place downtown — in fact, she had been a little late to the courthouse because she was walking around the apartment, enjoying how quiet it was, even during the day. When she got back to West Des Moines, she parked on the street — something she had never done before, because all of a sudden even the garage seemed claustrophobic, and she carried her bag up the walk — no snow yet. Her house — the house — looked like a picture, dark, shiny front door, square panes of light to either side, and an arch of light above. She climbed the three steps to the front stoop, wiped her shoes on the mat, and extended her hand toward the doorknob.

She glanced through the window. Gray, who was fourteen, was sitting on the third step of the staircase, reading a book. As she watched, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, pushed up his glasses, and turned the page. There was a laugh — Brad’s laugh — and here he came, stretched out on his back, sliding down the carpeted stairs. Just then, Claire had her Lot’s-wife moment — knowing perfectly well that she should not, could not, look into the past, and yet having the occasion of doing so come upon her like a stroke of lightning. Her hand trembled as she opened the door, and tears came to her eyes. How could this happen, she wondered, after so much preparation? Was mere familiarity that potent?

The boys, of course, greeted her as they always did: Where were the last two Popsicles? Could she sign the note from the teacher right away, before it was forgotten? Did she buy any milk? She nodded, smiled, passed them. When she got to the kitchen, she thought it was only an illusion that Lot’s wife was looking backward. Really, she was looking into the future, that strange city empty of herself, and she was thinking, I know nothing else but this.

Putting away the groceries, she did what she always did, which was imagine the boys talking about her someday — out of the blue, no reason of any kind, she must have gone crazy, or, alternatively, good riddance, we never liked her anyway, never understood why he married her in the first place, females are only good for two things and I forget what the second one is. Her hands were still trembling as she smoothed butter over the skin of the chicken and set it in the roasting pan.

But then Paul gave her a wonderful gift. She had just scrubbed the potatoes and was peeling the first one. Brad had the refrigerator door open, and Gray had brought his book into the kitchen. He was saying, “What does this word mean?” and pointing, when the back door flew open and slammed against the wall. Everyone jumped. Paul stormed into the kitchen, yelling, “I ran over a bicycle! Brad, your bicycle was lying right in the driveway, and I ran right over it, and now the—”

Brad jumped away from the refrigerator and closed the door. His mouth had dropped open. Gray moved back toward the doorway to the dining room, ready to flee. Paul yelled, “God damn it!”

Claire said, “Are you still on top of the bicycle?”

“No, I am not, for God’s sake! I backed off it.”

“Then no harm done.” She glanced at Brad. “Except to the bike.”

“It’s dark! I don’t know if there’s no harm done. There could be oil or gas dripping out of the underside of the car. And the car damaged, too, for Chrissakes. It could be quite a dangerous situation. Not to mention—”

She said, “Why don’t you not mention it?”

Brad started for the dining room, and Paul said, “Come back here, young man!” Claire dropped the peeler and the potato and stepped between Paul and Brad, who made it through the door. Paul’s voice sharpened. “Did you hear me?”

“How could he not hear you? You sound like an air-raid siren.”

And then he gave it to her — he popped her right on the chin and knocked her down.

She was lucky she didn’t whack the back of her head on the edge of the table; that was the first thing she thought. She landed sitting. Her neck hurt. Paul stood above her, and she saw his face, which was red with rage, become gradually infused with disbelief. And it was true that he had never hit her before. For Claire, though, there was nothing unbelievable about it. She knew that he had wanted to — that the kicking of a door or the smack of a fist on the table was only a substitute. It could be said, though she would never say it, that her change of tone — a bit of sarcasm for the first time in their lives — had startled him and undone his last mote of self-control. She turned her head. The boys were frozen in the doorway. She said nothing. Paul said, “Your mother fell down.”

“You liar,” said Claire. It was possible that Gray and Brad had never seen an argument, because it was possible that Claire had never talked back. Claire shook her head, leaned forward, and helped herself up with the chair. Not even the desperate look on Paul’s face aroused her pity, and that was how she knew that whatever love she had once felt for him had left no trace.

Finally, Paul said, “I’m s—”

Claire stood right in front of him and said, “I don’t care.” Then, “Dinner will be ready in an hour.” She went back to peeling potatoes.

She served at six-thirty; the chicken was a little dry, the mashed potatoes were good, and cleanup was easy. At eight, they watched Barney Miller, and at nine, they watched Soap. Brad came in and out with questions about his homework, and at nine-thirty, he was told to go to bed. Gray was, Claire suspected, hiding out in his room. At ten, they watched the news, and then Paul stood up from his easy chair and said, “Well, I’m going to bed. I—” But she must have had a look on her face, so he stopped, and headed up the stairs. She turned off the TV. In the late-night quiet, she glanced around and decided that she hated every piece of furniture, and she was not going to take a single one with her to the apartment. What was that furniture called that those Perronis had in California? Oh, right, Mission style, of course. She would start there. Paul appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She looked at him. His first utterance would be a final test.

He said, irritably, “It’s late. I have to be at the hospital by—”

How many times had he said that over the years? He was a very prompt man. But he had failed to pass the test. He had gone on with his life, with their lives, out of habit, not daring to recognize that all was changed.

She said, “I’m getting a divorce.”

He said, “I won’t allow that.”

And then she simply laughed. She saw his fists clench, and she saw him notice and unclench them. She said, “I’ll sleep on the couch tonight.”

“What will you tell the boys?” Now his lips twisted, and he looked as undecided as Claire had ever seen him, torn between remorse and rage.

“I’ll tell them I slept on the couch.”

He stared at her, then turned away.

Little had she known what a pleasure it would turn out to be, telling the truth at last.