HAMMER

ANGELA HAD ONLY one child, a daughter who abhorred her. Darleen was now sixteen years old, a junior in boarding school who excelled in all her courses. Her dislike of Angela had become pronounced around the age of eleven, increasing in theatricality and studied venom until it leveled off in her thirteenth year, the year she went off to Mount Hastings.

Darleen’s father had died in a scuba accident when she was but an infant. He had held his breath coming up the last twenty feet of an otherwise deep and successful dive. An absolute no-no. One did not hold one’s breath on the ascent to the light no matter how eager one was to return. He had been instructed in that, as had Angela and everyone else in the resort training course they’d been taking. While he’d been recklessly rising Angela had still been fooling around down in the depths, interesting herself in a rock that was in the process of being dismantled or constructed — it was hard to tell which — by colorful wrasses.

Angela had known few men after her impetuous young husband, whose name had been Bruce. She lived in the house she had returned to as a widow in the town she’d always lived in. Despite the dislike her daughter felt toward her, Angela was devoted to Darleen and awaited the day when their estrangement would be over, for surely that day would come. At the same time she feared that something would break then in Darleen, never to be made good again.

Ever since the girl insisted on going off to boarding school, Angela had worked as a masseuse in an old spa on the outskirts of town. She found the work distasteful and yet persisted in it, kneading and pummeling, rapping and slapping, the trusting hides presented to her. The old bodies became delusionarily flattered and freshened beneath her cool hands. Still, she was not as popular as the other masseuses. She spoke little and had no regulars. In her white cubicle on a white wooden table beside the high white-sheeted table was an envelope with her name written on it, a reminder that a gratuity would be appreciated. Seldom did it contain anything at the end of the day, though once an extraordinarily long and vigorously curling eyebrow hair had been deposited there.

On a cold morning in late February, Angela had a single appointment. She knew the woman, a wealthy and opinionated patron of the arts who was dedicated to social inclusion, moral betterment, sculpture in the parks and dance. She smiled at Angela thinly, disappointed that she was not being served by Margaret, everyone’s favorite. Outside the sky was dark, almost cyclonic, but inside a warm, optimistic light bathed everything. There was an orange on the table which really ought to be thrown out, and Angela left the room for a moment to dispose of it.

Midway through the session, just as Angela’s tape was about to end — it was Schweitzer playing Bach’s Fugue in G Minor, and she was dreamily placing the shaggy-haired theologian thumping away on an organ in the jungle, pulling out all the stops in a green and unreconciled jungle, which he was not doing at all of course — she snapped her prosperous client’s wrist bone, and before the ambulance arrived she’d been fired.

“I have no choice, Angela,” the manager said.

“What if the others signed a petition to keep me on?” Angela asked.

“They wouldn’t do that, Angela. They wouldn’t trouble themselves, you know that.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Angela said.

“Of course it doesn’t,” he said.

Angela did not return home that night. Instead, she drove to the coast several hours away and boarded a ferry that served a number of weedy, unremarkable islands that were popular with the very rich, who maintained large and hidden homes there. In the tiny lounge of the ferry, people were talking about a dog that had fallen overboard during the previous night’s crossing and had not yet been found. It was a chocolate-colored Lab named Turner. The owners, a young couple just married, were practically keening with distress, according to the purser. Angela stared at the water with the four other passengers. Occasionally, the ferry’s searchlight would cast a broad beam over the waves.

Angela checked into the inn closest to the ferry slip on the first island. She had come here before in times of distress, usually when she was trying to stop drinking. The following day, in her old wool coat and with a borrowed scarf over her head, she walked along the beach. The few people she encountered referred to the drizzle as mizzle, which had been more or less constant since New Year’s Day. Angela’s thoughts floated beside her. The vigorous eyebrow hair in the envelope appeared more than once, seemingly determined to show its jurisdiction over her most recent months. It had quite attached itself to Angela, though only in spirit, for she certainly hadn’t kept the damn thing.

When she boarded the ferry the next morning, people were talking about the brown Lab that had been rescued the night before, on the boat’s last run. He’d actually slipped below the waves just before they’d got a flotation ring around him. He was an instant from being gone but they’d hauled him in, and he’d smiled the way Labs do, pulling back his lips in a black, rubbery grin. After he’d been warmed and fed, the distraught couple had been called, and when the ferry returned to the mainland the three of them were reunited. But the couple said it wasn’t Turner. In their minds they had endured with Turner the weight of the stinging sea, the whipping of the starless dark, the bewilderment and despair that this animal too must surely have suffered. But this was not their Turner, and they were not going to take him home with them.

“I never saw a dog looked more like another dog in my life then,” the cashier in the galley was saying. “That Turner came in here three days ago with those people and he ate a fried egg sandwich.”

The couple apparently had been heckled off the boat.

“They weren’t crying anymore,” the cashier said. “They were stubborn about it, they’d made up their minds. It was the captain took the dog.”

Angela pressed herself against the rail and looked at the water in much the same way she had earlier, waiting for something to appear. This time she would be the first to glimpse it. There! she imagined herself calling out to the others. Though it was unlikely now. No, it would never happen now.

She drove home, detouring through the grounds of the old spa, which looked as ruined and complacent as it had when it was a big part of Angela’s life. Smoke rose from one of the chimneys. The fireplace in the game room frequently harbored a meager fire. The immense moribund pines, dying because of the town’s controversial road-salting practices, loomed protectively over the winding narrow road.

The phone was ringing as she opened the door. It was Darleen, who announced that she was arriving the next day for a brief visit.

“It would be thoughtful of you if you canceled your appointments at that vile place you work so we could spend some time together,” Darleen said.

“What would you like to do?” Angela said.

“I thought I’d help you put in a garden, Mummy.”

“I don’t have a garden, dear. There was never … I mean nothing’s changed much since you were here last.”

“I know the conditions under which you live, Mummy. I was just being annoying.”

“How is school?”

“They’ve completed the new library, and we’re allowed two days off from classes to move the books from the old institution down the hill to the new institution. We are to be utilized as a merry and willing human chain. I resist being so utilized. I’m here to learn.”

“So you’re coming here instead,” Angela said. There was silence.

“Which is wonderful,” Angela said. “Really wonderful.”

“I’m hanging up, Mummy. You can continue with your inanities if you wish.”

That night Angela had a dream. She was in a furniture store and the salesman was speaking about the wood of a bed she was looking at. Angela was not really interested in the bed and had no intention of buying it but she had been staring at it for some time. No wonder the salesman thinks I’m interested in it, she thought in her dream, I keep walking around and around it. Now some people, the salesman said, they look at a thousand-year-old tree and they say, what the hey. They don’t respect it, you know? Thing’s just growing out of the ground. But to cut to the detail, this bed comes to you from Indonesia fresh from a managed forest, what they call a managed forest, and it hasn’t been treated yet so you’ve got to care for it. You’ve got to oil it at least once a year. It’s like it’s still alive. The molecules are still stretching and expanding. I admit it’s not like a fine piece of furniture that your grandmother might have taken pride in and cared for because it isn’t a fine piece of furniture, it’s hacked out by simple Malay Archipelago artisans for export. With fairly crude tools. Now some people like this situation, it’s just what they want. They want to feel they’re doing their part by providing a commitment, a commitment to life, a thwarted life, not just to an inert tyrannical object like the kind your forebears served. And this baby’s cheap. Of course the timber industry is way out of control worldwide, and this price in no way reflects the real costs entailed, the invisible costs you might say. But the opportunity you have right here is to acquire something that’s alive even when it’s dead, do you hear what I’m saying? The salesman had a head that looked like a medicine ball. How heavy that must be, Angela thought. When it began to resemble something more like a brown dog’s head, she woke up.

Darleen arrived with someone she introduced as Deke, her assistant and guide, a man older than Angela with graying, slicked-back hair. He wore a leather shirt and extremely tight-fitting leather pants which suggested no knob. Angela couldn’t help but notice this. Darleen had dyed her hair white and it sprang above her pale face like a web composed of bristles and points. She had not, however, adorned her face with rings or studs, as was so much the fashion among the young. The rings always seemed to presuppose some sort of leash to Angela. She was pleased that Darleen had not succumbed to convention.

“Slippery out,” the man said.

He requested upon arrival a bath. His bathing was noisy and prolonged, and when he emerged from Angela’s bathroom the immediate premises smelled fruity and foul. “Bag?” he said to Darleen.

“I put it in the kitchen.”

Angela heard him opening and shutting drawers, criticizing the color scheme — green and red or “rhubarb”—and bemoaning the dearth of protein. There was then the sound of a bottle being uncorked. He appeared with a single water goblet filled to the brim with wine. “Glasses look as if they were washed on the inside only,” he complained. “Knives badly in need of sharpening.” He stood before them, sipping the wine appreciatively. Angela’s eyes reluctantly strayed to his remarkable leather pants.

“Can’t see nothing for seeing something else,” Deke muttered.

“Dear …,” Angela began.

“I want to marry him, Mummy, I’ll spend years if necessary nursing him back to health. I want a large wedding in an English garden with a champagne fountain.” She chewed on her fingers and laughed.

Angela decided to ignore the subject and presence of Deke, assistant and guide, for the moment. “Is everything going well at school? Tell me about school.”

“We have finished our studies of archaic cultures with the Aztecs. As everywhere else in the world, the Aztec elite had more varied ideas about their gods than the common people.”

“Don’t you go believing that now!” Deke exclaimed.

“Religious thinking among the elite developed into a real philosophy which stressed the relative nature of all things,” Darleen continued briskly. “Such a philosophy can only develop in a sophisticated environment.”

She then lapsed into silence. Deke said he was going to take a peek around if it didn’t disaccommodate anyone.

“What will you be doing this summer?” Angela asked after a while. “Will you be a nanny again for the Marksons?”

“I hardly think so.” Darleen gazed at her critically. At some point in boarding school she had learned how to enlarge her eyes and make them glassy at will, like some carnivore about to attack.

“I was on the island just yesterday but I didn’t walk as far as their house.”

“Am I supposed to find that interesting?” Darleen sighed. “In another class we’re reading Dante. Do you know why he called it a comedy?” She raised a gnawed paw to prevent her mother from replying, although Angela had no intention of interrupting her. “Because it progresses from a dark beginning to redemption and hope.”

“What translation are you using?”

“Oh for godssakes, Binyon. Laurence Binyon. What do you care? That’s not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that Dante’s imagination was primarily visual. In his time people didn’t dream, they had visions. And these visions had meaning. We only have dreams and dreams are haphazard and undisciplined, the meager vestige of a once great method of immediate knowing.” She gnawed on her fingers again. “You see visions today and you’re considered abnormal, uncouth.”

Deke hurried past them back into the kitchen, where he poured more wine.

“This ain’t much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so,” he said to Angela. “No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, washcloths worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare lightbulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly—”

“I like them a little fast,” Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.

“Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on.”

“I remember those violets,” Darleen said. “Those violets are from my childhood.”

“Now that’s just plain wrong,” Angela protested.

“Suffering the same fate regardless,” Darleen said.

“You got a considerable amount of canned goods, however. Can I take some back to my friends?” Deke’s hair was still wet, but already scurf was bedecking his thin shoulders like fresh snow.

“See, Mummy, even though a person has no future to speak of, he can take a moment to think of others. He can trust even in the blackest part of night that the daylight is not going to forget to come back for him.”

“She’s a talker, isn’t she,” Deke said.

“That surprises me, actually,” Angela confessed. “It really does.” She was brooding about that daylight-coming-back business. You couldn’t think that way about daylight, that’s why the ancients were always so hysterical. It was just too mental, too neurasthenic. Certain things just couldn’t forget to come back. And when they finally didn’t, it wasn’t because they forgot. They did it with deliberation.

Deke had casually resumed his litany of the inadequacies of Angela’s method of living. “Carpeting not particularly clean — gritty, in fact. No handy cold-care tissues available, no Proust.”

“For godssakes,” Darleen said, “you’re the biggest show-off I’ve ever known for someone who a couple hours ago was begging outside the bus station.”

“Selling newspapers,” Deke said.

“They were giveaway papers,” Darleen said. “They were supposed to be free.” She turned to her mother. “I was kind of not looking forward to us being together. I needed a respite from you at first. So I gave this one fifty dollars to come here with me.”

“You want it back?” From a slit pocket in his shirt he extracted a bill, then proceeded to unfold Benjamin Franklin’s enormous head.

“Yes, she does,” Angela said. “Of course she does.” She sent Darleen a hundred dollars every month for, the word they had agreed upon was incidentals, and she certainly did not want her to be disposing of the money in this fashion. “I send you a hundred—”

“Big goddamn deal,” Darleen said. “My roommate gets two hundred each month from her parents, which they earn by collecting cans and bottles. The Garcias search the streets and alleys thirteen hours a day for cans and bottles. It’s their goddamn job. Fifteen thousand cans pay their rent each month and another six thousand nets their little scholar Isabelle two hundred bucks each month, and I am informing you that Isabelle — who’s the biggest goddamn snob I’ve ever met — spends it on fancy underwear. The Garcias are tiny, selfless, worn-out saints walking the earth, I’ve seen ’em, and Isabelle buys lingerie.” She waved the proffered bill away. “What’s gone is gone,” she said, and laughed.

Deke refolded the bill and placed it back in his shirt. “She’s probably referring to an unfortunate erotic crisis I underwent recently. Otherwise, given its more general application, I would say that she doesn’t subscribe to the gone-is-gone theory one bit.”

Darleen scowled at him. “This is not the appropriate moment.”

Deke sniffed loudly, rotated his arms and clasped his hands together. “Cold in here too. Not cozy. Only thing of interest is this old painting. Where’d you get this? Quite out of place. An odd choice, I’d say.”

It was a large oil of beavers and their home on a lake, painted the century before. It was not in a frame but affixed to the wall by nails. Angela looked at it, resting her chin in her hand thoughtfully. The colors of the landscape were deep and lustrous. The water was a fervent rumpled barren of green, the trees along the curving shore like cloaked messengers. Everything seemed fresh and clean with kind portent, even the sky. God had poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, Angela thought solemnly, to each as much as it could receive. Beavers were peculiar and reclusive, but that was their nature. They were not frivolous beings. They behaved responsibly and gravely and with great fidelity. Here they were involved in the process of constructing their house, carrying branches and twigs and so forth in their jaws and on their great paddle-like tails, though the structure was already large and in Angela’s view extremely accomplished, a mansion, in fact, the floors of which were carpeted with boughs of softest evergreen, the windows curving out over the water like balconies for the enjoyment of the air.

“Mummy stole that painting,” Darleen said.

“Well, good for you!” Deke said. Clearly, Angela had been elevated in his regard.

“Some years ago, Mummy used to be quite the drinker,” Darleen said.

“Is that so!” Deke exclaimed, more delighted still. “Why’d you give it up?”

The painting had been in a roadhouse she once frequented. Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart. Slowly her heavy heart would turn light and she would feel it pulling away as though it wasn’t responsible for her anymore, freeing her to slip beneath the glittering skein of water into the lovely clear beaver world of woven light where everything was wild and orderly and real. A radiant inhuman world of speechless grace. This was where she spent her time when she could. These were delicate moments, however, and further weak cocktails never prolonged them. Further cocktails, actually, no matter how responsibly weak, only propelled her to the infelicitous surface again. The artist, the bastard, had probably trapped and drowned the beavers and thrust rods through their poor bodies to arrange them in life-assuming positions, as Audubon had done with birds, the bastard, and Stubbs had done with horses, the bastard, to make his handsome portraits.

“Your mother isn’t very forthcoming with the details, is she?” Deke said.

“I would wake up weeping,” Angela said. “Tears would be streaming down my face.”

“You quit, and now they don’t anymore?” Deke asked suspiciously.

Angela stared at him.

“Doesn’t seem much to give up the drink for, a few tears. How long’s it been since you’ve cried now?”

“Oh, years,” Angela said.

“And now her heart’s a little ice-filled crack. Isn’t it, Mummy?” Darleen said.

“Why don’t you leave your mother alone for a while,” Deke said. “Look at you. You’re a vicious little being, like one of those thylacines.”

“The Tasmanian wolf is extinct,” Darleen said. “Don’t show off so goddamn much.”

“Their prey was sheeps,” Deke said. “But the sheeps won out in the end. They always do.”

“Sheeps,” Darleen snickered.

“A vicious little being you are,” Deke repeated mildly. He regarded the painting once more. “I got a friend knew a guy who lived with a beaver in the Adirondacks. Every time my friend would go visit him, that beaver would be there with its own big beaver house made of sticks and such right in this guy’s cabin. He’d rescued this beaver and they had a really good relationship. You broke bread with my friend’s friend and you’d break bread with that beaver.”

“Mummy, when do you plan on serving supper?” Darleen said. “She never has food in this house,” she said to Deke.

“She’s got a number of vegetables ready to go. Vegetables are good for you,” he said without much conviction.

At dinner, Angela felt impelled to ask him how he and Darleen had met and what, exactly, it was that he did.

“This is what I got to say to that remark. I don’t know if you read much, but there’s a story by Anton Chekhov called ‘Gooseberries.’ And in this story one of the characters says in conversation that there should be a man with a hammer reminding every happy, contented individual that they’re not going to be happy forever. This man with a hammer should be banging on the door of the happy individual’s house or something to that effect.”

“You think you’re the man with the hammer?”

Deke smiled at her modestly.

“If I recall that story correctly,” Angela said, “the point being made about the man with the hammer is that there is no such person.” Angela had attended boarding school herself. She remembered almost everything she had been alerted to then and very little afterwards.

“You’re so negative, Mummy. You dispute anything anyone has to say,” Darleen crouched over the table with her fist wrapped around a fork, not eating.

“The man with the hammer that I recall is in another story, not by Chekhov at all. In A Mother’s Tale the circumstances couldn’t be more …”

“Don’t be tiresome, Mummy,” Darleen said.

“Why don’t you leave your mother alone, the poor woman,” Deke said. “This is an ordinary woman here. Where’s the challenge? Why do you hate her so much? Your hate’s misplaced, I’d say.”

“Why do I hate Mummy?”

“Not at all clear. Whoa, though, whoa, I got a question for Angela. You ever confess under questioning from this child that you had considered, if only for an instant when she was but the size of a thumb inside you, not having this particular one at all, maybe a later one?”

“No,” Angela said.

Deke nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. He picked at his potato. “This is a little overcooked,” he said.

“I just want to check on something,” Darleen said. She disappeared into what had been her bedroom. There was the ugly wallpaper in a dense tweedy pattern which would make anyone feel as though they were trapped under a basket. Darleen had selected it at the age of eight. Angela didn’t use the room for storage. Technically, it was still Darleen’s bedroom.

“Dinner was OK, actually OK,” Deke said pleasantly. “Glad you didn’t go the fowl route. You ever had goose? There’s this wealthy woman in town and she’s got this perturberance about nuisance geese. They’re Canada geese but they’re not from Canada, she says, and she’s got the town to agree to capture and slaughter them and feed them to the poor. If you have any influence, would you tell that old girl we don’t like those geese? The flavor is off. They’re golf course geese and full of insecticides and effluent and such.”

“Betty Bishop!” Angela exclaimed. “Why, I just broke her wrist!”

“Good for …” Deke began, then stopped.

“It was an accident, but what a coincidence!”

“I guess you wouldn’t have the influence I seek then,” Deke said, sniffing. “You ever get the air ducts in this place cleaned? Should be cleaned annually. Dust, fungi, bacteria — you’re cohabiting with continually recirculating pollutants here.”

Darleen returned. “Where’s my little fish,” she demanded.

“Well, it, oh goodness, it’s been years,” Angela said.

“Is that my fish’s bowl in the kitchen filled with pennies and shit?”

“I saw that,” Deke said. “Clearly a fishbowl, now much reduced in circumstances.”

“I had a little fish throughout my childhood,” Darleen explained to him. “I said ‘Good morning’ to it in the morning and ‘Good night’ to it at night.”

Deke stretched out his long, black-wrapped legs.

“For years and years I had this little fish,” Darleen said. “But it wasn’t the same fish! I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something awfully wrong with fishie sometimes before I went to school, and she would pretend she hadn’t slipped the deceased down the drain and run out and bought another one before my return.”

“Oh, I knew you knew,” Angela said.

“If it had been the same fish, you two would have lacked the means to communicate with each other at all,” Deke suggested.

“Mummy, I want to be serious now. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here because Daddy Bruce requested that I come. That’s why I’m here.”

For an instant, Angela had no idea who Daddy Bruce was. Then her heart pitched about quite wildly. Darleen had neglected to put her eyes in full deployment and she gazed at her mother with alarming sincerity.

“I was studying one night. I’d been up for hours and hours. It was very late and he just appeared, in my mind, not corporeally, and he said, ‘Honey, this is Daddy Bruce. I don’t want you cutting yourself off from your mom and me anymore. Your mom’s a painful thing to apprehend but you’ve got to try. She’s living her life like a clock does, just counting the hours. You can take a clock from room to room, from place to place, but all it does is count the hours.’”

“He never talked that way!” Angela exclaimed. “He was just a boy!”

“Well, that’s what happens pretty quick,” Deke said. “They all get to sounding the same. It’s characteristic of death’s drear uniformity. Most difficult to be pluralistic when you’re dead.”

“He said he never loved you and he’s sorry about that now.”

Angela’s heart was pounding hard and insistently, distracting her a little, making a great obtrusive show of itself. Be aware of me, it was pounding, be aware.

“He said if he had to do it all over, he still wouldn’t love you but you wouldn’t know it.”

“It don’t seem as if this Bruce is giving Angela much of a second chance here,” Deke said.

“Daddy Bruce wanted to assure you that—”

“Tell him not to worry about it,” Angela said. There were worse things, she supposed, than being told you had never been loved by a dead man.

Deke giggled. “What else he have to say? Did he suggest you were studying too hard?”

“He would hardly have bothered to come all the way from the other world to tell me that,” Darleen said.

“I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world,” Deke opined. “You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angela said. She took a deep uncertain breath.

“That might be correct,” Darleen said, gnawing on her hands again. “The dead are part of our community, just like those in prison.”

“Ever visit the prison gift shop?” Deke said. “Can’t be more than ten miles from here. They sell cutting boards, boot scrapers, consoles for entertainment centers. The ladies knit those toilet-seat covers, toaster covers. Nice things. Reasonable. They won’t let the ones on death row contribute anything, though. They want to sell products, not freak collector items. It’s like that tree used to be outside the First Congregational Church. That big old copper beech they cut down because they said it was a suicide magnet? Wouldn’t use the wood for nothing either, and that was good wood. Threw it in the landfill. Tree was implicated in only four deaths. Drew in two unhappy couples was all. Wouldn’t think they’d rip out a three-hundred-year-old tree for that, but down it went. And now they’ve got a little sapling there no bigger around than a baseball bat.”

Angela dismayed herself by laughing.

“That’s right,” Deke giggled. “If a young person gets it in his mind now passing that spot, he’s got to wait.”

“I should have suspected you two would get along,” Darleen said sourly.

“You sick?” Deke asked Angela. “Is that why you don’t care so much? Some undiagnosed cancer?”

“She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Darleen said. “She has the constitution of a horse.”

“Horses are actually quite delicate,” Deke said. “Lots can go wrong with a horse, naturally, and then you can make additional things go wrong, should you wish, if it’s in your interests.”

“Deke worked a few summers in Saratoga,” Darleen said. She suddenly looked weary.

“A sick horse is a dead horse, pretty much,” Deke said. “I’m going to uncork that other bottle now.” From the kitchen, Angela heard him excoriating the rust on the gas jets, the lime buildup around the sink fixtures, the poorly applied adhesive plastic covering meant to suggest crazed Italian tiles. Goblet once again brimming, he did not resume his place at the table but walked over to the painting. “I can see why you felt you had to have this,” he said. “At first it appears to be realistically coherent and pleasantly decorative, but the viewer shortly becomes aware of a sense of melancholy, of disturbing presentiment.”

Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.

“You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.

“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.

He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”

“Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.

“I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”

Angela rose to her feet suddenly and tried to embrace Darleen. The girl was all stubborn bone. Her clothes smelled musty, and a stinging chemical odor rose from her spiky hair. She pulled away easily from Angela’s grasp.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Deke said.

Darleen laughed. “Daddy Bruce better get here quick. Wake you up.”

“I have to … I have to …”

They looked at her.

“It’s late and I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said, ashamed.

“You said you’d take the day off!” Darleen cried.

“Take the day off, it don’t fit when you put it on again,” Deke said. “Attention here, I’m taking the fishbowl and going out for more wine. Liquor store has one of those change machines. Those things are fun, you ever seen one work?”

“Don’t leave!” Angela and Darleen exclaimed together.

“At a dangerously low level,” he said, raising the bottle.

No one could argue that it was otherwise.

“Just stay a little while longer,” Darleen pleaded.

Deke pursed his lips and pressed his hands to his leather shirt. “I might commence to pace,” he said. He grimly poured out the last of the wine.

“There was a strange thing that happened last night,” Angela began. “I was on a boat, the boat that goes to the islands. I wasn’t actually there, but the most remarkable coincidence—”

“A coincidence is something that’s going to happen and does,” Deke said. “You got a fondness for the word, I notice.”

“Oh, Mummy is so seldom precise,” Darleen said. “When I was small, she would tell me I had my father’s eyes. Then one day I finally said, ‘I do not have his eyes. He was not an organ donor to my knowledge. A little frigging precision in language would be welcome,’ I said.”

Deke looked at her impatiently, then stood as though yanked up by a rope. “You girls hold off on the Daddy Bruce business until I get back. That’s dangerous business. You don’t want to go too far with that without an impartial yet expert observer present.”

He left without further farewell bearing the fishbowl, the door shutting softly behind him.

Angela laughed. “I think we disappointed him.”

The room felt stifling. She opened a window, beyond which was a storm window, a so-called combination window, adaptable to the seasons. She fumbled with the aluminum catches and pushed it up. The cold clutched her, then darted past. She turned and looked at her daughter. “I love you,” she said.

“Mummy, Mummy,” Darleen sighed. Then, tolerantly, “The new headmaster has a white umbrella cockatoo that likes to be rocked like a baby.”

“Do tell me about it, please,” Angela said.

“Stupid bird,” Darleen said cheerfully.

Six years later, Angela was dying in the town’s hospital, in a room where many before her had passed. She had known none of them, but this room they had in common, and the old business engaged in there. Darleen had been summoned but would not arrive in time. Angela was fifty years old. She had not gotten out as early as she might have certainly, but now by chance she had firmly grasped death’s tether.

Passed that little sapling tree on the way here, Deke said. Still being permitted to grow in the churchyard. Too new yet to cast a shadow, but it had better mind its manners, no?

Angela wanted to laugh, even now. What a night that had been!

Most enjoyable evening, Deke agreed.

The first nurse said, “It sounded like, ‘Did you bring the hammer?’”

The other nurse said, “Sometimes their voices can be remarkably clear. You can really understand them. I had one say, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ Just as clear as could be.”

The first nurse did not like this one. She was new and ambitious, quite often imprudent. “Are you sure?” she demanded.

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