Mary and O’Neil

ORPHANS

July 1983

O’NEIL BURKE WAS twenty-three years old, a college graduate who had traveled to Europe, but by the time his sister came to get him at the hospital in Stamford, six hours after the accident, he felt as if his life had stopped. It was eight o’clock when Kay arrived, still in her suit from a day of work, a slim leather case under her arm; the wide glass doors of the emergency room sighed open on their hinges, and there she was at last. She stood a moment in the doorway, searching the room with narrowed eyes, until she found him parked in his wheelchair by the sign-in desk, his left leg encased in plaster of Paris from knee to toe.

“God, look at you.” Kay raked her fingers through his hair, clotted with knots of dried paint. She was a pretty woman who worked too hard-slender and brown haired like O’Neil, with a small nose and deep walnut eyes-and her tired face said: Now this. “Couldn’t they have cleaned you up a little?”

“That was extra.” O’Neil held up the magazine he had been reading, which was Business Week. In two hours, since the nurses had wheeled him back to the waiting area, he had read through the rack, everything from Highlights for Children to Modern Maturity. “Now,” he said, directing her attention to the article, “it says here that what we are experiencing is not so much a recession strictly speaking, as a period of contraction before an expansion. Does this make any sense to you?”

“You’ll have to ask Jack. O’Neil, what did they give you?”

He returned the magazine to the pile. “Some Demerol when I first got here. It made me throw up.”

“It can do that. Listen, honey. I hate to ask, but do you have any insurance?”

“A technical question,” O’Neil said, and paused for effect; the news was not good. “Technically, no.”

Kay paid for everything with her Master Charge, then pushed O’Neil’s wheelchair into the parking lot, where the orderly, a large black man named Donnelle, helped her drape O’Neil across the backseat of Kay’s Volvo. The light in the parking lot was evening light-the day had disappeared-and insects throbbed in the trees.

“Thanks for everything, Donnelle.” O’Neil leaned out the window so the two could shake hands; Donnelle met his hand with a firm grip.

“You mind that leg, now,” Donnelle said.

When they had pulled out of the lot, Kay lifted her eyes at O’Neil through the rearview mirror. “Please don’t pout, honey. I didn’t even get the message until forty minutes ago. I came as soon as I could.”

He had left messages for her everywhere: her office, the house, even the restaurant where she sometimes met Jack after work for dinner. “Oh, it’s all right,” O’Neil said after a moment. “Donnelle was good company.”

“I can stop somewhere if you’re hungry,” Kay offered.

O’Neil shook his head. “There was a candy machine at the hospital. Also, they gave me some codeine, after the Demerol wore off.”

In the front seat Kay sighed hopelessly. “What am I going to do with you?”

O’Neil tilted his head back and let the codeine wash over him like a warm, salty bath. He had more, twelve pills in all, in a little paper sack. “It’s anybody’s guess,” he said.

They drove on, into the June evening. Under the spell of the codeine the headlights of the oncoming cars pulsed benevolently, and O’Neil watched them until his eyes fell closed. He began to dream, a loosely knitted patchwork of images from the past, but then his mind turned sharply to the moment of the accident: the noise below as the ladder popped loose, his roll down the roof and then the long fall through open air to the ground below. It had taken forever, and was over in an instant. The orthopedist who cast his leg had marveled at the quality of his injury-like a crack in porcelain, he said.

“Aw, fuck.”

Again, Kay’s eyes met his through the rearview mirror. “O’Neil?”

He shook his head to send the memory away. “It was a long way down,” O’Neil said.

The accident occurred on a Wednesday, the third Wednesday in June. O’Neil had been painting houses for six weeks, since returning from eight months of backpacking around Europe. The company he worked for was called Professor Painter. The parent office was in Montreal, but Professor Painter had franchises all over the East Coast, and O’Neil worked for a branch that operated out of an apartment building in South Norwalk. O’Neil had no experience with this kind of work, but after he’d watched the training video, his boss, a Canadian named Joe, asked him if he’d like to be a foreman. What this meant was that O’Neil worked alone, though sometimes Joe sent other people to help. Usually they were college students, and most lasted only a few days before finding better, easier jobs.

The work was hard and paid just five dollars an hour, but O’Neil liked it and took care to do it well. Painting a house was a large undertaking that required a certain amount of tactical thinking, but once O’Neil laid out his plans, his mind was free to go where it wanted. His months abroad had been a happy time, and that was where he spent his days, remembering the golden light of sunset on the Lido of Venice, or the sad, exciting spectacle of a bullfight in Barcelona. For many years he had been afraid of heights, but he discovered, to his surprise, that this fear had left him. Many days he drank his morning coffee or ate his lunch on top of the chimney or some other apex, his legs dangling in space. The houses where he worked were all located within a few miles of Long Island Sound, and over the crowns of the trees he could see the water, its soothing and imperturbable vastness, and on the clearest days, the island of Manhattan, a spiky smear etched into the southern horizon. People walking by on the sidewalk below would stop and wave, and O’Neil waved back, or lifted his coffee in a little toast.

When the accident occurred, O’Neil was working alone on the jobsite, a large Victorian in awful shape with handsome willows over a level yard that always seemed damp. The house, in an upscale neighborhood of old homes that had all been meticulously restored, was owned by a striking-looking woman in her mid-thirties with high, sculpted cheekbones and hair the color of onyx, and her husband, whom O’Neil had never laid eyes on. They had just moved in, or were preparing the house for sale-either way, their rooms were nearly bare. The couple had a child, a luminous baby boy named Henry who cried all day long, and O’Neil felt sorry for the woman, whose name was Patrice. She spent her days alone in her house with an inconsolable child and seemed to pass the hours in a state of suspension, waiting for her husband to return from wherever he was. O’Neil was curious about her, as he always was about the people whose houses he painted, though the fact that she was pretty, and seemed to like having him around, made him more interested than usual. Yet, as the weeks went by, he learned very little about Patrice. In all the time he spent there, no one had ever come to the house; sometimes she would drive off with Henry in her car, an old Mercedes with rust on the door panels, but these errands produced nothing more than groceries. It took him two weeks before he realized that he had never even heard her phone ring. What was she doing here, in this fancy neighborhood, in a house with no furniture? What did she do for money? Who were her friends? Most of his customers paid him no attention at all, but often Patrice would appear at the base of his ladder to ask him how the work was going, or else they would talk at the end of the day while he was cleaning out his brushes and trays. O’Neil looked forward to their conversations, as he believed she did too. Standing in her driveway he told her of his progress, or stories of his adventures in Europe-hitchhiking through the hills of Tuscany and the green valleys of the Rhine, waking at dawn on a ferry from Catania to Naples to find a purser rifling through his backpack, seeing Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Prado in Madrid and weeping for an hour. O’Neil was not lonely, but when he told her these tales, he found they poured forth from him without effort, as if they were not things that had happened but living presences inside him, seeking release. But always on the drive home he would realize, with embarrassment, that he had done all the talking; she had told him nothing of herself.

The day of the accident, O’Neil was getting ready to take a ladder up to the porch roof to paint a pair of third-story gables when Patrice emerged from the side door, carrying a tray of lemonade. It was a hot, damp afternoon, the sky the color of old ivory, and the two of them sat at a picnic table in the yard to drink the lemonade. Henry was napping-finally napping, she said with a wry smile, for the little boy slept rarely, and never for long-and when she had seen him outside working, she’d thought: here was a chance to bring him something cool to drink. Patrice was wearing cutoff shorts and a loose man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as she spoke she placed her glass of iced lemonade against her long neck, holding it there between sips. How do you work in this heat? she asked him. She didn’t mind the winter-she had been raised in the cold-but sometimes in the summer it was all she could do not to lose her mind entirely. O’Neil wondered about the shirt, and the person it belonged to. On her ring finger Patrice wore a plain gold wedding band, and a large diamond that sparkled against her skin. These came from somewhere, of course, but O’Neil had never seen her husband, even though he usually worked at the house till six o’clock. In all their conversations she had never mentioned him, not even in passing.

He was about to ask her about this, deciding how he might do so without seeming to pry, when the sound of Henry’s crying reached them from his bedroom window. Patrice, sighing with irritation, left him alone at the table; it did not seem she would be back soon, so O’Neil returned to work, taking his ladder and paint up to the porch roof. This was when he made an error in judgment that was, in hindsight, completely obvious. The roof was pitched ten degrees, and the standard practice was to nail a pair of blocks into the roof joists to brace the legs of the ladder; the company training video was absolutely clear on this fact. But as O’Neil stood on the roof in the sweltering heat, his mind afloat in the image of the glass of lemonade against Patrice’s neck, this extra step seemed like a technicality. What the hell, he decided, I’ll just do it fast. Without another thought he propped the ladder between the windows, kicked its base tight against the shingles, scrambled up with his paint and brush, and had just enough time to realize his mistake before the whole thing came down in a clattering chaos of paint and equipment. The porch roof broke his fall, and for one hopeful instant he believed he might stop there. But then he was in space again-a sensation so awful he knew he would carry it inside him all the days of his life-and the only thing left to do was see what happened next. A sound poured from his lungs, a wail of purest terror, and then he landed, hard, on his back, the ladder twisted up in his left leg like an enormous ski; in the sudden silence that followed, he both felt and heard a tiny crack of bone. For a few moments he lay there, amazed by everything, watching the paint he had spilled dripping from the gutter above his face, and then Patrice came running. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and O’Neil wondered what she was apologizing for; the accident was, in every way, his fault. With damp rags she cleaned him up as best she could while Henry wailed on a blanket, and then she drove him to the hospital in her rusted Mercedes, watching from the doorway as O’Neil was wheeled into X ray, Henry still crying in her arms.

O’Neil had been living with Kay since he returned from Europe in late April, sleeping on a cot in a tiny room behind the kitchen that they use for storage, and paying her and Jack fifty dollars a week. The house, a one-story bungalow encased in aluminum siding, sat on a block that ended at a high cement wall and the freeway, and though the street seemed fine during the day-clean and neat in a neutral sort of way-at night a gloom descended, dogs began to bark, and groups of young men gathered on the corners. One early morning as he left for work, O’Neil discovered in his car an empty pack of cigarettes, and three butts in the ashtray. Otherwise, the car was untouched. No harm had been done, but O’Neil still worried about his sister, living in a neighborhood where strangers would smoke in your unlocked car when you weren’t looking. The room where he slept was full of boxes with words written on them in black Magic Marker-Dissertation Notes, Office Misc., Kitchen/Bath. Early on, O’Neil had opened one box, marked Wedding Presents and found, inside, three brand-new waffle irons, still in their packages. The hidden bounty of these boxes amazed him, for O’Neil himself owned almost nothing. He had sold most of his belongings to pay for his trip and was still living out of the backpack he had carried with him to London and Paris, Lisbon and Rome.

Kay, who was five years older than O’Neil, was the director of a state agency that assisted teenage mothers, and Jack was an economist, doing his postdoc at a think tank in Stamford. When this was done, in a year or two, they would sell the house and move to wherever Jack found a tenure-track position. O’Neil hadn’t a clue at all about Jack’s job, which had something to do with labor, and Kay often joked that it would have rounded out his expertise nicely if he actually did some around the house. At such moments she appeared not to like her husband very much, but these glimpses were brief. O’Neil didn’t feel one way or the other about Jack, who seemed to regard him with the generic masculine warmth of a fraternity brother. “How’s the man?” he would ask O’Neil as they crossed in the hallway, or maneuvered past one another in the cramped kitchen. “What’s the word, O’Neil?” One Friday, a few weeks after his return, O’Neil had come home late from a bar and heard Kay and Jack talking in low voices in the kitchen. He paused in the dark hallway to listen. Although he couldn’t make out their words, he knew from their measured, parental tone that they were speaking about him. When would he move on? What would become of such a person as O’Neil?

Back from the hospital, Kay helped him to bed in his little room of boxes, and in the morning O’Neil awoke late to find that Kay and Jack had already left for the day. Balancing on his crutches, O’Neil made coffee and took some more codeine and then paged Joe, who called him back in the early afternoon while O’Neil was watching a soap opera on the sofa, his cast propped on a stack of pillows.

“I just drove by the house,” Joe said, and in the background O’Neil could hear the wash of traffic on the Post Road. “What the hell did you do to the roof?”

“I had an accident,” O’Neil said.

“Those people are going to be royally pissed. Just get over there.”

“Joe, I have a broken leg.”

A pause followed, as O’Neil waited to hear what Joe would next say.

“Okay,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. Tell me, how’s your leg?”

O’Neil held the phone to his leg and rapped the plaster with his knuckles. “You can sign my cast, if you want,” he said. “Also, you owe my sister fifteen hundred dollars for medical expenses.”

“Jesus, O’Neil. Don’t you have any insurance?”

On the television a couple began kissing with their eyes closed. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” said O’Neil.

“Okay, okay. I have to tell them something. What’s the woman’s name? Patty?”

“Patrice. She drove me to the hospital.”

“I always thought she was pretty good looking,” Joe said, thinking aloud.

“Try telling her you’re going to paint her house.”

O’Neil passed the afternoon watching television and napping, and keeping off the leg, which had begun to hum with pain, like a low-bandwidth radio signal. He believed that Joe would call back eventually and try to settle the situation. He had never met anybody like Joe, who spoke about his native country with a rhapsodic patriotism that was like nothing O’Neil had experienced in his life. “People think Canada is cold,” Joe liked to say, “but it’s the warmth of the people that makes it special.” O’Neil had serious questions about Joe’s business practices-he underpaid all his workers so badly that almost no one stayed, and he seemed to be taking deposits on houses he couldn’t paint in a million years-and yet O’Neil liked to think that his loyalty, doing an awful job nobody else wanted, would count for something in the end. But Joe did not call back, and as the afternoon wore on, it occurred to O’Neil that this silence might be permanent.

After dinner, when Kay and Jack had left him to catch an early movie, O’Neil put two pills in his shirt pocket and swung on his crutches out to the patio, a concrete slab attached to the back of the house that Kay and Jack had dressed up with plastic furniture and potted marigolds. O’Neil arranged himself in a chair and washed the pills down with a can of Coors, and waited for the codeine to kick in. The day was nearly gone, and the last of the light seemed to pour into the shadows like water down a drain. His body had always been highly responsive to medication of any sort, and this was true of the codeine, which made him feel like hammered tin. At times like this, O’Neil sometimes thought of Sandra, the last girl he had loved. They had broken up just a few months after his parents’ accident-with so much on his mind, O’Neil had simply drifted away-and though they had managed to remain friends for the rest of their time at college, O’Neil often felt a stab of longing for her, and the way she had made him feel: more alive somehow, as if his life were an open door he had only to step through. The summer after graduation, Sandra had ridden her bicycle across the country, raising money for hunger relief; now she was in California, a medical student at Stanford planning a career in pediatric oncology, while O’Neil was painting houses and living in a storage room. He would have liked to call her, but what was there to say? On top of everything, Joe owed him two weeks’ pay, and O’Neil had begun to wonder if he would ever see it, let alone the fifteen hundred for his broken leg. If his parents had still been around, he would have asked them what to do. For some time after they had died, when he was alone and feeling lost, O’Neil would speak to them, asking them questions about his life. Should I drop calculus? Should I buy a car? He has never told anyone about this, not even Kay, though secretly he believed she did the same thing.

Now, five years later on his sister’s patio, O’Neil found that his memory of his parents, their incorporeal vividness, had receded. He could no longer hear their voices, or even imagine what they might say to him. When he closed his eyes he could still conjure their faces, but these images were static, like photographs. Sitting in the dark on Kay’s patio, he understood that’s just what they were-memories of pictures, nothing more. It wasn’t just the codeine, O’Neil thought. They had left him alone.

The accident that killed their parents happened on a trip they had taken to visit O’Neil at college, the fall of his sophomore year. His parents had driven up for parents’ weekend, and on the way home, in a snowstorm, their car went off the road and fell a hundred feet into a river gorge. All of this would have been clear enough-a skid on a wet road in failing light-if not for the fact that they had left the college at noon and crashed their car six hours later, on the wrong road entirely, having driven only thirty miles. Where had they spent the intervening hours? Their mother had telephoned Kay at four-thirty, but not said where she was. The stretch of road between the campus and the ravine where their car was found was empty: no towns at all, and no reason to stop. Sleeping in the college library, O’Neil had awakened at five to see, out the window, the first dry flakes falling; by midnight nearly a foot of snow was on the ground, and he had learned that his parents were dead. Identifying the bodies was a job that should have been O’Neil’s-he was, after all, right there-but in the end he could not face this; he waited for Kay and Jack to drive up from New Haven and stood outside the police station in the snowy cold while they saw to this task. Then the three of them drove on to Glenn’s Mills, the upstate New York town where O’Neil and his sister had grown up, to wait for the bodies to follow them for burial.

O’Neil arranged to take incompletes in all his courses and was planning to stay on at their parents’ house until school started again in January, when Kay would return to New Haven and they would put the house up for sale. Though some might have thought this a morbid scene, a pair of orphans moping around the house, in fact the weeks following their parents’ death passed quickly and became, for O’Neil, a time of strange and unexpected contentment. Unhappiness, he discovered, was an emotion distinct from grief, and he found it was possible both to miss his parents terribly-a loss so overwhelming he simply couldn’t take it all in, like looking at a skyscraper up close-while also finding in the job of settling their affairs a satisfying orderliness. Accounts to be closed, bills to be paid, letters to be read and discarded, clothing to be boxed and carted off: he knew what he and Kay were doing-they were erasing their parents, removing the last evidence of their lives from the earth. It was, O’Neil knew, a way of saying good-bye, and yet with each trip to the Goodwill box behind the Price Chopper, each final phone call to a bank or loan company, he felt his parents becoming real to him in a way that they had never been in life. More than real: he felt them move inside him. Jack had returned to New Haven a few days after the funeral, and alone in the house, O’Neil and Kay slipped into a pattern that was, he realized, the same one his parents had kept, or nearly. The hours they ate and worked and slept, their habit of meeting in the living room in the evenings for a cup of tea-these were all things their parents had done, and on a night close to the end of their time together, O’Neil dreamed that he and Kay were married. It was a dream in which they were both the same and also different-they were at once their parents and themselves-and when he awoke in his old bedroom under the eaves, he felt not revulsion or shame but a fleeting certainty that he had been touched by the world of the spirits.

His discoveries were many-his father, for instance, owned nineteen blue shirts; his mother kept a needle and thread in her glove compartment; on a shelf in the laundry room, behind the boxes of detergent and fabric softener, someone had hidden a pack of Larks-and yet the actual circumstances of his parents’ death, its strange location and hour, seemed unknowable. Then on a day just before Christmas, their father’s Visa bill arrived, including a forty-two-dollar charge for a motel, the Glade View Motor Court, and the mystery was solved. The charge was dated the day they had died, November 12, and O’Neil recognized the name at once: the Glade View was a run-down motel set back from the highway, about an hour south of campus. Its curious existence, so far from anything, had always seemed so sordid and improbable that it had become a familiar landmark; O’Neil and his parents had joked about it often, to fill the final minutes of their long drives together to the college. This was where they had spent the last afternoon of their lives together. O’Neil felt no embarrassment learning this-far worse had been the discovery, in his mother’s dressing table, of her diaphragm, and beneath it a faded pamphlet on “natural birth spacing.” And yet it was still troubling, like opening a door to find, behind it, another door just like it. O’Neil and Kay sat on the sofa, passing the bill back and forth between them, reading it over and over and shaking their heads. A motel. They had visited O’Neil at college, then stopped on the way home at a seedy roadside motor court, and, leaving, had turned themselves around in the storm. It was almost funny; it made, O’Neil realized, no sense to him at all. Did they do this all the time? What other secrets were they taking with them? And suddenly he realized how little he truly knew about his parents. The bills and blue shirts were nothing. A new sadness touched him, and at once he knew it was the one he had waited for. No more or less: it was the simple wish that he could have become a man before they died.

On Friday evening, with no word from Joe, O’Neil asked Kay and Jack to drive him to Patrice’s house to pick up his car, an ancient Buick he had bought out of the classifieds the week he’d returned from Europe. He hoped that the painting had proceeded without him, but when they arrived at her house the scene he found was one of abandonment, as if time had frozen at the moment of his accident. His ladder still lay in the yard behind the yew bushes, and beside it a nearly empty can of hardened paint. Though he hadn’t thought of this before, he had spilled most of a gallon on the porch roof, which was now a total loss-it would have to be reshingled, and this, O’Neil knew, would cost Joe more money.

Patrice answered the door before he could knock, holding Henry on her hip. Henry was wearing only a diaper, his eyes were glassy from a day of tears, and Patrice wore the stunned and hopeless look of someone who hadn’t slept in days. O’Neil had taken the last of the codeine that afternoon, and looking at Patrice, this thought made him feel unworthy.

She tipped her head toward his cast. “Does it hurt?”

“You’re the first person to ask me that,” O’Neil replied. “It did, thank you, for a while.”

She moved her hand through the air toward him, stopping just shy of his face. “There’s paint in your hair,” Patrice said.

The three of them made their way to the front yard, to get a better look at the roof. From where they stood, O’Neil could see a broad splash, marking the spot where he had first made impact, and below it a wide ribbon of paint that traced his course down the sloping roof to the ground below.

“I feel just terrible about this,” O’Neil said. “This is completely my fault. Also, I never thanked you for driving me to the hospital.”

Patrice looked sweetly at Henry, who smiled back into her face. “What else could we do, Henry?” she said. “Leave this poor man in the yard?”

She helped O’Neil cover his crew kit with a tarp and store the rest of the equipment, in case it rained. She seemed to have no expectation at all for when the work on her house would resume, and O’Neil didn’t know what to say about this. Probably it wouldn’t.

“What will you do?” she asked him, when the time had come to go.

“It’s hard to say. I’m thinking maybe law school.”

She smiled at this answer. “I meant about your hair, O’Neil.”

Then, for just a moment, they exchanged a deep regard. Patrice’s eyelashes, O’Neil saw, were long and thick and, though she wore no mascara, seemed braided. Such a small thing, but that was what he saw. His mind took hold of this image, pushing aside all other thoughts, and he imagined what her eyelashes would feel like, brushing against his cheek. He thought it would be nice to kiss her-more than nice. But sad too, and in a way he had not felt before. They held one another’s gaze a second more, and then Patrice looked past him to the Volvo parked at the curb, where Kay and Jack were reading the newspaper.

“Who’s that now?” she said. “You’ve brought someone.”

O’Neil followed her eyes to the car. “That’s my sister and her husband. They’re Kay and Jack.”

Patrice turned with her hip so Henry could see and lifted his little arm to help him wave. “I’m really sorry about your leg, O’Neil,” she said. “It’s not the same without you around here.”

They said their good-byes, and Jack took O’Neil home in the Buick, with Kay following in the Volvo. As they turned the corner onto Post Road, O’Neil lifted his eyes to find Jack looking at him through the rearview mirror.

“Nice-looking woman,” Jack said, and winked knowingly. “What do you say, O’Neil? Maybe I should take up house painting.”

O’Neil said nothing. This was when he realized he’d never seen Patrice’s husband because she didn’t have one. His assumption that this man existed was just that-an assumption. Or perhaps Joe had led him to believe this. Either way, there was no such person. It was just Patrice and Henry, and their big empty house that no one was painting for them.

O’Neil tried to wash the paint from his hair, but it was no use, and the next week he finally asked Kay to cut it. Using a pair of sewing scissors from the kitchen junk drawer, Kay snipped off most of his hair, while O’Neil sat wrapped in a plastic tablecloth and Jack swept up the trimmings with a whisk broom. The good news was that Joe had finally called O’Neil back, and after dinner he picked him up in the company van and drove him to a bar in Port Chester where they used to go after work. The bar was called the Moosehead, and was owned by some Canadians who, like Joe, seemed imprisoned in a sentimental exile. A Canadian flag hung over the bar, there were maps of Canada and travel photos of Canadian destinations on the paneled walls, and if they stayed long enough, O’Neil knew, the bartender would ring a bell and lead everyone in a chorus of “O Canada.”

“About the money,” Joe said regretfully, after they had taken a table. He had a weight lifter’s body, square and solid, and a blond moustache that he liked to stroke with thumb and forefinger. “We may have a tiny problem there.”

“Don’t tell me that,” O’Neil said.

“The situation is,” Joe continued, “the status of the company is a little tenuous at the moment. Technically, I have no employees at all, if we don’t count you. You might say that, as of last week, we are no longer an official branch of Professor Painter.”

“You have no insurance.”

Joe wagged a finger over their glasses. “Let me get the tab for these beers.”

“Is this how they do things in Canada? Pay you in beer?”

Joe left the table to select a song on the jukebox and returned with a bowl of nuts. “Oh, don’t be mad,” he said. “Hey, this is you and me. Am I missing something here? We’ll absolutely work this out.”

“Somebody has to finish that house,” O’Neil offered.

“Right,” Joe replied, chewing a mouthful of nuts. “That’s completely right. And I’ll do it myself, if I have to. I’m just saying we might not have explored all our options at this point.”

“Joe, she’s totally alone over there,” O’Neil said.

“See?” Joe nodded hopefully. “There’s something.”

In the parking lot they settled on three thousand dollars: fifteen hundred for O’Neil’s trip to the hospital, another thousand for back wages, and five hundred dollars compensation for his pain and suffering. O’Neil doubted he would ever see this money, but two days later Joe appeared at the house with a check, and a letter for O’Neil to sign. The letter said, in essence, that he was no longer an employee of Professor Painter, Inc., and that he held both Joe and the parent company harmless of any responsibility for his accident. O’Neil wondered if such a letter was legal-in the purest sense it was a form of extortion-but he was glad to get any money at all, and signing the letter seemed the only way to make this happen. The check did not bounce, and O’Neil gave Kay the fifteen hundred in cash one night after dinner.

Kay looked the bills over. “I hope he didn’t make you sign anything,” she said.

The next day, a Sunday, was the Fourth of July, and the three of them drove to the beach in Old Greenwich, to barbecue and watch the fireworks over the Sound. The shells were to be launched from a barge anchored offshore, and after they had eaten their chicken and drunk their wine they positioned lawn chairs at the shoreline to watch the display. The evening was clear; darkness came on with the swift evenness of a curtain falling. As stars appeared above the still water, the first cannon boomed, and the people cheered as the shell leapt heavenward to release its package of tendriled light.

“What is the magic of fireworks?” Jack said to O’Neil. Kay and Jack were holding hands, and O’Neil understood this remark as a way to include him, although Jack also appeared genuinely moved; his face glowed with the wine, and his eyes were moist in the reflected light of the display. “Is it the way they’re here one moment and gone the next? Are we just remembering other times?”

Before O’Neil could answer, Kay leaned over to her husband and kissed him. “Sweetie,” she said, and squeezed his face, “you’re wasted.”

Back home Jack went off to bed, and Kay joined O’Neil in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said sadly, and took a place across from him at the table. “Jack can’t hold his liquor at all.”

“He was right, though,” O’Neil said. “I was remembering.”

Kay thought a moment. “I miss them too.”

She left then and returned moments later with an envelope, which she placed on the table in front of O’Neil. He knew, even before he looked at it, that it was something their parents had left behind. Their father was-had been-a lawyer, and on the outside of the envelope was his name and the address of his office, embossed in heavy black ink, and then the name of the person the letter was meant for, a woman named Dora Auclaire. O’Neil saw that one end of the envelope had been opened with a single, neat stroke of a knife. He slid the letter out, and as he unfolded the heavy paper he felt his heart grow large. The letter was written in his father’s hand, a single sentence long. Dear Dora, it said, It would have been nice for me too. He had signed it, Love, Art.

“I’m sorry, O’Neil. I thought it was probably time you saw this.”

“God Almighty.” He put the letter down, though at once he picked it up again. “How did you find it?”

“It wasn’t hidden, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just sitting there in the top drawer of his desk. I found it just a couple of days after the accident when I was looking for the lease on his office. I guess I shouldn’t have opened it, but there was no address, and I thought it might be important.”

O’Neil read the letter again, its one taut sentence of yearning. Dora Auclaire: He searched his memory for this woman, but came up with nothing. “Jesus Christ, Kay.”

“I know, honey. It’s not good news.”

O’Neil sighed, uncertain what to say or think. “Any idea who she was?”

“He did some legal work for her, I do know that. A will, some real estate stuff.” Kay shrugged. “It wasn’t really my business to look.”

“I can’t believe Dad was screwing around.” O’Neil shook his head; he was suddenly cold. “I mean, they went to a motel.”

Kay took his hand. “He never mailed it, O’Neil. And the letter doesn’t prove anything. There’s a lot we’ll never know about them.”

O’Neil looked at the floor. “Can’t know, you mean.”

“Don’t, can’t. It’s all the same.” She paused; he felt her eyes on his face. “They were just people, O’Neil.”

“How can you say that?” He pulled his hand away, though he was instantly sorry for doing this. “They were our parents.”

Kay rose and lit the stove for tea. When her back was turned he closed his eyes, and tried to remember them, his parents. For some time he had longed to hear their voices again. But he could not imagine his father saying these words.

Kay returned to the table and pulled her chair close to O’Neil’s. “Honey, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I think it’s time we talk about you doing something with yourself.”

“I thought I was.”

Kay frowned. “Painting houses for this con man?”

“Oh, Joe’s not so bad.”

“Joe’s a liar, and a thief. What about law school? You’ve talked about law school.”

“I think that was just something to say.”

“Okay. No law school.” Kay sighed maternally. “How about teaching? You’re good with kids.”

“Have you ever even seen me with kids? I don’t think I even know any.”

For a while they sat in silence. The kettle whistled, and Kay left the table to pour the tea, which smelled like lemon and roses. She placed a cup on the table in front of O’Neil, then leaned over to put her arms around his shoulders and kiss the top of his head.

“They had their lives, O’Neil. Go have yours. That’s what I’m saying to you.”

“You’re kicking me out.”

“I love you, boyo.” She pulled away to fix him with an even gaze. “And, yes. When the leg’s better, off you go into your life. And off I go into mine.”

When Kay left him, O’Neil sat alone at the table, drinking his tea. No one had called him by that name in many, many years. He remembered the day he had graduated from college and the moment, stepping from the dais with his diploma in his fist, when he had lifted his eyes to search for Kay. A sea of sunlit faces, and then he had found her, waving to him. Of all the people in the crowd, Kay was the one who belonged to him, and he had never loved her so much as he did at that moment, the way a drowning man would love a life ring. What would he do without her now, in the life she was sending him to? The letter still lay on the kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers; he read it once more. Dear Dora. Love, Art. What did you do with something like that? It was a riddle, as the motel bill had been a riddle, and he knew he had no hope of solving either one; that was the point that Kay was making. It was not beyond imagining that she had saved the letter for a day such as this one, believing it would do the trick. O’Neil finished his tea, knowing what he was about to do but still taking the time to envision it, so that later he would know if the image he had made in his mind was the correct one. It was. He rose on his crutches, took the letter to the stove, and when he dipped it into the blue flame of the burner, the paper caught so quickly he was still holding it when it disappeared.

There was one thing left to do. The next afternoon O’Neil dressed in clean shorts and a polo shirt and hitchhiked the five miles to Patrice’s house. The crew kit still sat in the driveway with a tarp over it, and the yard was quiet under the mild shade of the willows. O’Neil had tried to page Joe for a couple of days, but he’d heard no reply, and it seemed likely that he was already back in the Canada he loved.

Patrice let him in and led him to the kitchen, where she sat at the table to resume spooning cereal into Henry’s mouth. Grains were caught in the little boy’s hair and eyebrows. “How’s the leg?”

“Not so bad,” O’Neil said. “I’m afraid I have some news. I don’t think anybody’s going to be painting your house.”

Henry picked up his cup and began to bang it on the tray of his high chair. Patrice scooped more cereal from the nearly empty bowl, and as she brought the spoon to the little boy’s mouth, O’Neil saw her pause to wipe a tear from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I’m truly sorry,” O’Neil said.

“I have to say I shouldn’t be surprised.” She lifted her tired face toward him. “I’m not very good at reading the signals. Any chance of finding him?”

“None at all. I’d say we’ve both been had.” O’Neil shifted on his crutches. “How much did you pay him?”

She sighed miserably. “Oh, four thousand dollars.” Patrice put her palms to her eyes, then opened them like doors to look at Henry. “What a goddamn idiot your mother is. Say, hello, idiot.”

Standing at the counter, O’Neil wrote the check. He would have gladly written it for more, but fifteen hundred dollars was all he had. In any event, it would probably cover the repairs to the roof. He had wondered all morning if he would write the check when the time came, but the moment it did, he found it was easy, and made him feel lighter than anything had in a long time.

Patrice stored the check in a drawer. “I won’t cash this, you know,” she said.

“It’s my hope that you will.”

They kissed, then, for the first time-a kiss that O’Neil realized he had been imagining for weeks, a kiss of tender longing. He touched her face, still damp with tears; he tasted these as he kissed her, their salty essence, and when they parted O’Neil saw that Henry had fallen asleep in his high chair. Patrice freed the little boy from the belt that held him in place and led O’Neil back through her empty house, waiting at the top of the stairs with Henry in her arms while O’Neil hobbled up on his crutches. He stood at the door to Henry’s nursery, waiting for the cascade of tears that would bring everything to a crashing halt, but this never came; a moment later Patrice crept from the room, holding one finger over her lips, and took O’Neil down the carpeted hall to a large room with nothing in it but drapes, a mattress, and an alarm clock on the bare floor beside it. The clock, O’Neil saw, was blinking 12:00 A.M.-not the correct hour at all. O’Neil lay on his back while Patrice helped him remove his shorts over the bulky cast, and this fact, which might have seemed strange, did not. With everything else-the kiss in the kitchen, Henry’s plunge into sleep, the blinking alarm clock, and the sunshine enfolded in the curtains-it seemed to belong to several periods of his life at once, as if they had stepped together outside the flow of time. She removed her skirt and blouse and placed them, folded, in a bureau drawer. The light was behind her, where she stood. She folded O’Neil’s shorts and put these aside as well. Then she returned to where he lay and all thought left him.

When the sun had moved from the windows Henry called from his crib, and they dressed and fed him juice and slices of apple in the kitchen before taking him out to the hammock in the yard. It was afternoon, an afternoon in July. Together they lay and rocked, the long branches of the willows enclosing them like a tent.

“Would you like to hold him?” Patrice asked.

O’Neil did, so much it surprised him. Patrice helped him lift the little boy from the space between them and onto O’Neil’s stomach. Henry was clutching a stuffed cube with bells inside and handles on the corners, and O’Neil pulled on these, to make the chimes ring. Henry frowned, but did not cry. O’Neil watched the boy bob up and down on his chest, listening to the bells, a sound that seemed to come from under them and all around.

“I forgot to tell you,” Patrice said. “I like what you did with your hair.”

“My sister cut it for me.”

Patrice took a strand of it in her fingers, narrowing her dark eyes to examine it. “Well, she did a good job. I cut hair for a while, and this isn’t at all bad.”

He knew nothing about her: the jobs she’d had, the places she’d lived, why she was alone. Henry’s body was warm and damp, and his breath had the dry, pasty smell of papier-mâché. O’Neil wondered what the little boy might make of him, this man with them in the hammock. He understood then that Henry’s father was dead, or gone so far away that it was all the same. There was no knowing, or need to know.

“I think I like the house this way,” Patrice said. With one bare toe on the ground she moved the hammock to and fro. “I think I’ll leave it half painted to remember you by.”

“This is just the one time, then,” O’Neil said sadly.

Patrice took his hand in hers.

“For the record,” O’Neil said, “I wish it weren’t.”

Patrice nodded thoughtfully. “You will find her,” she declared.

“Her.”

“Her. Yes.” Her voice was pale; she seemed to have left him behind, in memory. And yet she was smiling at him. “The one you are meant for.”

O’Neil said nothing. There was no reason to think it; and yet it seemed so. A few minutes passed, and Patrice squeezed his hand again. “You will.”

O’Neil rose. “I believe you,” he said. Then he kissed each of them good-bye, and swung on his crutches toward home.