Saul and Patsy

Twenty-five

At certain times, particularly on the days when she was working at the Baltimore food bank — it didn’t take much more than a certain cast of light in the office or the connected warehouse to cause her to be plunged into these moments of thoughtfulness — Delia would involuntarily remember her late husband, Saul and Howie’s father, and a picture of him would rise up in her mind, usually a random mental snapshot in which her husband was getting dressed for work, knotting his tie or making an effort to get the lint off his suit before he kissed her goodbye and left the house for the firm where he labored as a patent lawyer, and at such moments it occurred to her that now, twenty years after his death, she thought of him more than she ever had when they were married, a marriage that at the time had felt more like a business arrangement than a real marriage, lacking as it did much of any real passion on either side, or so she thought. They were both ready to get married when they had met as seniors at the university and a year later had married each other out of convenience more than anything else, though she had pretended to be crazy about him with her friends and family for the sake of appearances, and because she thought she should.

With many women she knew, especially the divorcées, the memory of the husband just faded out through an act of will. Men left behind their objects; women left behind the memory of their looks.

But with Delia the process had been different. You could sometimes love someone, as it turned out, after that person was gone, though not before. One of life’s larger ironies, its habit of making what was absent, visible. That was what had happened to her, and this odd recognition had followed lately from the fling she had had with that boy, the young man who had worked on her yard. Perhaps this paradox was commonplace, but she doubted it. The death, the absence of her husband, sweetened the memory of the life. Sweetened it almost intolerably. In life her husband might have been, well, exasperating and bound by habit and, on occasion, repulsive: now and then he would rub his scalp, for example, then examine his fingertips for dandruff, and, if there happened to be any dandruff there near the fingernails, he would, if he thought no one was watching, slyly slip the fingertips close to his nose, for a smell. Awful. In life, it was a disgusting habit. But now, long after his death, picturing it, Delia felt tender toward it, and him. It pierced her. The gesture made her see the child in him, which, all day long, he was at pains to conceal.

Another odd feature of her long-dead husband’s remnants, her memory of him, was that whenever she thought of him, her thoughts were accompanied by no name. In death he had seemingly lost the name he had had in life. He had turned into a man, into him, into the images she possessed of him, and his smells, and his gestures, his curiosities as a human being and as her companion, and the ways — pokey and tentative — he had touched her as a lover and husband who, truth be told, did not linger much over the niceties but who sometimes cooked for her and brought her breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings, all these images and smells added up to the memory of the man she had married and had known. She recognized that he had been utterly faithful to her because women as a gender and group and class simply did not occupy his thoughts very much. Somehow, you could detect his obliviousness to other women just by looking at him — he did not have a roving eye. As an adult man, his thoughts had turned completely to the schematics of providing for her and their two children, without, really, much conversation at the dinner table except for expediencies and plans, and then, one day, he was gone, before the conversations might really have started. He wanted, more than anything else, to be a utility-husband and a professional at business, and then he was professionally dead, slumped over the steering wheel, blocking traffic. His life had appeared to have had no purpose except as a husband and father and a lawyer. Nevertheless, he had helped to ease Delia through this life by being her companion and being, in his way, considerate and thoughtful. Now, in death, he had lost his name, though she said it from time to time when she was by herself, mostly in order to preserve it, so that someone here on Earth would still say it: Norman. A plain old name. But he wasn’t Norman anymore. He was those images he had left behind, and their accompanying gestures, and the associated scents, and he was also the father of the two children he had, with her, helped to bring into the world. He had become real once he became imaginary.

Working in the food bank, she wondered sometimes what it felt like to have a coronary thrombosis, whether you even knew what had hit you before you were out of this life, gone.

She had loved, in a very different manner, having an adolescent boy lover because now she knew what that experience was like to go through, once you were a full-grown adult. She had gotten it out of her system (again). Really, the whole experience had been an exercise in nostalgia, at being in high school one more time, and being desired. And loved, a little. It was a wonder to her that the boy had wanted her at all, even for a few weeks. The experience had left a few traces for which she was grateful — it was as if life had arranged something like a cookout for her at the top of a mountain — but now, back to her normal routines, working during the day and going back to the house at night and fixing dinner for herself and pouring her nightly glass of Merlot, she was newly reconciled, first, to herself, and, second, to the idea that she might meet someone else, someone more her age, or she might not, ever, and anyway the meeting or not-meeting would not make much of a difference, one way or another. She was through with the belief that having a relationship, or relationships generally, would in any way validate her life. She liked living alone.

She had wanted to convey this truth to her son Saul. She didn’t feel jealous of Patsy, but she just didn’t appreciate the way they had been married to each other and still were married to each other. He was — for this behavior of his there was an old word that no one used anymore — uxorious. They were always touching each other and telling each other how much they loved each other, and they did this routine in public, and it got tiresome after a while. Delia especially didn’t like to see her son doting over his wife. She would have liked it better if they had been able to take their love for each other for granted, as if it were permanent and assured, and, similarly, she would have liked it if he could keep some of his emotions to himself. He should make certain adult assumptions, as everyone did, and then get on with things.

Delia had never heard a man say “I love you” as often as Saul said it to his wife, in front of her, Delia — in front of everybody. Delia supposed that some women liked that. They became used to the sweet talk and expected it as if it were their birthright. But you didn’t cast out that phrase in public where everyone could hear it.

Saul doted on his wife, he doted on their children, he had doted over that boy who shot himself, and he was a sentimentalist, but that was how he was, how he always had been, ever since his father had died. He was a doter. He doted. How close this was to “dotage”! The etymology of the words — Delia as a Scrabble player took pride in her knowledge of words — must be related. She would look it up. She blamed herself for the way Saul had turned out. She had told him to be careful of his baby brother, to take care of him, noting his fragility; and some element had changed in Saul thereafter. He had become, in a sense that was difficult to pinpoint, a caretaker. He took care of things. A person shouldn’t live like that. Caretakers were servants.

Well, Delia thought, laughing inwardly as she did an inventory of cartons of soup, she should talk. He came by it honestly. If only he would leave that dreadful little city snuggled away in Michigan! But he seemed to like it. Still, it was no place for a Jew; big cities had all the advantages. The doctors were more expert, the concerts had more adventurous programs, the friends conversed more freely, and you could get a few of the amenities, including the New York Times delivered to your doorstep every morning — you didn’t go around in a cloud of unknowing.

And then Delia let her thoughts drift to her other son, to Howie, who had moved, first to Oakland and then to Moraga and then to Berkeley and then back to Oakland, and who seemed, just now, to have a steady job, working, as he said, “in retail,” though he still occasionally called her and asked for a bit of money (he called these loans “investments”), the scamp, and because Delia liked having a purpose in Howie’s life, she could never refuse him. He had grown used to having money around and missed it terribly when it was no longer there. It wouldn’t end well, Delia feared, it wouldn’t end well at all, but once they had emerged into their own lives, your children’s fragility was theirs and not yours. Handsome Howie, her bankrupt baby. Who was so attractive that his looks had been his fate in life but who seemed to love. . well, anyone? Who knew?

The thought of her younger son disturbed her, so she called up images of her grandchildren, Mary Esther, and the baby, Theo, who had been born with a handsome face but also a birthmark on his arm, an odd disfigurement in the shape of the state of Vermont. But it was tucked away where no one could see, thank God, and he’d been born with ten fingers and ten toes, and Delia had been there two weeks after he was born, and, my goodness, he was such a quiet and intelligent-looking child. His sister was already developing a mouth on her. She said, when she saw her little brother, that she wanted to throw him into the wastebasket.

She had watched Saul dressing Emmy in her snowsuit. As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it, but even so. .

Delia realized that she had lost count, by virtue of her daydreaming, and returned to her work. As she did, she heard the sound of two cars colliding out on the street. Immediately she looked up and saw through the doorway a man in a threadbare suit getting out of his car dazedly. In front of him, a teenager, a girl, sat behind the wheel of her car, on her face a broad staring smile, of shock. Her car’s windshield had cracked in a spiderweb pattern where her head had struck it, and blood was beginning to ooze down from her forehead toward her self-sustaining grin. In slow motion, her hands lifted themselves to her face, to feel it, to detect if it was still there. Delia dropped what she was doing to rush out to the street, to try to help, to murmur some consolation to the threadbare man and the smiling bleeding girl.

Twenty-six

The strands of toilet paper — were they like a set of icicles? or delicate traceries on a canvas? or thin cirrus clouds? or the white strings of misaligned protein molecules collecting in the wasting brain hemispheres of an Alzheimer patient? — the white strands of toilet paper hung down from the branches of Saul and Patsy’s tree in the front yard: ugly, and malice-begotten, and, finally, defeating all comparison. It was just toilet paper thrown into the tree. Patsy, seeing it there while stepping outside to get the morning paper, called out, “Saul! Goddamn it, Saul. Get out of bed and come see what they’ve done to us this time!”

After a few moments, during which Patsy watched a robin’s attempt to fly between the tree’s branches and the dangling toilet paper, Saul came shuffling onto the front stoop, rubbing his face violently with both hands. He put his palm on Patsy’s shoulder for balance as he lifted his left foot to scratch his right leg near the knee. Gazing at the tree, he said, with what seemed to be a tremendous effort at remaining calm, “Blue sky today. You know, I’ve really got to quit my job. Yeah,” he said, agreeing with himself, and nodding, “today is the perfect day for it, a blue-sky quitting day.” He breathed his stale dream-breath on her. “Today I quit.” Another pause. “I am no longer an educator. Today I am an un-educator.”

Patsy glanced at her husband, sizing him up. Hard to think of what else he would do with himself if he wasn’t in a classroom. Nor could she imagine what the world would welcome from him. Unemployment, maybe: the world would be happy to have Saul in no occupation whatsoever.

“Look,” he said, pointing. “They’ve painted the lawn blue.” She followed his pointing finger as directed. Yes, indeed, the little troop of local thugs had found some blue house paint and had poured it over their grass in no particular pattern. Vandal action painting alfresco. A blue lawn— she had never wanted such a thing or heard of it, except in a book she had once read. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn”—it was the only phrase she could remember from whatever book it was. Well, she had come a long way to this blue lawn, but this time the blue lawn wasn’t a metaphor but an object of the adolescent devils of the community, still excitable boys and girls, still intent on destruction.

Saul shuffled back into the house, fingering his nose. In the early morning he sometimes reminded her of a grumpy old man, coughing, as spiky as a pincushion, plagued with odd odors, opinionated and rather unclean.

You didn’t get rid of a contagion by blessing and burying its unquiet spirit, Patsy thought, as she went back inside to help Emmy get up and get dressed, and Theo diapered and fed. She had told him so and she was right. The unquiet spirits once stirred to action stayed stirred until they could manage some blood-spilling mayhem. Then they cooled down. Or else: they never would cool down. In the myths people lived by, devils stayed hot forever, perpetually fevered and licked by flames.

He wasn’t about to go to medical school or law school — Patsy understood that, at least. He had an abiding distaste for doctors as a class, and an equal distrust of lawyers — like bottleflies at the scene of illness and trouble. He didn’t want to turn himself into either one and had said so. In any case, his family on both sides was overpopulated with dermatologists and radiologists and litigators and patent attorneys and estate planners. They were all formidably short-tempered and quite well-off; Howie, of course, was the exception. Their topics of conversation often seemed to be limited to their golf games and their investment portfolios. A few waxed eloquent about their remodeled kitchens and their trips to Cancún. Saul had one uncle who could talk learnedly for an hour about his Sub-Zero refrigerator and his Vulcan gas stove. This mania for appliances was attached to both the men and the women. Their professions had addled them and reduced their sympathetic imaginations to small vestigial stumps.

No, Patsy thought, as she roused Emmy and helped her into her day-care outfit, whatever Saul decided to do with his adulthood, he would not go into one of those professions.

Soon after he had showered and shaved, taken Theo out of his crib and into his high chair in the kitchen, Saul called the superintendent of schools and then the principal, to let them know he wouldn’t be coming in today, or, for that matter, ever. He was resigning. Vermilya and Kabelá both tried to argue with Saul, to persuade him to return to his job. He genially refused. They assumed, they both said, that this resignation was a joke of some sort, a grandstanding gesture, a “stunt” (Vermilya), an “opening move from Mr. Don Quixote” (Kabelá), because if it was meant seriously, it was unprofessional and, Vermilya said — probably by accident — grounds for dismissal. Besides, schoolteachers never resigned voluntarily, Kabelá informed him in his nasal voice. Saul was sitting on the living-room sofa listening to Kabelá, the telephone cradled on his shoulder. In the kitchen, Patsy was spooning baby food into Theo while Emmy ate her cereal. Kabelá continued with his theories about schoolteachers. They didn’t have the nerve for actual unemployment. Nor could they exist in the real world, with authentic jobs. This was why they taught: to evade both employment and unemployment. This was exactly the sort of person Saul was, Kabelá continued: a teacher, unfit for the rigors of competition out there in the dog-eat-dog American business scene. Saul wasn’t doing, therefore, what he said he was doing.

“Zoltan, you knucklehead,” Saul said, “this is counterproductive argumentation you’re engaged in.”

“Come on, Saul,” Kabelá pleaded. “As a friend, I’m advising you: stop with the quitting. We need you down here. We can all understand why you would want to do this, but—”

“No,” he said. “I can’t do it anymore. My heart wouldn’t be in it. I’ve got that kid’s blood to think about, and besides, I need to do something else. When I’ve thought about it, I’ll let you know what I’m going to do. Goodbye, Zoltan. You’re a good guy — and I know this’ll inconvenience you and everything, and I’m sorry about that.”

“I won’t ever write you a recommendation,” Zoltan said. “You’ll be unrecommended.”

“Okay,” Saul said happily, before he hung up. He liked the idea of being unrecommendable.

That day, on her way home from work — the newly unemployed Saul had taken Theo and picked up Emmy in their recently purchased used car— Patsy found herself at the Valu-Rite checkout line, with a pile of Bartlett pears, three grapefruit, a small bag of apples, and a bottle of cheap domestic champagne from the U.S.A., penny-pinching budget bubbles. She planned to celebrate Saul’s unemployment that evening with the booze and fresh fruit. Going unemployed was one of the braver actions he had ever taken. It was as if he had borrowed a leaf from Howie’s book; perhaps there was a correspondence in the two brothers’ genetic infrastructure that gave them a tropism toward indolence, lassitude, laziness, apathy, lusterlessness, acedia, disinterest. Then again, perhaps not.

“Uh, miss?” the checkout clerk said. “Your credit card?”

“Yes?” Patsy asked.

The clerk was a short, mostly pretty young woman with blond hair, a hard, narrow, birdlike face, and turquoise fingernail polish. She had, however, minimum-wage bags under her eyes, the result of working long hours for low pay and few benefits. She was, Patsy guessed, gradually going to fat: frustration-eating would soon be having its effects on her. She probably had a boyfriend who sometimes hit her where it didn’t show.

“Your credit card didn’t go through,” the clerk said.

“What?” Patsy stood up straighter, to give herself more stature. She was, after all, a loan officer at the Five Oaks National Bank and Trust. “That’s impossible.”

The clerk shrugged. “We can try it again.” Patsy ran the card through the reading-strip once more. Again the message came back: Credit Refused.

“I don’t know what the matter is,” Patsy said. “This never happens.” The clerk gazed at her, the smallest ghost of a smile appearing on her face. “Well,” she said, “you could always pay in cash.”

Patsy took her wallet from her purse and opened it. There was no cash inside. Patsy felt herself suddenly reddening. Behind her, three people stood in the checkout line, watching her, shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Patsy seldom bothered with cash anymore except for small purchases like candy and breath mints and gum. But she thought she had stashed a few dollars in there. And where was the two-dollar bill she kept in her wallet permanently, for luck? Also missing, and anyway insufficient for pears and sparkling wine.

“I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the card,” Patsy said.

“Maybe you hit your limit and your credit ran out,” the blond girl said before reddening and putting her hand up in front of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

Patsy looked up at the ceiling and then at the floor. She felt nervous sweat on her back and under her arms, as this strange public humiliation continued. “I don’t suppose you offer credit,” she joked. She reached into the wallet and pulled out a quarter.

“No,” the clerk said, her ghost-smile now, just under the surface of things, turning to visible annoyance, her teeth beginning to show, an animal grimace.

“Do you have a public phone?” Patsy asked.

“Over there,” the clerk said, without gesturing. “Over there, by the doors.”

“Is it okay if I leave my groceries here?”

“Yeah, well — I’ll put them off to the side,” the clerk said. “But I can’t leave them there for long.”

“You won’t have to,” Patsy said. “I’m calling my husband.”

Waiting at the automatic doors for Saul and Emmy, Patsy thought of the enchanted carnal moments she and Saul had had when they first met and first made love as two sensual animals on fire with each other. That ended with the onset of marriage and routine and childbirth and child care and fatigue and day-to-day indifference. But, after all, this was what their marriage had come to: they depended almost blindly upon each other to get each other out of trouble; they were easing each other through this life. About Saul you could always say, He’s dependable. If he said that he’d be at Emmy’s day-care center at three in the afternoon, he would be there. He wouldn’t forget about Theo for a minute. If he said that he would pick up a friend at the airport, he would not forget the date. If you were in trouble, he would drop everything and get you out of trouble if he could; if you were itchy, he would make love to you, and if your back ached, he would rub it. He had once been an educator, until someone died. Now he was in search of an occupation. He was comfortably self-centered, though the caretaker side of him would never go away, and he was probably no woman’s fantasy of a mate, but, sitting near the automatic doors of the Valu-Rite, Patsy waited for him, and at the moment when he walked in, carrying Theo in a front-pack and Emmy on his shoulders, he smiled and waved at his wife, and she almost wept.

In the woods behind their house, a shrine had developed on the site where the ashes of Gordy Himmelman were said to be buried. An underclass of mourners skittered into the woods during the day and early evening and left behind their remembrances: packets of chewing gum, and a standing red-and-silver pinwheel that twirled when the wind caught it, and a carved yellow dog, and a few flowers here and there, and gold and blue ribbons; and a glass piggy bank with pennies inside it halfway up, as far as the pig’s tail, and more toys, including a battery-powered electric car, and several plastic figures of X-men, though the figures were mostly Wolverine, with his fingernails out, ready for combat; and more little flowers pasted onto the nearby trees, and a wooden cross with GORDY, WE MISS YOU written on it. It looked like a Mexican cemetery plot for a child, or a roadside shrine where someone had died in an accident, and day by day, week by week, the toys and decorations and flowers accumulated, and when Patsy walked out to visit it, as she did from time to time, she was at first horrified, then surprised, and then, finally, accustomed to the sudden involuntary appearance of her own tears. The tears had once belonged to Saul, but now they were hers, too.

After first thinking that he would make a good funeral director, a firstclass assistant to Binch, a man he had instantly taken a shine to, Saul told Patsy that the profession was, in fact, too much like being a doctor, though he suspected that the daily sight of corpses going in and out of the funeral home would calm his nerves and bring him spiritual quietude. There was something peaceful about a dead body, Saul informed Patsy. She listened to these opinions without comment.

Finally, at last, he had a good idea: he drove over to the Five Oaks News-Chronicle and offered his services as a columnist, three or four columns a week, to be titled “The Bloviator.” The features editor to whom he applied had never heard of the word and said that they certainly weren’t going to hire Saul as that, or as anything else.

Saul offered to write a sample column, full of excellent opinion. He would bloviate.

On the day Saul brought back his first column, the features editor was short on copy and ran the piece on spec, close to the editorial page, where he thought it wouldn’t attract much attention. The column that day was titled “Why Quit? A Manifesto,” and it caused a great deal of furor in Five Oaks, resulting in an increase in circulation and several angry letters.

The angry letters continued and peppered the editorial page — the anti-Semitic ones were discreetly screened — but the bloviator had apparently managed to help keep the newspaper’s circulation on the rise, and Saul was made a permanent fixture of Five Oaks discourse.

Behind the house the pinwheels and toys and flowers and signs began to fade and to grow sodden.

Saul is currently on a campaign to rid the city of WaldChem and its toxic chemical plant, and he has begun to write about factory-farms just outside of town with their relentless pollution of the groundwater.

Patsy sometimes is approached in the bank by people who ask if she is married to that jerk — one person used the word “scum”—who writes for the paper. She usually smiles and points to a laminated letter to the editor she has put up on the wall behind her desk. The print is so small that no one can read it without walking behind her desk, and no one ever does that unless she invites them to do so. When they do read it, they often find it puzzling that she would be proud of her husband’s having inspired such a letter.

To the editor:

I have been a resident of Five Oaks for forty-six years and have had to su fer a great deal of nonsense in my day but “Saul Bernstein’s” recent column on his own so-called “personal” view of zoning in the southeast corner of the city just about beats anything. Whatever gives this blowhard the confidence to criticize the fine businesspeople in the city who are all for growth and prosperity? You can’t have an omelet without a few eggs. This bloviator fellow — I believe his name as printed in the paper is a pseudonym — is an enemy to employment, to business, to profit, to life liberty and the persuit of happiness and I happen to believe that the oldstyle tar-and-feathers is too good for him. If he was in charge we would all be on welfare in a welfare state taking orders from Mr. Big, who would be him. He writes like he owns the secrets to the universe and I for one am fed up and am cancelling my subscription to the newspaper. I encourage other likeminded folks to do the same. No good society was ever made from the likes of him.

Yours sincerely,

Floyd Muscat

Patsy’s heart is gladdened every time she reads Floyd Muscat’s letter. It is always pleasing when a man finds his true vocation, as Saul has, and can inspire fervor in others.

Twenty-seven

One summer day, on his way home from his new job, Saul passed through a recently constructed residential neighborhood close to his own new home on Kingfisher Road. He and Patsy had moved again, for a bit more space. This particular location he was driving by now was where, years ago, he and Patsy had first lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. All the farmland surrounding it had been leveled and developed into a subdivision. He decided to motor around and snoop. He had about twenty minutes before he needed to get home, but he was curious about housing developments where no trees had yet been planted, how people lived in such places, without shadows, exposed to everything, saturated with sunlight and wide open to the elements.

About three blocks in, on the sidewalk, close to the curb, he saw a girl who seemed to be about ten years old sitting behind a card table, reading a book. Behind her, shadeless, on its narrow lot, the vinyl-sided, two-story house stood, stark with optimism and sanitation. The girl had light red hair in pigtails and a white dress cinched by a red patent-leather belt, and she wore patent-leather black shoes. She sat with her arms crossed, the book flattened on the table in front of her. Her face was not cute but defiant. On the table, along with the book, was a small cardboard box for cash, a lemonade pitcher, a few Dixie Cups, and some oddly shaped objects Saul couldn’t make out from his car. Next to the table, facing the street, was a large cardboard sign with block letters written in thick green ink.

LEMONADE AND OTHER THINGS BUY SOME

It had been a long day; Saul was thirsty and desired lemonade. It had always been his habit to stop for curbside children selling their wares. After parking the car and wiping his forehead with his sleeve, he approached the little girl’s stand while fingering the change in his pocket. He had several quarters. It would be enough, he thought.

“Good afternoon. I’d like some lemonade, please,” he said. As he advanced upon the table, he saw that the oddly shaped objects that he hadn’t been able to make out before were stones, plain stones from the ground.

The little girl glanced up from her book and examined him. “Okay. That’ll be one dollar fifty,” she said.

Saul reached into his wallet. “Well,” he said, “that’s a bit more than I expected. I only have three quarters. I do have a five-dollar bill, if you have change.”

“No,” the little girl said. “I don’t have change.” She seemed bored or obscurely dissatisfied with Saul. “I don’t have any change at all.” She lifted up the small cardboard box and then quickly dropped it. No coins clinked.

“Well, what else do you have for sale? I could buy five dollars’ worth of stuff.”

“These stones,” the little girl said. “I have some stones you can buy.” She pointed at the stones on the table. “I picked them out myself.”

“I don’t get it,” Saul said. “Why should I buy stones from you? I can get stones anywhere.”

“These stones,” the little girl said, “are magic.” She glanced up at him to see if he believed her. She had strange azure eyes. The eyes didn’t go with the hair, or with anything else about her.

“What do the stones do?”

“What do you want them to do?” she asked. She was a clever little girl.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Saul said. “Make me rich. Cure the common cold.”

“Well,” she said, “they can’t do that.” She pretended to go back to reading her book. She peered at the words and turned a page after slowly and rather sensually rubbing it between her thumb and index finger.

“If they can’t do that, then what can they do?”

“What do you want them to do?” she repeated.

“I just told you,” Saul said. He twisted around to see the title of the book she was reading. She had lifted it up as if for inspection. There was a horse on the cover. It was something called Heaven Is a Wind Swept Hill.

“No, I mean, what else do you want them to do?” she asked, without looking up.

“Help me find objects around the house that I’ve lost.”

“They can’t do that, either.”

“Name one thing that these stones can do, then,” Saul told her, irritated by the privileges the girl had assumed were hers just because she was a child. “Or I won’t buy any of your damn lemonade.”

“Don’t be so mean,” the girl said, glaring at him. “All right.” She sat up. “These stones can mend a broken heart.”

“Oh, right,” Saul said. “What do you know about broken hearts?”

“You think I’m just a little girl, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s the way it looks right now.”

“Actually,” the little girl said, “I’m actually a very old woman. I’m actually a witch. I’m ancient. I only look like a girl.”

“Have it your way,” Saul said. “So, how much are the stones? Their price, I mean.”

“I could sell you this one for four dollars.” She pointed at a gray, nondescript rock.

“That’s a lot of money for a rock. Do you have anything else for sale?”

“Yes,” the little girl said. “The number five.”

“Excuse me?”

The girl’s face had settled down into dailiness, and she looked bored again. She turned a page of her book with a self-satisfied flick of her hand. “I own all the rights to the number five,” she said smugly. “You can buy the rights from me if you want to use the number five this afternoon and tomorrow morning.”

“You’re crazy,” Saul said. The adjective just slipped out before he remembered that he shouldn’t say things like that to children.

“That’s what you think,” the girl said. “You’re the crazy one. I’m as sane as a sunbird.”

“My apologies. What happens if I use the number five without getting your permission? What then, little girl?” When he saw her expression of contempt, he added, “I’m just asking.”

“It won’t work,” she said. “You can try to use the number five, but it won’t work. It’ll be wrong. All your arithmetic will be false, and you’ll be mistaken, and you will fail.”

“That’s a new one. Where’d you get the rights to the number five?” Saul asked.

“They gave it to me,” she told him.

“Who’s this ‘they’?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you. That would be telling. They’re pretty scary.”

“I bet they are. Okay,” Saul said. “I think I see what’s going on here. So, I guess I’ll have one cup of your lemonade, please, and that rock, the one that mends broken hearts, and the use of the number five for this evening and tomorrow morning.”

“That’ll be seven dollars,” the little girl said.

“Seven dollars! Too much, I say,” said Saul. “Five dollars. Take it or leave it.” Maybe he would get a column out of this, an exposé of lemonade stands.

“Oh, all right,” the girl grumbled. She slapped her neck, as if a mosquito had bitten her there. She poured Saul his lemonade, handed him his rock, and dropped his five-dollar bill into the cardboard box. Saul took his first sip of the lemonade. It was wonderful, just the right combination of sweetness and sourness, the best lemonade he had had in a long time.

“Do you live around here?” he asked. “Here? In River Pines Estates?”

“Yeah.” She waited, as if in thought. “But I won’t tell you where.”

“Did you make this lemonade?” He took another sip. “It’s wonderful.”

“Thank you. My mom and I made it out of lemons,” she said, “plus the secret ingredient. Do you have children?” She was gazing at the Chevy.

“I have a daughter,” Saul said, “four years old, and a son. Theodore.”

“Who’s that in the car?”

Saul didn’t turn around to look. “Nobody. There’s nobody there.”

The little girl made a face at the car, a disagreeable and taunting expression, the way she’d look at any boy she didn’t know.

“Okay,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. She leaned back and closed her eyes in a deliberately languorous manner seemingly imitated from the paintings of Balthus. Saul, alarmed by this preadolescent display, put the little girl’s stone in his pocket, finished his lemonade, gave her the Dixie Cup, and returned to the Chevy. Then he drove home, having turned the rearview mirror upward so that he wouldn’t be distracted by whatever might have been back there.

At home, later that evening, after singing to Theo and reading Emmy a story, he put the stone — surrounded by bubble wrap — into a mailing box, which he addressed to his mother, together with a note telling her to keep the enclosed on her dresser. Maybe he should return and buy one for his brother and another for Brenda Bagley. Yes, he would do that. Secretly he had admired the little girl, who had found her vocation— salesmanship that thrived on indifference, peddling worthless commodities, infused with auras, to strangers — and, gazing down the hallway to where Patsy was sitting with Theo asleep in her lap, he thought with gratitude of his own skills and gifts, such as they were.