The Beginner's Goodbye

3

There used to be a dairy outlet over on Reisterstown Road, with a lighted white glass sign outside reading FIRST WITH THE CARRIAGE TRADE. It showed the silhouette of a woman wheeling a baby carriage — a witticism, I guess — and she was just galloping along, taking huge confident strides in a dress that flared below her knees although we were in the era of miniskirts. Whenever my family drove past that sign, I thought of my sister. This was before my sister had reached her teens, even, but still I thought of her, for Nandina seemed to have been born lanky, and ungainly, and lacking in all fashion sense. I’m not saying she was unattractive. She had clear gray eyes, and excellent skin, and shiny brown hair that she wore pulled straight back from her forehead with a single silver barrette. But the barrette tells you everything: she wore it still, although she would be forty on her next birthday. An aging girl, was what she was, and had been from earliest childhood. Her shoes were Mary Janes, as flat as scows in order to minimize her height. Her elbows jutted like coat hangers, and her legs descended as straight as reeds to her Ping-Pong-ball anklebones.

She drove me home from the hospital the afternoon that Dorothy died, and I sat beside her envying her imperviousness. She kept both hands on the steering wheel at the ten and two o’clock positions, just as our father had taught her all those years ago. Her posture was impeccable. (She had never been one of those women who imagine that slouching makes them look shorter.) At first she attempted some small talk — hot day, no rain in the forecast, pity the poor farmers — but when she saw that I wasn’t up to it, she stopped. That was one good thing about Nandina. She wasn’t bothered by silence.

We were traveling through the blasted wasteland surrounding Hopkins, with its boarded-up row houses and trash-littered sidewalks, but what struck me was how healthy everyone was. That woman yanking her toddler by the wrist, those teenagers shoving each other off the curb, that man peering stealthily into a parked car: there was nothing physically wrong with them. A boy standing at an intersection had so much excess energy that he bounced from foot to foot as he waited for us to pass. People looked so robust, so indestructible.

I pivoted to peer out the rear window at Hopkins, its antique dome and lofty pedestrian bridges and flanks of tall buildings — an entire complex city rising in the distance like some kind of Camelot. Then I faced forward again.

Nandina wanted to take me to her house. She thought mine wasn’t fit to live in. But I was clinging to the notion of being on my own, finally, free from all those pitying looks and sympathetic murmurs, and I insisted on her driving me home. It should have tipped me off that she gave in so readily. Turns out she was figuring I would change my mind once I got there. As soon as we reached my block she slowed down, the better to let me absorb the effect of the twigs and small branches carpeting the whole street—my twigs and small branches. She drew to a stop in front of my house and switched off the ignition. “Why don’t I just wait,” she said, “till you make sure you’re going to feel comfortable here.”

For a minute I didn’t answer. I was staring at the house. It was true that it was in even worse shape than I had pictured. The fallen tree lay everywhere, not in a single straight line but flung all across the yard as if it had shattered on impact. The whole northern end of the house slumped toward the ground, nearly flattening as it reached the sunporch. Most of the roof was covered with a sheet of bright-blue plastic. Jim Rust had arranged for that. I vaguely remembered his telling me about it. The plastic dipped at the ridgepole in a way that reminded me of the dip in Dorothy’s chest when the rescuers carried her out, but never mind; don’t think about that; think about something else. I turned to Nandina and said, “I’ll be fine. Thanks for the lift.”

“Maybe I should come in with you.”

“Nandina. Go.”

She sighed and switched the ignition back on. I gave her a peck on the cheek — a concession. (I’m not usually so demonstrative.) Then I heaved myself out of the car and shut the door and strode off.

It took a moment before I heard her drive away, but she did, finally.

Just in case some of the neighbors were watching from their windows, I made a point of approaching the house like any other man heading home after an outing. I stabbed the front sidewalk briskly with my cane; I glanced around at the fallen branches with mild interest. I unlocked my front door, opened it, shut it behind me. Sagged back against it as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.

An eerie blue light filled the hall, from the blue tarp overhead that showed through the gaps in the ceiling. The living room was too much of a jungle to navigate, and of course I didn’t even try to look beyond it to the sunporch. I stepped across a floorful of mail and made my way to the rear of the house. In the kitchen I was relieved to find only a scattering of wood chips on every surface, and one broken windowpane where a stray twig had poked through. But the dining room, to the right, was a ruin. I closed the door again after the briefest glance inside. That was okay, though. A person could live just fine without a dining room! I could eat in the kitchen. I went over to the sink and turned the faucet on. Water flowed immediately.

In the bottom of the sink sat a mug, the interior glazed with dried honey and stippled with bark dust, a teaspoon slanting out of it.

Sometimes the most recent moments can seem so long, long ago.

I walked back through the hall to check the guest room, the bathroom, and our bedroom. All fine. Maybe I could turn the guest room into a makeshift living room while I was having repairs done. In the shower stall I found a grasshopper. I let it stay where it was. In the bedroom I was tempted to lie down and simply crash — not so much sleep as tumble into unconsciousness — but I didn’t give in. I had an assignment to complete. I went to Dorothy’s side of the bed and pulled open the drawer of her nightstand. My fear was that she had taken her address book to the sunporch, which sometimes happened; but no, there it lay, underneath an issue of Radiology Management.

Her family’s name was Rosales. (It was her name, too. She hadn’t changed it when we married.) There were several Rosaleses in the address book, all written in Dorothy’s jagged, awkward hand, but the one I settled on was Tyrone, her oldest brother. He’d become head of the family after her father died, and I figured that if I phoned him I wouldn’t have to phone the others. I also figured that, with luck, I might get Tyrone’s wife instead, since in Texas it was barely past midday and Tyrone himself would most likely be at work. I had never met Tyrone or his wife, either one — or anybody else in the family, for that matter — but it seemed to me that a mere sister-in-law would be less subject to some sort of emotional reaction. I was very concerned about the possibility of an emotional reaction. Really I didn’t want to make this call at all. Couldn’t we just go on as if nothing had happened, since Dorothy never saw her family anyhow? Who would be the wiser? But Nandina had told me I had to do it.

The phone at the other end rang three times, which was long enough for me to start hoping for an answering machine. (Although I knew full well that it would be wrong to leave a mere message.) Then a sharp click. “Hello?” A man’s voice, low and growly.

“Tyrone Rosales?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is — this is—”

Of all times, of all impermissible times, I was going to have my speech problem. I made myself go quiet. I took a deep breath. “Aaron,” I said very slowly. I have more success with A words, as long as I slide into them without any hard-edged beginning. “Woolcott” felt as if it might present difficulties, though, so I said, “Your b-b-broth—”

“Aaron, Dorothy’s husband?” he asked.

“Mmhmm.”

“What’s up?”

I took another breath.

“Is something wrong with her?” he asked.

I said, “A t-t-t — a tree fell on the house.”

Silence.

“A tree fell on the house,” I said again.

“Is she okay?”

I said, “No.”

“Is she dead?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Oh,” Tyrone said. “Good God.”

I waited for him to absorb it. Besides, it felt restful, not talking.

Finally he said, “When’s the service?”

“There won’t — won’t — no service.”

Nandina and I had already decided. And no burial, either; just cremation. I thought Dorothy would prefer that.

Tyrone said, “No service.”

A pause.

“She was raised religious,” he said.

“Yes, but—”

It seemed best to leave it at that: Yes, but.

“Well,” Tyrone said after a minute, “anyhow, it wouldn’t’ve been so easy for us to leave the animals.”

“Right.”

“Did she suffer?”

“No!”

I took another breath.

“No,” I said, “she did not suffer.”

“She always was real spunky. Real mind of her own.”

“It’s true.”

“I remember once, when we were kids, me and the others were chewing soft tar from the road on this really hot day and Dorothy comes along and we say, ‘Here, Dorothy, try some.’ She says, ‘Are you kidding?’ Says, ‘Why would I want to eat a highway?’ ”

That sounded like Dorothy, all right. I could hear her saying it. Dorothy as a child had always seemed unimaginable, but now I could imagine her clearly.

“She was named for the girl in The Wizard of Oz,” Tyrone said. “I guess she mentioned that.”

“Oh. No, she didn’t.”

“That was our grandpa’s idea. He was the one who named all of us. He wanted to make sure we sounded American.”

“I see.”

“So,” he said. “Anyhow. Thanks for the phone call. Sorry for your loss.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told him.

After that, there was nothing more for us to say. Although I felt this odd reluctance to let him hang up. For a while there, while he was talking, Dorothy had been her old self again: strong-willed and sturdy and stubborn. Not the passive victim she had become in her final days.

It was a good thing I had a job to go to. My job was my salvation.

I went in early, took no breaks, didn’t stop for lunch. The only drawback was my co-workers, so long-faced and solicitous. Well, except for Irene. Nobody would ever accuse Irene of solicitude. But I was avoiding Irene, because, I don’t know, I guess over the years I’d had a little crush on her, and now that seemed obscene. All at once I didn’t even like her.

So I made sure to arrive before any of the others, and I’d hurry straight to my office and close the door behind me. Later I’d hear Nandina come in, or I could assume it was Nandina since she was our early bird as a rule. Then, after that, Charles and Peggy, and finally Irene. I’d hear murmurs in the outer room and laughter and the ringing of a phone. Eventually, Peggy would tap on my door with just the tips of her fingers. “Aaron? Are you in there?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Coffee’s made. Shall I bring you some?”

“No, thanks.”

A hesitation. Then the sound of her soft-soled shoes padding away again.

It had never been my plan to go into the family business. I attended college at Stanford, on the other side of the continent, and I’d expected to remain out there and make my own way in the world. But my father had his first heart attack right about the time I graduated, and he asked me to come home and run things while he convalesced. Now that I look back, I see how I let myself be bamboozled. Nandina, it turned out, was running things just fine. I guess I just liked to think that someone needed me. Besides which, I’d had nothing more specific in mind, having majored in English.

In my great-grandfather’s time the company called itself a “gentleman’s publisher,” which was their euphemism for “vanity press.” Even now we were sort of mealy-mouthed about it, although the word “gentleman’s” had been replaced in modern times by “private.” Still, the principle was the same. The majority of our authors paid us, and most did not welcome my editing advice, although, believe me, they could have used it.

In fact, once those print-on-demand outfits started popping up on the Internet, I might very well have found myself out of a job if not for Charles. Charles was our sales rep, and he dreamed up, single-handedly, the concept of the Beginner’s series. The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Monthly Budget, The Beginner’s Book of Dog Training. These were something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice — more dignified. And far more classily designed, with deckle-edged pages and uniform hard-backed bindings wrapped in expensive, glossy covers. Also, we were more focused — sometimes absurdly so, if you asked me. (Witness The Beginner’s Spice Cabinet.) Anything is manageable if it’s divided into small enough increments, was the theory; even life’s most complicated lessons. Not The Beginner’s Cookbook but The Beginner’s Soups, The Beginner’s Desserts, and The Beginner’s Dinner Party, which led the reader through one perfect company meal from start to finish, including grocery list. Not The Beginner’s Child Care but The Beginner’s Colicky Baby—our best-seller, in its modest way, and continually in print since the day it first appeared.

I was in sole charge of editing these, and Irene oversaw the design — even if she did call them “giftie books.” Then Charles ran around marketing them like a man possessed. He was convinced that sooner or later the series would make us all rich, although so far it hadn’t happened.

People often referred to us as The Beginner’s Press, but that was most definitely not our name; good Lord, no. It would hardly have inspired confidence. We were Woolcott Publishing, the words spelled out in tall, slim, sans-serif lettering, all lowercase, considered very modern once upon a time. (But printed only on the front of the Beginner’s books, of course, since the spines were far too narrow.)

In the first weeks after Dorothy died, I happened to be working on The Beginner’s Book of Birdwatching. As usual, an expert had been employed to supply the raw material, an ornithologist from the University of Maryland, and the result was an incoherent overload of information that I was struggling to whip into shape — also as usual.

It was my practice to settle upon a mental image of one individual reader, the way public speakers are told to direct their words toward one individual listener. I had decided that our reader in this case was a young woman who had been invited to go birdwatching with a young man she secretly fancied. It would be their very first date. She would certainly not be expected to know the Latin names of the birds she saw (although my expert was chomping at the bit to provide them), but she needed help in her choices of what clothes to wear, what equipment to bring, and what questions to ask. Or should she stay totally silent? Predictably, my expert had not thought to address this issue. I phoned him for a consultation, several times over. I made handwritten notes in the margins. I crossed out, crossed out, crossed out. I was left with a book that was too slender, and I phoned him yet again.

At the end of every day I put everything away in my desk, reached for my cane, rose to my feet, and approached my office door. There I squared my shoulders and assumed what I hoped was a cheerful, oblivious expression. Then I opened the door and strode out.

“Aaron! Calling it quits?”

“How’re the birds going, Aaron?”

“Would you feel like coming home with me for a bite of supper?”

This last would be Nandina, who had her own private office, much bigger than mine, but somehow contrived, these days, to be standing in the outer room every evening as I walked through. “Oh,” I’d tell her, “I guess I’ll just head back to my place. But thanks.” Peggy would be twisting a lace-edged handkerchief as she gazed at me. Charles would be staring fixedly at his computer, his face a mottled red with embarrassment. Irene would sit back in her chair with her head cocked, gauging the extent of the damage.

“Night, all!” I would say.

And out the heavy oak door and into the street, safe at last.

Back home, I’d find offerings of food waiting on my front stoop. I believe my neighbors had arranged some sort of rotation system amongst themselves, although they were clearly overestimating my daily intake. There were foil baking tins and Styrofoam take-out boxes and CorningWare casserole dishes (which unfortunately would need washing and returning), all lined up in a row and plastered with strips of adhesive tape letting me know whom to thank. Thinking of you! The Ushers. And Bake uncovered at 350° till brown and bubbling, Mimi. I would unlock the front door and bend to maneuver it all inside. From there I conveyed the items one by one to the kitchen, leaving my cane behind whenever I needed both hands for something spillable. I set everything next to the sink before I began adding to the list I kept on the counter. A column of previous offerings nearly filled the page: Sue Borden — deviled eggs. Jan Miller — some kind of curry. The earliest names were crossed out to show I’d already sent thank-you notes to them.

I must remember to buy more stamps. I was using a good many, these days.

After I’d recorded each dish, I dumped it in the garbage. I hated to waste food, but my refrigerator was packed to the gills and I didn’t know what else to do. So the chicken salad, the ziti casserole, the tomatoes with pesto — dump, dump, dump. You could think of it as eliminating the middleman: straight from stoop to trash bin, without the intermediate pause on the kitchen table. Occasionally, abstractedly, I would intercept a drumstick or a sparerib and gnaw on it as I went about my work. While I rinsed out a Pyrex baking dish, I made my way through a cheesecake parked beside the sink, although I didn’t much like cheesecake and this one was getting slimier every time I reached for a chunk with my wet fingers. And then, all at once, I was stuffed and my teeth had that furred feel from eating too much sugar, even though I hadn’t sat down to an actual meal.

I dried the baking dish and set it out on the stoop with a Post-it attached: MIMI. Outside it was barely twilight, that transparent green kind of twilight you see at the end of a summer day, and I could hear children calling and a wisp of music from a passing car radio. I stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

Next, the mail, which shingled the hall floor and posed a hazard to life and limb every time I stepped over it. I gathered it all up and took it back to the kitchen. The kitchen was my living room now. I’d done nothing about my plans to alter the guest room. I used the table as my desk, with my checkbook and my address book and various stationery supplies arranged in a row across one end. Oh, I was keeping up with my responsibilities admirably! I paid my bills the day they arrived, not waiting for the due-dates. I promptly filed catalogues and fliers in the recycling bin. I opened every sympathy note and read it with the utmost care, because there was always the chance that somebody would give me an unexpected glimpse of my wife. Somebody from her workplace, for instance: Dr. Rosales was extremely qualified, and she will be missed at the Radiology Center. Well, that was an added viewpoint that I very much appreciated. Or a former patient: I was so sorry to read about the death of your your loss Dr. Rosales in the paper. She was very helpful to me after I had my mastecto surgery, answering all my questions and treating me so normally so ordinarily with dignity. I suspected that this was a first draft mailed by mistake, but that just made it all the more meaningful, because it revealed the patient’s sincerest feelings. She had valued the same qualities in Dorothy that I had valued: her matter-of-fact attitude, her avoidance of condescension. That was the Dorothy I’d fallen in love with.

I answered each note immediately.

Dear Dr. Adams,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,

Aaron Woolcott

Dear Mrs. Andrews,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,

Aaron Woolcott

Then on to the food brigade:

Dear Mimi,

Thank you so much for the ziti casserole. It was delicious.

Sincerely,

Aaron

Dear Ushers,

Thank you so much for the cheesecake. It was delicious.

Sincerely,

Aaron

After that, the housework. Plenty to keep me busy there.

Sweeping the front hall, first. That was unending. Every morning when I woke up and every evening when I came home, a fresh layer of white dust and plaster chips covered the hall floor. At times there were also tufts of matted gray fuzz. What on earth? An outmoded type of insulation, I decided. I stopped sweeping and peered up into the rafters. It was a sight I looked quickly away from, like someone’s innards.

And then the laundry, exactly twice a week — once for whites and once for colors. The first white load made me feel sort of lonely. It included two of Dorothy’s shirts and her sensible cotton underpants and her seersucker pajamas. I had to wash and dry and fold them and place them in the proper drawers and align the corners and pat them down and smooth them flat. But the loads after that were easier. This wasn’t an unfamiliar task, after all. It used to fall to whichever one of us felt the need of fresh clothing first, and that was most often me. Now I liked going down the stairs to the cool, dim basement, where there wasn’t the least little sign of the oak tree. Sometimes I hung around for a while after I’d transferred the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer, resting my palms on the dryer’s top and feeling it vibrate and grow warm.

Then a bit of picking up in the kitchen and the bedroom. Nothing major. Dorothy had been the clutterer in our family. By now I had retrieved several pieces of her clothing from around the room, and I’d returned her comb and her hay-fever pills to the medicine cabinet. I made no attempt to discard things. Not yet.

Over the course of an evening the phone would ring several times, but I always checked the caller ID before I picked up. If it was Nandina, I might as well answer. She would arrive at my door in person if I didn’t let her know I was still among the living. But the Millers, always after me to go to the symphony with them, or the eternal Mimi King … Fortunately, I’d had the good sense to deactivate the answering machine. For a while I’d left it on, and the guilty burden of unreturned calls almost did me in before I remembered the Off button.

“I’m fine,” I’d tell Nandina. “How are you since five o’clock, when I last saw you?”

“I can’t imagine how you’re coping there,” she would say. “Where do you sit, even? How do you occupy your evening?”

“I have several places to sit, and no shortage of occupations. In fact, at this very minute I — Oh-oh! Gotta go!”

I would hang up and look at my watch. Only eight o’clock?

I angled my wrist to make sure the second hand was still moving. It was.

Occasionally, the doorbell would ring. Oh, how I hated that doorbell. It was a golden-voiced, two-note chime: ding dong. Kind of churchy, kind of self-important. But I felt compelled to answer it, because my car was parked out front and it was obvious I was home. I would sigh and make my way to the hall. Most often it was Mary-Clyde Rust. Not Jim, so much. Jim seemed to be having trouble these days thinking what to say to me, but Mary-Clyde was not in the least at a loss. “Now, Aaron,” she would tell me, “I know you don’t feel like company, so I won’t intrude. But I need to see if you’re all right. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Okay, good. Glad to hear it.”

And she would nod smartly and spin on her heel and leave.

I preferred the neighbors who avoided me. The people who gazed suddenly elsewhere if they happened to be walking their dogs past when I stepped out of the house in the morning. The people who got into their cars with their backs kept squarely, tactfully turned in my direction as I got into my own car.

One evening when the doorbell rang it was a man I didn’t know, a keg-shaped man with a short brown beard and a mop of gray-streaked brown hair. “Gil Bryan,” he told me. “General contractor,” and he handed me a business card. The outside light bulb made the sweaty skin beneath his eyes shine in a way I found trustworthy; that was the only reason I didn’t just shut the door again. He said, “I’m the guy who put the tarp on your roof.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I see you haven’t got it repaired yet.”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Well, that’s my card, if you ever want someone to do it.”

“Thanks.”

“I know it must be the last thing on your mind right now.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and then I did shut the door, but slowly, so as not to give offense. I liked the way he’d worded that. Even so, I just tossed his card into the porcelain bowl, because I was purposely ignoring the roof the way I had ignored those doctors peeking into the waiting room. “Roof? What roof?” I should have asked Mr. Bryan. “I don’t see anything wrong with the roof.”

The earliest bedtime I allowed myself was 9 p.m. I told myself I would read a while before I turned out the light; I wouldn’t go to sleep immediately. I had a huge, thick biography of Harry Truman that I’d begun before the accident. But I couldn’t seem to make much headway in it. “Reading is the first to go,” my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and still I couldn’t have told you what it was about. My eyelids would grow heavier, and all at once I’d be jerking awake as the book slid off the bed and crashed to the floor.

So I would reach for the remote control and turn on the TV that sat on the bureau. I would watch — or stare in a glazed way at — documentaries and panel discussions and commercials. I would listen to announcers rattling off the side effects of all the medications they were touting. “Oh, sure,” I would tell them. “I’ll run out and buy that tomorrow. Why let a little uncontrollable diarrhea put me off, or kidney failure, or cardiac arrest?”

Dorothy used to hate it when I talked back like that. “Do you mind?” she would ask. “I can’t hear a word they’re saying.”

This TV was just a little one, the little extra one that we sometimes watched the late news on when we were getting ready for bed. Our big TV was in the sunporch. It was an old Sony Trinitron. Jim Rust told me in the hospital that that was what had crushed Dorothy’s chest; the firemen said it had fallen off its bracket high in the corner. Sony Trinitrons are known for their unusual weight.

A while back, Dorothy and I had discussed buying one of those new-fangled flat-screen sets, but we’d decided we couldn’t afford it. If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still be alive?

Or if her patient hadn’t canceled. Then she wouldn’t even have been home yet when the tree fell.

Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead of heading for the sunporch.

If I’d said, “Let’s see if I can find those Triscuits,” and gone out to the kitchen to help her look, and then sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate them.

But no, no. I had to stomp off in a huff and sulk in the bedroom, as if it had mattered in the least that she’d refused to settle for Wheat Thins.

Oh, all those annoying habits of hers that I used to chafe at — the trail of crumpled tissues and empty coffee mugs she left in her wake, her disregard for the finer points of domestic order and comfort. Big deal!

Her tendency to make a little too much of her medical degree when she was meeting new people. “I’m Dr. Rosales,” she would say, instead of “I’m Dorothy,” so you could almost see the white coat even when she wasn’t wearing one. (Not that she actually met new people all that often. She had never seen the purpose in socializing.)

And those orthopedic-type shoes she had favored: they had struck me, at times, as self-righteous. They had seemed a deliberate demonstration of her seriousness, her high-mindedness — a pointed reproach to the rest of us.

I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.

But somehow, it didn’t work that way.

I wished I could let her know that I’d kept vigil in the hospital. I hated to think she might have felt she was going through that alone.

And wouldn’t she have been amused by all these casseroles!

That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

The TV infiltrated my sleep, if you could call this ragged semiconsciousness sleep. I dreamed the war in Iraq was escalating, and Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic nomination. I rolled over on the remote control and someone all at once shouted, “… this stainless-steel, hollow-ground, chef-quality …,” by which time I was sitting bolt upright in my bed, my eyes popping and my heart pounding and my mouth as dry as gauze. I turned off the TV and lay flat again. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth: Go to sleep, damn it.

You would think I’d have dreamed about Dorothy, but I didn’t. The closest I came to it was the whiff of isopropyl alcohol that I hallucinated from time to time as I finally drifted off again. She had carried that scent home on her skin at the end of every workday. Early in our marriage I used to have vivid dreams about childhood doctor visits and vaccinations and the like, evoked by the alcohol scent as I lay sleeping next to her. Now the ghost of it brought me sharply awake, and once or twice I even spoke her name aloud: “Dorothy?”

But I never got an answer.

The casseroles started thinning out and the letters stopped. Could people move on that easily? Yes, well, of course. New tragedies happened daily. I had to acknowledge that.

It seemed heartless that I should think to go in for my semiannual dental checkup, but I did. And then I bought myself some new socks. Socks, of all things! So trivial! But all my old ones had holes in the toes.

One evening my friend Nate called — WEISS N I on my caller ID. Him I picked up for. Right off I said, “Nate! How’ve you been?” without waiting for him to announce himself. But that was evidently a mistake, because I caught a brief hesitation before he said, “Hello, Aaron.” Very low-voiced, very lugubrious; not at all his usual style.

“How about a game tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Pardon?”

“A game of racquetball! I’m turning into an old man here. All my joints are rusting.”

“Well, ah, but … I was calling to invite you to dinner,” he said.

“Dinner?”

“Yes, Sonya was saying we ought to have you over.”

Sonya must be his wife. I had never met his wife. I suppose he must have mentioned her from time to time, but we didn’t have that kind of friendship. We had a racquetball friendship. We’d gotten acquainted at the gym.

I said, “Over to … to your house, you mean?”

“Right.”

“Well, gosh, Nate, I don’t know. I don’t even know where you live!”

“I live in Bolton Hill,” he said.

“And also I just … It’s been really busy at work lately. You wouldn’t believe how busy. I barely have time for a sandwich, and then, when I do find time, there is so much extra food in the fridge, these — these — these casseroles and these … cheesecakes. It’s practically a full-time job just to g-g-get it all d-d-d — just to eat it!”

“I see,” he said.

“But thanks.”

“That’s okay.”

“Tell Sonya I appreciate the thought.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to revisit the racquetball idea, but after I’d made such a point of being busy I figured that would be a mistake. So I just told him goodbye.

Not half an hour later, the phone rang again. This time it was TULL L. I answered, but I was warier now. All I said was, “Hello?”

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Luke.”

“Hi, Luke.”

“I can understand why you might prefer not to go to Nate’s.”

“Excuse me?”

“He told me you’d turned down his invitation.”

I said, “You’re talking about Nate Weiss.”

“Why, yes.”

“You know Nate Weiss?”

“We met in the hospital waiting room, remember? When we both stopped by to visit.”

This had been happening a lot lately. I swear I had no recollection that either one of them had stopped by, let alone that they’d met each other. But I said, “Oh. Right.”

“He says he got the impression you’re not up yet for coming to dinner.”

“No, but racquetball …” I said. “I’m itching for a good game of racquetball.”

There was a pause. Then Luke said, “Unfortunately, I don’t know how to play racquetball.”

“Oh.”

“But I was thinking: if getting together with wives and such is too much to handle just now—”

“Oh, no. Lord, no,” I said briskly. “Doesn’t faze me in the least.”

Another pause. Then he said, “I was thinking you could come to the restaurant instead.”

He meant his restaurant, which was how we’d been introduced, back in the era of The Beginner’s Book of Dining Out. I said, “Well, that’s a good idea, Luke. Maybe sometime in the—”

“Just you and me and Nate; just us guys. No wives. We could have an early supper, and then you could head on home whatever time you felt like. How about it?”

I didn’t want to do that, either, but what could I say? It was nice of him to make the effort. It was nice of both of them. I doubted I would have done as much if I had been in their place. I was more the “Let’s move on” type. The “Maybe if I don’t mention your loss, you’ll forget it ever happened” type.

I kind of wished they were that type, to be honest.

But okay: might as well get this over with. I met them directly after work the next evening, a rainy, blowy Tuesday in mid-September. It had been pouring all day, and driving conditions were terrible. On top of that, I had trouble finding a parking space. By the time I walked into the restaurant (white linens, wide-planked floors, a certain worn-around-the-edges friendliness), Nate and Luke were already seated at a table. They made an unlikely pair. Nate looked very sleek and dark and professional in his black lawyer-suit, whereas Luke was one of those all-one-color, beige-hair-beige-skin types in shabby khakis, going a little soft around the middle. They seemed to be having no trouble finding things to talk about, though, if you judged by the way they’d set their heads together. I had the distinct impression that it was me they were talking about. How to deal with me, what topics would be safe to discuss with me. I’d barely pulled my chair out before Nate asked, “What about this weather, hey?” in a sprightly tone I wasn’t familiar with. And Luke rode right over the tail of that with “You been following the Orioles?”

I felt compelled to answer in kind, in a louder voice than usual and with more verve. “You know, I haven’t as a matter of fact been following the Orioles lately,” I said, and then I wanted to take the words back, because I knew they’d be misinterpreted.

Sure enough: Nate said, “Well, of course you haven’t. You’ve had a lot more important things to think about.”

“No, I just meant—”

“Both of you should try the oysters!” Luke broke in. “We’re in the R months now!”

Luke was such a quiet man ordinarily that it was bizarre to see him so animated. Besides which, he clearly felt uneasy sitting idle in his own workplace. He kept glancing around at other tables, raising his eyebrows significantly at waiters, frowning over Nate’s head in the direction of the kitchen. “I personally recommend eating these raw,” he told me in a distracted way, “but if you prefer, you could order the, uh …,” and then he paused to listen to what a short man in a stained apron was whispering in his ear.

“… the Oysters Rockefeller,” Nate finished for him. “Those are great. They use this special slab bacon that comes from upstate New York.”

“You’ve eaten here before?” I asked.

“Yes, we came by last week,” he said, and then he gave a little grimace, which I couldn’t figure out for a moment. Was it because he had let it slip that he and Luke had met earlier, perhaps to cogitate over The Aaron Problem? No, on second thought it must have been the “we” that had embarrassed him, because next he said, as if correcting himself, “I had thought after I met him that I’d like to try his food.”

So apparently the plan tonight was to avoid all mention of wives. Pretend neither one of them even possessed a wife. For now Luke, turning back to us as the aproned man left, said, “Sorry, the chef has run out of lamb chops, is all,” and I happened to know that he was married to the chef. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have said that Jane or Joan or whatever her name was had run out of lamb chops, and he might also have brought her out to introduce her. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

I became perverse. I do that, sometimes. I started mentioning wives right and left — each utterance of the word “wife” thudding onto our table like a stone. “Did your wife like the Oysters Rockefeller, too?” I asked Nate, and Nate shifted in his seat and said, “Oh, um … she doesn’t eat shellfish.”

“You know, I’ve never thought to wonder,” I said to Luke. “Did your wife become chef here before you married her, or after?”

“Er, before, actually,” Luke told me. “Say! We need to decide on the wine!” And he sat forward urgently and beckoned to a waiter.

But I relented, after that, and let the conversation drift into more or less normal channels. Nate turned out to be the food-for-food’s-sake type, going on at length about the breeding beds of oysters and the best source for heirloom pork. Luke, whom you’d expect to be deeply concerned with such things, didn’t seem all that interested and spent most of his time focusing on what everyone else in the place was eating, or not eating enough of, or looking dissatisfied with. And within a bearable length of time, we managed to get through the evening.

“We should do this again!” Nate said as we were parting, and Luke said, “Yes! Make a regular thing of it!”

Oh, or else not. But I nodded enthusiastically, and shook both their hands, and thanked Luke for the meal, which he had refused to let us pay for.

I didn’t thank either one of them for the event itself — for the act of getting together. That would have implied that it had been a charitable gesture of some sort, and I most certainly was not in need of charity.

So I turned up my collar, and gave both of them a jaunty wave of my cane, and set off through the downpour as cocky as you please.

Though I’d have to say that I felt a little, maybe, woebegone as I drove home alone.

The outside light was supposed to come on automatically at dusk, but the bulb must have burned out. A damned nuisance in the rain. I stepped in a couple of puddles as I was walking up the sidewalk to my house, and my trouser cuffs were already wet enough as it was. I unlocked the door and reached inside to turn the hall light on, but that was burned out, too. And when I pushed the door wider open, I met with some kind of resistance. A gravelly sound startled me. I peered down at the dark hall floor and made out several white and irregular objects. I nudged them with my foot. Rocks? No, plaster, chips of plaster. I pushed the door harder and it opened a few more inches. My eyes had adjusted by now. Against the black of the floor I saw scatterings of white and then a mound of white — pebbles and clods and sheets of white. And now that I thought about it, the air I was breathing was full of dust. I could feel an urge to cough pressing my throat. And I heard a loud, steady dripping from somewhere inside the house.

I closed the door again. I went back to my car, stepping in the same two puddles on the way, and got behind the steering wheel, where I spent several minutes collecting my thoughts. Then I drew a deep, shaky breath and fitted my key into the ignition.

And that is how it happened that I went to live with my sister.