The Beginner's Goodbye

8

One night I woke up and heard low murmurs from Nandina’s bedroom. And one morning a few days later, when I was shaving in the bathroom, I chanced to look out the window and see Gil Bryan walking from the house toward the street, climbing into his pickup and starting it and quietly rolling away.

Oh, I was cramping their style, all right. It was time I moved back home.

Work was still going on there, as both Nandina and Gil pointed out when I mentioned my plans that evening. But really I could have returned several weeks ago, if I didn’t mind having the men overlap me a bit in the mornings. When I said as much to Nandina and Gil, they said, “Oh. Well …,” and, “If you’re sure, then …,” and both of them looked relieved. I started packing right after supper. I moved the next afternoon, a Friday, taking off early from the office.

The main part of my house was bare and shiny and echoing, as pristine as an empty dollhouse. But stray furniture and packed cartons filled every inch of my bedroom, so I settled in the guest room, which was small enough to have escaped being used for storage. I was glad to have an excuse not to return to my own bed. I think I was afraid it would bring back too many memories — not from the days of my marriage but from those weeks after the oak tree fell, when I’d lain there alone night after night wondering how to go on.

It wasn’t only for Gil and Nandina’s sake that I moved back when I did. Let’s be honest. The other reason, the main reason, was that I was hoping I would see Dorothy there. In the two weeks since her appearance outside my office window, there had been no sign of her, not a glimmer. I had looked for her in vain on the sidewalks and in crowds and wherever anonymous strangers waited in line. I had spun around without warning as I stood at intersections, hoping to surprise her behind me. I had settled conspicuously on public benches and strained to feel her sleeve brushing my sleeve. Nothing. She was avoiding me.

At home, I focused on the places where she had shown up before: the street and the backyard. On Saturday I got up when it was barely light out, and after a makeshift breakfast — two granola bars from a carton of foodstuffs in the bedroom — I took a stroll around the block, pegging my cane against the sidewalk almost soundlessly so as not to wake the neighbors. All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near. The solitude made me feel too tall. I was glad to get back to the house.

Once the sun was fully up, I dragged a wrought-iron chair from the front yard to the rear. I set it on the back stoop and sat down, facing outward. My God, the lawn was a wreck. We’d had a dry summer, and the grass was more like straw. The azaleas looked stunted and wizened, and the wood-chip circle where the oak tree once stood had sunk in a good foot or more.

I was probably out of my mind to imagine that Dorothy would come here. The backyard was so bald. It lacked camouflage. There weren’t enough dapplings of shadow to break up the flat glare of the sun.

I rose, eventually, and went into the house for my keys and drove to the grocery store, where I gathered a large amount of provisions. You’d have thought I was shopping for a family of ten. (I think I had it in mind to hole up, to wait it out in my cave until Dorothy chose to show herself, however long it might take.) Back home I dug a few kitchen utensils out of the bedroom cartons and I fixed myself a conscientiously balanced lunch — protein, starch, green vegetable — after which I went out and sat in the wrought-iron chair again, for lack of anything better to do. A few minutes of this and I rose to uncoil the garden hose. The grass made a bristly sound under my feet. I placed the sprinkler near the azaleas and turned the faucet on full-blast and sat back down. And that was how I discovered the pleasures of watching a lawn being watered.

I swear that I could feel the grass’s gratitude. The birds seemed grateful, too. A little crowd of them came out of nowhere, as if word had gotten around somehow, and they twittered and chirped and fluttered in the droplets. My chair was too right-angled, forcing me to sit unnaturally erect, and its scrolls and curlicues dug into the knobs of my spine, but even so I felt the most pervasive sense of peace. I tilted my face up and squinted against the sunlight to follow the arc of the spray, which sashayed left, sashayed right, like a young girl swishing her skirts as she walked.

I practically drowned that yard.

Not till early evening, when the gnats started biting, did I turn off the hose. Then I went inside to fix dinner, and after that I tried to read a while in the impractical little slipper chair in one corner of the guest room. But I was so unaccountably, irresistibly sleepy that I laid aside my book fairly soon and went to bed. I slept without so much as a twitch, I believe, until nearly nine the next morning.

The early part of Sunday I spent dragging various cartons from the bedroom to the kitchen, replacing pots and dishes and foods in the cabinets that smelled of fresh paint. I enjoyed establishing just the right locations for things. I never could have done that in the old days — at least not with any hope that they would stay there, not with Dorothy around.

When I caught myself thinking this, I averted my head sharply, as if I could shake the thought away.

Once I’d unpacked what I could, I went out back again, like some kind of sports fan desperate to return to his game. The grass was still a yellowish white, although it no longer crunched. I moved the sprinkler over by the euonymus alongside the alley, sinking into the sodden earth with every step, and I turned the water on and settled back into my chair.

I had learned by now that when the sunlight hit the spray in a certain way I could occasionally, almost, see things. I mean things that weren’t really there. Not Dorothy, unfortunately. But one time I saw this sort of column, an ornate Corinthian column rising up and sprouting apart at the top and then dissolving into particles, and another time a woman in a long beige dress with a bustle. And yet another time — this was the weirdest — I saw an entire swing set, and a man in shirtsleeves was pushing a small child in one of those chair-like swings intended for infants and toddlers. I also saw a good many rainbows, needless to say, and numerous sheets of changeable taffeta unfurling and spreading themselves across the lawn.

But never Dorothy.

I saw a woman with an umbrella but — hey! — she was real. She was Mimi King, hovering by the euonymus bushes and shifting from foot to foot like a girl preparing to enter the arc of a jump rope, until finally she plunged into the spray and emerged on the other side of it, shaking out her umbrella before she collapsed it. “Well, hi there, Aaron!” she called, and she squished toward me in her Sunday heels, no doubt digging little tent-peg holes as she came. When she reached me, I stood up and said, “Good morning, Mimi.”

“At this rate,” she said, “you’ll be growing yourself a rain forest!”

“Got to do my bit for the planet,” I told her.

She placed the tip of her umbrella between her feet and rested both hands on the handle. “Have you moved back in?” she asked.

“I figured it was time.”

“We were all afraid you might be gone for good.”

“Oh, no,” I said, as if I hadn’t had the same thought myself once.

“I was asking Mary-Clyde just last week; I said, ‘Shouldn’t somebody let him know that that lawn service of his is mowing grass that’s not even there anymore?’ But Mary-Clyde said, ‘Oh, I’m sure he must be aware; he’s got those construction men around; I’m sure they would have told him.’ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel construction men are very sensitive to lawns.’ ”

“Would you care to sit down, Mimi?” I asked. I felt bad about her shoes, which were plastered with a good half-inch of mud and damp yellow grass blades.

But she was pursuing her own line of thought. “This is just providential,” she said, “because I’ve been thinking I would like to have you over for dinner some night.”

“Oh, well, I’m not — I’m not—”

“I would like for you to meet my niece. She’s had a hard time of it since she lost her husband, and I’m thinking it would do her good to talk to you.”

“I’m not all that social,” I told her.

“Of course you’re not! Don’t you think I realize that? But this is different. Louise lost her husband last Christmas Eve morning, can you imagine? Poor thing has been just devastated.”

“Christmas Eve?” I said. “Haven’t I heard about this person?”

“Oh, well, you know, then! She’d accepted that he had a terminal illness, but it never entered her mind that he would pass on Christmas Eve.”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess she won’t celebrate Christmas ever again without remembering that.”

I was just trying to sound sympathetic, but it seemed I’d succeeded too well, because Mimi gave me a look of surprise and said, “That’s exactly right! See? You would have so much to say to her!”

“No, no!” I hurried to say. “No, believe me, it’s not as if I could offer her any … household hints or anything.”

“Household hints?”

“Besides, for the next little bit I’m going to be busy setting things straight. My golly, the place is a mess! I’ve got everything stuffed in one room: furniture, books, bric-a-brac, lamps, curtains, rugs.…”

I drove her away with words, finally. She gave me a wilted little wave and started back toward the alley, raising her umbrella again as she approached the sprinkler, although I’d gallantly shut the faucet off the instant she turned to leave. Anyhow, I had to admit the lawn was pretty well watered by now.

Having reminded myself of the mess in the bedroom, I went to tackle it after lunch. There wasn’t much point in putting things back in place yet, since they would only hamper the workmen, but I figured I could probably discard some stuff ahead of time. Dorothy’s medical books, for instance, and maybe a few of those decorative doodads that tended to accumulate for no useful purpose.

It turned out that a good many of the books had gotten damp — not just Dorothy’s but mine as well. They had dried in the months since, more or less, but their covers had buckled and they had a moldy, mousy smell. Carton after carton I would open, dig through dispiritedly, and then drag to the front hall for Gil’s men to carry out to the alley. I did try to save a few of my favorite biographies, though, and the family photo albums. I’d appropriated the albums after our mother died, and I felt guilty about the state they were in. I took them to the kitchen and spread them across the table and all available counters, where I pried the faded black pages apart in hopes that they would air out.

With the doodads, I was more callous. What did I care about my bronzed baby shoes? (A pair of tiny Nikes; how witty.) Or the little china clock that always ran slow, or the tulip-shaped vase someone had given us when we got married?

I ate supper standing up, since the table was covered with albums. I cruised around the kitchen studying sepia-colored photos as I munched on my taco. Men in high collars, women in leg-of-mutton sleeves, solemn-faced children whose clothes looked stiff as sandwich boards. Nobody was identified. I guess the album-keeper had thought they didn’t need to be identified; everybody knew who everybody was in those days, in that smaller world. But then the sepia changed to black-and-white, and then to garish Kodacolor, and none of those photos bore any labels, either — not my parents getting married, or Nandina in her christening gown, or the two of us attending a children’s birthday party. Nor did the single snapshot from my own wedding: Dorothy and I standing side by side on the front steps of my parents’ church, looking uncomfortable and uncertain. We were both of us badly dressed — I in a brown suit that left my wrist bones exposed, Dorothy in a bright-blue knit stretched too tightly across the mound of her stomach. Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we’d been.

Gil’s men and I barely crossed paths, since we had such different schedules. They arrived each weekday morning just as I was finishing breakfast. They brought paper cups of coffee that steamed in the early coolness, and they scuffed their soles heavily on the hall mat to let me know they were here. After we’d exchanged a few weather remarks I would leave for work, and by the time I returned they were already gone, no sign of them remaining but their little nest of belongings on a scrunched-up drop cloth in one corner of the living room. Something hung on in the atmosphere, though — something more than the scent of their cigarette smoke. I felt I’d interrupted a conversation about richer, fuller lives than mine, and when I drifted through the bare rooms it wasn’t only to reclaim my house; it was also, just a little bit, in the hope that some of that richness might have been left behind for me.

On Friday, however, two of the men were still there when I got home. One was just completing the varnishing of the sunporch floor while the other walked around collecting paint cans, brushes, and rollers in an empty cardboard carton. “We were figuring we’d be gone by now,” the one with the carton told me, “but then Gary here bought the wrong color varnish and set us back some.”

“It wasn’t my fault, bro!” Gary said. “It was Gil the one wrote the wrong number down.”

“Whatever,” the other man said. “Anyways, we’re finished,” he told me. “Hope you like how it all turned out.”

“You mean you’re finished finished?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Nothing more needs doing?”

“Not unless you say so.”

I looked around me. The place was spotless — the living-room walls a gleaming white, the new bookshelves in the sunporch just waiting to be filled. Somebody had swept up the last traces of sawdust, and the paper cups and the jar-lid ashtrays had disappeared, which made me feel oddly forlorn.

“No,” I said, “I can’t think of a thing.”

Gary straightened and laid his brush across the top of his can. “Now, don’t go walking on this, you hear?” he said. “Not for twenty-four hours. And then, the next few days or so, keep your shoes on. You wouldn’t believe how many folks think they’re doing a floor a favor to take their shoes off and walk in their stocking feet. But that’s the worst thing.”

“Worst thing in the world,” the other man agreed.

“Heat of your body …” Gary said.

“Linty old socks …”

“Bottoms of your feet mashing flat against the wood …”

They were still moaning and shaking their heads when Gil opened the front door. I knew it was Gil because he always knocked before he let himself in. “Hey there, guys,” he said, appearing in the living-room archway. He wore his after-hours outfit: khakis and a clean shirt. “Hey, Aaron.”

“Hi, Gil.”

“How we coming along?”

“Just finishing up, boss,” the man with the carton said.

Gil walked over to inspect the sunporch floor. “Looks good,” he said. “Now, give it twenty-four hours before you step on it,” he told me, “and then for a few days after that—”

“I know: not in my stocking feet,” I said.

“Worst thing in the world,” he said.

He saw the men out to the hall, then, clapping Gary on the shoulder, reminding them both they were due at Mrs. McCoy’s early Monday morning. (I felt a little twinge of sibling rivalry.) Then he returned to the living room.

“So,” I said, “I hear you’re all done here.”

My voice echoed hollowly in the empty room.

“She’s good as new,” Gil told me.

“Actually, better than new,” I said. “I appreciate the care you took, Gil.”

“Oh, any time. God forbid.”

“God forbid,” I agreed.

“Monday I’ll send a couple of men to move the furniture back. You want to be here for that?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s pretty cut-and-dried, in a house this small.”

He nodded. He pivoted to survey the living room. “And window washers,” he said. “You’ll be needing those. We’ve got a list of names, if you want.”

“I’m sure Nandina knows someone.”

“Oh,” Gil said suddenly.

He clapped a hand to the right front pocket of his khakis. A certain staginess in the gesture caught my attention. “By the way,” he said, falsely casual. He pulled a tiny blue velvet box from his pocket, clearly a ring box.

“Oho!” I said.

“Yeah, well …”

He snapped the lid open and stepped closer to show me. (I caught a strong scent of aftershave.) The ring was yellow gold, set with a little winking diamond.

“That’s really pretty, Gil,” I said. “Who’s it for?”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Does she know about this?”

“Just in theory. We’ve had the talk about getting married. Gee,” he said, “I guess I should have asked you first. I mean asked for her hand or something.”

“Take it,” I said, and I gave him a breezy wave.

“Thanks,” he said with a grin. He looked down at the ring. “I know the stone is kind of small, but the jeweler claimed it’s flawless. Not the least little flaw, he said. I had to take his word for it. Would I know a flaw if I saw one?”

“She’s going to love it,” I told him.

“I hope so.” He was still studying it.

“How did you know what size to buy?”

“I traced the band of that opal of hers when she was in the shower once.”

He reddened and glanced up at me, maybe worrying he had revealed more than he should have, and I said, “Well, great. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have for a brother-in-law.”

“Thanks, Aaron.” He closed the box and returned it to his pocket. “There’s a wedding ring that matches it, but I figured I should make sure Nandina likes this before I buy it. I already know she wants me to wear a ring.”

“Yes, that’s how people do these days,” I said. I started to raise my left hand to show him my own ring, which I still wore, but then I thought — I don’t know. It seemed that might have been tactless, somehow.

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one’s ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

It was kind of a nuisance having to wait till Monday for the furniture moving. I started doing some of the work ahead of time — dragging the living-room rug into place and unrolling it, setting a few of the lighter-weight objects where they belonged. And on Saturday evening, when the sunporch floor was dry, I fitted what books I still owned into the new bookshelves. I carried the photo albums from the kitchen and lined them up in order, oldest first. Even the most recent wasn’t all that recent. The last picture in that album — my mother’s butterfly bush in full bloom — came immediately after our wedding photo, so I’m guessing it dated from late summer of 1996. Or ’97 at the latest, because my father died in early ’98, and he was the one who took the pictures in our family.

This business of not labeling photos reminded me of those antique cemeteries where the names have worn off the gravestones and you can’t tell who is buried there. You see a little gray tablet with a melted-looking lamb on top, and you know it must have been somebody’s child who died, but now you can’t even make out her name or the words her parents chose to say how much they missed her. It’s just so many random dents in the stone, and the parents are long gone themselves, and everything’s been forgotten.

Even my mother’s butterfly bush struck me as poignant, with its show-offy clusters of blossoms in a vibrant, electric purple. Although in fact that bush still existed; it stood right there in Nandina’s backyard, where I could see it every time I took the garbage out.

In our wedding photo Dorothy did not, of course, carry her satchel, but her dress-up purse was almost equally bulky and utilitarian — a heavy brown leather rectangle with a strap that crossed her chest in the same theft-deterrent fashion. She had said, “Would you like me to wear a white gown? I could do that. I wouldn’t mind. I could ask if our receptionist would take me to this place she knows. I thought maybe something, oh, not strapless or anything but maybe with a scoop neck, white but not shiny, not lacy, just a lustrous white, you know what I mean? And I was thinking a bouquet of all white flowers. Baby’s breath and white roses and … are orange blossoms white? I do know they’re not orange, although it sounds as if they would be. I’m not talking about a veil or anything. I’m not talking about a long train or anything like that. But something elegant and classic, to mark the occasion. You think?”

“Oh, God, no. Good Lord, no,” I said.

“Oh.”

“We’re neither one of us the type for that, thank heaven,” I said.

“No, of course not,” she said.

In the photograph her blue knit was not very becoming, but in real life it had looked fine, as far as I can recall. (Photos have a way of frumping people; have you noticed?) Anyhow, I had never paid much heed to such things. At the time I was just glad that I’d landed the woman I wanted. And I believe that she was glad to have landed me — the diametrical opposite of that needy “roommate” who had demanded too much of her.

Then why was our marriage so unhappy?

Because it was unhappy. I will say that now. Or it was difficult, at least. Out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something; that’s what I tell myself.

Once, when we had an anniversary coming up — our fifth, I believe — I invited her out to dinner. “I was thinking of the Old Bay,” I told her. “The first place I ever took you to.”

“The Old Bay,” she said. “Really. Are you forgetting that we couldn’t even see to read the menus there?”

“Oh, okay,” I said, but I felt a little disappointed. For sentiment’s sake, at least, you would think she could have agreed to it. “Where, then?” I asked.

“Maybe Jean-Christophe?”

“Jean-Christophe! Good grief!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Jean-Christophe is so pretentious. They bring you these teeny froufrou bites to eat between courses, and you have to make a big show of being surprised and thankful.”

“So don’t make a show,” she said. “Just fold your arms across your chest and glower.”

“Very funny,” I told her. “What on earth made you think of Jean-Christophe? Is this another one of your receptionist’s ideas? Jean-Christophe didn’t even exist, back when you and I were courting.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize it had to have historical significance.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “Would you rather just not do this?”

“I said I would, didn’t I? But then all you can come up with is this fusty old place where your parents used to eat. And when I question it, you fly into a huff and turn down everything else I suggest.”

“I didn’t turn down ‘everything else’; I turned down Jean-Christophe. It just so happens that I dislike a restaurant where the waiters require more attention than my date does.”

“Where would you be willing to eat, then?”

“Oh, shoot,” I said, “I don’t care. Let’s just go to Jean-Christophe.”

“Well, if you don’t care, why do we bother?”

“Are you deliberately trying to misunderstand me?” I asked her. “I care that we have a good meal together, preferably without feeling like we’re acting in some kind of play. And I was thinking it might be a place with associations for the two of us. But if you’re so set on Jean-Christophe, fine; we’ll go to Jean-Christophe.”

“Jean-Christophe was just a suggestion. There are lots of other possibilities.”

“Like where?”

“Well, how about Bo Brooks?”

“Bo Brooks! A crab house? For our anniversary?”

“We did go to Bo Brooks a couple of times while we were dating. It would certainly meet the ‘associations’ criterion.”

“Yes, but—”

I stopped and looked at her.

“You really don’t get it, do you,” I said.

“What don’t I get?”

“Never mind.”

“I’m not ever going to get it if you refuse to discuss it,” she said, and now she was using her doctor voice, her super-calm, let’s-be-reasonable voice. “Why don’t you just begin at the beginning, Aaron, and tell me exactly what you envision for our anniversary dinner.”

“How about what you envision?” I said. “Can’t you be bothered coming up with any ideas of your own?”

“I already offered an idea of my own. I offered two ideas, as I recall, and you rejected both of them. So it’s back in your court now, Aaron.”

Why am I telling this story?

I forget.

And I forget where we ended up eating, too. Someplace or other; I don’t remember. What I do remember is that familiar, weary, helpless feeling, the feeling that we were confined in some kind of rodent cage, wrestling together doggedly, neither one of us ever winning.

I was rinsing vegetables for my supper, and I turned from the sink to reach for a towel, and I saw Dorothy.

“You’re here,” I said.

She was standing next to me, so close that she’d had to step back a bit to give me room when I turned. She wore one of her plain white shirts and her usual black pants, and her expression was grave and considering — her head cocked to one side and her eyebrows raised.

“I thought you might never come again,” I said.

She appeared unsurprised by this, merely nodding and continuing to study me, so that it seemed I’d been right to worry.

“Was it the cookies?” I asked. “Were you upset that I ate Peggy’s cookies?”

“You should have told me you liked cookies,” she said, and I don’t know why I’d ever doubted that she actually spoke on these visits, because her voice was absolutely real — low and somewhat flat, very level in tone.

I said, “What? I don’t like cookies!”

“I could have baked you cookies,” she said.

“What are you talking about? Why would I want you to bake cookies? How come we’re wasting this time discussing cookies, for God’s sake?”

“You’re the one who brought them up,” she said.

Had I lived through this whole scene before? I felt tired to death all of a sudden.

She said, “I used to think it was your mother’s fault. She was such a fusser; no wonder you fended people off the way you did. But then I thought, Oh, well: fault. Who’s to say why we let one person influence us more than another? Why not your father? He didn’t fuss.”

“I fended people off?” I said. “That’s not fair, Dorothy. How about how you behaved? Wearing your white coat even to go out to dinner; carrying your big satchel. ‘I’m Dr. Rosales,’ you’d say. Always so busy, so businesslike. Bake cookies? You never even made me a cup of tea when I had a cold!”

“And if I had? What would you have done?” she asked. “Swatted the cup away, I guarantee it. Oh, it used to bother me when I saw what people thought of me. Your mother and your sister, the people in your office … I’d see your secretary thinking, Poor, poor Aaron, his wife is so coldhearted. So unnurturing, so ungiving. Doesn’t value him half as much as the rest of us do. ‘Shows what you know,’ I wanted to tell her. ‘Why didn’t he marry someone else if he was so keen on nurturing? If I’d behaved any other way, do you suppose he and I would ever have gotten together?’ ”

I said, “That wasn’t why we got together.”

“Oh, wasn’t it?” she said.

She turned away to gaze out the window over the sink. Earlier I’d switched the sprinkler back on, and I could see how her eyes followed the to-and-fro motion. “I had a job offer in Chicago,” she told me in a reflective tone. “You never knew that. This was one of my old professors, somebody I looked up to. He offered me a much better job than what I had here — not better paying, maybe, but more prestigious and more interesting. I felt honored that he even remembered me. But you and I had just gone to our first movie together, and I couldn’t think of anything but you.”

I stared at her. I felt as if heavy furniture were being moved around in my head.

“Even after we were married,” she said, “I’d have patients now and then who wore braces or splints or the like with Velcro fasteners, and they’d be undressing in a treatment room, and from my office I’d hear that ripping sound as the fasteners came apart, and I would think, Oh! I would think of you.”

I wanted to step closer to her but I was afraid I would scare her off. And she didn’t seem encouraging. She kept her face set toward the window, her eyes fixed on the sprinkler.

I said, “I probably did save up that barberry thorn.”

I wasn’t sure she would understand what I was referring to, so I added, “Not to make you feel bad about the L.A. trip, though. Just, maybe, subconsciously to … oh, let you know I needed you, maybe.”

Now she did look at me.

“We should have gone to Bo Brooks,” I said. “Who cares if it’s a crab house? We would have gotten all dressed up, you in the beautiful long white gown you were married in and me in my tuxedo, and we’d eat out on the deck, where everybody else was wearing tank tops and jeans. When we walked past they would stare at us, and we’d give them gracious little Queen Elizabeth waves, and they would laugh and clap. Your train would be a bit of a problem — it would catch on the splintery planking — so I’d scoop it up in my arms and carry it behind you to our table. ‘Two dozen of your jumbos and a pitcher of cold beer,’ I’d tell the waitress once we were seated, and she’d roll out the big sheets of brown paper, and then here would come the crabs, steaming hot, dumped between us in this huge orange peppery heap.”

Dorothy still didn’t speak, but I could see that her expression was softening. She might even have been starting to smile, a little.

“The waitress would ask if we wanted bibs but we would say no, that was for tourists. And then we’d pick up our mallets and we’d be sitting there banging away like kindergarteners at Activity Hour, with bits of shell flying up and sticking to your dress and my tux, but we would just laugh; what would we care? We would just laugh and go on hammering.”

Dorothy was smiling for real now, and her face seemed to be shining. In fact she was shining all over, and growing shimmery and transparent. It was sort of like what you see when you swerve your eyes as far to the left as you can without turning your head, so you can glimpse your own profile. First your profile is there and then it’s half not there; it’s nothing but a thread of an outline. And then she was gone altogether.