The New Yorker Stories

“I’m afraid my grandmother’s interest was landscape.”

“I bet you could do it.”

“Sailboat riding on waves?”

“My idea is better.”

“But out of my field of expertise.”

“Tell me the truth,” I say. “I can handle it. Did you buy groceries to cook that woman dinner?”

“No,” he says. “Also, remember that you dumped me, and then for a finale you married some jerk, so I’d be entitled to do anything I wanted. Then you call and want me to make a corpse with a stake through its heart because you don’t like your new sister-in-law, either. Ask yourself: Am I so normal myself ?”

Banderas nearly topples me, then immediately begins sniffing, dragging the afghan off the sofa. He rolls on a corner as if it were carrion, snorting as he rises and charges toward the bedroom.

“That’s the letter?” Vic says, snatching the envelope from the center of the table. He rips it open. “Dear Sister-in-law,” he reads, holding the paper above his head as I run toward him. He looks so different with his stubbly beard, and I realize with a pang that I don’t recognize the shirt he’s wearing. He starts again: “Dear Sister-in-law.” He whirls sideways, the paper clutched tightly in his hand. “I know that Tim will be speaking to you, but I wanted to personally send you this note. I think that families have differences, but everyone’s viewpoint is important. I would very much like—” He whirls again, and this time Banderas runs into the fray, rising up on his back legs as if he, too, wanted the letter.

“Let the dog eat it! Let him eat the thing if you have to read it out loud!” I say.

“—to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner, and also to offer you some of our frequent-flier miles, if that might be helpful, parenthesis, though it may be a blackout period, end paren.”

Vic looks at me. “Aren’t you embarrassed at your reaction to this woman? Aren’t you?”

The dog leaps into the afghan and rolls again, catching a claw in the weave. Vic and I stand facing each other. I am panting, too shocked to speak.

“Please excuse Tim for disappearing when I came to the door of the Oaks. I was there to see if I could help. He said my face provoked a realization of his newfound strength.” Vic sighs. He says, “Just what I was afraid of—some New Ager as crazy as your brother. ‘I’m sure you understand that I was happy to know that I could be helpful to Tim in this trying time. We must all put the past behind us and celebrate our personal Thanksgiving, parenthesis, our wedding, end paren, and I am sure that everything can be put right when we get together. Fondly, your sister-in-law, Cora.’ ”

There are tears in my eyes. The afghan is going to need major repair. Vic has brought his best friend into my house to destroy it, and all he will do is hold the piece of paper above his head, as if he’d just won a trophy.

“I practiced this afternoon,” he says finally, lowering his arm. “I can do either a train coming through the mountains or a garland of roses with a butterfly on top.”

“Great,” I say, sitting on the floor, fighting back tears. “The butterfly can be dreaming it’s a man, or the man can be dreaming he’s . . .” I change my mind about what I was going to say: “Or the man can be dreaming he’s desperate.”

Vic doesn’t hear me; he’s busy trying to get Banderas to drop a starfish costume he’s capering with.

“Why do you think it would work?” I say to Vic. “We were never right for each other. I’m in my fifties. It would be my third marriage.”

Carefully, he creases the letter a second, then a third time. He lifts the scissors out of their small plastic container, fumbling awkwardly with his big fingers. He frowns in concentration and begins to cut. Eventually, from the positive cuttings, I figure out that he’s decided on the train motif. Cutting air away to expose a puff of steam, he says, “Let’s take it slow, then. You could invite me to go with you to Thanksgiving.”

Coping Stones

Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn’t it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch, perpendicular to the original? That way, he could walk out of the kitchen in the winter with his cup of freshly brewed coffee and his vitamin drink (those mornings when he went to the trouble to make it) and enjoy the late-blooming flowers on an enclosed, heated porch. In the summer, he could set up a makeshift desk—probably just the card table—and not have to worry that rain would ruin his paperwork. There was so much paperwork! His wife, Barbara, used to manage most of it, but she’d been dead for more than eight years, and, except for what his accountant did and the occasional question he asked his tenant, Matt, he dealt with it all himself now, and not a bit of it had anything to do with medicine.

Matt lived in Cahill’s renovated barn. Thirty-two years old, he had already suffered a divorce (at twenty-four) and the death of his second wife, who’d been knocked out of her kayak by a low-hanging branch and drowned, in Canada. Several times during the past year, Cahill had noticed Matt coming home with a woman, but he’d also noticed that the woman—or women—almost always left the same night. Once, he had been lured into playing a game of croquet with Matt and a woman named Leora, but usually he avoided contact when Matt had company; he felt that Matt became sour and withdrawn when women were around, as if he were still suffering through adolescence. But Matt—Matt was his preoccupation. Cahill had the sense to extend fewer dinner invitations to his tenant and friend than he wanted to, because the man needed his freedom. If Barbara were alive, and if Matt’s wife had not died, Matt would no doubt have been living somewhere else, and Cahill would have had more interesting things to think about. It was just that his world had shrunk since he’d retired.

Right now, Cahill was talking to a man Matt had nicknamed You Know What I Mean, a tall, perpetually windblown-looking carpenter whom Cahill had recently advised to have what he felt sure was a skin cancer removed from the side of his nose. His real name was Roadie Petruski, and, as Roadie tried to smooth down his electrified hair, Cahill listened to his beliefs concerning pressure-treated wood: “You know yourself, Doc, these things leach into the environment. Before you know it, your lungs are Swiss cheese, you know what I mean? This genetically engineered corn, the Europeans don’t want nothing to do with it. But us? We always got optimism. You probably read about rat kidneys shutting down when they was fed the stuff ? I read it in one of those doctor’s-office magazines—meaning no disrespect. My advice is always to seal up pressure-treated boards with the best sealant available, and even then you don’t want to walk on it without shoes, you know what I mean?”

“Whatever you think best in terms of flooring, Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Not up to me! Always up to the customer!”

“Well, I certainly agree with what you’ve informed me of, so let us proceed as you suggest.”

“That’s the thing, Doc. That’s the direction you want to go.”

In the distance, a cardinal twittered on a tree branch. If Cahill had had his binoculars, he would have raised them—he loved cardinals—but they were on the back porch. The same back porch that was going to be transformed into a heated room off the kitchen. Matt must be at home, Cahill thought: he could faintly hear Mick Jagger singing. The bird, too, must have heard the music, because it swooped away, dipping down for just a second to check out the goings-on on the porch.

A man he and Matt had dubbed You Got No Choice had visited a few days earlier. He’d come from town hall to inform Cahill that a wall on his property was in need of maintenance, and that, as the owner of the property on which the wall stood, surrounding a four-headstone cemetery dating back to the eighteen-hundreds, Cahill was responsible for repairs; he had no choice. There had been a lot of freezing during the winter, the man explained, and spring had been unusually wet. Such things accelerated deterioration. Cahill was told that he must keep “vegetation” six feet from the wall in all directions (he had no choice) and that no mortar could be used in rebuilding it. “I took a look just now, Doc, and from what I can tell it’s pretty much just a matter of replacing some of them coping stones along the top,” the man said, moving one hand up and down to indicate peaks and gulleys. “And—just to remind you—it’s all gotta be done by hand.” He handed Cahill a Post-it note with “URGNT fx g-yard wall 7/16” written on it in pencil, and then nodded while backing away, as though he were taking leave of the Queen of England. If Cahill hadn’t known better, he would have thought he was being made fun of. The man climbed into his truck and drove away, music blaring. Tchaikovsky’s notes bit the air like muriatic acid.

Following the encounter, Cahill proceeded directly to Matt’s, where he knocked and entered to find him starting a new painting of a fruit bowl. Matt’s still lifes were distinguished by the unconventional objects he included—plastic rhinos, a single beaded earring, a Princess Di figurine lying on its side. Cahill was gratified not to see a beer bottle on Matt’s table. The daytime drinking was new, and not a good sign. The painting class—of course it was harmless, and no doubt interesting, but did he imagine that solitary painting was a way of rejoining the world? In his opinion, Matt had got entirely too large a payment from his wife’s life-insurance company. Cahill had a millionaire living in his barn and functioning variously as his repairman, class clown, snow-removal guy, and sometime chauffeur. But he liked Matt, relied on him. The cliché would probably be that Matt was the son he never had, but then his daughter, Joyce, was enough like a son: in spite of his dire warnings, for years she’d taken steroids and lifted weights. The year her mother died, she had come East and chopped down the dead trees on his property and sawed and stacked them for firewood. She had size-11 feet encased in men’s work boots, and a tattoo on her arm of the nation’s flag, below which lurked a spiny lizard with a tongue unfurled to capture an insect. It seemed likely that Matt had a nickname for Joyce, too, but he’d had the good manners to keep quiet about it.

Cahill examined Matt’s odd painting and pronounced it “coming along.” He grumbled briefly about the visit from You Got No Choice, which provoked—as Cahill knew it would—negative generalizations about the self-righteousness of New Englanders.

On his way back to the house, Cahill went to inspect the graveyard. He had not noticed that the wall there was in need of repair, nor had he thought that anyone would tell him that fixing it was his responsibility. In the plot lay two children, one aged three, the other eleven months, the cuts in their stones mostly filled with moss. Their mother had died at twenty-three, the father at seventy-one—a good age to have attained. No headstone indicated another marriage. Pink and white phlox grew nearby, and sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—Cahill would cut a few stalks and put them in one of his late wife’s crystal vases to commemorate her domesticity.

That afternoon, Napoleon, the neighbor’s basset hound, paid a visit and was rewarded—though Cahill knew it was wrong—with one saltine. Cahill flipped through a copy of Science News and, finally, an hour or so later, walked the basset hound to the road, picking him up for the dangerous crossing, then down four houses, where he saw that Breezy’s car was gone and the back gate unlatched. He led the dog into the backyard and firmly shut the gate.

A week or so after You Got No Choice stopped by, a letter arrived from Code Enforcement informing “Property Owner Cahill” that he was in violation of an assemblage of hyphenated numbers. He was so angry that he could hardly focus on what it said. You Got No Choice had told him that he had thirty days in which to make repairs. Nevertheless, after he made a cup of tea and stopped fuming, he put on his work clothes and stalked into the yard. He took his tool kit with him, though he didn’t know why; it seemed the sort of job best done with one’s hands. He saw that his tool kit contained work gloves, so he put them on and set about replacing the rocks that had fallen. Some were missing, but where had they gone? Matt must have moved them to mow and stacked them somewhere. But he’d already interrupted Matt once that morning, so he decided to find the few rocks he needed elsewhere. He took off the gloves and dropped them back in the tool kit. As he did, a wasp came out of nowhere, like a stealth bomber, and stung him. He yanked his hand sideways in pain, wincing and squeezing his wrist. In the house, he made a paste of baking soda and water in a teacup and smeared it on, then swallowed an antihistamine, just in case.

When the Benadryl kicked in, he went upstairs to lie down, and he was surprised when he woke up hours later. He went into the bathroom and undressed, turned on the shower, and stepped in, grasping the shower bar. What would his wife have said of this latest mishap? That he had somehow invited the wasp? Barbara had had many good qualities, but charity toward him when he was hurt was not among them. He thought that perhaps it had frightened her, to know that he was human. She had said many times, only half-jokingly, that she’d married a man she thought could take good care of her.

He dried off with his favorite towel, threw it over the shower door, and went downstairs, where he made another cup of tea. His wrist was tender but no longer painful. Napoleon was standing silently at the porch door. The dog was going to be killed crossing Route 91. Didn’t Breezy care? He opened the door, and the basset hound bounded in, something clamped in his teeth. It was a dead chipmunk. Napoleon dropped it, with its bitten bloody neck, at Cahill’s feet and looked up expectantly.

“Maybe the doctor could work it in around five o’clock,” Cahill said, staring down at the creature. “But the doctor is a very busy man, you know.”

The dog knew none of these words. Cahill relented. “Good boy,” he said to the dog, who wagged his tail furiously and nosed the chipmunk, then looked up for further approval. This would have set his wife screaming. Cahill patted the dog’s head, keeping it from the dead thing, then picked the chipmunk up by its tail and dropped it in the trash. This meant that he would have to take the trash out immediately, but no matter. He washed his hands. All those years of careful washing, using the brush, scrubbing under nonexistent fingernails—oh, his precious hands. Now a minuscule rim of fingernail protruded on a few of his fingers, and this brought him a certain sense of pride. He’d never tell anyone anything so ridiculous, but there it was: he liked having fingernails. “We are two very impressive gentlemen, aren’t we?” he said to the dog. The interrogative always made the dog’s tail wag frantically. “But maybe it’s time to be getting home—what do you say?” He looked at the list of phone numbers taped to his refrigerator, then welled up with sudden anger: he’d call Breezy, and she could walk over and get her dog this time. Enough of the escort service. He dialed her number. Above the phone was hung a copy of an etching he had always loved, and had kept above his desk in the private part of his office: “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” by Rembrandt, the angel’s hands so exquisitely, so lightly placed. “Breezy?” he said, when he heard her voice. “I’ve got Napoleon over here and I think it’s time for him to come home, if you’d be so kind.”

“I am sorry. Did he run away again?” Breezy asked. “Ever since I started taking classes up in Orono, there’s no keeping him in the yard. But the other thing is, he just loves you. It’s hard to keep him behind the fence.”

“I noticed that. He’s going to be hit by a car, Breezy, and you’re never going to forgive yourself. You’ve got to do something about that gate latch.”

He looked at the dog, sniffing the trash can. It was too tall for him to get his snout in.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I’m going to speak to Ed at the hardware store about how to fix the latch. Tomorrow.”

“They’re open till nine tonight,” he said.

“Morty, you do not hint subtly!” she exclaimed. “I’m overwhelmed tonight, if you must know, with Father having misplaced his glasses and his teeth, and he’s got a terrible cold, so he’s in a foul mood. The practical nurse didn’t show up today, either.”

“A lot of part-timers in that profession,” he said. “Doesn’t make for reliability.”

“Well, Morty, that may be true, but what alternative do I have? If dear Barbara were still alive, I could at least get a hug.”

Breezy had been his wife’s best friend. She had received endless sympathy from Barbara—especially concerning her father’s move into her house. Breezy was one of the reasons that Barbara had wanted to spend what turned out to be the last winter of her life in Maine.

After they hung up, Breezy did not appear for so long that he suspected she might not be coming at all. The dog lay curled next to him in the living room, as Cahill read a book called How Buildings Learn, his feet stretched out on the footstool. Finally, she arrived.

“Morty, I hope I didn’t cause you pain by mentioning Barbara,” she blurted, instead of saying hello. The dog rose and shook himself, ambling toward her. She bent and stroked his side. “You ran away again,” she said. “Did Napoleon run away again?”

“Exile to Elba next time,” Cahill said.

“I’ve been to the hardware store. Ed was off tonight, but I left a note saying I came in and that it was an emergency. We are going to solve this problem, aren’t we?” she said in baby talk to the dog. Then she turned to Cahill. “Morty, I feel sometimes that when I say something you aren’t . . . I don’t know . . . that you don’t approve of what I’m saying. I don’t want a gold star for going to the hardware store, but I did go there as you suggested.”

“I’m afraid the dog is going to be hit by a car, Breezy,” he said, with the firm sympathy of a doctor giving a bad diagnosis. He heard his voice pitched a bit too low, and softened. “Just a long day,” he said, standing. Breezy—she’d got her nickname because she loved to talk—was clearly hoping to be asked to stay for a cup of tea. But it had been a bad day—the officious letter, the wasp—and he realized that he’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. He patted Breezy’s shoulder as if she were a patient he was steering gently out the door. At the front stoop, she turned to face him and said, “I know you miss her very much, Morty. I do, too, every day of my life,” and then she was gone, down the steps, curving with the path into the night, Napoleon—so named because the dog did not like to chew on bones, though he liked to tear the bones apart (the sole original thing he’d ever known Breezy’s father to come up with)—trotting along on his leash without a backward glance.

Cahill went into the kitchen and took a potpie from the freezer, placed it on a cookie sheet, and set the oven for four-fifty. Though the oven had not reached the correct temperature, he put his dinner in anyway. Then came another knock at the front door: most certainly Breezy, back for some reason.

Cahill went to the door and opened it. A young woman was standing there.

“Dr. Cahill?” she said. “Excuse me for knocking so late. I’m Audrey Comstock. I live in Portsmouth.”

“Yes?” he said.

“May I come in? I’m a friend of Matt’s.”

“Enter,” he said, gesturing toward the living room. She walked in and looked around. She did not sit, nor did he motion toward a chair. Patients were that way: some would remain standing forever if you did not formally offer them a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.

“Get him to marry me,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“He doesn’t think he can leave here. You,” she amended. “Leave you.”

“I know nothing about this,” he said.

“We’ve been seeing each other for more than a year. We met at a painting group in Portsmouth. At Christmas, he all but proposed.”

“Oh?” he said. At Christmas, Matt had prepared a goose and cooked parsnips from the root cellar. They had eaten the meal with some Stonewall Kitchen condiment—a sort of jelly with garlic. Was he to believe that all that time Matt had been in love but had never mentioned the person’s name? Of course, anything was possible. A patient having a physical would say that nothing was bothering him, and only when he’d taken off his shirt would Cahill see that he was broken out in shingles, or had cut himself badly and wasn’t properly healing.

“I’m not sure why you’re here,” he said. She was an unpleasant-looking woman—in her early twenties, he thought. Her beak of a nose, crammed too tightly between her small eyes, made it difficult to look at her with a neutral expression.

She said, “I wanted to tell you that you wouldn’t be losing a son; you’d be gaining a daughter.”

“My child is grown and gone,” he said. “I am looking for neither.”

She looked at him blankly for a moment. “He doesn’t feel like he can leave,” she said again.

“I assure you he can,” Cahill said.

“We have our art work in common,” she said, as if he’d asked for further explanation.

He looked at her.

“Matt and me,” she said finally.

“This matter is entirely between you and Matt,” he said. “You don’t have to persuade me of anything.”

“He respects you. You’re like a father figure to him. It’s just that he doesn’t think he can leave you.”

“You’ve said that many times,” Cahill said. “I’ve explained that he can leave.”

“He loves me,” she said. “He said he’d take care of me.”

“Well,” he said, “perhaps you can work things out. When people are meant to be together, such things have been known to happen.”

“You’re trying to get rid of me,” she said in a trembling voice. “You don’t think I’m good enough.”

“Please do me the favor of not attempting to read my mind,” he said. “I was about to eat a late dinner when you knocked, and now it’s time to do that, if you’ll excuse me.”

She stamped her foot. The woman was ridiculous; he would have to get a peephole and not let such people in.

“Can I see?” she said plaintively.

Cahill stared at her. “See what?” he said.

“Just once, can I find out if somebody’s trying to get rid of me or if you’re really eating dinner?”

He almost expressed his surprise, but checked his reaction. He leveled his eyes on her, wondering whether she wasn’t shamed by her own childishness. Of course, such people rarely were. “By all means,” he said. “The kitchen door is right there.”

Surely she would not really go in, but no—of course she would. Like an obese patient advised to diet who would proceed immediately to the nearest vending machine for a candy bar. There she went, to view his potpie. She would be seeing that, and the landslide of mostly unread newspapers that needed to be thrown out, a few days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink. He had not yet carried out the trash, so perhaps even the dead chipmunk had begun to smell.

“That’s all you’re eating?” she said, returning to the room. In a gentler tone of voice, she said, “I could cook for you. Make extra when I cook for Matt and me.”

“I assume Matt doesn’t know you’re here?” he said.

She shrugged. “I can’t find him,” she said. “I thought maybe he was here.”

He gestured toward the front door. “When you find him, you can discuss with him these generous impulses,” he said. “I wish you good night.”

She started to say something. He could almost sense the second when she decided against it and turned to leave. He followed her out the door and stood on the stoop. No lights were on in the barn. The stars shone brightly, and there was a faint, wind-chime-tinged breeze. Breezy’s house was the only one he could see that was lit. Matt’s car was not in the driveway. Audrey waved sadly, overacting, the poor child cast out into the night. He did not return the wave.

Damn the woman! There was nothing he liked less than getting caught up in other people’s soap operas. He wrote a quick note on the pad by the phone and walked over to stick it to Matt’s front door. “Met your friend Audrey,” the note said. “Stop by when you get back.”

The next morning, when he answered his front door he saw not Matt but Deirdre Rambell, who worked as a secretary at town hall and had heard about what she called, with hushed sincerity, the situation. “Deirdre, it’s a few rocks that I’ve already put back,” he said. “The town is making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Oh, it’s the Historical Society, you know. The volunteers go around checking, and they really care. For my own part, I’ve always felt the dead have souls that cannot be at peace when they sense any lack of respect.”

“Souls sense respect?” he said. He realized with slight embarrassment that although he was wearing chinos, he still had on his pajama top.

“Indeed they do,” she said.

“Then let me inform you, Deirdre, that at this point I have replaced all but a couple of the six or seven stones necessary to give the souls their deserved respect. Let me also ask you this: Do you happen to really know or care anything about the people buried on this property? About their lives, I mean—as people, rather than as souls?”

Nothing in his tone registered with her. “Aren’t they Moultons?” she said. “Fine people, among the first settlers.”

“Onward!” she exclaimed when she finally drove away.

Yes, he thought, that sort of woman always feels that she’s making progress.

You Got No Choice appeared next, apologizing for what he called the “slipup” at town hall. “That lamebrained letter was embarrassing,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I just found out, Doc, and came right over to apologize.”

“You, and the rest of the town, will be relieved to know that, as infirm as I am, the wall has been repaired, and now all is well with the world.”

“Excellent, Doc!” He tugged the brim of his cap.

“You wouldn’t have seen Matt’s van anywhere around town, would you?” Cahill said. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Are you kidding?” You Got No Choice said.

“Kidding?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?” Cahill said.

“Up in Warren,” he said warily, as if Cahill might be having him on. “It’s been all over the papers.”

You Got No Choice saw the answer in Cahill’s expression. “Doc—they got him on some molesting-a-minor thing, or something. I didn’t want to bring up a sore subject. I know he was like a son to you. You get rounded up by the cops, you got no choice—you go where the Man says you go, right? Don’t mean you’re guilty.”

Cahill put his hand out to brace himself on the door frame. His mind was racing, but it moved neither backward nor forward. It raced like a car on a lift, with someone inside gunning the engine.

“Sorry to drop a bomb on you. Articles have been in the paper every day, as far’s I know.”

“It’s impossible,” Cahill said, having recovered enough to speak, though he could hardly hear his own voice.

“Say what?”

“Why wouldn’t he have called me? Why wouldn’t police have come to the barn, why—”

“There you go,” You Got No Choice said. “Fishy, huh? You got a point; it’s odd if they haven’t made no search.”

Cahill almost tripped on the rug in the entryway on his way back into the house. He walked toward the kitchen and the pile of papers, which he wanted to look through immediately, and not at all. “Real life,” as his wife would have said. He sank into a kitchen chair and brushed the newspapers onto the floor, putting his head in his hands. The phone rang, and he got up and walked numbly toward it. Matt? Calling to say what? “This is Joyce,” his daughter said.

“Joyce, my dear, this is not a time I can talk,” he said, but another voice intruded. “And this is Tara,” a younger, more high-pitched voice sing-alonged, and he realized he’d been talking to a recording. He heard chimes, and the first unmistakable notes of the wedding march. His daughter’s voice said, “We’re sending this recording on the happiest day of our lives to announce that at one o’clock July 20, 2005, we were joined together in a commitment ceremony, blessed by Mother Goddess Devi, and we are now officially Joyce”—the squeaky voice broke in—“and Tara.” “Forever!” the voices shouted in unison. Next, he recognized the familiar strident voice of his daughter: “Don’t be put out that you weren’t invited,” she said. “Our ceremony consisted of only Mother Devi, Tara’s brother who lives next door—who did a bee-yoo-tee-ful Sufi dance—and our little girl Fluffy Sunshine, with a collar of bells and white pansies.” Tara broke in: “When you get this message, we’ll be in the air to Hawaii.” “Peace and love to you, and may you recognize the happiness we have experienced today,” his daughter said. Bells clanged merrily; over their ringing, he heard them giggling, voices overlapping: “Inshallah. G-g-g-goodbye, folks!”

He put his head in his hands again, pushing his fingertips against his eyelids until he felt pain.

He went to the barn in the dark, shining the flashlight in front of him. It had rained, and tiny frogs leaped across the dirt road like tiddlywinks. In front of him grew the rhododendrons that Matt had been so delighted to have found in some nursery’s compost heap: two of them, with electric-lavender flowers, grown large beside the door. The ink on Cahill’s Post-it note had run into one black smear. He knocked, though it was obvious that the place was deserted. He had read enough in the paper to make him sick.

An oversized T-shirt was draped over an oak ladder-back chair. Matt had glued the chair’s leg for him some months back, and somehow it had remained in the barn. On the kitchen table were a few shiny copper pennies, and a Little Mermaid key ring. Cahill felt revulsion. He was also afraid that the police might zoom in on the barn and find him there, snooping. He understood sadly and too late about the toys that Matt had taken pride in rescuing from the dump. They were to lure children, of course. The tag-sale Barbies on the bathroom shelf, stripped of clothes and bracketing the can of shaving cream, the bathroom glass, and the electric razor that Cahill had given Matt for his birthday—he saw the dolls as the bait they were. How could he have been so obtuse?

He sat in his old chair and surveyed the room. It resonated with silence. This had once been his wife’s dance studio, the place where she practiced—only for the love of it; she’d been too old to seriously dance ballet. This had been her private place, where she watched tapes of Nureyev dancing and no doubt imagined herself being lifted high by his strong hands; where she wore tights and one of Cahill’s old white shirts long beyond the time when she would have appeared coquettish in such attire. But now he had to accept the fact that the barn had been desecrated, inhabited for years by a person he’d misjudged, toward whom his wife would have felt the greatest contempt. A slight smell of sweat hung in the air—at least, the kitchen had that odor. He got up and opened the refrigerator—not expecting a Jeffrey Dahmer banquet but checking nonetheless. A bottle of cheap champagne lay on its side, and a couple of packs of moldy cheese, unsealed. Yellow celery lay in a brownish puddle in the drawer. The opened cans he didn’t peer into. He took out the one can of Coke, pulled back the top, and drank it, hoping it would settle his stomach. It was not exactly reassuring that the police hadn’t come. Hadn’t they made Matt tell them where he lived? He saw an old calendar held with a magnet to the side of the refrigerator: Shirley Temple as a child, sniffing a yellow daisy. Oh, the banality of it. The sad predictability of people’s intense yet ultimately unoriginal desires. “You’re so superior?” his wife used to chide. Well, yes, he was. At least to some. He took another sip and put the can aside. Well: there were no lollipops. No pictures of little girls naked on the computer, because Matt did not own a computer. A back-to-basics child molester.

It might be, Cahill thought, that the space itself was cursed. There was the time, during its reconstruction, when the carpenter—a strong-bodied, red-haired woman named Elsie—had flirted with him, the strap of her sweaty tank top fallen from one shoulder, and he had questioned her with his eyes, and she had answered in the affirmative. He had moved toward her and gently slipped down the other strap, intending only a kiss to such peach-perfect breasts, when, with the timing of a bad movie, Deirdre Rambell had walked into the barn, carrying the sandwiches and drinks his wife had sent out on a tray. It was funny now—or, if not funny, he still took pleasure in having shocked Deirdre, that holier-than-thou woman. There had been no chance in the world that she would ever report what she’d seen to Barbara. He could still hear the glasses rattling on the tray.

He called the police from Matt’s phone—a rotary dial, another of Matt’s Salvation Army finds. That was what Cahill thought Matt had been doing: going here and there, collecting trivia as a way of getting over his wife’s death. The policeman who answered on the eighth ring—eighth!—seemed none too interested in what he was saying until he raised his voice. “That child molester you’ve got up there in Warren,” he said. “You might want to come over to his house and check through it. This is his landlord calling.” Already, he had retreated from the notion of friendship. “I can’t understand why you haven’t been here before now,” he added. The Coke rose up his throat, the acid rush subsiding sickly. He looked at a pencil sketch of trees in an open sketchbook on the counter. A rather lovely little depiction. Well, he thought, nobody does what they do all the time. Another person came on the phone and took down his name and address. When the police appeared, about fifteen minutes later—local police first—he found out three things: that Matt had given an address in Syracuse, though he claimed he’d been living out of his van; and that there was an address in Syracuse—the address of his second wife, who was not dead at all. The third thing he found out, but not until they were leaving, was that Matt had got into an altercation with a man in the holding cell and had been stabbed with a homemade shiv.

A few weeks later, Cahill received a note from You Got No Choice, whom he now resolved to think of, more charitably, as Bill: “My boss is breathing down my neck and even though these are rough times and you have my heartfelt condolences, Doc, the wall around the grave still hasn’t been fixed to come up to code. I’d be glad to drop by this weekend and have at it with some stone.” It was nice of Bill to offer to pitch in, but the letter only strengthened Cahill’s resolve to fix the wall himself.

Which he set out to do, after eating a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch. Protein and carbohydrates were good together, midday. Bad eating had contributed to his wife’s untimely death; she’d been diabetic and sometimes wouldn’t eat anything for an entire day, calling him a nag. She “felt sick,” yes, but it was a vicious circle: feel sick, don’t eat; don’t eat, feel sick.

He walked to the side of the house where the soil was mixed with chips of old brick and rocks. Nothing much would grow in the shady area, but it was a good place to harvest rocks. He piled them into a discarded one-gallon plastic flowerpot. After some digging, he had what he hoped was enough, and set off with the pot pressed to his ribs, his other hand grasping the handle of his toolbox. Hi ho, hi ho. He wondered if Matt would expect him to get in touch. Hear his side of things. Offer help—if not as a doctor, then as a friend? Whatever Matt expected, Cahill could not bring himself to make an attempt to contact him—at least, not at this point in time.

The barn wasn’t roped off, though he supposed it wasn’t really a crime scene. So many men had come in unmarked cars lately: anybody could have been rummaging around inside, after a while. What was he supposed to do, run out every time he saw another car and ask to see identification?

Cahill turned to see Napoleon bounding across the lawn, foolish ears flapping like luffing sails. The dog tipped sideways as he came close, rudderless with friendliness. “Come to see the old man?” he said. In answer, Napoleon snapped at a bug. “Cross the busy road for the billionth time, tempting fate?” He rubbed the dog beneath his ears. “Let’s let her come after you if and when she gets lonely, yeah,” Cahill said, continuing to scratch. While he stacked rocks, he kept an eye on the dog, who was nosing at the edge of the woods.

The wall repair took longer than he’d anticipated, and he had to get the shovel and dig up one quite large stone from beside the porch, but finally he stood back and admired his handiwork. “There you go, Bill, my friend,” he said aloud, saluting the air. “Your job done, my job done.” He cleaned some fallen leaves and bits of stick out of the area, stepping carefully around the wall. What had they died of, these four? In those days, people could die from an infected tooth. Dying young was to be expected: young, then, had another meaning.

By the time his daughter had graduated from high school, he hadn’t loved her or his wife for some time. His fingertips scratching beneath Napoleon’s ears now communicated more sincerity than all the kisses he’d planted formally on the cheeks of his wife and daughter. His wife knew that he’d done things automatically, without feeling. “Reading your rhymes like they make order of things,” she’d sneered, as, in her last days, he sat beside her bed reading poems by Yeats, or D. H. Lawrence, poems that rarely rhymed. It was clear where his daughter got her mocking ability. She’d pattern-stepped into bitterness, too. She’d complained about being named for a man (James Joyce), especially for a man whose own daughter had ended up a madwoman. But what ultra-feminine name had she wished they’d given her, what other rose would have gone better with her scuffed work boots and her black-framed glasses? He had no wand of malice; age alone had turned his wife into a failed ballerina, while genetic signals had resulted in her diabetes. He had determined nothing about his daughter’s future by naming her Joyce; it was her own doing that made her what she was. He’d provided well for them, even after he’d stopped loving them. You could will yourself to stop (as he’d done upon hearing the revelations about Matt), or you could stop slowly, point the blades of your skates inward, so to speak, so that coming to a halt was done gracefully, sometimes unnoticed by you or by others. He thought of some lines from Byron: . . . I seek no sympathies, nor need;The thorns which I have reap’d are of the treeI planted: they have torn me, and I bleed:I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

There it was! The thorns and bloodshed were a bit of a cliché, but look at the poet’s real passion. To know something about oneself—that was what caused that pleasurable ache which put one in another state entirely. Too much time was lost trying to figure out other people.

There had been nights in recent years when he had sat awake, a tumbler in his hand filled with chilly Perrier (as a young man, he would have had a glass of brandy), reading to Matt. What did it mean that someone who appreciated poetry also appreciated, sexually, children? Oh, he supposed he knew that humans were “complicated,” that they clung to exteriors, that they instinctively turned away from the illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy, which offered factual information about their inner selves; why did people have no interest in the real coherence of their inner workings, the rhythms of the muscles, the—all right—poetry of the vascular system? He knew that these were the thoughts of a peculiar old man, marginalized and dismissed for years, acerbically pronounced upon by his daughter. Guileless children told the truth? They did, but not so well as poets.

On his way back to the house, he picked up the day’s mail. He found in the pile a newsletter from the A.A.R.P., a packet of coupons, a letter from a local charity, and—he almost dropped the flyer—a grainy photocopied picture:

“MISSING PERSON,” it read, and gave her age as sixteen. Last seen in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He remembered Audrey standing at his door. But could this be the same girl, if she was only sixteen? He held the page farther away, squinting. Audrey’s eyes followed him as if he held a hologram. He wandered into the living room, debating whether to call the police yet again. Audrey’s having been a friend of Matt’s, her visit . . . all of it would be of interest to them. It was his obligation to call—he really should—but for the moment he thought that, actually, no one had done much for him lately, except to hassle him about rebuilding a pointless wall around a graveyard. It also occurred to him that he did not want to be the one to put another nail in Matt’s coffin, so to speak: Matt’s friendship with the disturbed teen-age girl could not possibly help his cause, whatever had or had not gone on between the two of them. Cahill decided that he could use a shower and a nap.

This many years after her death, he was still using his wife’s Dove soap. Yellowed packages of it were stacked here and there, even in canisters in the pantry. You discovered people’s secret stashes when they died. The little, unknown things filled them in, as if they hadn’t had quite enough dimension in life. Or perhaps those discoveries took them farther away, dried-out cigarettes and hidden half-pints reminding you that everyone was little known.

He turned on the fan and curled onto the bed, and when he awoke it was evening, and he was in a cold sweat. Sounds he’d been making had awoken him, and he struggled up so suddenly from a dream that he knocked his arm against the light. It was a dream, it had been a dream, but it had been so shockingly real. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, but the water only intensified his already palpable dread. He all but ran down the stairs and across the lawn to the graveyard. He had dreamed that Audrey was buried there. Just hours earlier he’d seen that the ground was undisturbed, yet he had gone to sleep and smelled the newly dug soil, felt its graininess beneath his fingernails, stared wide-eyed at the fallen gravestones.

His horrific vision—the only one he’d ever had—turned out to have some validity, though it was wrong in the specifics. There was no sign of digging, but there were scratch marks in the soil, and the smallest of the gravestones was leaning toward the ground. But no: the ground had not been dug in. In the center of the plot—he could not stop a wry smile: dead center—was a pile of dog shit, immense in size. A mound of it. Napoleon! Some of Cahill’s earlier handiwork had been toppled yet again, and he realized with embarrassment that his efforts had been slapdash.

He went back to the house and found Roadie standing in the hallway inside the screen door, holding his cap in one hand and a clipboard in the other. “Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Yes, sir,” Roadie said, replacing his cap on his head. It said “SHERYL CROW.”

Cahill blurted, “Neighbor’s dog just took a huge crap in my backyard. Really annoying.”

“Dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do,” Roadie said.

“Right,” he said.

Roadie cleared his voice. “Doc, I’ve talked to two people I respect, who’ve advised two different approaches to your porch situation. One thinks sliding thermal doors, and, for my personal opinion, it’s more money but that’s what I’d be inclined to go with.”

“Then that sounds fine with me, Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Approach No. 2, Doc, for full disclosure, this comes from Hank, down at Elbriddle’s. He thinks . . .”

He let Roadie drone on. As a younger man, he might have studied the figures longer, asked more questions, but if it was Roadie’s opinion that the first option was the best, he was inclined to go along.

“Awful about your friend,” Roadie said suddenly, with no segue. “My wife said, ‘Don’t you be bringing that up, it’s none of your business, and how do you think the doctor feels? Don’t tell me that no-good didn’t hoodwink him, because the doctor wouldn’t have a tenant but what he thought he was an honorable man—’ ”

Roadie stopped, seeing that Cahill was numbed by this sudden outpouring. Roadie cleared his throat again—a nervous habit. He said, “Men like that ain’t much liked by other men. Way I’ve always heard it, you’d get more sympathy from the jailbirds if you killed your mother than if you’ve fooled with a child. I’ve got Hannahlee and Junior, as you know. Any pervert touched a hair on their head, I’d be on ’em in one second flat. How do you suppose a guy like that seemed so regular?”

Silence. Finally, Cahill spoke. “Roadie,” he said, “do you think I should undertake such a project at all, given my age? Do you think I’ll last the winter to enjoy it?”

Roadie’s tongue darted over his lips. “Well, Doc, you’d know the answer better than me. You in bad health?”

“No,” Cahill said.

“Well, I ain’t here to build if you think your money should best be used elsewhere, but a closed-in porch with a real one down at the end? That’s something I’d spring for if I had the money.”

For Roadie, this was tactful—turning the subject from death to money. Roadie made a fist and pounded a black ant racing across the table. “Something my wife said, she said, ‘Roadie, you go over there and express some human kindness to the doctor. That’s a man’s done a lot for a lot of people, and, if he had a moment of misjudgment, you tell me who hasn’t.’ She says, ‘Come to think of it, I guess time’s proven me a fool for marrying somebody like you, needs this much instruction before he goes to see somebody who lost his wife and his friend!’ ”

“She thinks herself a fool for marrying you?” Cahill said.

“You met Gloria Sue. Turns out she married me thinking I was going to build the Taj Mahal, or something. Where’d she get that? Nothing I ever told her.”

“Do you love her?” Cahill said.

Roadie looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“I stopped loving my wife,” Cahill said. “First, I thought I was just overloaded with all her minor annoyances—snoring, refusing to take her diabetes medicine, the way she ignored the phone every time it rang. Half the time it turned out to be her sister.”

Roadie looked sideways, kicking some grass off his boot. “That right?” he said. He took a deep breath. “Well, these plans here, Doc—you want to give me a deposit, I’ll run down and get some things Monday morning?”

“No,” Cahill said. He waited for Roadie’s face to register surprise, which it did immediately. “But I will,” he said, “because it seems like closing in the porch is betting against death. Today I feel like that would be a good idea.”

“You do?” Roadie said nervously.

Cahill clasped his hands. “Roadie,” he said, “how often do men speak frankly? I think some of the things we’ve just been talking about . . . We’ve spoken frankly to each other.”

Roadie nodded silently.

“One more thing,” Cahill said. “I’ve never been a mystical person, but things change as you age. You’ll find that out. Some things—people, even—disappear, then something else comes in to replace them.” Cahill paused. “Life is like having a garden, Roadie, because inevitably the time comes when the deer eat everything, or you don’t mulch and the soil gets exhausted. Right away, the weeds are in there. So I suppose what I’m getting at is that, well, tending your garden seems to me now like a young man’s game. When you don’t have the inclination or the energy or the . . . optimism to tend it anymore, the weeds rush in.” He looked Roadie square in the eyes. He barely knew what he had said himself. He said, “The moment you stop loving something, the moment you’re inattentive, the wrong things and the wrong people take over.”

“That’s one of the best ways of puttin’ it I ever heard,” Roadie said. “I’ll go back to talk to Gloria Sue, try to tell her what we discussed. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to put it like you did, though.”

“Express it in your own way,” Cahill said. “It seems to me you love her if you’re going home to talk to her.”

He went to the beach, a place he’d gone only once or twice, quite early in the season, and unfolded a chair and looked at the water.

He’d never called the police in response to the flyer. He’d never spoken a word to Breezy about what the dog had done in the graveyard. He tried to think philosophically: Audrey and Matt had been involved in whatever way they’d chosen—two losers, in any case, who were no good for each other; the dog was just a dog. People projected onto dogs, so they found themselves surprised when dogs acted like dogs instead of people.

What did not change? Change was part of the natural process.

Coming to terms with what Matt had done, though, was difficult. It wasn’t a matter of Matt’s having been like his son, as Audrey had suggested, but, rather, that Matt seemed at times like a source of . . . what? Guidance? Ironic, thinking of what Matt might have guided him toward. But of course parents didn’t tell their secrets to their children, just as the children withheld theirs from their parents.

“I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” little Joyce had cried, hand stained red, lipsticked J’s all over the bathroom mirror, the bath tiles, even the toilet lid.

“You never really got involved,” his wife had said, when she was still able to discuss his shortcomings. “If you don’t get involved, you don’t have to take responsibility. That was the way you always operated as a parent. As if you were the éminence grise, as if your family was just too much pressure. The aloof doctor.”

The sadness of family life. The erosion of love until only a little rim was left, and that, too, eventually crumbled. Rationalization: he had been no worse a father than many. No worse than a mediocre husband. That old saying about not being able to pick your family until you married and had your own . . . People rarely remarked upon the fact that time passed, and you kept picking friends who were closer to you than family members; dogs you’d come to prefer to people. The next “family” in the line of succession could be a goldfish in a bowl, he supposed.

In front of him, a little boy in a wetsuit played with a fishing rod that dangled no lure, casting it all wrong, the way he’d learned to throw a softball. His mother and father sat on a blanket, their attention focused on each other.

As the sky turned that indescribable silvery tone it often attained in late summer in Maine, Cahill rubbed his face and was surprised that his skin was still hot from the sun. A real Mainer would have worn his baseball cap. He slid a bit lower in his chair, and some time later was startled awake by squawking gulls. The charcoal-gray sky was flatlining a thin horizontal line of pale pink; the breeze had a bite to it. The couple and their child had gone, a bucket with a broken handle and a pile of shells left behind. He stood and folded the chair, scooping up his shoes with his other hand.

He drove home, appreciating what a pretty town this was, how the residents kept their houses in such good repair. Back home, he stashed the chair in the garage, where the garter snake who’d lived there contentedly for years slithered away behind piles of tied-up newspapers. His wife’s plastic planters dangled from a beam, the few dried stems that remained deteriorating into dust. As he started up the walkway, he saw something suddenly dart past a bush at the side of the house, startling him so that he teetered for balance on the edge of the bricks. It was Napoleon, panting, big ears flapping.

“You listen here,” he said to the dog, grabbing his collar. “You desecrated a graveyard, you—” He stopped, automatically rephrasing, in case he might not be understood. “You shit in the graveyard and knocked down the new wall!” he yelled. “You come with me.”

He was dragging the dog across the lawn, though the animal dug down, clawing as if to score music, trying to stop the forward rush. The dog yelped as Cahill dragged him all the way to the wall, which was now even more caved in, though thankfully there was no more shit inside the enclosure. “Bad dog! Bad dog!” he said, jerking the collar. The dog risked further pain to turn his neck to look up at him, and what Cahill saw was fear. Fear and incomprehension. The sad squeaky sound went infinitely sharp, and Cahill realized he’d been intending to push the dog’s nose against a pile of shit that was not his. It had been left by a much larger animal. Of course it had. Look at the size of the dog, and look at the pile of shit.

Instantly, he loosened his hold on the collar but stopped short of releasing it entirely, because of course the dog—any sane creature—would immediately run away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bending and putting his lips close to the dog’s head, the smell of grass and dog mixed with a hint of . . . could it be lavender? “I’m sorry,” he said staunchly, as if someone might overhear. Then, leaning in even closer, he risked letting go of the collar, whispering, “I misunderstood.”

The Confidence Decoy

Francis would be driving his Lexus back from Maine. His wife, Bernadine, had left early that morning, taking their cat, Simple Man, home to Connecticut with her. Their son, Sheldon, had promised to be home to help out when the moving truck arrived, but that was before he’d got a phone call from his girlfriend, saying that she would be flying into J.F.K. that afternoon. So he was gone—when was Sheldon not outta there?—though the moving men were perfectly capable of unloading furniture without anyone’s help. What had Bernadine imagined—that Sheldon would have ideas about decorating, about what should go where?

Francis’s aunt had died, and, since he was one of only two surviving relatives and the other, Uncle Lewis, was in an assisted-living facility in California, the emptying of her summer house had fallen to Francis. Uncle Lewis had asked for the pie safe and for the bench in the entryway, nothing else, maybe an Oriental rug, if the colors were still good and it wasn’t very big. Francis had rolled up the small Tabriz, which he tied with string and put in the bottom of the pie safe.

A few days earlier, Sheldon had taken his father aside to ask his advice: should he become engaged to his girlfriend now, or get the first year, or even the first two years, of law school behind him first? Sheldon and Lucy had already discussed marriage, and she seemed in no hurry, but he hadn’t liked her going off to teach English in Japan with no engagement ring on her finger. Francis thought Lucy a nice young woman, pretty, neither shy nor aggressive, but, really, despite the many occasions on which they’d interacted, he could not get much of a sense of her. She’d twice been involved in car accidents in the past year, both times when she was driving, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—three times would have been more definitive. The biggest clue Francis had got about Lucy had come one morning after she’d spent the night, when she’d come down to breakfast late, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and trailing her underpants in one leg of the jeans. Bernadine had whispered to her, and Lucy had turned bright-red and snatched up the underpants, stuffing them down the front of her jeans. She’d had no sense of humor about it at all. Well, he couldn’t imagine having come downstairs at the Streetmans’ (what would it be—forty-some years ago?) after sleeping with Bern, because no such thing would ever have happened. They would have had him arrested. But this was a different age, and he had no objection to Lucy’s sleeping with Sheldon in their house. They put their cups and saucers in the sink, and were extremely quiet. The TV in Sheldon’s bedroom never went on, as Bern had pointed out.

Bernadine said that she liked Lucy, but Francis thought she might like her only moderately. For a woman who’d wanted a daughter, Bern was quite skeptical of other people’s daughters, though her skepticism about Lucy took the form of mentioning little oddities and quickly adding, “Nothing wrong with that, of course.” One of the things that there was nothing wrong with was Lucy’s inability to cook—her ineptitude extending even to lettuce-washing, to not understanding what a salad spinner was. She recoiled from the blender and the toaster as if they might become animated without her touching them. She drank a lot of tea, so she could boil water. But why did she resist when Bern tried to explain how other things were done in the kitchen?

Then Bern had begun finding banana peels in strange places: thrown behind a flowering bush in the garden, or pushed into a vase. “Fortunately none in the linen closet yet,” Bern said wryly. She had found two or three folded inside empty toilet-paper rolls in the trash; she’d found another buried in the little trash can that held lint from the dryer.

“What do you think?” she asked Francis. “Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?”

“She’s realized we’re monkeys,” he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.

“It isn’t funny to me, Francis, it’s upsetting. I’ve never known anyone to stash banana peels.”

“How do you know it isn’t Sheldon?”

“Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn’t even come in eating a candy bar. I’ve never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He’s so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home.”

Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his glasses. “Maybe it’s a mating ritual,” he said, but she’d already left the room.

Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt’s house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they’d seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the basement, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.

Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. “Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?” the burlier of the two said. “Moving day, Mr. Field,” the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the passenger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. “I’m Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O’Rourke.”

“Don,” the partner echoed. “We want to do a good job here, make sure you got no reason to remember us.”

Both men came forward to shake Francis’s hand. Jim plucked a pen from between the feathers in his pocket. “Just need your John Hancock on the line, then we can get started.”

Francis signed their forms, then led the movers inside. “My aunt’s summer house,” he explained, giving them a quick tour. He’d supposed that everyone in the area knew that his aunt was dead, though, of course, he had no reason to suspect that she would have met these particular men.

“Aunt didn’t have tons of furniture,” Jim said. “She an older lady?”

“Ninety,” Francis said.

Don let out a low whistle. “Make it to ninety, then a couple of crooks come in and load everything out.”

Jim crouched to examine a side table, then looked at Francis. “You tagged the pieces we load last?”

“They’re both in the hallway. The pie safe and the hall seat.” The movers had told Bern that they would be unloading these pieces to another moving company, which would transport them to California.

“We’ll get started, then,” Jim said. He turned to Don. “What that remark was about us being crooks, I won’t ask.”

“We took those six-packs of water from behind the 7-Eleven,” Don said. He grinned at Francis. “Go to auctions, get things and distress ’em, bang ’em up and make ’em old.”

Francis nodded, trying to indicate that, whatever they’d done, he did not intend to pass judgment. (It didn’t much matter to him.) His wife had arranged for the moving men, who had been recommended—wasn’t that what she’d said?—by the real-estate agent.

Jim and Don began issuing orders to each other, pulling furniture into the center of the room, moving quickly. Francis turned, pretending to have something to do upstairs. Over his shoulder he noticed something small on the floor and went back to see what it was, as the two men carried the Sheridan sofa out the door. It was Jim’s feather. He put it on the chair cushion, where Jim would be sure to notice it, and returned to the stairs. He went up three steps, four . . . then stopped. Through the window, he saw the broken limb of a tree dangling over the front windshield of the moving truck. On the stairs, a dust ball grazed his foot, stirred up by the small breeze coming through the door. His aunt had lived to be ninety, and he was sixty-six. His son was twenty-four, which, he quickly computed, was the difference in age between his aunt and him. The computation meant nothing.

Francis had practiced law for years, and he did not think his son was at all suited to the vocation. But what was he suited to? He’d been a solid B-plus student, but he’d done very well on his law boards, and he had two very good letters of recommendation, plus one that Bern had helped him get from their congressman. Sheldon played tennis and golf, if that mattered. Lawyers were always disparaged and joked about; probably passion was not a prerequisite quality. Still, he imagined the worst: that Sheldon might get engaged to Lucy just to keep her from other men; that, yes, Lucy did have an eating disorder, and, even if she didn’t, being sneaky was a problem; Sheldon would begin law school then quit—Francis was entirely sure that that was the way things would go—and then he and Lucy would rethink things, though it would be too late if they were already married, or if she was pregnant. She was pregnant. That was why she was eating the bananas, he realized, standing on his aunt’s stairs, the moving men coming and going, oblivious to him. She was coming back—Lucy was coming back from Tokyo early, because she was pregnant. He and Bern would be grandparents. Sheldon would be overwhelmed with responsibility. His life would be nothing but takeout coffee. He wouldn’t have time to study if he wanted to. He would be in a relationship with a woman who did not love him, and whom he did not love.

“That feather,” Francis said, standing (how had he got there?) in the living room. Jim and Don were sweating. The clipboard was on a table. Both feathers were in Jim’s pocket. The pen lay on the clipboard.

“Yeah?” Jim said, patting his pocket.

“What is it from?”

“From? From a bird. I picked it up because I didn’t recognize it, and around here I know the birds. After the hurricane, we lost a lot, then this spring we got some others that hadn’t come around before. Big bird, obviously. I’ve got a book at home. I’m gonna check it.”

“Do you hunt?” Francis asked. He was giving in to his nervousness, making idle conversation.

“Sure,” Jim said slowly. “Hunt, fish. Only go after deer with bow and arrow, though. You wouldn’t be one of those people who get upset because a guy wants to eat, would ya?”

“No, no. I was just curious. Because of your interest in birds. Whether you also hunted, I mean.”

“Know what else he does?” Don interrupted. “Famous for his carving.”

“Oh?” was all Francis could think to say.

“Decoys,” Jim said quietly, almost shyly.

“People collect ’em,” Don said. “Real artistry involved. He apprenticed himself to his grandfather. His grandfather’s things are in that museum in Hartford, Connecticut. You must have been there.”

“The Wadsworth Atheneum,” Francis said. “It’s not that close to where I live.”

“Well, when you go there, you look for Roy Jay Bluefield’s decoys. They’re beautiful things, and my friend here is the bearer of the flame.”

“I’d like to see your work,” Francis said.

“You would?” Jim said. “I live in a workshop that would about fit in the living room of this house. Wife put me out three years ago. You would be interested in seeing decoys?” he said again, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

Francis nodded.

“Tell you what,” Jim said. “You go upstairs, like you were doin’, and in an hour we’ll be outta here. We can swing by my place on our way to Connecticut, if you were serious.”

“Oh, I was very serious. Most serious,” Francis added. That was right: he had been going up the stairs, and suddenly time had gone into a warp, and now it was much later. At this moment, if the plane had landed on time, Lucy might be telling Sheldon the news. That was how your life could change: someone would tell you something.

The moving men resumed giving each other orders, furniture was lifted and shifted into other positions, then something was selected and carried down the steps to the driveway, where the big truck sat. Francis thought again about calling his wife, but realized that she would still be driving home and wouldn’t answer the cell phone. She would probably stop for groceries, which she bought most days, though they both had light appetites. Their son was taller and heavier and ate more than they did, though he was big-boned, rather than heavy. Six feet; a nice-looking boy, with thick wavy hair and those square glasses that all the young people wore unapologetically now. The novel he’d worked on in college had become a novella, then had been abandoned entirely, except for sections he obsessed over and had used to apply to various M.F.A. programs, not one of which admitted him. Good or bad, Francis had no idea; Sheldon would show his writing to no one. An entire year had passed after he finished college, during which he’d lived in their attic and—a bit histrionically, Francis thought—started and abandoned a second novel. Then he had moved out and worked for a year or so with a college friend, doing ordering for the friend’s father’s company, even taking a trip to London. Then—how exactly had it happened?—he had let his lease expire and had moved back into the house, forgoing the attic for his old bedroom, which he repainted charcoal gray. On the weekends Lucy often joined him there.

What did they plan to do? Have the baby and live in the house?

Francis had climbed to the second floor, where his wife had packed his aunt’s clothes into boxes to be donated to charity. There was toile de Jouy wallpaper in his aunt’s bedroom. Near the end, his aunt, on high doses of painkiller, had thought she was stretched on a divan surrounded by a party of French aristocrats, the women dressed in feathery bonnets and carrying parasols, the men on horseback, all awaiting her cue to open celebratory bottles of champagne. Aristocrats, in a nine-by-twelve bedroom on the second floor of a house in rural Maine. Who knew what she’d made of them all being pastel blue? Perhaps that they were cold.

His aunt had died of pancreatic cancer less than two months after she was given the diagnosis. When she called them with the bad news, he and Bern had driven out to the house and cried and cried, unable to think of anything optimistic to say. His aunt had pressed jewelry on his wife, though Bern was a no-nonsense sort of woman who usually wore nothing but her wedding ring and a Timex. His aunt had told them her sensible plan for what she called “home help.” She had asked him, as a complete non sequitur, to change the light bulbs in the hallway, but instead of doing this immediately they had talked more—Bern, in her strong way, had been very upset. And then he had left that night, forgetting to do the one little thing his aunt had asked of him. He had not remembered until almost the day she died.

There was a faint odor of ammonia in every room, and he thought that might be what he’d been squinting against. Bern had opened all the blinds; it made the house look more spacious, the real-estate agent had told her. So where had his aunt’s spirit gone, he wondered; had it lingered for a moment in the pastel confusion, then permeated the window—nicely beveled old glass—to alight briefly in the now smashed tree? If so, she’d had a safe landing, leaving well before the moving van pulled in.

Francis never knew what was the proper amount to tip moving men. It had probably become more than he could imagine, if the average tip in a nice restaurant was at least twenty percent, no matter how indifferent the service. He wondered if his seeing the decoys meant that he must buy one; if so, what would they cost, and shouldn’t he tip the men before he got to Jim’s workroom, because otherwise the price of purchase might be confused with the tip. Or, if he tipped generously in advance (whatever generously meant), might the decoy have a more reasonable price?

He backed the Lexus out to follow the moving truck down the drive. Jim drove faster than Francis expected, but he kept up, patting his pocket to make sure that his cell phone was there. They drove for a while, then turned down a rutted road where someone had put a red-and-black cone to indicate a deep pothole. The houses here were smaller than the ones on the main road. With all that he had to do, what was he doing going into the woods with two men to see decoys? It was the sort of thing that could turn out badly, though his instincts told him it would not. Still, he could imagine being in court, asking the defendant with a hint of skepticism in his voice, “You followed these two strangers to one of their houses?”

When the road forked, the truck slowed and Jim put down his window, pointing to the right with his thumb. Francis hesitated. The truck continued to the left, bumping onto a field. He thought he understood and took the right fork, stopping in front of a little clapboard house that stood alone, with no trees in front and only a half-dead bush in the side yard. It was, indeed, very small. Again he heard himself in the courtroom: “And with no hesitation you got out of your car?”

He got out. Don and Jim were walking toward him. He could tell from their faces that there was nothing to fear. Don was holding a can of seltzer. Jim—who looked much larger beside his tiny house—had a set of keys in his hand, though he used none of them to open the unlocked door.

“Used to live in a Victorian over in Milo,” Jim said. “Wife comes home one day, says she’s seen to it I can’t come within ten feet of her. For nothing! Never laid a hand on a woman in my life. You can march into the police station, if you’re a woman, and just get an order to have a guy gone from your personal space, like it hadn’t been his space, too.”

“Bitch,” Don said, under his breath.

“Do you have children?” Francis asked.

“Children?” Jim said, somewhat puzzled. “Yeah, we had a kid that had a lot of problems that we couldn’t take care of at home. One of those things,” he said.

Don averted his eyes and toed a dandelion that had gone to seed.

“I’m sorry,” Francis said.

Don said, “I got one wife, no kids, a bulldog, and half my life stacked up in some storage place by her brother’s, since we had to downsize when the balloon came due. Downsized into my brother-in-law’s garage! You know what I mean?”

He did, actually. “Yes,” he said.

Jim tossed the big key ring on the worktable, which took up most of the room. There was a single bed pushed in the corner with a cat lying on it that looked something like Simple Man. The cat raised its head, then curled onto its side to continue its nap. There was a brown refrigerator in the corner opposite the bed, and a sink hung on the wall. The toilet sat next to the sink. He saw no sign of a shower.

“Sit,” Don said, pulling out a canvas director’s chair. Francis counted seven such chairs, most of them similar to the first, but avoided the one that sagged badly.

“Could you use a beer?” Jim said.

“That would be nice,” Francis said. He told himself, I can’t call my wife, because how would I explain where I am? He reached for the can of Coors, which was icy cold. He could not think of the last time he’d had a beer, rather than a Scotch-on-the-rocks. He raised the can, as they all did, in silent toast to whatever they were toasting.

It did not look as though Jim had done any work on the table recently. There were piles of newspapers, dishes, something that looked like part of a saddle. In a glass, there were some feathers. Francis wished that he could see some wood chips. The table looked too low to carve on—you would stand to carve, wouldn’t you? He saw with relief that there were a few tools, but the one he focused on looked rusty. “O.K., let me get ’em out,” Jim said, kneeling.

He lifted a box from under the table, opened the lid, and unwrapped a white towel inside. The box itself was beautifully made, with the word “Mallard” burned into the wood on the underside of the lid. Jim removed a duck and put it on the table.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Don said, shaking his head.

Jim took a step back, cleared his throat, and said, rather formally, “Some would do it different, but I use black eyes on the mallards. Ten millimeter,” he added. Francis stood with his can of beer, looking down. He wondered if he was supposed to touch it. It was quite convincing, and really beautiful. He moved forward tentatively, and, as he did, Don said, “Let me get that Coors outta your way,” sweeping the can out of Francis’s hand.

Francis held the decoy at a distance where he could see it clearly without putting on his reading glasses. Jim was pulling out other boxes. “Got one more to go, then I ship ’em off. Guy from Austin, Texas. He got himself an art gallery as a ‘ship to’ address, so maybe it doesn’t matter if he’s got no real idea what he’s doing,” Jim said. “Guy wants nothing but mallards, O.K., but if you’re going to set out decoys, then, yeah, you can have mallard, mallard, mallard, mallard—lots of ’em. But you throw in one of these—” He set another box on the table, and unwrapped a beach towel. “This is your egret. You put all the mallards out there, but if you’re going hunting you need something like this egret, for a confidence decoy.”

Francis had never heard the term, but he understood. In any case, the egret was a real piece of art.

“Yeah, like things are just nice and casual,” Don said. “An egret happens to be standing around, you know? Could be something else. A crow. Got to mix it up a little bit, so the ducks don’t get suspicious. ‘Hey, look down there, quite a flock of ’em, even an egret wandered in. Let’s go down and see if we can join the party.’ ” Don put his beer and Francis’s on the table. “Bang!” he said loudly.

“That’s the idea,” Jim said.

“How many of these did you make for the man in Texas?” Francis said. He was amazed at the detail. He stared at the black eye, and it seemed to stare back, the way it reflected light.

“Just over a dozen. If he’s a hunter, which I doubt from the way he talked and looked, maybe he’s been having bad luck. That’ll change when he gets this confidence decoy. Might have overdone it just a bit, carving an egret, but what the hey. You know, if you’ve got ’em in fields, most of them will be eating, but then there’s always one at least that acts as a sentry head. You think about all that while you’re working. About how the whole flock’s gotta look.”

“Well, the detail is just incredible. You say you learned this from your grandfather?”

“Learned a couple of things on my own, I guess. Went to some shows, got some ideas.”

“I do the naming,” Don said. “I’ve got a kit. I’m enrolling in a course in special writing at night school, come fall.”

“Calligraphy,” Jim said. “We’re a team.”

“I wonder if you would be offended if someone who didn’t hunt wanted a mallard just as a beautiful piece of handwork to put on his desk?” Francis asked.

Jim shrugged. “All the same to me,” he said.

“May I ask what they cost?”

“Two twenty-five,” Jim said. “Cost of eyes just went through the roof.”

“They’re worth every penny,” Francis said. “They—I’m sure they do the job, but just as something to look at and contemplate . . .” He trailed off. “Would you have time to make one for me?”

“This is what I do,” Jim said. “Sure.”

“Well, may I give you a down payment? That, and of course I wanted to tip you, because the way you drive, you’re sure to get to my house in Connecticut before I do!” Without waiting for a response, he reached into his back pocket. His finger slid through. His wallet was not there. He quickly patted his jacket pocket. Only the cell phone was inside. Then he jerked the chair back and felt shock reddening his face. He almost ran out to see if the wallet was on the ground, but tried to remember that nothing would be gained by being in a rush, by being sloppy. He walked back to the car, sensing both of them conferring silently behind him, searching too. The wallet had been full of cash, because he’d known that he would need to tip them. How would he drive without a license? He would have to notify the bank, American Express, too many places to remember.

“Bad break,” Jim said, holding a can of beer toward Francis. “Worth going back to the house to look? It would be, wouldn’t it?”

“This is hardly your problem,” he said.

“Terrible feeling,” Jim said. “I got my wallet picked at a Sox game in Boston, summer before last. Caused me no end of trouble. You think it might be back at your aunt’s place?”

“It couldn’t be. I mean, it could, but I would have noticed. It was empty up there.”

“Let’s leave the truck here and go in your car,” Jim said. “Maybe it’ll turn up.”

“It’s no use,” Francis said. “I can envision where I was standing, and I know it wasn’t there.”

“You don’t know,” Don persisted. “C’mon, back we go. We’ll impress you with our fast drivin’. ”

It was getting dark. Francis felt terrible, as if he’d lost a friend. He had lost his wallet only once before—left it behind in a hotel room, actually, and it had been returned to him empty. He tried to tell himself that twice in sixty-six years wasn’t so bad, but both times had happened in the past year. He closed his eyes to envision the second-floor room in which he’d been standing. It was something he’d trained himself to do as a lawyer, to reimagine something. Something concrete, not something abstract, like an idea.

“You prayin’ or something?” Jim said and held out his hand for Francis’s keys. Francis shrugged and handed them to him. At least he hadn’t lost his keys.

Jim drove as if they were being chased, taking a shortcut he’d had to avoid with the truck. When they pulled in to the drive and got out, Jim began to pace the lawn, in the last of the waning light, leaving Francis and Don to go inside. Francis began looking through the first floor, feeling utterly defeated. Then he heard someone bolting up the stairs. “We got gold!” Don shouted almost immediately. “Hunt’s off.”

It was unbelievable; what concluded that way, so easily, so well? He couldn’t believe what he heard, and stood with his head turned toward Don’s voice, perplexed, allowing only the slightest tingle of relief to pass through his clenched stomach.

“What’s this? Is this a wallet?” Don said, stepping off the last step into the hallway.

In that second, Francis, who had never been paranoid, realized that the wallet had been missing because Don had taken it. Hidden it somewhere. He had meant to go back later to get it. But then why had he insisted that they all come back there? Why had he produced the wallet so suspiciously soon? Why would Don do such a thing?

“Holy shit!” Jim said, giving Don a quick slap on the back when he and Francis emerged from the house. “He found it! Just like that, he found it! See?”

It was the moment when Francis, too, should have thrown his arms around Don. But he knew Don had taken the wallet. O.K.: maybe it had fallen out of his pocket, but then Don had noticed it on the floor and either pocketed it or put it somewhere where he could get it later. As sure as Francis had an instinct for anything, he knew that the man preening in front of him had both taken, and returned, the wallet. Because he wants to be the big man in his friend’s eyes, Francis thought. His more talented friend, whom he wanted to impress. Don was like those firemen who set fires so they can be heroes when they extinguish them.

“Where exactly did you find it?” Francis asked when they were back in the car, not turning to look at Don.

“On the shelf in the hallway,” Don answered. “Sitting right there.”

Francis searched his mind, but could not remember having gone near that shelf.

Zooming again through the dark back roads, Jim seemed energized. In the back seat, Don fell silent. The silence was deafening, but Francis thought it would be rude to put on the radio when he wasn’t the driver. He would almost certainly not select the sort of music Don and Jim would like. Fidgeting, he took the wallet from his breast pocket and tilted it toward him: it was accordioned-out with money. “I think I should give you the two hundred and twenty-five dollars now, rather than just a deposit. Will that be all right?” he said.

“Hey, I don’t turn down an offer like that,” Jim said.

“But then, separate from that, I want to thank you for working so quickly and getting everything out of there so well—I mean both of you, of course,” he rushed to add. An image of the broken tree limbs sprang into his mind. He blinked. “I’m much older than you two,” he said, “so will you permit me an awkwardness?”

“What’s that?” Jim said.

“I’ve never really known exactly how to tip, when furniture is moved. Never in my life. Is there some—”

“Like you’d tip a whore,” Don said.

“Excuse me?” Francis said.

“He’s kidding,” Jim said, disgusted.

“No, I’m not. Don’t you tip whores? They name a price, and you’ve got to pay it, but, if you really like what they did, don’t you give them a big tip and go to them again?”

“At my age, I’m not sure I’ll have any more moving jobs for you, unless it’s moving us into the old-age home,” Francis said.

“You never went to a whore, did you?” Don said.

“Shut up,” Jim said.

“I’m not bragging,” Don said. “I never did it in Kuwait. I did it once in Las Vegas, and once in the Combat Zone, when one almost pulled me outta my car. She was terrible, but the one in Vegas had red hair.”

“I’ve been to Vegas,” Francis said. “But you’re right—not for anyone’s services. I was with Hugh Hefner, who had to fly there to pick up the sister of that month’s Playmate, to help Miss November, or whoever she was, get her twin into rehab. They were only seventeen, lying that they were eighteen.”

“What?” Jim said. “You’re puttin’ us on.”

“No,” Francis said, with the dismissive tone of someone telling the truth. “No, I was advising Hugh Hefner about a legal matter I’m still not free to disclose. We talked business on the plane, because we thought a trial might be coming up soon. I found him to be a gentleman. This was long before he went everywhere in pajamas.”

They rode in silence for a moment. Then Jim said, “So did it work out O.K. with the sister?”

“She completed rehab but died in a skiing accident,” Francis said. He could feel it as if it were yesterday: Hefner’s broken voice on the phone, going straight into his ear.

“You wouldn’t have struck me as the sort of guy who hung out with Hugh Hefner,” Don said.

“I was a lawyer,” Francis said. “Lawyers meet all kinds of people.” He let the comment hang in the air. What he still did not know was how one calculated a tip. He decided to delay payment until the furniture was unloaded, which might have been the way to do it, in the first place.

By the time they got on the road with the truck, it was after ten o’clock. They drove for a while, and then Francis blinked his lights several times; eventually, Jim responded by pulling to the side of the road. It was late and Francis was tired. He asked Jim if they could check into a motel. The two detours had cost them several hours, and Francis was having trouble staying awake. He was worried for Jim, as well, and insisted on paying for their room. Jim thought it over for a second. “Sure,” he said.

Half an hour later, as they registered for two rooms at a Hampton Inn, Francis handed Jim a folded-up wad of money. “For the decoy,” he said solemnly, as the night clerk handed them their key cards. Don had fallen asleep in the truck but stumbled out, groggily, when he realized where they were. He stood outside the door on the passenger side, blinking, his hair matted. He looked young, and helpless, and for a second Francis felt sympathy for him—he’d acted impulsively, then regretted what he’d done, because he wasn’t a bad guy, after all. Tough lives, both of them had. Fighting in the Gulf War. Having a damaged child.

Jim said that he would wake Francis early if he was sure he wanted to follow the truck. Why did he want to follow them? But Francis insisted that he did, and then Jim and Don hopped back in the truck to drive to a faraway but well-lit area that the clerk had said was for large vehicles. They went their separate ways without saying good night.

“Bern?” he said, sitting on the side of his bed.

“God! I thought you’d never call!” she said. “Where are you?”

“A Hampton Inn,” he said. “Has everything gone to hell?”

“It’s terrible,” she said. “Lucy’s mother calling, like a woman possessed, forgetting it’s three hours later on the East Coast, and poor Lucy at wit’s end, trying to calm her. And Francis, it is unbelievable to me, but Sheldon is no help whatsoever. He went out for a walk! A walk! If I were Lucy, I’d never speak to him again.”

The non-smoking room smelled of cigarette smoke. Did it come as a surprise to him that people did not follow rules, when unobserved? He pinched the tip of his nose between thumb and finger, let go, but the itching continued. He rubbed his nose. “What is her mother so upset about?” he said.

“The crash landing! What do you think she’s upset about? Three people died.”

Francis let his mouth drop open. “Crash landing? The plane crashed?”

“You heard it on the radio, didn’t you? Somewhere?”

“No,” he said.

“You didn’t? Then what did you mean by asking—”

“I thought there was trouble between them,” he said.

“I just assumed you’d heard. They almost didn’t let the passengers who survived leave the airport. The investigators are coming to our house, Francis, at the crack of dawn. Something about someone on the plane telling his seatmate it was going to happen. Francis, go turn on the television.”

Francis didn’t move. He took in what she’d said with dumb shock.

“And Francis,” she said, “I do not have the slightest idea how we raised a son who could not reach out and comfort poor Lucy—who stalked off, instead, to take a walk.”

“Maybe he lives in his own head, like his father.”

“This is not the time to reproach me for criticizing you, Francis. Whether you do or do not live in your own little world, in the larger world, poor Lucy was two seats behind someone who died.”

“Horrible,” he murmured. “He’s still on his walk? Would it help if I spoke to Lucy, do you think?”

“I’ve given her an Ambien, poor thing. Her mother is hysterical about the U.S. government and wants to give us all a civics lesson, dragging in the war in Iraq. She’s a terrible woman.”

“Lucy’s asleep upstairs?” he said. He suddenly felt quite exhausted himself.

“Yes, of course. What did you think—that I’d have her stretch out on the sofa?” His wife’s voice broke.

“We’re coming home first thing in the morning,” he said.

“Who is ‘we’?”

“The moving men. There was some confusion about my wallet and we were delayed. I thought it best to put us all up at a motel. We’ll set out first thing in the morning.”

“What do you mean, ‘confusion’?”

“One of them took my damned wallet, then felt remorse and returned it. But do not breathe a word of this to either of them, do you understand? I want to remain cordial and simply conclude this move.”

She sniffed. “I suppose it’s very late, and I might not be understanding you,” she said. “You have the wallet, you and the moving men will be on your way. All right. But tell me, Francis—what do I say to our son about his behavior, when he returns?”

“That he’s an insensitive asshole, I guess.”

“I don’t think I should cross him,” she said quietly. “He got very angry when Lucy’s mother upset her, as if that was Lucy’s doing.”

“Get some sleep,” he said.

“We’ve raised an immature idiot,” she said.

He nodded, but of course she could not see him. “Sleep,” he repeated.

“He has a screw missing,” she said.

“See you tomorrow, early,” he said.

“You have your wallet? That all worked out all right, did it?”

“It worked out,” he said.

She said, “For God’s sake, turn on the television.”

At the Continental-breakfast buffet, he saw Jim sitting alone at a circular table. Jim had piled two Danish pastries onto a napkin—for Don, Francis was sure. A cup of coffee sat on the table, with a lid on the cup. “Didn’t hear the news until this morning,” Jim said. “Seems like plane stuff happens a lot more than it ought to.”

“Do they know what caused it?” Francis asked.

Jim looked at him. He seemed more tired than he had when they checked in. He had circles under his eyes, dark, like a raccoon’s. “They tell us what they want us to hear,” he said.

“Your friend Don,” Francis said, pulling back a plastic chair. “He obviously looks up to you.”

“He wanted the two of us to spring my son and take care of him, you know that? Go on welfare and take care of him.” Jim shook his head. “He’s somethin’, ” he said.

“Would that not be at all possible?” Francis said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Jim said. “You’d know that in one second.”

“He miscalculated, then. He obviously looks up to you,” Francis said again.

“Yeah, well, it’s no ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ ” Jim said, taking a big bite of his bagel.

Francis tried again: “I think he might do things—say things, maybe—to impress you.”

“Scare me, is more like it. My son’s a pretzel,” he said. “Not one doctor, ever, thought anybody could take care of him anywhere but in an institution.” He got up. “Ten minutes, out front,” he said.

Francis stood to get some coffee. “I hope I didn’t offend you by asking whether Don’s idea might have some viability,” he said.

“No, it’s just that Don’s not my kid and sometimes it feels like he is.” Jim started for the door, shaking his head. Then he turned back. “If he pressured you into saying you wanted one of the decoys and you don’t, no hard feelings.”

“He didn’t do that. I want one very much. You do beautiful work. You’re a real artist,” Francis said.

Jim nodded slowly. “My grandfather was better, back twenty years ago, but I stick with it, and every now and then I learn something.”

“The price is very reasonable,” Francis said.

“If I have more money or less money things are about the same, I notice.”

“You didn’t feel you had to quote me a low price, for any reason?” Francis asked.

Jim looked at him.

“You know, it might be a little tense at my house. My son’s girlfriend was on that plane. That’s bad enough, but she’s also pregnant, and he doesn’t want to marry her.”

A look of concern flickered over Jim’s face. “You’re full of surprises today,” he said. He seemed to be debating continuing on his way or staying rooted to the spot. “Tell him not to,” he said. “If he’ll listen to your advice.”

“I wanted to prepare you, because there might be a bit of tension in the air,” Francis said.

“We’ll just carry the furniture in. Leave,” Jim said. “We’re just the moving men.”

“My wife sometimes deals with her anxiety by remaining rather aloof.”

Jim nodded. “Not lookin’ to make friends with your wife,” he said.

“Five minutes?” Francis said.

“About,” Jim said, turning and walking across the breakfast area’s chaotic carpeting, which looked like shards from a broken kaleidoscope, the wild colors dusted with crumbs.

“Your friend Don,” Francis said, coming up behind Jim. “Is he like a bad kid, sometimes? Does the wrong thing?”

“That’s shit-shootin’ sure,” Jim said. “But what can you do?”

“I don’t know what to do about my son,” Francis said. “Like you said—he’s my son. He isn’t very likely to listen to me.”

Jim nodded. “Worth a try to stop him from marrying somebody he doesn’t want to marry,” he said. “Life doesn’t hold a lot of happy surprises.”

“That’s exactly what I think,” Francis said.

“Friends, family, they get you every time,” Jim said.

With that, Francis felt sure that Jim had known about Don and the wallet, or at least he’d known that Don was capable of having hidden the dropped wallet so that he could return for it later. Otherwise, what would they have been talking about? Friends and family?

Francis took a deep breath and entered the oppressively gray-walled bedroom where Lucy lay facing the window. She had told his wife that she and Sheldon had been writing and talking to each other, and that they had decided to separate, but at the last minute she’d e-mailed him from Japan and asked him to come to the airport. Then she had done a very bad thing: she had insisted, when she was finally allowed to leave J.F.K., that he wouldn’t have cared if she had died. She wanted it both ways: to break up with him, and also to have him love her. Lucy told Francis that Sheldon had pointed that out, calmly but coldly, and when she would not let up he had stalked out of the house. So it hadn’t been as simple as Bern had reported.

Still, he knew there was more. She did not look pregnant, but maybe she just wasn’t showing yet. Or maybe she had done something about it.

“Lucy,” he said, sitting down on the bed, “when I practiced law, I was often successful because I followed my instincts. I used to clear my head by closing my eyes and letting my mind drift until I admitted to myself what I knew. Lucy?”

“You and your wife have been very good to me. I don’t know why your son holds you at a distance, but when I was here I was imitating him, for no good reason. I guess I was wary, because I’ve always been overwhelmed by my parents. My mother, in particular.”

“Before we get off track,” he said. “Because my mind does wander and I do get off track when I shouldn’t. I quit practicing law before other people noticed that—good to quit when you’re still on top. But my mind wandered somewhere recently and it came to me that you were pregnant.”

She rolled toward him and stared, wide-eyed. Perhaps it was the background—the gray walls—that made her look unusually pale. “How could you know that?” she whispered.

“Do you want to know? Because of the bananas,” he said. “Though it was Bern who noticed the banana skins.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. She rolled away, facing the window again.

“But she didn’t put it together,” he said. “I didn’t either, at first. Maybe if you’d left out empty jars of marshmallow cream and pizza boxes, it would have been easier.”

“Just bananas,” she said.

He nodded.

“You know, and you hate me,” she said.

“Hate you? Bern and I like you. It’s our son whose behavior—even if you were mixed up, jet-lagged, scared to death . . . still. He should have been more understanding.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m not clairvoyant,” he said. “Sometimes I close my eyes and things come to me, but most times they don’t.”

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Me? Would it be O.K. to ask what you’re going to do?” He looked at her long, thin legs. Her flat belly. “Or what you’ve done?”

She sprang up suddenly. She said, “I’m afraid to tell him. I don’t know if I missed him because I wanted to convince myself that I loved him, or whether I really do. My mother will kill me. She put me on birth-control pills when I was thirteen.”

“You returned early because you have to deal with this,” he said.

She nodded.

“He’ll come back, and you two have to talk it over.”

“Does your wife know?” she said.

“No.”

“You didn’t tell your wife?”

“I thought I was right, but I wasn’t sure,” he said. “In fact, if I’d been wrong, it would have taken me down a peg. It would have made me wonder whether something else I’d just recently figured out might not have been wrong, too.”

“What might have been wrong?” she said.

“Oh, that someone stole my wallet, then decided to look like a hero by finding it.”

“You knew the person who took it?” she asked. “Did you tell him that you knew?”

“Why would you assume it was a man?” he said.

“What?”

It wasn’t the time to play with her, she was in a bad way—she didn’t realize that he was trying to tease her into examining her assumptions. He said, “No, because I couldn’t prove it. But I more or less told his best friend, the one he wanted to impress, that I’d realized what was going on.”

He put his hands on his knees, getting ready to stand. She shifted her weight onto her hip, following him with her eyes. “Do you know what I should do?” she asked, as he stood. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

He thought about it. “I’d think you’d want to talk this over with Sheldon, as soon as he shows up.”

“Nothing tells you that he won’t show up?”

He smiled. He’d impressed her too easily, when usually he understood very little. Common sense told him that his son—his lazy, spoiled son—would return to the family home, if only because there was nowhere else for him to go. Even now, he could sense Sheldon watching, the way ducks circled decoys, waiting for some instinctive sense that everything looked right, that it was safe to move in; fooled by the sentry heads (that would be Bern, sitting in her chair with her embroidery, her head cocked in semi-disbelief at the way her life was turning out). The mallards would look harmonious, feeding as they bobbed on the water, much the way lawyers struck a pose to suggest how effortlessly they kept themselves afloat. Then the eye would travel to the oddly lovely egret, who just happened to have landed in his bed, having drifted in after a long flight. Francis smiled at his own conjecturing: who was really the writer in the family, he wondered. His son would keep himself apart a bit longer, making his calculations: Things in place? Feeding time? The most ordinary of things going on? The egret would verify the ordinary by interjecting something different. But then—to extend the metaphor—his son would be wrong, and he would fall into a trap, though not a deadly one: nothing worse than domesticity, nothing he couldn’t escape. Francis thought that he, himself, might have left long before, when he first realized that he’d married a good woman, but not a woman he would die for, and that their only child was deeply flawed. Did he regret having stayed? No. He had never believed in the idea of perfection. Nor did he believe that he was owed a reward for staying: Jim’s mallard would merely represent the receipt of something he had paid for.

It did not ever arrive, with or without its white towel, with or without its burnished coffin, and he did not pursue it. In two days’ time, though, his son returned home.

About the Author

Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award collections and in John Updike’s Best American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Key West, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

The Lawn Party

A Platonic Relationship ♦ April 8, 1974

Fancy Flights ♦ October 21, 1974

Wolf Dreams ♦ November 11, 1974

Dwarf House ♦ January 20, 1975

Snakes’ Shoes ♦ March 3, 1975

Vermont ♦ April 21, 1975

Downhill ♦ August 18, 1975

Wanda’s ♦ October 6, 1975

Colorado ♦ March 15, 1976

The Lawn Party ♦ July 5, 1976

Secrets and Surprises ♦ October 26, 1976

Weekend ♦ November 15, 1976

Tuesday Night ♦ January 3, 1977

Shifting ♦ February 21, 1977

Distant Music ♦ July 4, 1977

A Vintage Thunderbird ♦ February 27, 1978

The Cinderella Waltz ♦ January 29, 1979

The Burning House ♦ June 11, 1979

Waiting ♦ June 20, 1979

Greenwich Time ♦ October 29, 1979

Gravity ♦ June 2, 1980

Running Dreams ♦ February 16, 1981

Afloat ♦ September 21, 1981

Girl Talk ♦ December 7, 1981

Like Glass ♦ February 22, 1982

Desire ♦ June 14, 1982

Moving Water ♦ November 8, 1982

Coney Island ♦ January 24, 1983

Television ♦ March 28, 1983

Lofty ♦ August 8, 1983

One Day ♦ August 29, 1983

Heaven on a Summer Night ♦ November 28, 1983

Times ♦ December 26, 1983

In the White Night ♦ June 4, 1984

Summer People ♦ September 24, 1984

Janus ♦ May 27, 1985

Skeletons ♦ February 3, 1986

Where You’ll Find Me ♦ March 3, 1986

Home to Marie ♦ December 15, 1986

Horatio’s Trick ♦ December 28, 1987

Second Question ♦ June 10, 1991

Zalla ♦ October 19, 1992

The Women of This World ♦ November 20, 2000

That Last Odd Day in L.A. ♦ April 15, 2001

Find and Replace ♦ November 5, 2001

The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation ♦ April 12, 2004

Coping Stones ♦ September 12, 2005

The Confidence Decoy ♦ November 27, 2006

Table of Contents

A Platonic Relationship ♦ April 8, 1974

Fancy Flights ♦ October 21, 1974

Wolf Dreams ♦ November 11, 1974

Dwarf House ♦ January 20, 1975

Snakes’ Shoes ♦ March 3, 1975

Vermont ♦ April 21, 1975

Downhill ♦ August 18, 1975

Wanda’s ♦ October 6, 1975

Colorado ♦ March 15, 1976

The Lawn Party ♦ July 5, 1976

Secrets and Surprises ♦ October 26, 1976

Weekend ♦ November 15, 1976

Tuesday Night ♦ January 3, 1977

Shifting ♦ February 21, 1977

Distant Music ♦ July 4, 1977

A Vintage Thunderbird ♦ February 27, 1978

The Cinderella Waltz ♦ January 29, 1979

The Burning House ♦ June 11, 1979

Waiting ♦ June 20, 1979

Greenwich Time ♦ October 29, 1979

Gravity ♦ June 2, 1980

Running Dreams ♦ February 16, 1981

Afloat ♦ September 21, 1981

Girl Talk ♦ December 7, 1981

Like Glass ♦ February 22, 1982

Desire ♦ June 14, 1982

Moving Water ♦ November 8, 1982

Coney Island ♦ January 24, 1983

Television ♦ March 28, 1983

Lofty ♦ August 8, 1983

One Day ♦ August 29, 1983

Heaven on a Summer Night ♦ November 28, 1983

Times ♦ December 26, 1983

In the White Night ♦ June 4, 1984

Summer People ♦ September 24, 1984

Janus ♦ May 27, 1985

Skeletons ♦ February 3, 1986

Where You’ll Find Me ♦ March 3, 1986

Home to Marie ♦ December 15, 1986

Horatio’s Trick ♦ December 28, 1987

Second Question ♦ June 10, 1991

Zalla ♦ October 19, 1992

The Women of This World ♦ November 20, 2000

That Last Odd Day in L.A. ♦ April 15, 2001

Find and Replace ♦ November 5, 2001

The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation ♦ April 12, 2004

Coping Stones ♦ September 12, 2005

The Confidence Decoy ♦ November 27, 2006

Table of Contents

A Platonic Relationship ♦ April 8, 1974

Fancy Flights ♦ October 21, 1974

Wolf Dreams ♦ November 11, 1974

Dwarf House ♦ January 20, 1975

Snakes’ Shoes ♦ March 3, 1975

Vermont ♦ April 21, 1975

Downhill ♦ August 18, 1975

Wanda’s ♦ October 6, 1975

Colorado ♦ March 15, 1976

The Lawn Party ♦ July 5, 1976

Secrets and Surprises ♦ October 26, 1976

Weekend ♦ November 15, 1976

Tuesday Night ♦ January 3, 1977

Shifting ♦ February 21, 1977

Distant Music ♦ July 4, 1977

A Vintage Thunderbird ♦ February 27, 1978

The Cinderella Waltz ♦ January 29, 1979

The Burning House ♦ June 11, 1979

Waiting ♦ June 20, 1979

Greenwich Time ♦ October 29, 1979

Gravity ♦ June 2, 1980

Running Dreams ♦ February 16, 1981

Afloat ♦ September 21, 1981

Girl Talk ♦ December 7, 1981

Like Glass ♦ February 22, 1982

Desire ♦ June 14, 1982

Moving Water ♦ November 8, 1982

Coney Island ♦ January 24, 1983

Television ♦ March 28, 1983

Lofty ♦ August 8, 1983

One Day ♦ August 29, 1983

Heaven on a Summer Night ♦ November 28, 1983

Times ♦ December 26, 1983

In the White Night ♦ June 4, 1984

Summer People ♦ September 24, 1984

Janus ♦ May 27, 1985

Skeletons ♦ February 3, 1986

Where You’ll Find Me ♦ March 3, 1986

Home to Marie ♦ December 15, 1986

Horatio’s Trick ♦ December 28, 1987

Second Question ♦ June 10, 1991

Zalla ♦ October 19, 1992

The Women of This World ♦ November 20, 2000

That Last Odd Day in L.A. ♦ April 15, 2001

Find and Replace ♦ November 5, 2001

The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation ♦ April 12, 2004

Coping Stones ♦ September 12, 2005

The Confidence Decoy ♦ November 27, 2006