Winter/Spring 2015

         I would like to tell my sister Janice about the dream I had last night. I was in the kitchen, getting ready for Christmas dinner, or some other holiday meal. I opened the door to the freezer to find the skulls of our parents staring back at me. I panicked. The peas were freezer-burned. I had forgotten to replace the scotch, and where was my father’s favorite ashtray, the resting place for all his cigar-ends? I squinted at my parents’ eye-pits. Behind me, Dean muttered something about keeping the door open too long. I blinked and before me sat a bag of hoary peas, a few disks of pork, and an ice cream cake from Fourth of July that had half-melted and reformed as confectionary slag in the bottom of the box.
         I would like to tell Janice about this when she comes over tonight with her husband, Paul, but I probably won’t. We’re having New Year’s Day at our place this year. Dean makes ham rolls at the kitchen table while I set up the bar. I wipe each thick shot glass and plunk it down on the sideboard. The glasses came from Dad’s bar and they are heavy and solid.
         “You should put out the teapot Janice gave you,” Dean says.
         For Christmas, Janice had given us a ceramic teapot. It looks like something a Who from Whoville might excrete. It’s very original. It just doesn’t go with anything. I say as much to Dean.
         “It would be a nice gesture, though, to put it out.”
         I consent to this and put it on the kitchen counter. “On a scale of one to ten, hideous.”
         “Be nice,” Dean says.
         “I’m always nice.”
         He turns to show me his raised eyebrow.
         “What?” I’m already imagining packing the teapot and its tray into a box and dropping it off at Goodwill.
         Janice and Paul come exactly on time, bearing topiary. The topiary is surprisingly normal and lovely: an elegant tower of holly balls in a gold-painted pot. “I love it.” I’m so taken with it that, for a moment, I block the door and Paul and Janice can’t get in.
         “I really, really love it.” I take the topiary from Paul and turn it to inspect the glossy dark leaves and red berries. Dean gently tugs on my sleeve. I hop away from the door, letting Paul and Janice enter.
         “Well,” my sister says—managing to sound both smug and incredulous—“I’m glad you like it.”
         She has brought black-eyed peas—a Southern tradition, she says. Paul is from Louisiana, and he wants to make us Pimm’s Cup, a New Orleans specialty. “I don’t want to interfere with your traditions. If there’s something else, I…”
         “No, no!” Dean and I won’t let him finish. I hate that Paul is so careful with us, that Janice has instructed him to be so, and he is kind enough—or scared enough of Janice—to do it.
         “Pimm’s Cup all around,” I say.
         Paul worries about his parents, while we listen in the living room. His parents ran a grocery in New Orleans until they retired a few years ago. They moved to Mobile and hate it, so they’re moving back to New Orleans in the spring. As we chat, I squint at the floor. The glare of the waxed hardwood gives me a headache. Dean is an ardent polisher and waxer, whereas I prefer things scuffed.
         “I mean, they’re old,” Paul says. “What will they do there?”
         “Travel?” I say, because I imagine that’s what retired people do.
         “They only like New Orleans,” Janice says. “It’s ruined them for other places.”
         “So they’ll be happy there,” my sweet Dean says. I kiss his forehead from where I sit on his lap.
         “You’re breaking my legs,” he whispers.
         I hop up. “I think I need another of these New Orleans specials.”
         Paul gets up to make our drinks.
         “I wish they lived closer,” he says. “I worry about the call in the middle of the night— not getting there in time.”
         “Well,” I say, “they have to go sometime.”
         Janice snorts. “Nice.”
         Paul nods. “You’re right.”
         “Anyway,” I say, “It’s not like they’re ever really gone.”
         Dean looks tired, and Janice says something quietly to him that I can’t hear. Paul seems pensive. I change the subject.
         “Where did you get the topiary? It’s charming.”
         “Paul made it,” Janice says.
         “Really?” I touch Paul’s arm. “I had no idea you did such things.”
         “Neither did I,” laughs Paul. “I just woke up one morning with this image in my head. Luckily it was a Saturday. I went right to the nursery for materials.”
         “If it had been a work day, he never would have done it,” Janice says.
         “That’s right,” he says. “I would have been at my desk at 7 AM.”
         Paul is one of those brokers who works very, very hard, not the kind that comes to work at noon in golf clothes.
         “He did great business over the holidays,” Janice says. “The angels were really popular. We were at the festival three hours and we sold out of everything—bells, angels, mistletoe balls, reindeer.”
         “I wish I had known,” I say. “I would have gone.”
         Janice blushes and Paul gives her a look that tells me he thought I did know.
         “It slipped my mind,” Janice says, looking at her lap. “The holidays! So crazy.”
         Paul and I ignore her. “If things keep up this year,” he says, “after Christmas I can probably quit my job.”
         “Wow.” I look at him, shaking my head. “I mean really—wow.” Can you imagine? Waking up one morning with an idea like that—something so simple like topiary—that changes your entire life? For a moment I imagine the contents of my parents’ shop—now my shop—and its cartoon disappearance: poof! Then nothing. I insist on opening a bottle of champagne to celebrate Paul’s new talent.
         Janice follows me into the kitchen. She leans against the counter by her teapot. “I see you’ve got the teapot out.”
         “Yes!” My enthusiasm suggests I will profess my love and admiration for it. “It’s very original.”
         “I didn’t think you’d like it,” she says. “But the topiary. You do surprise me sometimes.”
         “I think Paul’s talent is marvelous.”
         “It is nice,” Janice says. She’s more subdued than usual, and when I look up from the champagne bottle that I’ve been trying to open, she looks lost, as if there’s a vast sea before her and she doesn’t know where to fix her rudder. The look scares me, so I ask her about work. Janice runs a small vocational agency; she helps the professionally lost find professions. Sometimes they just find jobs; sometimes they find they are totally different people than they’d imagined. Once, a fifty-five-year-old woman, laid off by the battery factory where she had worked for thirty years, took a test and discovered she would make a fine game warden. In two years she was a park ranger in the Keys, carrying a rifle and protecting herons, gators, and park visitors. In another success story, the marketing director of a software company found satisfaction as a mail carrier. Janice helped him realize that his unhappiness stemmed from too many hours indoors.
         I hand Janice a glass of champagne, the old-fashioned saucer type. “Who have you helped lately? Tell me a good one.”
Janice sips from her glass, shakes her hair back and says, “I don’t help anyone.”
         “Pish-posh,” I say, and she flinches. “You’re fabulous and you know it.”
She takes up the hem of my organza hostess apron—one that had belonged to our mother—and fingers the lovely diaphanous fabric. She traces an embroidered daisy with her thumb, and before I can stop her, she’s poked straight through it. I slap her hand away, clocking her with the enormous diamond dinner ring on my right hand. She looks at me, shocked.
         “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” A red splotch blossoms on the back of her hand.
         Janice licks her lips, a bad habit that chaps her skin. Our mother used to yell at her for it, that and gum-chewing. “Dry rot,” she says, looking satisfied. “Guess you’ll have to throw it out.”
         “I have no intention of throwing it away. I’ll fix it,” I say. “No harm done.”
         We stay up until three, buoyed by Pimm’s and champagne. In the living room, Dean and I sit opposite Janice and Paul, and I stare from Paul’s topiary to Paul, and back again. I’ve never seen a new thing with such importance. The clusters of leaves—glossy and compact—seem ready to burst from their arrangement. The brush strokes in the gold paint reflect tiny worlds of lamplight; each stroke shows Paul’s hand. Yet it is a very simple thing. I look up to find Janice staring, too.

         The next day, I have a headache. We get ready for work. Dean straightens his tie while I lie across the bed in my running clothes. Soon I’ll head to the track where I’ll work on the coach of a local triathlon club. His mother died recently, and I want to make myself available to handle the sale of the estate. It’s delicate business. One can’t appear eager. After I drop Dean at the private high school where he teaches history, I drive my father’s old Mercedes to the track. It’s butterscotch-colored and doesn’t require as much maintenance as you’d think. I have fond memories of riding in the back seat when I was small, on our way to the homes of the recently deceased, where my father or mother would manage the sale of generations’ worth of family heirlooms. Much of my business comes from connections my parents made long ago.
         Coach is himself on the downhill slide of life, though he’s as healthy as a man his age can be. Sometimes he jogs with me during my slow warm-up. He makes fun of the young girls who turn out in their perfect outfits—the white singlets and powder blue running shorts, their hair pulled into tight ponies. “See that girl?” He points to a young woman in navy nylon shorts who stretches at the perimeter of the track. A few young men—actual athletes with rock-like quads and sinewy calves—stand around her smiling. Once practice starts they’ll forget about her.
         “I see her.” I already know the punch-line.
         “I’ve never seen her run.”
         “You should ask her to join the team.” I mean this to be funny.
         “I should,” he says. “I will.” He veers away from me, running at his true speed, far faster than a man his age should be able to. He has such an intentional gait—he means to get somewhere, the way he pushes off from the track, putting it behind him. He pulls up beside the girl, introduces himself. The young men break away and hit the track. Coach will have the girl on his team in a day or so, and she may last a few weeks or even a few months. She’s young, and probably not used to pushing herself or staying with things long after they’ve stopped being fun. She may run too hard, start off too quickly, injure herself, quit. But he’ll get her for a little while, and who knows what he’ll be able to do with her. I’ve seen him take regular people—insurance agents and human resource officers—and turn them into competitive athletes. He jogs with the girl around the track, talking and laughing with her. The sun glints off the windshields of the cars in the track’s parking lot, and I feel my jaw tighten; I’ll have another headache later.
         After I’ve run six miles through the neighboring streets, after Coach has done what he can stand to do with the girl, we reconvene at the track for a leisurely stretch. This is where our best talks occur. I tell him to let me know if he needs assistance with his mother’s estate. He doesn’t answer for a while. Then he says, “What did you do with your parents’ estate?” He knows my parents are dead, though they died at different times: dad first, heart attack, then mother, lung cancer.
         “I mean, that would be weird, selling your parents’ stuff. Did one of your colleagues do it for you?”
         I imagine my colleagues: Roy with the hairpiece who is older than my parents would be if they were alive, and his niece Veronica, who looks older than Roy. Something has happened to her skin—too much exposure to sun or a nasty bout of adolescent acne—and she compensates with too much make-up.
         “I wouldn’t let my colleagues touch my parents’ things. They’re ghouls.”
         “Ouch. So you unloaded it yourself?”
         We’re both on our backs, not looking at each other.
         “I still have it. Dean and I live in their house.”
         “What—you just fit your stuff in around theirs?”
         I imagine the disaster that would have been. “We got rid of most of our stuff. It wasn’t good furniture—just cheap, mass-produced stuff.”
         “What about your husband’s stuff? Didn’t he have parents who gave him things?”
         Dean had rooms full of blonde modern museum-type chairs and tables that didn’t go with anything.
         “Dean has his own room. We converted the carport. He keeps the things he can’t part with there.”
         “So you have a whole house full of things you can’t part with, but all his stuff has to fit in the carport?”
         “It’s not a carport anymore—it’s really a very nice room. Why are you making this a problem?”
         He doesn’t answer my question. “My girls are coming this weekend to take what they want. I’ll let you know if I need your help after that.”
         We make plans to meet for a beer after his practice on Thursday, while Dean’s taking a course for recertification.
         At home in the foyer, the glare from a mahogany picture frame slices into my field of vision and I wince. The oval frame holds a photograph from my grandparents’ wedding, New Year’s Day, 1906. Neither of them smiles, in the European tradition of leaden portraiture. Would it have been impossible for them to smile—on a happy occasion? Would it have killed them?
         In the shower I try to rinse away my headache. I’ll make some calls at the shop, keep some appointments. Collectors come for the vases, paintings, and jewelry the dead have left and the living don’t want. I have auctioned entire households of furniture—secretaries stuffed with crinkled letters in foreign languages, pantries full of home-canned tomatoes, beans, cabbage, and soup, moldy sporting equipment—white leather skates, wooden tennis racquets, scuffed bocce sets and rusted horseshoes. And over everything the thick dust, the heavy living smell of thriving mold and mildew. In my office, stacked in bookcases with glass doors, sit tins and leather albums of unlabeled family photographs and daguerreotypes. Researchers from the university come to paw through them, searching for items of cultural interest, anything that will justify their hypotheses. A pale graduate student came by once to see my collection of “families engaged in leisure pursuits”. I gestured to the cabinets, told him I hadn’t sorted the photographs. He offered to catalogue them by period and subject, but I told him no, the families should stay together. He shook his head, repeatedly, all week as he came every day to sift through the photos.
         At my desk, I unfold the newspaper and glance at the front page. Someone’s young son drowned in a swimming pool; a teenager drove her parents’ car into a tree. I think of the girl’s room, her plastic beads, ribbons from cheerleading or equestrian, those collages girls make when they are bored, lonely, or angst-filled, the inevitable diary. The boy’s room: posters of sports stars—hockey, baseball, basketball—and the gold and silver trophies. Maybe a musical instrument, bought on installment, with a dried-up reed inside it. I turn quickly to the obituaries and make note of likely candidates. I keep a stock of tasteful sympathy cards, though truthfully there’s no such thing. I include my business card, which describes my services in plain terms. I mail about thirty of these a week and attract the interest and business of about one in thirty. Often I get calls six months, a year, or even three years after the fact. It takes a while for the family to pick through what’s left. Sometimes they never do; the boxes sit for years until someone decides it’s time to move, or a new baby arrives, and the boxes of diapers and toys crowd out the dead.
         I’m making out the cards when the bells on the front door chime. A fairly young man enters. He wears a cheap-looking suit—the jacket hangs crooked and the pants pull across the front. The shirt is pale yellow and looks like part of a Catholic boy’s school uniform. In his hand, he holds one of my cards. He clears his throat when he sees me staring at him from behind my desk.
         “Are you–?” He waves the card at me.
         I put down my pen. “I am.”
         After a little hitching motion, he clumps toward my desk. His pants are short and show his dark brown socks when he walks. While he tells me what he wants, I try not to stare. I imagine he sprang up late for work, and threw on clothes without a single glance at the mirror. He tells me his parents are dead and he wants an appraisal of their possessions. They lived in a house just outside of town, in a swank subdivision, built on a hammock in the woods—the kind of place where executives lived side-by-side with successful artists and everyone had cocktail parties. My parents would have attended parties there, but I had never had a client from this neighborhood.
         I agree to drive over with him. He lays his hand on the dash of the Mercedes and leaves a sweaty palm print.
         “Nice car.”
         I see him calculate its worth. “Thanks. What did your parents do?”
         The man sneers. “My mother was an artist, and my father was a collector.”
         This seems promising. “He collected art?”
         “He thought it was.”
         “Are you an artist?”
         He laughs out the window, then turns to face me. “Do I look like one?”
         I want to say, you look like the manager of a fast-food joint. He is, in fact, the manager of the Popeye’s on Main Street, where he presides over fryers filled with catfish nuggets, big pots of gumbo, and baking sheets of dry, buttery biscuits. I remember his pale unwholesome face floating under the grease hood with all the brown faces of the cooks.
         His parents’ house is filled with junk. The house itself is lovely—all windows and natural wood, wide open with a view of the woods. On the main level, we pause by the enormous windows, which slide open like patio doors and give way to dense green growth. Live oaks strung with blue-gray Spanish moss make lace-work of the sky. Saw palmettos scratch and rustle. The top-heavy pines stand stiff, upright—the straight men of the hammock. I imagine he must have fond memories of such a lovely place.
         “Will you be moving in?”
         “I’m selling it,” he says. “You want to buy? I’ll sell it to you right now.”
         He probably can’t afford the taxes, but his voice tells me he wants to be rid of it for other reasons.
         “It is a fine house. Maybe you should show me the other things first. I’d have to talk to my husband.” I don’t want to insult the place by outright refusal.
         “Don’t wait too long if you’re really interested. These places don’t go on the market often. I mean, somebody has to die.”
         He turns, and I follow him down a dim cool hallway. We pause in an open doorway. Huddled in the room like terrified rodents, obsolete computers and monitors stare at us. The father collected vintage Macs and PCs, and now their gray cases and blank glassy screens sit waiting for their caretaker to come and—do what, exactly, with them?
         “He was going to make the Mac Classics into fish bowls and sell them on e-bay. This was just a hobby,” the son tells me.
         A little further down the hall, he opens another door. The hulking matronly forms of antique clothes washers greet us. “Ditto for these,” he says.
         We climb creaking narrow stairs to the upper level, and the son leads me to the father’s workshop. The doorbell rings, followed by loud pounding. “That’s the egg man,” he says, and he turns abruptly to answer the door. The son and the egg man exchange words. The son returns, out of breath from the stairs, looking a little embarrassed. “Can I borrow a dollar? I don’t have enough cash and I need to pay him.”
         “Sure, no problem.” I reach into my purse and take a dollar from my wallet.
         He snatches the bill from my hand and says “Thanks.”
         I realize he’s not embarrassed at all; he’s in a hurry. He probably has to get back to work. I guess he told the egg man about his father’s death right there on the doorstep. I turn my gaze back to the room. On the desk is an egg. Someone has been painting it but has left off work. The bottom half is still white. To the left of the desk sits a long wooden table, its surface covered with painted eggs.
         The son returns, slightly red-faced and out-of-breath. He hands me two-dozen eggs. “These are yours. I forgot to have delivery stopped.”
         I stare at him.
         “The eggs,” he says. “My father paints them? Painted them.”
         I agree to take the painted eggs but nothing else. I ask him the story of the eggs and he rolls his eyes.
         “It’s a Ukrainian thing. All the oldsters go for it. The house was always filled with this old-country crap. You should see my mother’s paintings.”
         I tell him I’d like to see his mother’s paintings.
         “She made her own paint,” the son says. “She was a loon—they both were. She used the yolks my father blew out of the shells.”
         The mother had painted a series of a cuckoo clock—fifteen smallish canvases. Though each clock has all the numbers it should have to mark the passage of time, none of the clocks have hands. In each painting, the clock’s face reflects a different quality of light. Some have a cool feel, as if all the lights in the house are out and only weak daylight washes over the clock. In others, the light glows gold—lamps keeping dark away. Twilight nearly obscures the Roman numerals—a faint edge shows here and there—and the clock itself makes a menacing figure on the darkened wall: marking time in its private way. Among these hang the more subtle deviations in light, small slices of the day captured for examination. I wonder what the boy did while his mother painted all these many hours, if he played patiently nearby or if the mother worked quickly, so as not to be late picking him up from school.
         “Do you have more of your mother’s art?”
         “This is it. The rest she sold.”
         “Why not these?”
         He puts his hands on his hips. We both stare at the paintings. “She said it reminded her of me—my childhood.”
         I drag my gaze from the paintings to the man. “What did she mean by that?”
         He exhales through his nose. “I have no idea.”
         “Well,” I say, “they’re lovely,” though what I mean is they’re full of sorrow. “I’ll take them.”
         “Great,” he says. “Good.”
         I hadn’t noticed at first, but the pink background of the paintings matches almost exactly the pink of the wall. The wainscoting in the painting matches the wainscoting of the room.
         “What happened to the clock?”
         The man is already removing the paintings from the wall. “I broke it.”
         He agrees to pack the eggs and drop them off at the shop. I take the clocks with me. I already know where I’ll hang them: in the foyer of our house, where my grandparents’ wedding photo hangs, where the grandfather clock stands beside the mahogany table. The paintings need a wall to themselves; the other things will have to be moved.
         In the foyer, I hear an abrupt sound from Dean’s room, the sound of someone rising quickly from a chair. Dean shuffles into the foyer and stands there, still in his school clothes, home three hours too soon.
         “Are you all right?”
         On his face, a look of recognition appears.
         “I am sick,” he replies. His arms hang at his sides. I’ve never seen him more inert, like a machine waiting to be turned on.
         “What happened?” I go to him and touch his wrist.
         “Nothing happened.” He glances past me at the paintings. “What are those?”
         I explain and he nods. He moves to sit on the couch. “Aren’t you tired of it?”
         I panic a little. “I don’t know what you mean.”
         He loosens his tie. “I can’t breathe.”
         “I’ll open a window.” As I move past him to the window, he takes my hand. “I quit my job.”
         Suddenly, I am no longer married to a history teacher. I sputter for a moment about the outrage of his not talking to me first, but before I can even properly begin to form the sentence, I sit in a chair opposite him and say, “Oh.” Practical considerations aside, “Oh.” So many questions bubble up and dissipate. I wait for Dean to tell me something. He tells me he’s been seeing Janice—professionally—behind my back, instead of taking recertification classes. He isn’t made for teaching history. He’s meant for working in nature.
         “That’s how it always works for her clients,” I tell him. “They’d all be happy if only they could work outdoors. Don’t you think that’s a strange coincidence?”
         He doesn’t respond.
         “Are you going to be a game warden or a mail carrier?”
         Dean shrinks into himself. “I’m going to be a naturalist.” When I don’t respond he continues. “I’ll give tours of the parks and tell people about the land—its trees and plants and birds. It’s a whole other world.”
         It occurs to me that Dean will still be a historian, but now he’ll be historian of the trees, hills, hammocks, and creeks. I stand and straighten my skirt. “If this is what will make you happy, good for you.” It comes out more forcefully than I’d anticipated, and Dean seems even more depressed. “This will make you happy, right?”
         “I just wish,” he says, then stops.
         “What?” I say. “You wish what?” I feel a snarl rising in my throat and I want to snap, “You dare to wish what, exactly?” He doesn’t say anything. I turn away and busy myself clearing the wall for the paintings. As I reach for my grandparents’ wedding portrait, my mouth makes a sour pout. I’ve been seeing lines around my mouth lately, and I believe the lines may have something to do with the sourness. I try to catch my reflection in the portrait’s glass, but it’s too dark to see anything so faint. Dean helps me move the grandfather clock and mahogany table to our bedroom. We hang the paintings together, and I think about the woman who painted them. I try to read these artifacts from her life. I feel something like hope, but I don’t know why. We stand back to admire the effect.
         “I like them,” Dean says, and he takes my arm. “I really like them. You have a good eye.”
         I wave away the compliment. “Pish-posh,” I say. I’m pleased that he feels something for the paintings. I watch him from the corner of my eye, my husband, this unfamiliar creature. Janice’s fraudulent counseling feels predatory now—not the stuff of amusing stories—as if she had practiced on all those hapless wanderers until she could get to us. I had no idea Dean was lost. Why didn’t I? And why didn’t he come to me first?

         Over the next few weeks, Dean is transformed into a bigger presence in the house. Correction: he has a presence in the house. He goes for long walks and returns with pinecones and dried needles, leaves from deciduous trees and the evergreen oaks, all of which he deposits around the house in my mother’s Waterford and Limoges. I don’t raise an eyebrow. When he’s not looking, I touch the pinecones and finger the leaves. He’s keeping a small journal—he draws pictures of the trees and plants he sees on his walks, writes the common and Latin names beside each drawing. The book is quite lovely, its pages swollen from humidity.
         I never knew he could draw, didn’t realize that he had been drawing all the time we’d been together. I remember the maps he made for his classes, to mark out the old boundaries and to show lines of battle, but it had never occurred to me that he had drawn these. Now, I remember they contained too much of Dean to have been traced. He included icons to help his students remember something about each country: the Netherlands, marked with a windmill and a bicycle; France marked by the Bastille and a mobcap; Italy, the Colosseum and an olive tree. I am sorry for his students that he won’t be teaching anymore. I remember how excited he had been to discover that they could learn, that he could teach them.
         He teaches himself now, by making this book. Along the edges of each page, he has drawn pictures of the insects that pollinate the flowers, the birds that nest in the boughs of the trees, the animals found nearby. He draws full miniatures of each tree, flower, plant, and shrub, along with close-ups of their leaves, stems, petals, and nuts. For the magnolia (“Southern Magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora”), he has drawn the tree in our front yard, with a partial sketch of our brick and cinderblock house in the background. In the margin, he has drawn a small Dean in tie and khakis, and me in a flippy skirt and running shoes. I laugh at the sight—I would never wear running shoes with a skirt. He has made me angular and girlish, about ten years younger-looking than I actually am. My freckles are there, and I’m smiling. I tap my finger on my colored-pencil self. She looks to be having a fine time.
         I start to notice things, too: the long-leaf pine needles collecting at the base of the Mercedes’ windshield; the mashed pinecones everywhere in the street; the fine grains of black and white sand embedded in the asphalt of the driveway; the dried magnolia flowers that look like the hulls of giant seeds. On the way to see Coach Tuesday night, I listen to the Mercedes’ engine, a loud diesel purr that I usually drown out with the radio. I hope Coach tells me he doesn’t need me for the job, that he’s handling it himself. I shouldn’t have brought it up. He’s already sitting at an outdoor table when I arrive.
         “Where’s your new recruit?” I say as I sit down.
         He shifts in his seat a bit stiffly and angles his face away from mine.
         “Boyfriend troubles,” he says.
         Coach has a cut high on his cheekbone, and there’s some blood in the white of his eye. I don’t ask about it. Instead, I tell him about the paintings. He agrees that they sound interesting and tells me I should contact one of the local galleries to show them. He doesn’t mention his own business, and he seems chagrined about something. He allows himself to be distracted by the ring on my right hand, the diamond dinner ring my father had given my mother for their 18th wedding anniversary, the one that left a red mark and scratches on Janice’s hand when I backhanded her. It had come from an estate sale and it is something meant for after 5. The center diamond is emerald cut—a whimsical and misguided choice. The emerald cut doesn’t have enough facets, so the brilliance of the diamond is never brought forth. It is, essentially, an extravagant waste. The stones surrounding the center stone form a diamond and the topmost diamond in the diamond touches my knuckle. After my mother died, I put it on as a joke and never took it off.
         “Is that real?”
         I assure him it is, and I tell him the story of the ring.
         “Why the 18th anniversary?”
         “He didn’t see why 20 was more special than 18 or 50 better than 49.” I shrugged.
         “No offense,” Coach says, “but that thing’s tacky.”
         “That’s kind of the point,” I say, though I’d forgotten that. “I don’t even like it.”
         Coach laughs. “Why wear it?”
         “It’s funny?”
         We sit silently for a moment, Coach with his white hair blown away from his face by the breeze of his perpetual forward motion, and me squeezing my fist until the ring digs into the sides of my fingers.
         “I got rid of my mother’s stuff this weekend.”
         I breathe deeply and sigh.
         “Packed it all in boxes and hauled it over to Goodwill.”
         “Good,” I say. “Really.” I feel relieved for both of us.
         I walk him to his car. In the darkness of the parking lot, in this transitional place where neither of us will look each other in the eye, I can’t refrain from asking about his face. “Soooo,” I say.
         “Sew buttons,” he says.
         “What happened to your face?”
         “Ah—that.” We get to his car and he hauls himself onto the trunk. He leans back against the rear windshield. I settle next to him. The car is still warm from the day’s sun.
         “Shelley—″
         “The non-runner at the track?”
         “Yeah.” He’s about to tell the story but he interrupts himself.
         “I don’t understand young women.”
         “Yes, you do. Tell the story.”
         “She wants to get a piercing.”
         “Okay.”
         “In a place with a lot of nerve endings.”
         I am pained for Coach. “Is that how she put it?”
         “I won’t repeat what she said. It’s too dumb.”
         I imagine her giggly and coy, hinting around, and then blurting something vulgar or childish. “Why did she tell you?”
         “You know how people talk when they run.”
         I make a quick inventory of all the things I’ve told Coach while running, and I vow to be more circumspect. “Did she say why she wanted it?”
         “She said she wants to feel more.”
         I wince. “So what did you say?”
         “I said, ‘Ouch.’ Then I told her I could help her feel more.”
         “Oh, no.”
         “Then she kissed me.”
         “Did you stop her?”
         “Not right away.”
         The car feels very warm now. We sit a while in silence.
         “Anyway, I tell her I meant that I’d get her running hard every day. Then she’d feel—her feet, her shins, her knees, her hip flexors, her quadriceps—not to mention the sense of accomplishment. She thought I was making fun of her.”
         “So she decked you?”
         “She ran off crying. Her boyfriend—”
         “If she has a boyfriend, what’s she doing at the track all the time?”
         “Sometimes one boyfriend is not enough. It takes a village, you know.”
         “Well,” I say, “I’m sorry that happened. You don’t deserve it.”
         “Thanks.”
         “You should have stopped kissing her sooner.” I give him a playful backhand above his knee, and he grabs my hand. He holds on and rubs the back of it with his thumb. I wait to see what happens. He places his thumb over the ring and presses down. “Get rid of this thing,” he says. “You’re too old for costumes.”
         Swallowing is hard. “Get rid of it?”
         “Stop wearing it.”
         I relax a little. I expect him to assign me a penance of miles and intervals, but instead he invites me to breakfast Saturday after a long run. I frown at him. “You’re up to something.”
         He gets up, stiff-legged. “You’re paranoid.” He stretches. “Get rid of that thing, seriously. It’s ugly.”
         I know he’s right. I’ve associated myself with something in poor taste, that isn’t even funny anymore—or never was. On the way home I consider throwing it out the window, but that seems excessive, an extravagant gesture, much like the ring itself. And what has it ever done to me? At the thought of selling it, a steel door in my brain slams shut. The ring will not be sold. In its ugliness, it is unique. Stopped at a light, I twist it off my finger, open the ashtray and drop it in. My fingers feel much slimmer. I can make a tight fist, and each finger can feel itself against its mates. “For the right occasion,” I tell the ring, and then I correct myself. No more lying: the right occasion doesn’t exist. What did my father think he was making fun of?

         Janice comes by on Saturday after my run and breakfast with Coach. She walks quickly from her car to the door, staring at the ground, her long black hair whipping around her. We had been talking about throwing a fancy party for Valentine’s Day, at which we would unveil Paul’s new topiary: cupids with bows and arrows, and ivy trained to climb on hearts and X’s and O’s. I have been avoiding her calls since Dean’s revelation. She lets herself in, and I stop her between the kitchen and the foyer.
         “Dean tells me you think I’m a phony,” she says.
         “I said that all your clients end up with outdoorsy jobs. It’s an observation.”
         She walks past me into the kitchen and stops at the place where her teapot was New Year’s Day. “I see the tea pot’s gone.”
         “Janice—” I begin, but she won’t let me finish.
         “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
         Then she makes apparent the reason for her visit. “Why don’t you come to my office? We can help you.”
         I’m still holding the plate I was about to put away when she walked in, and I grip it a little tighter. I can’t put it down. I would like to change out of my running clothes, shower, and nap. Dean is out for a long walk in the woods with his sketchbook. We’ve been grilling out in the evenings, and he shows me his book. It’s filling with his gently colored drawings of our little world. Every day I look forward to seeing what Dean sees. I cannot tell Janice that she is a fraud.
         “Did you see the new paintings?” I walk to the foyer and she follows. “You were in such a state when you came in.” Standing before them, I feel an affection that spills over onto Janice, just because she’s near.
         She stares. “Where did you get these?” she asks, as if I have done something very bad by having them. I tell her. She shakes her head and gestures to the canvases. “You can’t tell what time it is.”
         “It’s the light, Janice.” I am touched by her literal-mindedness. “You have to look. Each one is different.”
         She stares at the paintings. I wait and wait for her to understand.
         “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never know what you’re talking about.”
         It occurs to me that Janice might never ever understand. I wonder how I will feel about her if this proves true. “Janice,” I say, “the teapot was ugly. Dean thought so too.”
         She gives me a tired look. “What does Dean know? I tell him it’s his destiny to be a naturalist. I think he’ll go back to school, get some useful degree, but what does he do? He makes drawings of leaves!” She spits out this last as if it’s a piece of poisonous bark.
         It occurs to me that Janice might like to work in nature. I tell her.
         Her face goes pink. She seems to quiver just underneath her skin, as if she is made of something molten, about to burst and shower us with her liquid fire.
         “You know what? You pain me. This place—″ she gestures to the foyer, the walls, the house, “you’re rotting in here. Can’t you do something new with your life?”
         I look past Janice and catch my reflection in Mother’s silver tea service. My cheekbones appear in the shoulders of the coffee urn, high and white, and my mouth stretches long. My eyes are dark pits. I imagine pounding each piece flat with a rubber mallet—the coffee urn, the teapot, the sugar bowl and creamer—and hanging it in pieces on the wall, where I could gaze at the shallow, fragmented pools of myself. My gaze drops to the plate in my hand—part of Mother’s Wedgwood set. The blue band around the edge is heavy with decoration—I feel the layers of raised enamel under my fingertips. The pattern crowds the edge of the plate. In the center, a variation of the pattern repeats itself in tight circles of tiny identical flowers. I see quiet dinners Janice and I have taken with our parents, the dishes and glasses, crystal and china, salt cellars and candlesticks of the dead all around us. The smell of the shop presses in: the faint smell of mildew and mold, in my own home—in my parents’ home—so familiar, so comfortable. I look Janice in the eye. I raise the plate over my head and hurl it down at the floor between us. She raises her arm to protect her eyes. Splinters of blue and red china flare up in front of us, a fountain of shards, already something new.