For m
ROSE
I was seven months pregnant — we were heading into town for my monthly doctor’s visit — when we first saw the man in the red car. It was on the Harpole Road, near the lone twisted oak that guards one end of a sweeping S-curve. You can drive fast on the Harpole Road — no speed traps — which is why Ned preferred to go this way. It was for him a daily commute. My reason, when I went along, was the sky, brilliant and moody by turns. That morning, light sliced holes in the clouds as the man swung the red car toward us through the curve. When nearly even with us, he waved. We waved back.
We have friends, Willem and Madeleine Steiner, who are renovating the old farmhouse on their twenty-one acres in Moses Valley. While ripping down walls to studs, peeling away layer upon layer of paint, wallpaper, paneling, tile, they uncover the stratified midden of other peoples’ lives. A rifle butt. A lace collar. A mouse skeleton caged in a live-trap. A daguerrotype of a man on horseback, his black-suited torso comically erect, a stiff white collar upholding his head like a pumpkin on a post; Maddy guesses, the circuit rider who built the place. Part of a letter from a father (the circuit rider?) to a daughter (Minor Evans, Maddy’s neighbor, told her the circuit rider had one), giving grudging approval of a suitor she hopes to marry because he fears she is “slipping past marriageable age,” can’t afford to “lose this solid prospect.” Maddy and I like to think such mindsets are gone forever, deader than the mummified bat in the bedroom wall. But we know better. My friends the Steiners are learning, and I through them, that history is not about Who They Were but Who We Are.
MADDY’S JOURNAL
August 16: Week 7 renovating the farmhouse. Or, to be exact, day 50. And I am, for once, being exact, documenting our progress in this journal and in the renovation scrapbook: what we’ve pulled down, put up, where and why. I’ve never chronicled anything before. Even my bookkeeping is, to use Willem’s word, casual.
It’s the finds — what the house disgorges from its innards — that, more than anything, impel me to document.
They sucker me.
They succor me.
Yesterday we found a blue and white baby bootie lodged inside the wall of what we call the study. Might it once have been a nursery? The bootie was dirty but intact; nothing — no bugs, no mice — had nibbled away. I washed it with our clothes and hung it with the rest on the line to dry. This time I want the real thing for the scrapbook, not a photo; and I want it clean and serviceable, ready to wear.
Willem gave me a wild look when he saw it hanging, as if to say, Maddy, I thought we’d settled that. We have, Willem — officially. We’ve had The Official Conversation, or should I say round of conversations — a moveable feast beginning (where else?) in the bedroom, flowing like day-old gravy into every other room in the house. Even out the door. We’ve had The Conversation while the chickadees and grosbeaks waited for me to fill the feeder, while you hoed to plant corn and lettuce and dug holes for cabbage starts. You’re always prepared, plated with an armor of whys and why nots. Yet for all the times I’ve run this around my head, I’m never prepared and, in the end, accept your pain so you don’t have to.
Why do I do this? Why do we? What kind of death-dance is this we two-step around the pair of us?
It’s not our “selfish lifestyle” or our “eccentric personalities” (your arguments) that keep us childless. We’re neither that selfish nor that eccentric. It’s your fear: of being the father your father was, of disappointing me, of disappointing yourself by, God forbid, creating someone in your own image. I guess you just can’t take the risk, even knowing, as you know well, I have enough nurture for both of us, not to mention a talent for salvage.
ROSE
One Saturday I find Willem weaving baskets out of cedar and maple, grape, iris, trailing blackberry, like the ones the native people made before the trappers, with authority, dispatched them. He says “Maddy’s up the hill.” His cryptic instructions to find her — “Just follow the path to the village” — lead me to a moss-covered hut where she’s ensconced, queen of the woods. She’s grinning like a ten year old. Then I see other little huts scattered beneath the oaks.
“Gnome Village,” she announces, as if that explains all.
Minor told her the circuit rider’s granddaughters, by now mummified as the bat, had constructed this childhood playland. I wonder by what energy it still stands. What beings seen only by those who believe re-thatch the roofs, shore up the rotted frames? Whose sacred duty is it to make sure the chain is never broken?
Send $1 to the person whose name tops the list at the bottom of this letter. Cross that name off and add yours to the end of the list. Make ten copies of this letter and send one to each of the remaining names on the list. If you do, good fortune is assured. Brenda Jarvis followed these instructions and received $3,142 within a year’s time. But if you don’t, bad luck will dog you. Richard Salvino threw the letter away and, within a week, had a serious car accident. We are keepers of the chain; don’t be the one to break it.
Maddy walks to the center of Gnome Village, mistress of all she surveys. “We plan to die on this land,” she states flatly, she who isn’t yet thirty — a commitment to place, to continuity, that in this day and age astonishes me as much as the man in the red car waving.
◊ ◊ ◊
Ned reported daily on the Harpole Road encounter, and if he forgot I’d ask. It’s one of the few rituals we’ve observed. Occasionally he and the man in the red car would fail to connect, and we’d hypothesize why: he overslept, left a little early or a little late, was ill, on vacation. When I rode with Ned, I’d concentrate on seeing the man’s face, as if physiognomy could lay bare the mystery. But his face remained a featureless blur, indistinct, an Anyface, obscured by dark glasses worn even though he was driving west, the morning light at his back. Sometimes at night, nestled in bed, we’d knit stories, speculating on who the man was, where he lived, where he worked and in what line, what kind of life he led, where he came from and where he was going when Ned passed him on the road. We were reluctant to accept that he, too, was commuting, preferring a more exotic explanation.
As Ned dropped off to sleep and I quieted, the baby inside would push and poke, impatient to emerge. Once I saw what I awaited: the baby, larger than life, Superbaby, talking in full sentences — we are keepers of the chain — telling me all about itself as it made its entrance, sticky white and bloody, proof positive of unimagined lives unseen, unheard, long gone, to come.
◊ ◊ ◊
On Wednesdays I visit Irene Haniotakis. Ned and I met her the year we came to Moses Valley at the annual potluck that catches everyone up on everyone else’s business. She wore crisp jeans and a red-checked shirt; silver wisps strayed from beneath a red bandana. She sat tall in her wheelchair, as if ready to take command. When Maddy told me Irene had had a stroke the year before, could barely move or speak, I was stunned. She had such presence.
Irene and her husband, George, had retired to Moses Valley. After George died, Irene had stayed on. But the stroke changed all that: she went to live at her son Robert’s, in town. It is Willem, with whom Irene shares a love of gardening, who sees to it that Irene attends the annual potluck. He makes sure the chain isn’t broken.
IRENE
It is Sunday. The adults are in the throes upstairs. The children, conveniently, are out. An age-old routine: we did it too, George and I, long ago, or so the tenant of my mind prompts.
I am dispatched, also conveniently, to the picture window in the wheelchair that now delimits my physical world like circumference bounds circle. But it really doesn’t matter where I am, here or in front of the TV, in my room, in the recesses of my mind where the tenant bustles, or where they are, upstairs, across town, in the most faraway place I can imagine — on the moon! — they have trouble penetrating my circumference. Even when they’re standing before me looking me straight in the eyes though they’re not sure what I see, exaggerating their words with rubbery lips and gesturing like mimes because they think I can’t hear.
It’s not entirely their fault. Since the stroke — I heard them call it that — it’s hard for them to tell how diminished my capabilities are. They rely on the doctor who, despite the fancy certificates on his office walls and his high-powered tests, knows virtually nothing. Besides, I rarely see him now that I am “stable.” Maybe I’m a perverse old lady, maybe my mind is going — I rely on the tenant, not the doctor, to tell me things like that — but the discomfort of his ignorance amuses me. We have something in common, the doctor and I. His circumference bounds him as mine does me.
The fact is, I see fair enough. And I hear, better than before. I speak a word or two now and then, but this frustrates more than relieves me. The words are few and far between, and like naughty children they pay me no mind. I no longer command them, no longer possess them. And it’s this loss more than any other that diminishes me — me, my literal self; not my capabilities. I shrink a little, I shrivel, every time a word escapes. I become a little less defined. And if I’m still here once the words have gone altogether, then what? Will I be rendered prehistoric? This query ricochets. The tenant complains of a headache. My only recourse now, I see, now that words abandon me, is to search out new code.
◊ ◊ ◊
I try transmitting to Robert, who smiles a lot, a sure indication he doesn’t get my signals. In his life-long memories, I take a different shape. I see fear in Robert’s eyes. I see confusion. How I hurt for him. He is my son, after all, and he is suffering.
I’ve given up trying with Alicia; it’s a waste of time. She also smiles a lot, to mask not fear but anger. She is angry with the burden of me, now squarely her burden. In that I can’t blame her; it appalls me too, my dependency. When she dons the duty mask I watch her, though she doesn’t see me watching because she doesn’t expect me to be. I notice the rise and fall of her chest and wonder what it signifies. Anxiety? Impatience? Concern? The programmed moves of life support incarnate? My nurse, Lorraine, who’s paid to serve, is much freer than Alicia, who’s indentured by circumstance. My daughter-in-law and I, it seems, have something in common after all.
I try transmitting to my grandchildren. The youngest mothers me as she does her dolls, with love and authority. When she brushes my hair, I am thrilled to be touched by someone not strictly performing maintenance. The middle girl flits in and out, chattering nonstop, her phone always in her hand like some kind of deformity. But her words say less than her hips, which now gyrate when she walks. She is, I think, just discovering boys. My grandson reads to me in his new-found baritone despite — maybe because of — his parents’ braying that I don’t hear. The children’s attentions feel real, untainted by other agendas. But do they copy loud and clear? The tenant and I have trouble deciphering.
I try transmitting to Lorraine. Hers is the first face I see every morning, even weekends. The grandchildren aren’t allowed to enter my room before Lorraine “just in case.” And to be on the safe side, the adults don’t enter before Lorraine either. Lorraine begins the business of my day as if we had a plane to catch. She bathes my mannequin body, dressing me with what must be the deftness of a mortician. Once put together, I’m slid into the wheelchair, and we enter the breakfast nook with Lorraine humming, I used to suspect humming was the signal for the adults to put on the right faces. But the tenant and I have come to believe that Lorraine just likes to hum.
Between meals, Lorraine deposits me where Alicia ordains and checks regularly on my — what shall I call them? — personal needs. The loss of dignity is indescribable. Yet Lorraine’s doing what she’s trained to do, what Robert has hired her to do. She brings experience, not rancor or history. We are symbionts, Lorraine and I, she needs me as much as I need her — which puts her in another category altogether.
◊ ◊ ◊
I do best with Rose, who visits me on Wednesdays. Neither family ties nor money obligates her. It worried me at first that she’d taken me on as good works. But then I saw that, like me, she’s lonely. She’s only just discovering what I’d learned long ago: that marriage doesn’t fill the hole.
A man storms your body, but your soul? Well, very few will venture there. He’d rather run off to Antarctica or the Himalayas or the headwaters of the Nile — or to a restaurant for 37 years, like George did — than face the real danger that the life he feels responsible for providing you isn’t picture perfect. That it’s not his responsibility doesn’t occur. He tries to do something to remove the affront to his manhood because millions of years have primed him for action. He doesn’t think to talk. Talk isn’t action. Besides, his brain is tuned to the silence of the hunt. The bravado of talk, the male embroidery, comes after, and it doesn’t converse, it tells. Another kind of male member, it swells. It re-paints the picture perfect.
But when tears streak your cheeks like comet tails, he only knows one question and, evolved as he is, he knows it’s the wrong one. Again, he acts, making a fire with wet wood and only one match, a trick he repeats like a trained dog, then hangs his tail between his legs because you don’t applaud your palms off. It’s an old story, old enough I could’ve written it myself, old enough it was tattered parchment, weathered stone, long before I was born.
Rose’s visits remind me, paralyzed as I am, that I can feel. And feeling is movement, the micromovement of neurons in flight. And movement signals I am — the right word comes! — A-LIVE. More than anyone, Rose gives me hope for new code.
MADDY’S JOURNAL
August 30: Marguerite Evans called this afternoon to tell me Minor found several vertebrae and a skull, a human skull, while digging for the septic tank clean-out. I grabbed my camera and drove over.
Suburban Connecticut, where I grew up, also harbors bones — the bones of squirrels and rabbits and birds, of peoples’ pets, of (no doubt) the occasional missing person. But nobody was interested in bones, at least nobody I knew. It was when I came West that I discovered bones and began to collect them — or, as Willem puts it, they began to collect me. I remind him I’m in good company: the painter Georgia O’Keeffe had a barrelful shipped to New York after her first summer in New Mexico. One glimpse of eternity through the hole in a cow pelvis and she was a goner.
But it’s people gone to bone long ago who finally explained to me my fetish. The ancient hunters who brought down an animal understood it as body and spirit. They burned bones as fuel but also to raise the fallen animal from its skeleton. They built shelter with bones, carved them into tools, notched them to keep records. But they also displayed bones so new animals could spring from them, and they ate the bone ashes of the dead to ingest the sensitive soul.
Bones symbolize not death but rebirth. They are the reservoir of life.
The bones rested on the seat of Minor’s bush-hog. He said, pointing to the skull, that whoever this was smoked a pipe (“See that dip in the lower front teeth?”). I remarked on how straight and cavity free the teeth were — a model mouth — suggesting that the several missing teeth probably fell out after he was dead. Marguerite said it could’ve been a she: some women smoked pipes in pioneer days. The skull seemed small, but none of us had much of a frame of reference. Not to mention, none of us knew how to sex a skull.
Marguerite wondered whether the bones might have come from the old cemetery between their place and ours, now mostly under poison oak, but we couldn’t fathom how they migrated. Might be runaways, Minor mused with a dry wit that still catches me off guard. Seismic movement? A subtle shift in the Earth that disjointed the skeleton, launching body parts into an underground flow? The area is rich in springs, Willem and I learned to our dismay when excavating footings for what was to be the solarium. I wondered aloud about foul play, but the Evanses swatted away that notion like a pesky fly.
We agreed I’d take the skull to the county archivist. Then I suggested we dig some more to see what else we might find. But Minor demurred, less concerned about archaeology than the clean-out, which he still hadn’t located. To document, I took a picture of the bones next to the excavation hole, and one of Minor and Marguerite cradling the skull between them like a babe in arms, before carefully wrapping it for transit in an old, soft flannel sheet Marguerite loaned me.
IRENE
It is Monday. As usual after breakfast I am at the picture window. The rain that began last night in fits and starts falls steadily now. The last school bus has splashed past, and by my calculations the mailman won’t arrive for a while. Lorraine is on duty because Alicia is out. The tenant proposes that, when Alicia’s gone, Lorraine sneaks in a boyfriend who nuzzles her ample bosom while they watch soap operas and eat corn chips.
A red car pulls up to the curb to the right of the picture window. Perhaps Lorraine is expecting someone. The windshield wipers stop and I anticipate people getting out, but nothing happens. The windows begin to fog, yet I make out the gestures of the passenger, a woman, her back toward me, and the grimaces of the driver, a man. The signals are clear: the woman and man are arguing.
George and I used to go at it when the seasons changed, as if the change in temperature or humidity, maybe the barometric pressure, shifted the balance of pain in love. Sometimes you’d see it coming, twisting the air, turning it dark and murderous. You could sharpen your weapons while you watched and waited; gather energy; calculate, standing at the edge of the storm cellar, when precisely to take shelter so you might live to fight another day. Other times the calm was torpedoed by a word, a look, a fear, the shadow of a fear. George hated what he became then.
◊ ◊ ◊
The car door swings wide and the woman emerges. She starts walking fast, almost running, in my direction. The man gets out and lopes to catch up with her. When he does, he grabs her shoulders and spins her around. They are nose to nose. Their mouths work. They are directly in front of the picture window. She tries to shake loose of his hold but hasn’t the strength. She fires another salvo, and whatever she says gashes him good. He pushes off, staggers back a step. His color goes. That’s when he slaps her. That’s when she sees I’m watching. She doesn’t know, cannot tell, that I have no choice, that in my state and positioned as I am, I cannot not watch. Her nose is bleeding, but she isn’t crying yet, she’s so stunned at the drama — and the audience.
She hugs herself, but her focus doesn’t waver. It high-centers on me. She nods. I signal what I can. Now she starts to cry. The rain pours down. She licks her lips and puts her hands to them, around them, as if discovering them for the first time. She confirms that she is bleeding. She fishes in her coat pocket for something to wipe away the blood but comes up empty.
Unexpectedly the man takes her gently by the elbow and guides her toward the car and, as unexpectedly, she acquiesces. The rage is spent. Opening the car door, he produces a handkerchief, which she accepts along with his guilty goodwill, as she gets in. In one move he closes the door and the incident, then rounds the rear of the car to enter on his side. They drive away, the distance swallowing them. They’ve done this, in one form or another, before. I swallow too, a lump in my throat, but it’s not what I first think.
SHE TOO IS LONELY.
Words escape me like runaway slaves. They tumble over my tongue through lips and teeth that remember to part out of longstanding habit.
WHAT IF HE TALKED?
WHAT IF SHE ACTED?
WHAT IF I MOVED? MADE CONTACT?
CAN I? HAVEN’T I?
CAN’T I AGAIN?
LORRAINE, LORRAINE, WHEREVER IN THE HOUSE YOU’RE STATIONED, DUSTING OR IRONING, SPEEDING YOUR BOYFRIEND OUT THE KITCHEN DOOR, I’M CALLING YOU…I’M SIGNALING…I’M MOVING AT THE SPEED OF SOUND…
No, not running away. Words aren’t running away. Words have re-shouldered the yoke of meaning. They are resurging, repopulating the blast zone, re-engineering the shape I take: redefining me.
ROSE
When I arrive at Robert’s, Irene is stationed at the living room picture window where, like it or not, she spends much of her time. I notice she no longer wears jeans or checks or bandanas. Alicia, who decides now for Irene, smiles too brightly when she greets me at the door. Anger props up the corners of her mouth, anger at having this feeble old woman interrupt the smooth curve of her life. Lorraine, not Alicia, ushers me into the living room, then disappears into the bowels of the house till noontime, when I leave to meet Ned for lunch. Alicia avoids the living room while I’m there. She prefers not to face the possibility that her mother-in-law is sentient.
I read to Irene, usually detective stories. She parceled out the word MIS-TER-REE when I asked her what she liked to read the first time I visited, and when the next Wednesday I brought an Agatha Christie, her eyes signaled what her tongue couldn’t manage. Alicia says Irene doesn’t hear — something about doctor’s tests — but as far as I can tell, she hears remarkably. I’ll bet Alicia would be red-faced to learn what Irene hears if her sense of shame weren’t boxed and stored like so many of her other emotions seem to be. After reading, I give Irene news of her old friends in Moses Valley.
◊ ◊ ◊
When I told Ned, over brunch Sunday morning, that Irene’s a great listener, he shrank visibly from what he called my sick joke about someone who’s in the worst sense a captive audience. He perceives in me the latent cruel streak he’s sure is there because his mother has it. I explained to him, for the nth time, that I am tired of living with his mother between us, her persona the overlay to mine. He rolled his eyes. We are worse caricatures of a married couple than Desi and Lucy.
“Irene is a great listener,” I insisted, realizing Ned will not be convinced, Ned who accepts on faith the force of gravity but questions how a child knows its mother.
“Don’t delude yourself,” he said, “visiting Irene is an act of charity.”
“Charity has little to do with it,” I retorted. “Irene and I have ESP” — I said this solely to annoy him — “we are confidants who don’t need words.”
“Maybe you and I’d be better off without them,” he huffed.
Touché.
We didn’t talk for two days.
◊ ◊ ◊
WUH-MAN. MAN. AR-GYOO. Irene deposits the words this Wednesday like lost finds: midden from the Steiners’ farmhouse, bones from the Evanses’ front yard. Anthropologists have built cosmologies on less. I give Irene a long hard look. Maybe we do have ESP.
MADDY’S JOURNAL
September 7: We found the remains of a human baby (!) while pulling up the old kitchen floor. It’s been twenty-four hours and I’m still having trouble documenting this find. By what seismic movement, what underground flow, what twist of fate, was this clothbound parcel delivered to our dirt-stained hands?
We never could have guessed what we had till we unwrapped it, and even then we stared at the shrunken form without really comprehending. Flesh like onionskin about to tear; taut as bow hair, wrinkled as raisins. Hands curled tight, the thumbs tucked in, and toes like withered nuts. Pits where eyes should have been. Seeing is not believing.
Willem called the sheriff, who showed up twenty minutes later with his holster unsnapped. Maybe he expected a lunatic. Maybe he got one. My mind held the baby like a magnet holds nails. He examined the corpse (his characterization) and the scene of the crime (my characterization). But was there a crime? The current kitchen was added by latecomers who might have been ignorant of an existing family burial plot. But why would it be so close to the house? Could there be more bodies? We’ve only just begun the floor.
I wonder what Minor and Marguerite might know.
Looks old, the sheriff said about the remains, as if that were news. I guess that meant he didn’t suspect us. He got his camera from his car and took pictures of us, some of our tools, the hole in the floor, and of course the baby (front and back, each from several angles). Then he unceremoniously dropped the baby in a plastic evidence bag like you see on CSI.
I’ll get back to you, he told us as he walked out, holding the bag like garbage.
How in hell will I cook here?!
Willem buried himself in woodwork today, more introverted even than usual. And me? Well, I guess I got my baby after all. And I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.
ROSE
When Chloe was born, Ned plastered a banner on our car’s grill — IT’S A GIRL! — but the man in the red car only did as he always did. He waved. I was relieved: I wasn’t sure our relationship could bear the weight of the thick black letters. The words we speak — IT’S A GIRL…BUT THE EMPEROR’S NOT WEARING ANY CLOTHES…I CAN’T STAND THIS ANY MORE I’M GOING TO KILL YOU — conjure realities to be reckoned with, and I feared the banner would crystallize what was only meant to be ephemeral.
When Chloe became old enough, she started waving too. As soon as we’d cue “There’s the man in the red car,” her small hand went up like a flag. Soon she spotted the red car before we did, making a game of cuing us.
When inevitably she asked us, “Who waved first?” we told her he did. When she asked, “Why?” we said, “To be friendly,” which, we explained, is why we waved back. When she asked, “Why can’t the man come to our house?” we answered that we don’t know him well enough, to which she responded, “Then how can he be our friend?” “Well,” we said, beginning to struggle, “he’s a different kind of friend,” which quieted her for the moment. While she was processing what this might mean, I was too.
I thought about her questions and our answers which, like the circuit rider’s loop, ended where they began. About the rounds of conversation that delimit us, our literal selves, like circumference bounds circle; that sweep us through the S-curves to tattered parchment, weathered stone, the old story written long ago or — the right word comes! — FREE-DOM; that birth us and rebirth us, fallen animals that we be, from the bones of pain in love.
I thought about circles metaphoric, about circles geometric, whose area can’t be tallied thanks to never-ending pi. What is the area of a friendship anyway, a circle whose missing links don’t break the chain?
◊ ◊ ◊
The time came, as I knew it would, for us to move into town: Chloe and I needed the sociability, Ned had tired of the commute. When I told Irene we’d be moving and I might be able to visit more often, her eyes flooded with tears Alicia couldn’t have acknowledged even the idea of. At the farewell party our Moses Valley neighbors threw for us, we were presented with a basketful of notes — reminiscences, funny stories — commemorating our time there. The basket, of course, was one of Willem’s.
I thought about the man in the red car as we disassembled life as we knew it, packed it up in boxes, carted boxes into town, reconstructed the contents in new rooms in a new house facing a new street that doesn’t lead to the Harpole Road. I wondered how he’d take it, this disappearing act: breaking the chain. He wouldn’t think anything of it the first morning he didn’t pass Ned. But when our car failed to show the next morning, and the next? Well, he might assume, he might surmise — and then?
We did the worst of the move on a Thursday and Friday, and got the basics like beds in place over the weekend. Monday morning, Ned left the car in the driveway — it’s virtually mine now — and rode his new acquisition, a bicycle, the mile and a half to work. Like a swimmer in a sea of mud I navigated the boxes and piles and began, like First Woman, making order. By garbage day, which I learned is Thursday, I had all the boxes collapsed, baled, stacked curbside, for the men with the thick gloves and big noisy trucks and giant recycling trailer to haul away. By lunchtime, the detritus of the move was gone. Well, not quite. There was still the man in the red car.
It hit me halfway through my tuna sandwich. I saw, suddenly, where pi dead-ends —
Him, cruising through the S-curve that feeds the straight stretch where we almost always cross, us flashing our lights on and off — one if by land, two if by sea — sounding the horn, rolling down the windows and waving our arms outside like semaphores; braking; slowing down, way down; stopping dead in the middle of the road, lights, horn, arms going; the doors opening; all three of us emerging. Him responding, stopping, backing up, getting out too, removing the dark glasses, his face taking on detail finally in the morning light. Shaking hands, exchanging the first words of a friendship that hadn’t known or needed any. Us explaining. Him nodding, touching the child on the cheek the way people do; getting back into the red car and, through the open window — a variation — of course! — waving.
I kept picturing it, that wave, through the afternoon and into the evening. Ned, seeing me distracted, seemed to know not to ask. I carried it to bed with me like a childhood hurt. It followed me into sleep but failed to appear in my dreams. For the next several days, it ached. Then the ache receded. Then the memory sped furiously down the road to an undisclosed destination.
Copyright 2011 Carol Rosenblum Perry