Keepers

II

Beth was released from the hospital five days before I was, but she made it a point to visit me every day after school. Even then I noticed how some of her sparkle seemed to fade once she was back in the world. It was nothing dramatic, her spirit hadn’t been broken in one brutal blow, but even a kid can recognize a soul that’s starting to bleed to death from thousands of tiny scratches.

Still, she was always upbeat and affectionate, bringing me comic books or telling me about this groovy new song she’d heard on the radio, or regaling me with gossip gathered during lunch or study hall. She always sat on the edge of my bed and held my hand and made me feel like I was the most important thing in the world. I had never received such unselfish attention from a person before, nor have I since.

“I’ve been driving for a month now,” she said, “and my aunt is finally trusting me to use the car when she’s not with me. I haven’t had any passengers yet”-she winked at me and smiled one of those delicious I’ve-got-a-surprise smiles-”but that’s gonna change on Friday.”

“What’s Friday?”

She lightly smacked my hand. “Friday, dummy, is when you get released. Doctor said you’ll be well enough to go home, and I am going to pick you up.”

“But Mom and Dad-”

“I already asked your mom and she said it was fine.”

I blinked. It had never occurred to me that Mom wouldn’t want to pick me up, but just as unsettling was the idea that she had given Beth-who was little more than a stranger to her-permission to take me. “Did you ask her when she was here?”

“Nuh-uh. I called your house.”

We were unlisted. “How’d you get our phone number?”

Another patented Beth wink. “Vee haf vays of gazzering zee information.”

“Huh?”

“Someday you’ll understand. Care enough about someone, and you’ll find a way to help them, no matter what.”

I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, but it seemed like this was something she really wanted to do because she liked me. I had to keep reminding myself that this great girl with the long hair and love beads and hip-huggers and gold flecks in her light brown eyes liked me. A lot, it seemed.

“Hey, here’s an idea-how about after I pick you up, we go out for some ice cream cones?”

“Sure!”

“Then maybe you can come over and eat dinner with the family.”

“Oh-did your mom come home?”

A brief, wistful shadow crossed over her face and then was gone, replaced by her bright smile that seemed a little false. “No, it’s just me and my aunt and the Its.”

“‘Its’?”

“You’ll see.”

Mom called the morning of my release and said it was fine if I wanted to go over to Beth’s for dinner; Dad wasn’t feeling well (which meant he was either drunk or hung-over) and it might be best if I didn’t come home right away. Too much activity might upset him and we couldn’t have that. It made me glad she wasn’t picking me up; all she’d do was complain about Dad, then tell me not to say anything.

A little before ten a doctor I hadn’t seen before came in and gave me the once-over, told me that I’d need to exercise my shoulder, and gave me a pamphlet explaining how to do it. Half an hour later a nurse I’d never seen before came in with a wheelchair, handed me some slips of paper, and told me that my ride was here. Beth came in right behind her, all Day-Glo smiles and flourescent sunshine.

“Ready to hit the road, little brother?” She winked at me but the nurse didn’t see it. “Got all your stuff? Okay, good-what about his prescriptions?”

“He’s got them,” replied the nurse, who must have been new to this floor because she didn’t seem to recognize Beth at all.

“Cool. Mom gave me money to get them filled on the way home.” She was play-acting, just like her mother on the London Stage. It was kind of fun to watch.

I was rolled downstairs and to Beth’s car-a monstrous green U-boat of a station wagon with wood paneling on the doors. Inside it smelled of cigarettes, sweat, and something pungent that made my nose itch.

Once on our way, Beth reached over and squeezed my hand. “How you feeling, hon? Any pain?”

“Yeah, a little. My shoulder and stuff.”

“Let’s stop and get your medicine. My treat.”

“But Mom said my medicine was going to be expensive.”

“Codeine, some stuff for swelling and stiffness, and antibiotics. Twenty-two dollars-I already checked.”

I know it’s hard to remember, but in 1970, twentytwo dollars was a lot of money, even if you weren’t a kid.

“That’s an awful lot,” I said.

“Hey, nothing’s too good for my guy. Besides, I’ve been saving my allowance for years. And I worked waiting tables part-time during the summer. It won’t leave me broke.”

She was my friend, she’d visited me, she was giving me a ride for ice cream, and now she was going to spend twenty-two dollars of her own money on medicine for me? What had I done to deserve this? People never did anything for me without wanting something back for it, and for a moment I thought maybe Beth was going to say something like, “Hey, since I did this for you, would you do a favor for me?” But she never did, not once in all the years I knew her.

Prescriptions in hand, we drove over to the Tasty Freeze on West Church Street and pigged out on the Holy Grail of large cones: the two-scoop doubledipped chocolate with sprinkles. Impossible not to eat and wear at the same time. About midway through it my shoulder and arm began to hurt terribly, so Beth bought a small Coke and gave me a pain pill. By the time I finished the cone, I was feeling full and shiny. For all I knew my shoulder and arm were still in agony but, thanks to the pill, I didn’t care anymore.

“Oh, great,” said Beth, lifting my head by the chin and looking in my eyes. “The first time I’m in charge of someone younger than me and I get him stoned. Let’s get out of here before someone calls the fuzz on us.”

Back in the car, I noticed how the shine from the sun in her rearview mirror painted a glowing slash across her face. It looked as if she was wearing a golden mask. Whenever she turned to speak to me, the mask would slip around her face and over her ears, turning her hair the color of dreams. “Still with me?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, though I felt really sleepy.

“Hey, wake up, Boy Wonder, c’mon.” She sounded genuinely concerned. “C’mon, okay? Stay awake. I checked the instructions and it turns out I’m a spaz, I was only supposed to give you half a pill, not a whole one. Don’t make me have to take you back to the hospital to get your stomach pumped or something, okay?”

“… ’kay.”

“Promise?”

I shook myself awake. Everything was still shiny, but I was more alert now. “Can we get another pop?”

“Ah, caffeine, yes. Smart idea.”

We pulled into a gas station where Beth ran into some boy she knew. He came up behind her while she was pulling the bottles out of the freezer-like cooler and put his hand on her back. She whirled around like she might slap whoever it was, but then she recognized him and smiled, pushed her hair back behind her ears, glanced quickly in the direction of the car, and leaned in to kiss him. Even from thirty feet away, I could see their tongues going into each other’s mouths. The boy slid his hand down and grabbed her hip, then her ass. She broke the kiss and saw me staring at them, then quickly yanked his hand away and whispered something. They looked over at me and the boy laughed. For a moment it looked like Beth might laugh, too. I didn’t know who this boy was, but I hated him.

They talked for a few more moments and then Beth gave him a quick kiss and came back to the car. She smiled at me when she climbed in but didn’t look in my eyes like she usually did. She seemed embarrassed-or maybe annoyed that I’d been watching. I took the bottle of pop and swallowed two big gulps. It made my chest and stomach feel all frosty as it went down, and then an ice-bird spread its wings through my center and I wasn’t as hot, thirsty, or tired anymore.

We were almost to Beth’s house when she said, “I go out with him sometimes, that guy back at the gas station.”

“Is that why we stopped there? So you could see him?”

She blushed. “Yeah. My aunt doesn’t like him. She doesn’t much like any of my friends.” She finally looked at me. “You’re the first friend I’ve had over in a long time.”

“I won’t say anything to your aunt about him, I promise.”

Squeezing my hand as she pulled into the driveway, Beth cleared her throat and whispered, “I’ll never ask you to lie for me, I promise.”

Beth’s aunt Mabel was the most unhappy-looking person I’d ever seen; even though she smiled an awful lot and spoke in a bright, happy voice, the tightness of her features, the worry etched into her skin, and the way she sat as if expecting the other bomb to go off at any moment betrayed her true feelings. This was a sad woman, a cheerless woman, stoopshouldered and shopworn and heartbroken and chain-smoking. Looking at her made me want to cry; she reminded me too much of Mom.

“How’s the lasagna?” she asked early into dinner.

“It’s real good, thank you. A lot better than the hospital.”

Mabel laughed a thick, chortling laugh composed equal parts of phlegm and sandpaper. “I should certainly hope so. Lord! If I can’t beat hospital food, I might as well hang up my apron!”

I giggled and took another bite of the lasagna; it was quite good, but its rich flavor and aroma were overpowered by the smell of the house, which made me feel sick.

Beth and her aunt lived in a one-story house that was only slightly bigger than a double-wide trailer; two small bedrooms, an even smaller bathroom, a big living room, and a kitchen that took up a full third of their living space. Deep shag carpeting the color of old rust covered every inch of floor-at least I think it was the color of old rust; it could’ve been light blue for as much as I could tell by looking at it, which I tried not to do because it only made me feel sicker.

A fly buzzed around the lasagna pan and Mabel swatted it away. “Damn things,” she mumbled. “I got to replace those screens on the doors.”

I was surprised that only one fly had found the nerve to come over; there were so many of them.

Something brushed by my leg and I looked down to meet yet another of the Its-one of the seven dogs that Beth and Mabel shared their home with. That’s right, seven dogs of various shapes and sizes-from a Chihuahua to a mid-sized sheep dog and everything in between-none of whom seemed to be very housebroken, if the pee stains and scattered piles of dried and not-so-dried poop were any indication.

Imagine what the inside of a kennel left unattended over a sweltering three-day weekend would smell like, add an underlying scent of sour milk and rotten eggs, then spray an entire aerosol can of rose-scented air freshener and you might have some idea how this place smelled. I didn’t have to ask Beth why it had been so long since she’d had any friends over; one hour in this house and already I wanted to shower until my skin came off. It wasn’t only the smell, it was the feel of the place; it felt ruined, the air thick with humidity and animal fur. By the time dinner was finished, all three of us were wheezing to one degree or another. Mabel’s constant smoking didn’t help matters, but I never said anything; I never said anything to Mom or Dad when their smoking started bothering me, it seemed rude to complain to this bright-eyed sad woman who was so happy that I liked her cooking.

I helped Beth clear away the dishes and wipe down the table. Mabel disappeared into her bedroom with two of the dogs and emerged twenty minutes later in a light-blue outfit, smelling of deodorant and Avon perfume.

“Okay, kids, I gotta head to work.”

Beth’s face immediately registered alarm. “But, I need the car to take-”

“I know,” Mabel replied. “Suzy’s giving me a ride both ways tonight, so the car’s all yours. But you be careful. Get him home and then come right back.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it, Elizabeth. I’m going to call you when I get my break and you’d better be here to answer.”

Beth shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I will be! Jeez-us.”

“Don’t ‘jeez-us’ me, young lady. I’m only looking out for your well-being. God knows my sister couldn’t be bothered to.”

“Please don’t say things like that about Mom.” Now it was Beth who was stoop-shouldered and shopworn. This hurt, and I wondered if her aunt knew it hurt and that’s why she’d said it.

Mabel came over, put a hand on Beth’s shoulder, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I didn’t mean anything by it, okay? I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”

A shrug: “Okay.”

“Okay, then.” Mabel turned toward me and held out a hand. “It was real pleasure having you over for dinner, young man. I hope you’ll visit us again. Often as you’d like.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, shaking her hand-the first time I’d ever done so with an adult. “You’re a real good cook.”

“Aren’t you sweet.” Then she bent down and kissed the top of my head. A car horn sounded out front and Mabel waved to us on her way out the door.

“God!” said Beth with a sudden rush of air. “I swear she must think I’m retarded or something, the way she treats me.”

“Where does she work?”

“Huh? Oh-at the nursing home. She’s one of the night nurses. She also cooks breakfast sometimes.”

I remembered the home from visiting my grandfather there when I was seven, how lonely, exhausted, and used up everyone seemed to be. No wonder Mabel was so sad.

I wasn’t sure how to ask this next question, so I just let fly: “Where’s your uncle?”

“I’ve got a couple of them, why?”

“I mean…your aunt’s husband?”

A quick shake of her head. “Mabel isn’t married, she never was. I don’t think men interest her much.”

“Whatta you mean?”

She mussed my hair. “It’s a little hard to explain, sweetie pie. She has friends who stay over sometimes. I don’t think she gets lonely. She’s got me to talk to and all of the Its for company. Speaking of the Its, want to help me clean up a little? I do this every night after she leaves for work.”

“Is it safe? Mabel seemed awful worried about-”

“Mabel worries about everything. We’ve had some trouble in this neighborhood-some break-ins, a couple of shootings a few blocks over, you know-so she thinks every time she leaves me alone that all these monsters are going to knock down the door and attack me. She even has a gun in one of her dresser drawers-like she’s Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harriet or something. There’s not going to be any trouble. C’mon, give me a hand.”

We spent the next hour picking up-and scraping out-all the poop from the carpeting, then Beth let the dogs out in the backyard by twos and threes so they could relieve themselves as nature intended. (During all the years I knew Beth and spent time over there, that house was always filled with dogs; if one died or got sick and had to be put to sleep, it was quickly replaced by another. Beth and I eventually began to refer to her house as “Doggyship Down.”)

I sprayed the pee stains with this foamy stuff Beth took out of the bathroom; she told me to let it set until it dried, then we sprinkled baking soda all around and Beth ran the vacuum cleaner.

Once finished, the carpeting looked a little better and the stench wasn’t as strong as it had been.

“That’s only because you’re getting used to the smell,” Beth said. “Live with it long enough, and it doesn’t seem that bad.”

I wondered how she kept the smell off her clothes; not once during her visits to me did I ever smell the dogs on her, so I asked her how she managed to do that.

“Every week I take five outfits from my closet, wash them at the coin laundry or have them drycleaned, then hang ’em up in my locker at school. I get there about a half-hour before school starts and change in the girls’ restroom. In the mornings, after my shower, I can usually get out of here before the smell sinks into me.” Another shrug. “No biggie, really. I like to look and smell clean when I’m at school or going to the movies or something. If I go out, I do it after school on Friday so I don’t have to come back here first. Don’t worry yourself, the system’s worked fine for a while now.”

I nodded as if I were mature enough to understand. She was a wonderful mystery to me.

“Why do you have so many dogs, anyway?”

“Because nobody else wants them. A couple we adopted from the Humane Society, but most of them are strays Mabel or I have found. Just can’t turn away a animal in need, I guess. It doesn’t seem right that nobody wants to keep them, care for them, have ’em there in the middle of the night to snuggle with when you wake up and feel lonely… .”

I thought she was going to say something else but she didn’t. We had a couple of brownies, talked a little more about nothing terribly important, and then it was time for me to go.

We were a few blocks from my house when Beth pulled the U-boat over to the curb and put it in park. “Listen, I want to tell you something, okay? Something that’s just between us, right?” She was a long way past serious; she seemed almost scared. “Right?”

I nodded my head.

“This is gonna sound weird, okay, but…I never had any friends when I was your age, I never got to do any of those things that kids your age get to do, right? I always felt mad about that, about missing out on things. Hell, I’m not even sure if I know what kids your age like doing ’cause I never did it.”

“Could you please not…not say that?”

“Say what?”

“‘Kids your age.’ ”

She shook her head and smiled. “But you are still a kid; you’re not even ten yet.”

“I know, but…” I looked down at my hands, which I couldn’t feel.

“Okay, I guess you deserve that. If I live to be twice the age I am now I doubt that I’m ever gonna know what it feels like to get shot, so you ought to be entitled to age points for that. Deal-I don’t call or refer to you as ‘kid’ anymore.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I wanna know what it is you like to do, I guess. Will you show me that? Will you teach me how to have fun like a person of your age has fun?”

“You might think it’s stupid.”

She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. “Bet’cha I don’t.”

And she didn’t.

Over the next year and a half I taught her (in no particular order): how to build a fort from boxes, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas; how to climb a tree; the fine art of thumb wrestling; how to make a kite from scratch; how to tell if Godzilla was going to be a good monster or bad monster before he even made his first appearance in the movie (not as easy as it sounds); the proper way to build and paint the Aurora monster models; why Steppenwolf kicked Three Dog Night’s ass; how Mr. Terrific was just as cool as Captain Nice but The Green Hornet was by far the coolest of them all; why the Bazooka Joe comics sucked monkeys but the bubble gum could be rechewed at least three times before it lost its flavor; and, probably the most valuable tidbit of wisdom I tossed her way, how, if you sat or stood in the proper position and had the right muscle control, you could make a fart last up to thirty seconds and not dump in your pants (eating popcorn at least twenty minutes before attempting this difficult stratagem is immensely beneficial to a successful outcome).

Whenever we were together, which was often, Beth had a childhood, and I had the woman against whom all others would be measured and come up lacking.

But for that night, it was her kiss lingering on my cheek as I walked toward my front door and my father’s putting his hand on my shoulder for the first time in an eternity (“How you holding up there, son? Ever tell you about when I got shot during the war?”) that made me feel that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t such a worthless little kid, after all.

I spent the next seven years becoming an honorary member of Beth’s and Mabel’s family. By the time Beth turned twenty-four she had grown into her shopworn beauty and grace with all the poise I’d come to expect from her. In the years since the hospital we had shared every secret, every dream, every sadness, pettiness, fear, hope, want, triumph, and failure of both childhood and adolescence; I knew her better than anyone, and she, in turn knew more about me than any person ever had or ever would. There had been so much between us, so many shared moments and experiences: our first trip (the first of many) to King’s Island where she took me on my very first roller coaster ride, then didn’t laugh her head off or make fun of me when I threw up as soon as we climbed out of the car; a terrible afternoon a few weeks after I’d gotten my driver’s license when I drove her over to Columbus to get an abortion because her boyfriend at the time (all her boyfriends were so physically interchangeable to me they became faceless over the years) had dumped her and quickly skipped town after she told him she was pregnant; the day she picked me up at four in the afternoon on my fifteenth birthday and drove all the way to Cincinnati so I could see my first circus; an Emerson, Lake amp; Palmer concert where we were nearly trampled to death after the crowd-who’d been standing in near-blizzard conditions for over three hours-rushed the doors when they were finally opened; all the times I helped her to take one of the dogs to the vet, times when I stood beside her after the animal had been given the Last Injection and she needed to say good-bye-then, later, her infectious near-giddiness when the dead pet was replaced by a new one; and, most of all, a certain picnic in Moundbuilders Park on my seventeenth birthday when Beth asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I said no, she leaned in and gave me the sweetest, longest, most tender kiss against which all others would forever be compared and come up lacking, then shyly handed me a birthday card inscribed: Just wait until you’re legal!

I read the inscription twice before clearing my throat and saying, “Um, I, uh…is this a joke?”

She put her thumb and index finger under my chin, lifting my head so she could look straight into my eyes. Whenever she did this, it meant Something Serious was about to happen or be said. “Can I ask you something?”

“You mean besides that?”

“Don’t try to be funny, you’re not all that good at it.”

“Okay.”

She kept her thumb and finger under my chin, making small, maddening circles against my skin with the tips of each. “Do you love me?”

I blanked out for a second-what was happening here?-then shook myself back to the Right-Now and said, “Yes, of course I do. We’ve known each other for-what is it now?- eight years?”

“Almost nine now.”

I reached up and held her wrist. “You are the best friend I have ever had, Beth. Hell-you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had.”

She cupped my face in both her hands and kissed me again. “And you’re my best friend. You’ve never judged me, or lied to me, you’ve never been cruel or thoughtless to me, you’ve appreciated everything I’ve ever done for you and you’ve done so many sweet things for me, even when I was acting like a real bitch on wheels-”

“Your words, not mine. Go on, I’ll speak up when I disagree.”

She smiled, moving closer to me. “You know that in high school I was kind of… oh, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Popular?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I suppose that’s one word for it.”

“Friendly?”

She bit her lower lip and shook her head.

“Available? ‘Open twenty-four Hours’?” I began to laugh. “ ‘One Mattress, No Waiting’?”

“You’re dangerously close to losing one of your nuts.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“You do know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”

“That you were kind of easy in high school?”

“Don’t sugar-coat it, kiddo-Oh, shit! I didn’t mean-”

“Too late.” I held out my hand. “You owe me a buck.”

“But we were having a moment-”

“-that will continue once you pony up the dough.” Ever since the day she’d taken me home from the hospital, Beth and I’d had an agreement: any time she slipped up and called me “kid” or “kiddo” or any other variation thereof, it would cost her a dollar. She had promised never to call me anything like that again, and my charging her for her digressions seemed a solid way to remind her of the importance of keeping her word.

She dug into her pocket and produced a crumpled dollar bill, which she slapped into my hand with a lot more force than was called for, in my opinion.

Shoving the buck into my pocket so the lint would have some company, I smiled at her and said: “You were telling me something about your being easy in high school?”

“Easy? I was a slut. If I’d stayed in college, I’d probably be a real piece-”

“-like you already weren’t?”

“- of work, smartass. I’d be a real piece of work. I spent way too much time in way too many beds trying to convince myself I was worth something. If a guy even hinted that he liked me, I’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted.”

“I kind of suspected that after you banged the orderly that time in the hospital so he’d take us to the animal lab. Well, that, and when I saw you with that bozo at the gas station the first time you took me home for dinner.”

“I’m not like that anymore. Since the abortion last year, I’ve been very careful about who I… you know… I mean, I haven’t been with a guy in that way since…”

She wasn’t on the verge of tears-Beth almost never cried-but there was a thinness to her voice, a vulnerability that both surprised and scared me.

I touched her face. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me. I understand how things were. It never mattered to me. It still doesn’t.”

She turned her face into my hand, kissing the palm. “That’s just so goddamn typical of you.”

“What? Did I do something untoward? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I let fly with a whopper of a fart and just not notice-what?”

“You accept me for who and what I am. You always have. Whenever one of those dick-for-brains boyfriends of mine would treat me like shit, or embarrass me, or stand me up for a date, you always said or did the right thing to make it better. I could never really hurt when I was with you. Sometimes, just knowing that all I’d have to do-it didn’t matter who I was with or where we were or whatever kind of trouble I getting into-all I had to do was pick up the phone and call you and you’d make everything better.”

“Okay. And…? ”

She stared at me for a moment, then slightly shook her head. “And you have no idea how great a thing that is, do you? You have no idea how wonderful you really are. All you can see are your weaknesses and failures. You don’t see how strong you are already, how strong you’ve always been. Christ, when I first met you in the hospital I thought you were, like, my age. Sure, you were built about the size of a nine-year-old, but when you looked at a person-when you looked at me -you were so much older than you should have been. Even now, looking into your eyes, you seem so much older than I am. Haven’t you ever noticed how people can’t keep eye contact with you during a conversation?”

“Always figured it was because I had something stuck in my teeth-”

“ Shut. Up. You listen now. People can’t keep eye contact with you because you see through all the scrims and bullshit. Whether you mean to or not, you just don’t look at a person, you look right into the middle of who they really are and people can’t handle that.”

“That explains my jam-packed social calendar.”

“See? Just then, that remark-‘My jam-packed social calendar.’ How many seventeen-year-old guys do you know who say things like that? And wasn’t there an ‘untoward’ in there earlier? Don’t answer, it wasn’t really a question.”

“What’s going on here, Beth? I’m confused.”

“No, you’re not. You’re one of the most un- confused people I’ve ever known. I think everything is very clear to you.”

I held up the birthday card. “This isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. You just don’t want to admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you love me.”

I sighed in exasperation. “ I already said I did! That’s what started this… this…this goddamn dialogue exchange from a Harold Pinter play. You’re my best friend and I love you.”

“But you don’t only love me as a friend, do you?”

(Mayday, Mayday, sonar has malfunctioned, there’s an unexpected obstacle outside the cabin window and-)

– and there it was.

She’d blindsided me and she knew it. Had it been that obvious all these years and I was just too stupid to know I’d been wearing all my feelings on my sleeve?

Staring into her soft-brown, gold-flecked eyes I was as utterly and deliciously helpless as any teenager in love has ever been. “You’re twenty-four, Beth.”

“You make it sound ancient.”

“How would it look to your friends? Christ, I’m just a baby as far as they’re concerned.”

“Leave them out of it for now, okay? Fuck ’em. Right now, right here, I want to know your feelings for me.”

What surprised me the most was how quickly I answered, and the ease with which the words came out of my mouth: “I’ve been in love with you since that day you brought two of your friends into my room at the hospital and kissed me in front of them. I was in love with you long before you held my hand for the first time, or told me a secret, or took me to your house, or slipped your arm through mine while we wandered around King’s Island. The first time I saw you in your hip-huggers and a halter-top I thought I’d implode from how beautiful you were. Do you have any idea how much I wanted to kill that guy at the gas station because he got to hold you and kiss you and all I could do was sit there and watch him do it? You haven’t dated one guy that I didn’t immediately want to run over with a power mower just to hear him scream. Whenever you hug me, I won’t wash the shirt for a week because the smell of your musk oil lingers in the material. All my life girls have either made fun of me or treated me like I was their brother. My first kiss I got only because I was at a party playing ‘Spin the Bottle’-it pointed at Linda McDonald, who was the new girl at school and didn’t know I was the class joke. The only girl who’s ever kissed me like she meant it is you. I’m never really happy unless you’re around, or I know that I’ll be seeing you soon. When I’m an old man sitting in a nursing home with oatmeal dribbling down my chin, I’m gonna bore the piss out of the nurses because I’ll keep telling them over and over about this girl named Beth who was the great love of my life, but because she was also my best friend I did the noble thing and let her slip away.

“Whoever you wind up with, whichever guy out there has the brains to know he’s just met the greatest woman in the world the first time he meets you…the two of you can be together for sixty, seventy years, you can have dozens of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and build the most unbelievably fantastic life together. But when you’re holding his hand at the end and looking into his eyes and seeing him remember the richness and fulfillment and joy he’s known because his life has been spent by your side, at that moment, that very moment, he won’t come close to loving you half as much as I do, right here, right now. So, yeah, Beth, I love you, and I’m in love with you, and nothing you’ve said or done in the past has changed that, and nothing you can say or do now is going to change it. There? Happy now?”

“Actually,” she said, slipping her arms around my neck, “I am. Very happy. Because I love you, too. And I figure that if you’re going to lose your virginity, Gil, it should be to me.”

Earlier, when I said the first kiss Beth gave me that day was the one against which all others would be compared and come up lacking…I was wrong. The kiss she gave me at that moment, a kiss just as soft and warm and deep and long and moist as the first, but this time with the hint of hunger on the tip of its tongue and a heat around it that you experience once and once only in your life if you’re lucky, because it’s a heat that burns into the core of your heart and tells you that this is it, kiddo, run for cover, this is the Real Thing, Take No Prisoners, give it up, you’re doomed, because Love has just kicked your teeth down your throat, ain’t it grand?- this kiss was the one whose summer taste and autumn passion would linger on my lips for all the rest of my days.

When she pulled away-not taking her arms from around my neck-we both let out a long, hot, staggered breath. She pressed her forehead against mine and stroked the back of my neck, swallowing once before saying, “Oh, my,” ending that second word on a smoothly descending note of embarrassed laughter that snuggled down in the back of her throat and wrapped itself up in something like a purr; I could almost feel her voice with my fingertips.

“Just wait until I’m legal, huh?”

“Oh, I think we passed the ‘waiting’ part about thirty seconds ago.” She lifted her head and looked into my eyes again. “Before I picked you up today, I rented a hotel room downtown. Can I take you there? Can we leave right now?”

She’d bought two boxes of condoms (three to a pack, and we still called them “rubbers”) and bet me a year’s worth of back rubs that I couldn’t last through one box. I made it all the way through the first one from the second box before she and I didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out. I say this not to boast (c’mon, I was seventeen and a virgin; most days I was so horny the crack of dawn wasn’t safe) but to give you some idea of how gloriously unhinged the whole experience was. It was romantic and primal, awkward and embarrassing, spectacular and funny, life-affirming and depressing as hell, always surprising (she did things with me I didn’t think two bodies were capable of doing, even with lubricants), and even a little…mystifying. We fell out of bed laughing, we got a little mushy, a lot dirty, very sweaty, and ultimately so sore neither of us walked very fast or very straight for a day or two afterward.

It was wonderful.

And I think I knew the truth about the whole thing before we’d even finished dressing afterward.

“You’re giving me a look,” she said. “Why did you do this, Beth?”

“Because I wanted to.”

I tied my shoelaces and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to see her face when she answered the next question. “This doesn’t mean what I think it means, does it?”

“What do you think it… no. No, kiddo. And I’m sorry.”

“Then why? ”

“Because I needed to…to be with a guy who loved me.” She placed her hand against the small of my back. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

“No.” Which was a lie. At that moment I don’t think I’d hated anyone or anything more, but I also knew I’d get over it. This was Beth, after all.

A few nights later at dinner Dad remarked that Beth seemed like a decent girl and I should count myself lucky to have found her. Then he looked across the table at Mom and smiled, and my mother actually blushed.

I was stunned. For as long as I could remember, they’d never displayed any tenderness or affection for one another in front of me-as far as I cared to imagine, they’d never displayed any in private, either. They were Just Mom and Dad, the people who raised me and paid for my clothes and put a roof over my head and sent me to school and never missed a chance to remindme that everything Ihad was because of them. I knew that parents were just like any other couple, that there was love and affection and all of that, but these were my folks, for the love of God. My folks never talked about anything like this-hell, the only time anything more than the day’s trivialities were ever brought up was when Dad was on a drunk and shouting at the top of his lungs about the bills or the condition of the house or how the goddamn company was going to fuck over the union with the next contract.

But this little flirtatious display over the meatloaf…this was just weird. It made me nervous. And a little queasy.

I went to bed that night without setting them straight about Beth and me. I think my dad was just glad to know that I liked girls.

Later-I guess it must have been two or two-thirty in the morning-I woke up with one of those middle-of-the-night cases of dry mouth that make you think you’re going to die within seconds if you don’t get something to drink right now, and went downstairs to get a glass of juice from the fridge. The living room was dark as I passed by but it felt like someone was in there. Probably Dad. Again. They’d been screwing with his hours at the plant and as a result he hadn’t gotten back on anything close to a normal sleeping schedule yet. Most nights he’d toss and turn for hours until he woke Mom, who’d make him come downstairs and do his tossing and turning on the sofa. He was usually cranky as hell whenever this happened, so I walked very softly and decided not to turn on the kitchen lights. I drank my juice, quietly rinsed out the glass and set it in the sink, and was starting back toward the stairs when I heard Dad say, in a voice so tired and sad it froze me where I stood: “Did I ever tell you that when I was a kid, I wanted to raise chickens for a living?”

I couldn’t have been more anxious if I’d run into an armed burglar. Talks between Dad and me never ended well-one of us always wound up accusing the other of being too pushy or disrespectful or whatever-and the idea of getting into it with him at this hour, especially considering how upset he sounded, made me cringe.

Then I heard Mom reply: “Only about a hundred times, hon. But if you want to talk about it again, go ahead.”

When had she come down? I would have heard her-the steps squeaked and groaned like something out of a haunted-house movie. I was surprised that Dad hadn’t lit into me about making so much noise coming down here.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the two of them had been sitting in there the whole time since I’d gone to bed, that maybe Dad was genuinely upset about something other than the usual list of complaints and Mom, to keep the peace, had decided to sit in there and let him talk it out, however long it took.

Something in their respective tones baffled me; they were talking to one another not as my parents, but as a husband and wife.

I realized then that, until the incident at dinner tonight, I’d never actually thought of them as being that way-husband and wife-only as Mom and Dad. It was kind of fascinating, and in my best What-the-Hell-Are-You-Doing? skulk, I crept out of the kitchen and hid myself in the shadows on the stairway. They couldn’t see me there, I was pretty sure, but I had a clear view of their silhouettes against the window, where the curtain glowed a dull blue against the diffuse street light trying to sneak in from outside.

Mom was sitting in her chair next to the fireplace and Dad was on the old leather ottoman that should have been put out of its misery years ago. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, holding his pipe in one hand. If the curtains had been open, he would have been staring out the window, but I knew he’d just been sitting there staring at the curtains as if imagining something really interesting on the other side. I’d seen him do this too many times to count. I always wondered what he thought about as he sat in the dark staring at a set of closed curtains. Why not just open the damn things? At least the view of the street might change if a car or dog or neighbor wandered by.

“You gonna tell me what’s bothering you?” asked Mom.

“It’s stupid.”

“Not if it’s got you upset like this, it isn’t.”

Dad fired up his pipe, then pointed toward where I was hiding with its glowing red bowl. “He must think I’m some kind of asshole.”

“I don’t think he feels that way. He maybe doesn’t understand you, but he doesn’t think ill of you.”

“What about you?”

“You’re my husband and I love you.”

“C’mon. I’m not drunk so I’m not gonna throw a fit- answer the question.”

“I think you act like a real bastard when you’ve been drinking-but it doesn’t make you a bastard. That’s something you really have to work at.”

Dad chuckled, puffing on his pipe. Even from where I was hiding, I could smell the sweet cherry-flavored tobacco.

“Think he’ll remember much about us after we’re gone?”

Mom pulled in a little gasp of air, then said: “Don’t you go talking like that. We may not be as young as we used to be, but I’m not shopping for burial plots just yet.”

“That’s because you don’t have to, remember? We paid for them damn things-what was it?-ten, fifteen years ago?”

“Oh.”

“ Oh, she says.” He shook his head. “Think a person’d remember something like that.”

Mom readjusted her position in the chair, then asked: “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or not?”

Dad puffed on his pipe again, then wiped the back of his arm over his face. “I told you, it’s stupid.”

“How about you let me decide that for myself?”

He looked straight at her. “It’s just, I been thinkin’ about when I was a kid, how I’d always get a whole dime once a month to go spend however I wanted. Shit, I had seven different paper routes I worked, and I handed every penny over to Mom so she could buy groceries and pay the bills-”

“-I remember the Depression, hon. We’re the same age, as I recall.”

“A dime was a small fortune back then. But Mom, she insisted that once a month I take a dime and go to the movies on Sunday. I could see a triple-feature with cartoons and get popcorn and a soda and still have three cents left for ice cream or something. I used to love those times, y’know. ‘Downtown Sunday’ was a big thing for me. I’d go to the Midland or the Auditorium for the movies, then walk around the square. Those’re some of the best memories I have.

“Anyway, there was this one corner downtown with this old building, and every Sunday I’d see the same three old guys sitting on the steps, sharing a newspaper or splitting up sandwiches, passing around some beer, and they always had this raggedy-ass fat old hound dog with ’em. I didn’t know which one of ’em owned the thing, but it never gave me any trouble so I never asked. But any time that dog’d see me coming, he’d waddle over and then just sit there and look at me with those sad eyes-thing looked like it was coming down off a drunk most of the time. I’d usually give it some leftover popcorn or a piece of my sandwich or whatever I picked up after the movie, and it’d eat it, then lick my hand and waddle back over to those three old guys. They always waved at me and I’d wave back. It was like part of my Downtown Sunday routine, you know?

“I thought it was great that here you had these old guys who’d meet each other on them steps and pass the better part of the day with their paper, and their stories, maybe playing checkers or something… and they always had that damn dog to keep things interesting. I mean, there was people who’d walk by and make fun of them, or try not to laugh at ’em ’cause they thought they was, you know, funny in the head or something. But I never laughed at ’em or made fun or anything. They had a place to go and spend good time with their friends. I thought that was just… just great.” His voice was growing thin, unsteady. He took a few more puffs from his pipe and as he did, Mom leaned forward.

Something more was going on here than what I was seeing and hearing. I’d never heard Dad talk about his childhood much, and whenever he did, I always tuned him out after a minute or two. Same thing with Mom. After all, I was young-what the hell did their childhood memories have to do with me?

“One day,” Dad continued, “I’d had a real good month and so Mom gave me an extra nickel, I thought I was King Midas or something, even bought myself a couple of comic books-I bought a little penny bag of dog scraps from one of the restaurants after I got out of the movie, decided that I was gonna make that old hound dog’s day. So I walk over to that corner and the three old guys are there and the dog waddles over as usual and boy, did it get lively when it saw what I had for it. So I fed it the scraps and petted it for a little bit, and that’s when I noticed that somebody’d stapled this plastic blue tag to the back of the poor thing’s ear. I figured maybe the dog catcher had caught it or something and maybe they did this down at the pound before the old guys came to claim it-but I couldn’t imagine anyone doing something like that to an animal. So I was extra nice to the dog that day and decided to walk it back across the street and say hello to the guys.

“We stood there talking for a few minutes and I finally got around to asking them whose dog it was, and you know what? It didn’t belong to any of them. They said that it had just always been there, and that it had waddled up to each one of them at some point and that’s how the three of them had met. After that, they sort of saw that dog as their good-luck charm, so they didn’t think they should send it away. None of ’em had any idea how that tag got there, either. I thought that was odd but I didn’t want to push the subject and maybe get them mad at me, so I asked ’em how long they’d been coming downtown on Sundays. And you know what one of them said to me then? He looked at me and shook his head and said: ‘Christ, boy! We come down here every day. We’re in our eighties-everybody else we know’s dead. What the hell else have we got to do?’

“I went home that day and cried myself to sleep. It was just terrible. Here I’d spent all this time thinking they were having a grand time, and all the while they were miserable. I didn’t go by that corner much after that. It must’ve been five, six months later before I passed by there, and this time they were all gone. There was only that old hound dog, just as friendly as ever. I think it even looked better in some ways; more energetic, and its eyes weren’t as bloodshot and droopy anymore. But it was just sitting there, scratching at that tag on its ear and waiting for the old guys to show up. It was still sitting there waiting when I left to go home and-”

And then Dad did something I’d never seen him do before; he dropped his head down and started crying. Even from where I was standing, I could see the way his body jerked and shuddered with the sobs.

Mom made a move to go to him but then thought better of it at the last moment. I wanted to call out “Give him a hug!” but I didn’t. I was as stunned and confused as she must have been.

“Oh, God,” said Dad, wiping at his eyes, but still the sobs kept coming. “I hate to get up in the mornings. You know? Some days I wish I didn’t have to get up at all, that I’d never have to get up again, ever. Just lay there and stare at the ceiling until… I don’t know what.”

“Honey, what’s going on?” Mom moved closer to him, but still would not touch him, as if she were afraid he might shatter into a thousand pieces.

“I wish I’d been a better soldier in the war, come home a hero like Sergeant York or something. But, no, I gotta go and get all shot up and now I’ve got a bad hip and two legs that get all swoll-up on me until I can’t hardly stand it hurts so much. I wish I’d been able to afford college, get me a degree in agriculture or something. We’d be on our own farm right now, one we own, and we’d be raising chickens, all of us. Instead we got this damn house that ain’t even paid for yet and ain’t gonna be anytime soon, and all I can do is drink until my hip or my legs don’t hurt so much ’cause I can’t afford the doctor bills anymore… then I yell at you and him and make everyone scared.” He pulled in a deep breath full of snot and regret and wiped at his face again.

“I see the way he looks at me sometimes. He looks at me just like people used to look at those old guys on the corner when I was a kid. Like I’m some kinda joke. I don’t want to be a joke to him, some worn-out old man who don’t know nothing but factory work, and I don’t want to be a bad husband to you. But every time I get up in the morning, every time I haul my fat ass out of bed, I think about them old guys. I can’t help it. Because they might not be down on that corner anymore, but I know -as sure as I know that a man’s hands weren’t meant to be as scarred and calloused as mine are-I know that them old guys and that dog are still out there somewhere, and they’re still sad and lonely and miserable and people still make fun of them and one day that’s gonna be me, if it ain’t already. An old, drunk joke of a factory worker that’ll be forgot about an hour after he’s dead. I know this. And when I die, that old hound dog’s gonna show up on that corner again and sit there waiting for me. I’ll sit there on them steps with it and wait for it to drag over the ghosts of other guys who bungled everything and-what the hell am I going on about? Listen to me, will you?

“Oh, Christ, honey, I’m so sorry. It’s just I think about them guys and they way they were and I get so… scared.”

Mom went to him now, kneeling beside him and taking him in her arms. “It’s all right, honey, shhhh. There, there. It’s all right.”

“I love you. I don’t much act like it most of the time, but I do.”

“I know, shhh, c’mon.”

Still, he wept, pressing his face into her shoulder. “I wish I’d given both of you a better life, that’s all.”

“You’ve given us a good life, and that’s enough.”

I couldn’t watch any longer; I was an intruder, a spy, a voyeur, so I turned and left them there, a silhouette against a closed window, two people I now knew I’d never really known at all, a tableau frozen in the shadows: husband and wife.

God, how I wished that Beth and I would someday love each other like that.

I wasn’t surprised to find myself crying as I got back into bed. I’d found out more about my parents in those few minutes than I would have ever found out if it’d been left up to me. What did their memories mean, anyway? Who cared about their hopes? I was young and had better things to busy myself with.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of myself right then. I had never stopped to think that maybe it was important to them to share things like this with me, so that I might keep some small part of them alive after they were gone. Here is one of my best moments, would you keep it safe for me? Here is the dumbest thing I ever did, remember it for me, please? This was your great-grandmother, try to keep her in your thoughts.

It suddenly occurred to me that Mom hadn’t told Dad that I loved him, too. Had she been too caught up in comforting him to remember? Did it just slip her mind or – or was she as uncertain about it as Dad seemed to be?

There was such stillness in that room, and it found its way into the center of my chest, whispering of a man’s anger at seeing himself as being less than he really was; of a woman’s need to give comfort even if it meant making herself vulnerable to that anger; of a young man’s (really still a child in many ways) need to understand why he’d never seen them as being anything other than keepers and providers; and, most of all, in the stillness of the center, there in that house with its chronic angers, in that room, a final whisper from some dimly remembered poem about love’s austere and lonely offices.

I told myself that I would find a way, a right time, a good moment to let him know that, yeah, I thought he acted like a son-of-a-bitch sometimes, but that I understood why a little better now, and that I loved him. Loved them both.

I drifted off to sleep to find myself on a downtown corner, and here was an old hound dog waddling up to meet me. I looked around to see if I could spot the little boy who would grow up to be my dad. I wanted to say hi, and to thank him.

Shortly after my nineteenth birthday, the Cedar Hill Healthcare Center fell into some financial difficulties-I never understood the specifics-and had to make some cutbacks in personnel. Luckily, Mabel wasn’t among those who were laid off, but the woman with whom she often carpooled was among those let go. As a result, I began taking her to and from work, which was no burden; for one thing, I liked Mabel very much; for another, on those nights when she worked both the units and cafeteria, it was easier to just stay over at the house with Beth (the CHHC was only a fifteen minute drive from Beth’s house, thirty from mine). Any excuse Beth and I could find to be alone (excepting for the Its, who soon learned that once that bedroom door was closed, it wasn’t opening again anytime soon) was welcomed.

No, we weren’t a couple-not publicly, anyway. Beth still went through relationships like most people went through tissues during allergy season, but during the frequent “breaks” in her love life, whenever we were alone, there was no such thing as “hands off.” Even then I suspected that it was all going to break my heart in a major way sometime in the future, but when you’re a teenager it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that you’re made of sterner stuff than you really are.

So I willingly became Beth’s “fuck-buddy.”

It wasn’t just the sex-though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that was a factor-it was the companionship. I don’t know if that’s something a lot of people under thirty ever really grasp-it doesn’t have to be the naked, sweating, rolling, groaning, shrieking do-me-do-me-do-me christ I’m-gonna- come routine all the time. Sometimes just sitting next to the person you love and watching a movie on television while their fingers brush lightly over the back of your hand is infinitely more satisfying, simply because they get you; they know that this twitch means one thing and that little shiver something else; they can tell by the way you clear your throat that you’re about to laugh, or that when you stretch your neck to the left and no bones crack it means you’re anxious about something: companionship.

Beth was splendid company. Even after she disappeared, the memory of those nights of doing nothing-watching television, listening to records, sorting through grocery store coupons, clipping one of the Its’ toenails-made me smile.

And to a large extent, I have Mabel to thank for that-if I hadn’t been the one driving her to and from work, I never would have truly understood that sometimes tenderness marks you far deeper than passion can ever dream.

Usually I’d get to the nursing home a few minutes before Mabel’s shift ended and would wait in the cafeteria area, or chat with whomever was working the station while Mabel made her last rounds on the unit. The people there began to recognize me after a while, and by the time I turned twenty my presence there at the end of Mabel’s shift was something of an evening staple; if I were even five minutes late, both eyebrows and questions would be raised: You don’t suppose he forgot, do you? It’s just not like him to be late, is it? Doesn’t seem right, not having him around at this hour, huh?

Because I always used the same entrance and took the same route to Mabel’s unit, I always passed the same doors. Most nights these stood open (a closed door, I came to find out, meant only one of two things: fast asleep, or dead and waiting for the funeral home to pick up the body) and I came to have “on-sight” relationships with some of the residents. You know the kind: pass the same person at roughly the same time often enough over the course of a day or a week or month and you both become something of a fixture in the other’s life, even if you never speak or learn his name. Nine-fifteen, time for Mr. Pickup to saunter by my door. I wonder if he’s going to wear the leather jacket tonight or that gray windbreaker. Let’s see, where is he? Ah, here he comes. Hmm. The windbreaker tonight. Good choice. Seems like he’s in a good mood-maybe he got some earlier. Looks like a nice young man, though. Time to wave to him.

The flip side to this was Mr. Pickup unintentionally made himself an expected part of the Door People’s routine; the woman in 106 who blared Later with Tom Snyder from her television set just couldn’t enjoy the second half of her program unless I stopped to hear her comment on how awful it was that they had to have so many gosh-darned commercials on these days; the two sisters in room 112 just had to know how the weather was tonight, and had I heard anything about tomorrow’s forecast?; the silver-haired guy whose wheelchair was always parked near the vending machines would not-repeat, not -pop open his evening soda until I passed by so he could lift the can in my direction and say “ Salute, my boy! ”; and the two old farts in 120-who for some reason called me “Captain Spaulding”-could have their evening ruined unless we ran through the same shtick:

Old Fart #1: Here comes Captain Spaulding!

Old Fart #2: The African explorer?

Me: Did someone call me “Shnorer?”

Them: We weren’t talking to you!

Followed by uproarious laughter from them.

(Hey, I never said it was a clever shtick.)

One night I had the mother of all sinus headaches and passed by their room without so much as a glance. I heard one of them start the shtick-“Here comes Captain Spaulding!”-but was well past the room before his buddy could do his part. I stopped for a moment when a dribble of pain moved from between my eyes to the back of my throat, then turned back toward the water fountain that was only a few feet away from their room. I downed a couple of decongestants then figured, What the hell, I’m here, and poked my head around into their room.

They weren’t looking at the door, nor were they looking at each other-in fact, they didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all. They just stared. At an empty space where their laughter should have been ringing. At a place where a visiting child should have been sitting. At a lifetime of Maybe-Next-Year places they’d always meant to take the wife, but the old girl had gotten cancer too young and left this world before they could ever get away together.

There is a very thin scrim that keeps the ruined things behind the curtain of everyday life, and one of the weights that held that curtain in place had just been removed. Now, with no Captain Spaulding shtick, the edge of that curtain was fluttering, and something of infinite sadness and disappointment could be seen shifting: Here we are, pal, two old sons-of-bitches at the end of our lives and no one else but each other to give a shit. It would’ve been nice to have our nightly laugh but that’s gone now, too; just like our families, our good women, our strong young-man notions. It was nice while it lasted, though. Maybe they’ll serve buttermilk pancakes tomorrow, huh?

“Excuse me,” I said.

They both started, blinked, then turned in my direction. The look on their faces suggested that something with three heads and a dick growing from its left nostril had just entered the room.

“I, uh… I was passing by and could have sworn someone in this room called me ‘Shnorer.’ Was that one of you gentlemen?”

It took them a moment.

It is him, right?

I believe so, yes.

Hey, the curtain fell back into place.

Damn good thing, too; I think tomorrow’s poached eggs.

“‘Shnorer,’ did you say?” asked Old Fart #1.

“Yes, I believe that’s what I heard.”

They looked at each other, then: “We weren’t talking to you!”

Uproarious laughter. This time I actually joined in.

“Sounds like you got yerself a mighty nasty cold there, Captain.”

“I do. I’m kinda dizzy and my ears are clogged.”

“Have trouble sleeping?”

I nodded.

“Neither one of us can sleep worth a tinker’s left nut, either.”

They both smiled and told me I should take some tea with a little whiskey in it, and while I was at it could I sneak a little in for them? Maybe they could get one of them young nursing assistants a little tipsy and she’d give them an extra-long sponge bath.

I grinned and mimed tapping the edge of a cigar. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever hoid.”

That got a big laugh out of them, though I’m damned if I know why. I waved at them, sang a quick “Hooray-hooray- hooray! ” and headed back down the hall. I made it a point after that to stop by their room every night and do the shtick until the night that door was closed and the names which I had never bothered to read were removed from the outside slots. I knew neither one of them slept worth a tinker’s left nut, so that limited the options.

But, for that night, I felt better about myself and the world and my place in it. My sinuses, however, were having none of this fun and frolic and warm squishy happiness. I’d decided to give Mabel the keys and let her drive the car that night; the decongestants weren’t helping, my chest felt like it had been filled with rubber cement, and I couldn’t see clearly past five feet or so.

Which is why it took me a moment to locate the voice coming from another of the opened doors.

“You did the wrong routine,” it said.

Here I go, stumbling around, looking for the speaker, banging my knee against one of the wall rails used by the patients who didn’t get around so well on their own anymore.

“Hello?” I said.

“To your right, Baryshnikov.”

I blinked, wiped my eyes, and found him.

Seventy, seventy-five, but he wore it so very well. Think of Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City. Class and style; shopworn and a bit craggy around the edges, but still commanding. If it hadn’t been for the wheelchair and the gnarled branches that had once been his legs, I would’ve expected him to grab my collar and warn: “Don’t. Touch. The suit!”

“Hello,” I said. Then: “What did you mean, the wrong routine?”

“When you blew your cue back there and had to go back and cover your ass. Instead of trying to pick up the old routine where you’d left it writhing in a heap on the floor, you should’ve hit ’em with Groucho’s ‘Hello, I must be going’ line.”

“Hello, I must be going?”

He nodded. The light danced across his startlingly white hair. “Right. ‘I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going.’ ”

“Ah.”

“Not a Marx Brothers fan?”

“ Big Marx Brothers fan,” I said, a bit defensively.

“That’s good. You’re young enough to be one of those Three Stooges people. That’d be a damn shame.”

“Why?”

“Because there are only two types of people in this world: those who like the Stooges, and those who like the Marx Brothers.”

“Buster Keaton was always my favorite, actually.”

“He’d’ve been embarrassed, the way you were stumbling around out there. No grace. No style. No art.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, thank you, James Agee, for that blistering review, but I came to say I must be going.”

He clapped his hands loudly. “ There you go! Not the most clever or smoothest transition back to the opening gag, but a damn good outing your first time. No doubt about it.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“You’re welcome. Maybe. Hey, you got a minute?”

I checked my watch. “Actually, I’m here to pick up someone.”

“Who? If it’s your mom or grandpa or someone like that, they tend to discourage late-night roustabouting. Afraid if we actually have some fun it’ll improve our dispositions and make us a bit more clearheaded, and then they’ll be forced to deal with us like we possess honest-to-Pete personalities and feelings. Keepers gotta keep the kept kept, know what I’m saying? Ever had anyone talk to you like you don’t have the brains God gave an ice cube? After a while you start to wonder if maybe they aren’t right in addressing you like that because maybe, maybe you have taken up residence in Looney-Toons Junction and spend all your time discussing Heraclites’s River with Elmer Fudd while out here in, the happy world, they’ve been changing your diapers and drawing lewd grafitti on your butt with permanent markers. By the way, in case you lost track of what I was talking about before I wandered off the highway subject-wise, I’d just asked you who you were here to pick up. If I’m not being what you’d call a buttinsky. Too inquisitive. Nibby. Et cetera.”

“Mabel,” I said.

“Ah, our Angel of the Cafeteria and Catheters. I know her well, Horatio. Your mother? Aunt? Mistress-or are you a kept man? A heartless gigolo using her for your distasteful carnal pleasures while racking up charges on her credit card?”

“Your minute was up about thirty seconds ago.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had such a jam-packed social calendar. How thoughtless of me. No wonder the Kremlin will return none of my calls. Can you set the clock on this damn thing?” He pointed to a brand-new Betamax unit that sat on top of his television. “It works just fine, I can record and all that, but I can’t seem to set the clock.”

“No problem.” I’d been eyeing one of these for a while, but had held off buying because of the six-hundred-plus dollar price tag. But it would be nice to actually record movies and television shows to keep.

I set the clock for him.

“A wizard, that’s what you are.”

“I’ve been thinking about getting one of these.”

He snorted a derisive laugh. “A gift from my daughter. She’s in Los Angeles. She’s in the entertainment business. These things are supposedly going to be all the rage in a few years. Thing is, for as much as it costs, you can’t find all that many movies to play in it. There’s a place over on Church Street that just opened, claims they have the biggest selection in the city-which amounts to being the most gifted ballerina in Hoboken, if you ask me, which I realize you didn’t, but I’m old and lonely and like the sound of my own voice and, besides, you haven’t exactly been taken hostage here, have you?”

“You in show business too?”

“Used to be.” He extended his hand. “Name’s Weis. Marty Weis. Friends call my ‘Whitey’ because of my hair. You can call me ‘Mr. Weis.’ ”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Weis. I think.”

“Pleasure to meet you, too. Maybe. Hey-did you know that back in the heyday of vaudeville, Cedar Hill used to be one the biggest tour stops?”

I leaned against the door. ‘Whitey’ needed to talk to someone, I suddenly felt so sick I wasn’t sure I’d be able to walk another ten feet, and after the near-miss with Old Farts #1 and #2 my guilt tank was already on ‘F.’ I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that. I know it was once the boxing capital of the country.”

“Back in the late thirties, early forties, you bet it was. It was the same thing with vaudeville. You know the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building?”

I shook my head.

“‘Course not-you’d know it as the Auditorium Theatre.”

“The one across from the Midland?”

“The very one. You ever get the chance, you ought to go in there and head down to the basement. There’s a wall directly underneath the front of the stage that’s covered in autographs from all the acts who played there. Houdini’s autograph is there, so are the Three Keatons’. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. There must be a thousand autographs on that wall. Now that the place doesn’t show movies or book acts anymore-”

“-not in about twenty years,” I said.

“Thanks, I wasn’t feeling enough like a fossil tonight.” He shook his head. “It’s a damn shame, all that history down there, all those names-some of famous people, too-just stuck down there in the dark where no one can see them.”

“I never knew that.”

“Not too many folks do, and the ones who are old enough to remember, can’t anymore.”

“Except you.”

“Except me. I used to be a talent agent. The Double-Dubya. Whitey Weis. Midwest Talent and Entertainment. Handled Gypsy Rose Lee for about a month near the end of her career. Lot of other acts, too, but I doubt you’d know the names.”

“Names that are on the wall under the stage at the Auditorium?”

“That’s right. Thank you for setting my clock.”

“What’re you going to watch?”

“Watch? Hell, I’m not going to watch anything. You see what’s on these days? There’s a cop show, Blue Hills or Blue Street or-”

“ Hill Street Blues?”

“That’s the one. It might turn into something if they can ever hold the goddamn camera still, but otherwise-” He waved it away with a wince and a snort. “The blinking light was getting on my nerves. Thanks for setting the clock and listening to me prattle on. Now go. Away with you. Fair Mabel awaits. Just make sure you check the apple juice before drinking.”

“Did I hear my name?”

We both turned and saw Mabel standing in the hallway. She smiled at me. “Is Whitey here giving you a hard time?”

“I was only extolling your innumerable virtues to this no-good hoodlum. What you see in the likes of him is beyond me. Why waste your feminine charms on hamburger when you’ve got all of this”-He gestured down at himself-“prime cut beef right under your nose?”

“This is Beth’s guy,” she said.

“ This is him?” He rolled his chair closer, narrowing his eyes as he gave me the Double-Dubya once-over. “No accounting for taste. Well,” he said, rolling his chair away, “as long as he’s good to her.”

“He is. He treats me well, too.”

“He’d better. Make sure you have him set your clocks. Seems to be his most valuable asset.”

I laughed. “I’ve enjoyed our time together, as well.”

“That makes one of us.” He winked at me. “Never mind me, son. I’m colorful. That’s what happens when you live long enough. You get colorful.”

“Strother Martin in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“Oh, good, he can quote throwaway lines from movie dialogue. Thank God I lived long enough to witness such a wonder. You realize, don’t you, that the area in your brain you just pulled that little tidbit from used to hold your parents’ anniversary date, right? ‘Sorry, Mom and Dad, forgot today was your thirtieth but, hey, I can quote lines from William Goldman scripts! That makes up for a lifetime of my disappointing you at every turn, doesn’t it?’ For the love of all that’s true and pure, Mabel, take him away before he launches into a recitation of the Steiger and Brando ‘I-Coulda-Been-a-Contender’ scene from On the Waterfront. I might weep openly.”

Mabel slipped her arm through mine. “Good night, Whitey.”

“Did you hear that?”

“What?” I said, enjoying the hell out of him.

“That was the sound of my death getting ten seconds closer because I’m not getting the sleep I need. An old man needs his sleep and I’m not getting mine. Now, let’s see, hmmmmm -why might that be?”

“Good night, Mr. Weis.”

“Are you still here?”

“I only came to say I must be going.”

“On second thought, don’t bother checking the apple juice. It’d serve you right if she got the containers mixed up.”

Mabel giggled and pulled me away.

As we were walking toward the car I gave her my keys and told her why I wanted her to drive.

“I thought you were looking under the weather.”

“I feel like I’m under the ground. Six feet under, to be precise.”

In the car, I laid my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

“Don’t mind Whitey,” she said. “He’s a good one. Sharp as hell.”

“I noticed. What’s the deal with his legs?”

“Diabetes. It’s pretty bad.”

“That’s terrible.”

Mabel nodded. “Sure is. I guess he used to be a dancer before he got into the talent agent business. He tell you all about the wall under the-”

“-stage at the Auditorium, yes. Is that true?”

“You know, it is. One of our supervisors has a cousin who used to work there when they showed movies. He’s seen it.”

“Huh.”

“That would be something to see for yourself, though.”

I turned my head and opened my eyes. There was something in her voice that sounded wrong. “Yeah, I suppose it would… be-is something wrong?”

She blinked, then fished a cigarette from her pocketbook. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead. I can’t smell anything anyway.”

She lit up and inhaled so deeply I could almost hear the cancer cells cheering. “Had another meeting about the budget today.”

“Bad news?”

“No. Looks like we’ve got another investor and will be able to hire back almost everyone who was laid off.”

“That’s great.” I sat up and rubbed my eyes, wanting to give this my full attention. Both she and Beth had been nervous about what was going to happen should there be another budget cut. “Mabel?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“It is good news, right?”

She blinked, then, after a moment’s consideration, nodded her head. “Oh, you bet it is. Sure. Only they want us to sign something.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure. And that’s what’s bothering me. All we know is that it’s called a ‘confidentiality agreement’ and we can’t tell anyone about what it says.”

“Have you seen it yet?”

“Lord, no-the paperwork won’t come through for another week or two, but the director thought we should be warned. I asked him if he knew what it was all about and he said, ‘Hey, if they want to give us X-millions of dollars to keep this place open for the next ten years, I’ll have the cafeteria serve Billy Beer at every meal if that’s what they want.’ ”

“A man of principles. Have to admire that.”

“He’s doing the best he can. Truth be told, a lot more of us should have been let go this last time, but he managed to convince the board to keep us.” She looked at me and I could see there were tears in her eyes. “I haven’t let on to you and Beth about how bad it’s really been. I’ve been hanging on by a thread for a while now, financially. They could have let me go any time this past year, just walk in any day and- kapow! -no more job. Helluva thing to live with.”

I squeezed her arm. “You never said anything.”

“Why would I? Look at me, will you? I’m a sixty-one-year-old lesbian with no special someone in her life. I cook meals and clean bedpans and change diapers. I got a nursing degree but all that means to most doctors and administrators is that they don’t have to be the ones to wipe the asses and write the reports and make sure the charts are in order-and when you get a two-fer like me, well, that’s all the better. I can cook and mop up the mess they make after eating it.”

“You’re a great cook.”

She grinned. “You’re sweet for trying to change the subject, but I’m an old gal and I’m scared and pissed off so just let me gripe for a bit.”

“Okay.”

She flicked some ashes out the window. “I didn’t want to say anything to Beth about… about this-”

“-about the job?”

“No, something else.” She squeezed my hand. “I’m gonna need you to help me tell her something. I got a call from the landlord a couple days ago. Some of the neighbors, they’ve been complaining about the Its. I guess one of their kids supposedly came home with fleas or lice-which God knows they couldn’t have picked up at school or somewhere else, must be the old lezzie’s animals-so they threatened to call the health department unless the landlord does something.”

I had a terrible feeling I knew what was coming.

“We have to get rid of half of them,” she said, her voice cracking. “Isn’t that a pisser? Most of the poor things had no home to begin with, and now we gotta get rid of them to keep ours. I’d buy the house if I could afford it, but I can’t, and there’s been no rent increase in I don’t know how long, and I’d never be able to find a house that size for what I’m paying-”

“-calm down, Mabel-”

“-and the landlord’s a nice guy, he really is. He could’ve just been a bastard and told me to get rid of all of them but he didn’t, he said we can keep four but four of them have to go and they have to be gone by the first of the month, so that means that sometime in the next ten days we have to choose which ones to get rid of-”

“-we’ll take them to the Humane Society, it’ll be-”

“-oh like hell we will. I mean”-she wiped a tear from her cheek-“I know they care for them as best they can, but after a certain amount of time they have no choice but to put them down. I can’t do that. I can’t hand them over to someone I know is going to have to kill them eventually. I have no idea how I’m going to tell Beth about this, I really don’t…”

“You won’t have to. I will.”

“Would you? She’ll hear it better, coming from you. She and I get along but… I’m not her mother. I wish I were, I love her like my own daughter, but she’s always acted like I think I got stuck with her or something. I don’t know…” She took a last drag from the cigarette and tossed it out the window. “Maybe something’ll come up.”

I had no idea what “something” she was referring to, or how it was going to “come up,” or in connection with what.

“There ought to be a place,” she said, “where they’d keep them healthy and happy for as long as they live, let them pass away naturally after a good life. Instead it’s dump the old people here, dump the animals there; you wait for one to die, kill the other if they don’t die soon enough. It isn’t right, however you look at it, however you justify it. It’s not right. There ought to be a place.”

“I know,” I said, my eyes closing as the decongestants kicked in. “I know.”

“There really ought to.”

“Mabel?”

“What is it, hon?”

“Why did you introduce me to Whitey as ‘Beth’s guy’? You know that we’re not… well, she says that… I mean…”

“I love my niece, Gil, you know that, but sometimes she hasn’t got the brains God gave an ice cube. You’re her guy. She’ll figure it out, eventually.”

By the time we got back to the house what I thought was only a sinus headache brought on by a cold turned into a fever, then a 4 A.M . trip to the emergency room followed by a five-day stay in the hospital for pneumonia and dehydration. I never saw it coming.

What I remember of that first day or so was the cloud-that’s the only thing I can call it. When I tried to open my eyes the lids would only lift halfway because there was a cloud pressing down on them. This cloud was a dull silver. It covered my entire face. I could feel it slipping through my lips and spreading down into my chest. It was hot and humid and felt like oil in my lungs.

I was sitting on a hillside, and it was raining. God, how it was raining. The wind was so strong that the rain was falling sideways.

I was sitting on a hillside, alone, watching as a ship of some sort sailed past in the distance. I thought perhaps I had friends on that ship, but they were leaving me behind.

And I was so angry.

So angry.

The anger was so powerful it made a soft buzzing noise inside. And whenever I dared peek out from under my too-heavy lids, I saw things hiding in the silver cloud made by the rain and mist.

Hunched things.

Silent things.

Things with bright red pinpoint eyes. I never saw their faces. I didn’t think they had any. But their eyes told me enough. They were watching me. They had always been watching me. And someday they would step out of the cloud so I could see them. They would flip over the sky and tear out its tongue as they choked it to death. And I would be crushed by it. They would feed me to the dead animals who would claw down from their graves. They would claw down to get out because the sky had been flipped over. The world was upside down. The dead animals would rain from the sky, howling, speaking to me in human language. They would have red pinpoint eyes, too, and tell me ancient secrets. But they could see through the cloud. It was their home. Oil and silver were their skin, and their skin was hard. My skin was soft and pink. They chewed through it. With every bite I grew older, weaker, an old man with stick-thin arms and a shiny bald head. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The silver was too hot. The oil was too thick.

I came out of the cloud. It was very dark in the room. A nurse stood over the bed, wiping the sweat from my face and neck and chest. She asked me if I would like some ice chips. She placed them in my mouth. They tasted like the autumn sky.

“Your fever’s broken,” she whispered to me, then gave me a shot. I closed my eyes. The cloud did not return. I was safe.

Safe enough.

My third day in the hospital, Beth came to see me, wearing the same outfit she’d worn the day she’d picked me up from the hospital when I was nine. Not the same style of outfit, mind you-the same outfit. Same halter top, same jeans, same belt, same everything. Yeah, the pants were a bit shorter around the ankles and the halter was a little tight here and there and might be showing some age but, damn, she still wore it well.

“I thought you might appreciate a little trip down memory lane.”

“More like a face-first fall in the middle of amnesia boulevard. Why do you still have those things?”

“Because you said I was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen that day.”

“I was recovering from a gunshot wound. You could have been dressed like Minnie Pearl and I would have thought you were the hottest chick on Earth.”

“‘Chick.’ Wow. Has a nostalgic ring to it. You’re such a romantic.”

“I love you.”

“You’d better-do you know I can’t feel the blood circulating in my waist because of these damn jeans? Who the fuck ever thought hip-huggers were sexy?”

“Guys who get to slide them off the hips of girls who wear them.”

“You’re one sick puppy. Speaking of puppies-” She sat on the edge of the bed and took one of my hands in hers. “Mabel told me about what happened. But it’s okay, we found a place that will take them.”

“Have you picked out who’s going to go?”

“Not yet. We still have a week before we have to do the deed. We decided you have a say in this, too, you know.”

“I don’t want to have to-”

“Each of us picks one to stay.”

“But that leaves one-”

“Mabel picks the fourth. In fact, she promised me that she’d have it picked by the time I get home today.”

“The rest go the Humane Society?”

“No. A place called… oh, what was it? Hang on.” She dug into one of her pockets and removed a piece of wadded paper. Unfolding it, she smiled a “Meand-My-Scattered-Brains” smile, then read: “ ‘Keepers.’ It’s a private organization, funded by donations and animal-loving rich people, I guess. They take your animals and care for them until a new home can be found. They don’t put them to sleep, ever, even if they never find a new home.”

“Just take them in and let them live out their lives naturally, huh?”

“Right.”

“How’d you find out about them?”

“Someone who works at the nursing home with Mabel. She didn’t find out all that much, but this is enough.” She grabbed my hand and leaned in, smiling. “Isn’t this great? I mean, don’t get me wrong-I cried like hell when Mabel told me, and I’ll cry like hell when we have to leave them, and I’ll miss them… but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be so hard to live with afterward, y’know? Because I know they’re going to be happy, they’re going to be taken care of and loved and kept safe.”

“There ought to be a place,” I whispered.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. ‘Keepers,’ huh?”

“Yeah. Something about that name seemed familiar to me. How about you?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, then shook my head. “No. Yes. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

Beth cocked her head. “Yeah, me too. It seems like it should ring a bell, but it doesn’t, y’know?”

“Yeah, yeah I do.” For some reason the color blue flashed through my mind, but its meaning-if indeed it even had any-was lost on me.

“Thanks for bringing me over to the emergency room,” I said.

“You had a temperature of a hundred and four! We thought about turning off the stove and just using your forehead to heat the stew, but Mabel likes having you around. You scared us, you idiot! Did you know they put you on ice after you got here? I mean, they actually stripped off your clothes and put you in a tub full of ice to bring down your temperature. You were in brain-damage territory.”

“That could explain a lot.”

“I said were. You’re safe now, so you can’t use it as an excuse.”

“Damn. It would’ve been a good one, too.”

“Is that the resplendent Beth I see?” came a voice from the doorway. Low in the doorway. We looked over and down just as Marty Weis wheeled himself into the room. “A-ha! I’ve caught you in the act. Trying to thaw out Frosty the Snowman, I take it?”

“‘Frosty’?” I said.

“Word of your icy exploits have traveled all the way across the parking lot to our side of the tracks, Captain Spalding. I heard you awoke screaming for Larry, Moe, and Curly to stop dancing on your pants, as you were still wearing them at the time.”

“How did you get out?” said Beth between laughs.

“Yadda-yadda, Warden, as the late-great Lenny Bruce once said. Shhh -your aunt had a hand in my escape. Yadda-yadda. And if either of you tell me you don’t know who Lenny Bruce was, I’ll-”

“-weep openly?” I asked.

“‘Scowl meaningfully,’ was the phrase I’d meant to employ but-oh, all right, I was going to say ‘weep openly.’ ”

“‘A pro never forgets his good lines.’ ”

“ Magic -you’re quoting William Goldman again.”

“May twenty-third.”

Weis stared at me. “What?”

“My parents’ anniversary. May twenty-third.” I tapped my head; it still felt hot to me. “I can remember Goldman dialogue and important dates.”

“The miracles I’ve witnessed in this lifetime. It humbles me. Truly. Or maybe it’s only a hemorrhoid flare-up. Either way, it makes a definite impression.” He rolled over to the bed and pulled a small box from under the blanket covering his legs. “A token of my esteem.” He tossed it up into my lap.

I was about half afraid of the thing. “You’re giving me a present?”

“I just paid for the gift-wrapping, but it’s the thought that counts so let’s not get all emotional-however if someone named ‘Rico the Blade’ comes looking for his ‘lid,’ say nothing of this conversation. I am a mule on the run.”

“The considerate felon.”

Beth shook her head. “You two ought to take this act on the road.”

“Oh, my days on the road are long gone, Beautiful Bethany. Unless of course you’re driving, then it’s Easy Rider time.”

“They both get blown away at the end of that movie.”

“Yes, but it’s to a Bob Dylan song, so that makes it symbolic and culturally significant. Perhaps Yukon Cornelius here could hum a few bars of ‘Lay Lady, Lay’ and we’ll feel terribly important and meaningful as we pull into the Dairy Queen drive-thru. Lacks the sociological pathos of Fonda and Hopper biting the big one, but I always found that ending depressing, anyway. Ice cream is not depressing. Ice cream is yummy. Shotgun blasts to the chest are not. I hear they leave a slightly metallic aftertaste.”

“Hey, I got an idea,” said Beth, grabbing my hand and Weis’s. “Let’s do it. Let’s have a road trip. The three of us and Mabel and the Its.”

“The ‘Its’?” said Weis. “Dare I ask?”

“No,” I said. “Trust me.”

“C’mon,” Beth said. “We have to do this by next Thursday. Mabel can sign out Whitey here and he can ride along with us.”

“I would ask where we’re going,” said Weis, “and what, exactly, the ‘Its’ are, but frankly I don’t care. A road trip! Magnificent. If you’re willing to get me out of that mausoleum for a day, I’ll even go to Toledo-and I wouldn’t wish that on Eichmann.” He slapped his hands against his useless legs, and grinned from ear to ear. “I must go and choose an outfit from my extensive wardrobe. One must always dress properly for a road trip.”

“Just don’t show up naked,” said Beth.

“I would be dazzling in my raw manliness.”

“You’d be an old man with no clothes stranded by the side of the road.”

Weis considered this for a moment. “Ah, yes-but think of the attention I’d get.” He gave me a thumbs-up. “See you soon, Mr. Freeze. Beware the Green Hornet.”

“You mean the Caped Crusader,” I said.

“Just making sure there’s no brain damage. There isn’t. What a tragedy.”

Six days later all of us piled into Beth’s U-boat of a station wagon along with four of the Its and took a drive. Beth drove and Mabel rode in the front with her, while I got to share the backseat with Mr. Weis and various of the Its who decided from time to time that the cargo area and Weis’s folded-up wheelchair were just too boring. The temperature was well into the upper eighties and the air-conditioning didn’t work so we had to make the drive with all the windows rolled down-much to the chagrin of Mr. Weis, who’d gone to a lot of trouble that morning to ensure his hair looked presentable.

“Jeez-Louise,” he said, finally giving up trying to hold his white mane in place. “If I’d have known it was going to be like this, I’d’ve just wet my finger and jammed it in a light socket.”

“It might have improved your disposition, as well,” said Mabel. Yelled, actually. The sound of the wind blowing in through the windows made it impossible to talk at a normal volume; I don’t think a word was said during the drive that wasn’t delivered at three hundred decibels. Thank God I’d thought to bring along some aspirin.

The drive took forty minutes. The Keepers facility was located outside of Hebron, which meant having to drive through Cedar Hill, then Heath, past the Industrial Park, and making a turnoff near Lakewood High School that took you in a straight line for the better part of fifteen minutes. (By the time we actually arrived, I wasn’t sure we were still in the same county.)

One of the Its got too excited and vomited on my pant leg. Twice.

“I see even our four-legged friends aren’t immune to your considerable charms,” said Mr. Weis.

“Watch out or I’ll put him in your lap.”

“I’ll have you know that animals happen to adore me. Why, I handled an animal act back in the day-”

“Here.” I picked up the It and dropped the animal in his lap. The dog licked his face, nuzzled his cheek, and puked on his shoulder.

“I shall have my revenge, dear boy.”

“On the bright side, at least we have one clean set of clothes between us.”

“I brought an extra set of clothes for both of you,” Mabel called over her shoulder. “I had a feeling there might be some redecorating going on.”

“‘Redecorating,’ ” said Mr. Weis. “What a tasteful way to put it.”

Beth pulled a hand towel from her bag and handed it to me so I could clean off my shoes. The Its had once again gathered on or around the wheelchair in back and were craning their necks to stick their heads out the back window, which was opened a third of the way.

We pulled into a gas station and I helped Mr. Weis into his wheelchair so he could go into the restroom and change his shirt. According to the directions, we were only a mile or so away from the facility.

As I stood outside the restroom door waiting for Mr. Weis, I saw another station wagon drive past, this one heading back toward Hebron. There was a woman of about forty driving, and two young children riding in the backseat. A happy little dog was bouncing between the kids, sticking its head out the window, having a grand time. The children were laughing and the mother was smiling. I wondered if the dog was a new pet, and if they’d just gotten it from Keepers. I caught sight of Beth and Mabel (who’d also seen the children and the dog) and knew they were wondering the same thing. I hoped the children had just gotten their new pet from the same place we were about to deposit four more. Even if that weren’t the case, I hoped Beth and Mabel thought it was; it would make leaving the four Its there easier for them.

Both of them had cried a little that morning as we loaded the dogs into the station wagon. They might as well have been abandoning newborn babies in trash cans, it hurt that much for them. Mr. Weis planned on treating everyone to an “extra-special” lunch after everything was finished, “… and maybe even a movie, if there’s time.” I thought that was a great idea. We’d all need to do something happy after this was done, regardless of how much Mabel and Beth insisted this wasn’t going to upset them.

Mr. Weis rolled out in a crisp, clean white shirt, tossing his soiled one at me. “Easy on the starch next time, pal.”

“Thanks for the Keaton book,” I said. His gift to me had been a copy of Buster Keaton’s autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick .

“Ah, so you can read as well as launder clothes. Every day in every way, I find you more and more adequate.” He winked at me and grinned. “Glad you liked it. If you want, I got Groucho’s autobiography, as well. Might learn a few pointers about comic timing from it-God knows you could use some.”

I helped him back into the car, folded up and replaced his wheelchair, then went into the men’s room to change pants and clean myself up.

Onward.

The facility came into view about two minutes later.

It sat on the right side of the road, at the end of a long asphalt drive, directly in the middle of a wide expanse of blacktop like a passenger ship on a flat dark sea; Noah’s Ark, Day 41. It was quite a large one-story building, made of limestone, concrete blocks, and metal. It could have been a city jail, or a building from an old prison compound suddenly displaced in the center of a field. There was no sign on the road telling you what the place was, if it was open, or why it was even here.

The asphalt drive branched off in two directions, and at least here there was sign telling you why: VISITOR PARKING TO THE LEFT. The right-side parking lot was for SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY, and was half-filled with about a dozen vans (some of which looked to be converted bread delivery trucks), each a dull tan color with only the word KEEPERS painted on the sides.

It took us a minute to find a parking space because the lot was quite full. What struck me was not that there were so many cars, but that so many of them were expensive cars, rich-people cars, cars driven by owners who were too important to be bothered performing a distasteful duty like the one we were here to discharge.

Beth parked, shut off the engine, then looked at Mabel. Neither of them said anything for a few moments which, in this heat, seemed two-and-a-half eternities long.

“I really don’t mean to sound like I’m trying to take over or assume the role of cantankerous old fart,” said Weis, “but it seems to me that this is the point where one of us should at least pretend we’re going to get out of the car.”

“In a minute,” said Mabel, very softly, but underlined in steel.

Farther back, the Its sat still and silent, as if they knew why we were here.

“Maybe I should go check it out first,” I said.

“‘Check it out’?” said Weis. “ ‘Check it out’? What are you, Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar? We casing the joint for a heist? ‘Check it out.’ Lord save us from amateurs.”

“I think that sounds like a good idea,” Beth said. “We don’t want to be wandering around with the dogs and have no idea where to put them.”

Mabel nodded. “I don’t think the dogs would like it if we dragged this out for too long.”

I looked at Weis the same instant he looked at me.

The dogs. They had said “the dogs.”

I suppose in a way it must make it easier for a person to do something like this if they can remove their hearts from the event to some degree. Put your father in a nursing home, you suddenly stop referring to him as “Dad” and just as “him” when talking to the admissions nurse; “Dad” gives his identity a too-close proximity to your conscience, but “him,” “him” is safe because it’s nonspecific, “him” is a term applied to a Person You Don’t Really Know, someone removed from you, someone you haven’t spent your entire life around and who has helped determine the kind of person you’ve become. So “Dad” becomes “him,” “Mom” becomes “her,” and “the Its” become “the dogs.”

Christ, I felt suddenly so sad. I suspected Weis did, too. When our gazes met I could see the signal flares going off behind his eyes: Mayday, Mayday, we’re sinking fast, jettison all unnecessary cargo immediately, Mayday, Mayday…

I opened the door and started to climb out. “You wanna come along, Mr. Weis?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

I retrieved his wheelchair and got him situated, then leaned down by Beth’s window. “I’ll find out what we’re supposed to do, where we take them and all of that.”

“Thanks. It’ll give us a couple of minutes to say good-bye.”

“I figured.”

She leaned out and kissed me. After all this time, her lips on mine still made my knees melt.

I grabbed the handles of Weis’s chair and moved toward the building.

“Alone at last,” he said.

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“No one ever does, it’s part of my well-honed mystique.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that so I left it alone. “Any thoughts on what movie you’d like to see later?”

“So long as it doesn’t have Meryl Streep in it, I don’t care. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great actress and a looker, but she reminds me too much of my daughter. Have I mentioned that I’m a little irked at my daughter right now? I mean, I don’t expect her to fly up here from L.A. every chance she gets, but I have trouble believing that someone can be so busy that they can’t pick up a goddamn phone and call for five minutes once a week. I’m not asking to be the center of her life, you understand, but it gets boring as hell out here on the periphery sometimes. Was I raving there for a moment? Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.” And I was. He was actually pretty splendid company, once you got past the bluster and brouhaha.

The entrance to the building was surprisingly small-I almost couldn’t maneuver the wheelchair through it-but once inside it seemed even larger that it appeared from the parking lot.

The entry area was probably about twenty feet wide and fifteen deep. To the right was a massive steel door with a single, darkened window at eye-level and a SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY sign. It reminded me of the heavy iron door to that cell in every last Frankenstein movie where they imprison the monster and assure one another that it’s strong enough to prevent the creature from escaping. Whatever lay beyond that door took up exactly half of the building. I figured that’s where they probably kept the animal cages.

The wall facing us was concrete, about seven feet tall, and held three rows of eight cubbyholes, each big enough to hold a good-sized dog or cat; a fourth row, at knee-level, contained cubbies for the larger dogs-Saint Bernards, German shepherds, Dobermans, etc. Each cubby had a door of heavy iron bars attached to it. For the moment, all the cubbies were empty and their doors open. It looked like an automat after lunch rush; you could even see how the back wall of each swung open so whoever worked behind the scenes could retrieve the animals. A sign above stated that once an animal was placed inside, it became the responsibility of Keepers and would not be returned to the donor; it also warned that the locks were magnetized, so once a door was closed it could not be opened again from our side.

“Why do you suppose they do it that way?”

Mr. Weis shrugged. “My guess is it’s a safety precaution. Folks wouldn’t be bringing their animals here unless they absolutely had to. If you love a pet enough not to hand it over to those Nazis gas chambers at the Humane Society, then you love it enough to change your mind at the last minute, and that’s not a good idea for you or the animal. My guess is a lot of folks have second thoughts once they see their pet behind those bars. This way, there’s no going back.”

“So they really only give you one chance to back out.”

“Damn straight. Once it’s in that cage, that’s all she wrote.”

The wall behind us sported a long shelf deep enough for a dog or cat to sit on and be groomed; there were combs, brushes, nail clippers, flea collars, bags of treats, and countless other goodies set out for people to use before leaving their animals. There was also a series of wooden lockboxes where you could leave a monetary donation; a sign over each box read: “Keepers is a privately funded, non-profit animal protection organization. Donations from the public, though not required, are nonetheless welcomed. All money goes toward the feeding and care of the animals. Keepers does not believe in destroying animals. Once they are with us, they are here for life, even if a new home is never found. Here they will remain happy. Here they will remain loved.”

I read the sign again. “Seems almost too good to be true.”

“Gift horse. Mouth. Looking into it. Bad idea. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Then: “A Danny Kaye fan, as well. There’s hope for you yet.”

There was no wall to our left; instead, there was a massive and cavernous play area that extended so far back it looked like a study in forced perspective; swing sets for children, sandboxes, rows of folding chairs, picnic tables, music playing from unseen speakers, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers… if it weren’t for the walls surrounding all of this and the ceiling of skylights, you’d swear you were in Moundbuilders Park on a summer afternoon.

And the animals were everywhere, dogs, cats, pigs, birds, rabbits, a couple of horses and cows, each fenced off in its own area (except the birds, who flew freely throughout) so that children and adults alike could pet them, either from outside the barrier or from within.

“Looks like a goddamn 4H convention,” said Weis.

I thought it was cool. There were children playing on the swings, mothers sipping icy colas as they relaxed on the chairs or played with the dogs and cats. The animals themselves were clean and healthy and seemed quite happy. I caught glimpses of figures wearing tan jumpsuits with KEEPERS printed across their backs weaving through the pens and people, asking questions, making notes, handing out treats. All of them wore tan wool caps pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. Although it was comfortably cool in here-the air-filtration system must have cost a fortune, because you could barely smell any urine or feces or any other potently animal scents you would have expected-it wasn’t cool enough for a cap of any kind.

A sign on the farthest wall proclaimed this to be the “Selection Area,” and that we should take our time getting to know the animals before bearing them home with us. That was the actual phrase: “bearing them home.” I don’t know why that stuck in my mind. All of the signs contained odd little phrases like that, as if written by someone to whom English was a second language and so its most formal rules of usage were followed when composing the notices.

I wondered if the woman in the car and her two children had made a morning of it in here, playing with dozens of puppies and dogs before selecting the one that just seemed to love them so much they couldn’t bear the thought of leaving without it.

Everywhere I looked there were women-well-dressed women, women who drove expensive cars and wore white gloves for afternoon tea and had a standing appointment with their hair stylist each week and whose children attended private schools-playing with a dog or cat or bunny, smiling as the animal wagged its tail or whiskers and licked a hand or face, and these women would grin from ear to ear saying, “How is Mama’s little baby? Is Mama’s little baby lonesome?” It was sweet.

“Beth and Mabel need to see this,” I said to Mr. Weis. “I really think they’ll feel a whole lot better knowing how this works.”

“You don’t suppose they’ve got an elephant stashed away somewhere, do you?” asked Weis. “I was expecting just cats and dogs, but this ”-He made a sweeping gesture of the Selection Area-“is like a traveling zoo. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket or anything, so please let’s not get into a discussion of my dreadful personality problems, but do you notice anything odd about the way the animals are behaving?”

“No.”

“Of course not- that would require actual powers of observation, and since you’re wearing mismatched socks, we can assume that’s a lost cause. So allow me to assist you: Take another look. See that pen of cats over there? Three times now the same bird has landed on the fence within easy jumping distance, yet none of the cats have tried to get at the thing. None of them are even hissing at one another. Cats are territorial as hell, yet all of them are getting along just fine. None of the dogs are fighting or growling at each other. And despite all the noise and the kids and the movement, the horses don’t look nervous. Ever spend time around horses? I love horses, hope I’ll be one in my next life. Damn nervous animals most of the time, sudden movement and loud noises are no friends to their nerves.”

“So the animals are well-behaved, so what?”

He looked at me as if I were drooling. “So it just doesn’t seem right to me, that’s all. The Peaceable Kingdom ’s good in theory, but this is just weird, seeing it in practice like this. You don’t suppose they drug the animals, do you?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Would they be this active if they had sedatives in their system?”

“Hell- I’m on sedatives half the time and you don’t see it slowing me down any, do you?”

“No, but then you’re freakish.”

“Pot. Kettle. Black. Fill in the blanks.”

“Me. Go. Bring women and dogs.”

“Here. Me. Wait. Air-conditioning. Bring adverbs when you return.”

Beth and Mabel were very matter-of-fact as they placed the dogs into the cubbies and closed the doors, each of them trying for the other’s sake to look strong, but I knew that on the inside they were crumbling. Mabel wrote out a generous check that she deposited in one of the boxes, and then I took her into the Selection Area. Beth said she wanted a moment alone. I wasn’t going to deny either of them anything they wanted today.

Mr. Weis had gotten us a couple of sodas and hot dogs from one of the snack stands, and as we ate Mabel wandered through the Selection Area for about fifteen minutes, shaking her head in wonder, stopping occasionally to pet a dog or pick up a cat, and she tried to smile and be happy and enjoy it, and maybe she succeeded to some degree, but her mind and heart were still stuck in the barred cubbies-which had been emptied while my back was turned.

“That was fast,” I said. If Mr. Weis heard me he gave no indication of it. I patted his shoulder and excused myself, wandering back out to the cubbies.

The steel door on the opposite wall was open just a crack. The breeze wafting through the crack wasn’t just cool, it was outright cold. Could this be some sort of refrigeration area where they kept food for the animals?

I reached out to pull the door open farther and it swung out toward me.

Beth was standing there, shaking, her skin covered in goose bumps, holding a wrapped package the size of a shoe box. She looked dazed.

“Are you okay?”

She blinked, looked at me for a moment as if she had no idea who the hell I was or why I was bothering her, then came out, closed the door behind her, and said, “Yeah, I’m… I’m fine. Damn it’s cold in there.”

I began rubbing her arms. “I noticed. What’s back there, anyway?”

She was looking at the empty cubbies where the Its had been a short while ago. “They don’t waste any time, do they? That’s good, you know? Get them out of sight as quick as possible. I doesn’t hurt as much that way. That’s important. For it not to hurt too much.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

She nodded her head, and even though she looked right into my eyes, her gaze was elsewhere. “I’m fine, I told you. Come on, let’s round up the troops and blow this pop stand.”

“What’s in the package?”

“Huh?” She looked at the box in her hand. “Oh, something I need to mail out, no biggie.”

I did not recognize the name of the person to whom it was addressed, but couldn’t help noticing that the return address was the same.

“Beth?”

“Huh?”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Uh-huh.” Wherever she was, she still wasn’t all the way back yet, and I almost asked her if she’d snuck off into cold storage to fire up a joint, but then a burst of laughter from a couple of children in the Selection Area startled me and Beth sailed past to retrieve Mabel. I started to roll Mr. Weis out but he stopped me.

“Give me a minute, will you?”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s all these women,” he said. “Look at how they fawn over the dogs and cats. How they hold them like they’ve been the family pet for years. They’re going out of their way to make the animals love them.”

I looked, and he was right; it’s one thing to pet an animal and play with it only briefly-most of the animals are happy for whatever little attention they get-but many of these women of the afternoon tea and white gloves were taking it three steps further: the more they played with the dogs and cats, the more their own tired beauty seemed to be revitalized, as if they were drawing a few moments of time-stolen youth back from the animals’ energy and affection.

“There was a fellow I once knew,” said Weis, “who was one of the ugliest men you’d ever laid eyes on-I mean, this guy had a face that would make a freight train take a dirt road. Used to get him work in horror movies all the time because he didn’t need makeup. Thought he might go on to be the next Rondo Hatton. Anyway, every time I saw this guy, he was in the company of the most beautiful women-real jaw-dropping traffic-stoppers. Women who’d make Sophia Loren envious. One day I asked him what his secret was, and you know what he said to me?”

“If I yawn it’s only in anticipation.”

“Funny guy. He said, ‘Regardless of how beautiful a woman is, there’s always someone who’s tired of her, who’s glad to leave her. And they’ll take any attention they can get, even if it’s from a mug like me.’

“Look at these women here. I’m not talking about the younger ones with kids, but the others, the forty and forty-five crowd, the ones who’re paying so much attention to the animals. They’re all beautiful, and they’re all here alone. You know why? Because someone is tired of them and was glad to leave them. Their husbands go off to the office, their kids go off to college, but they leave them alone, understand? They love their families, but their families always leave them in some way. Who’ve they got to leave? No one. So they come here. I’ve been sitting here listening, and every last one of them has at some point asked one of the attendants, ‘Will they go to good homes?’ But it’s not out of concern for the animal, it’s because they don’t want this on their conscience. They have no intention of adopting one of them. It’s the leaving that’s the important part. It matters that they have someone to leave, so they leave behind this dog or that cat, some lonesome little animal who’d never leave them if they had the chance to give them their hearts.”

Mr. Weis blinked, and for a few moments his eyes were every lonely journey I’d ever taken, every unloved place I’d ever visited, every sting of guilt I’d ever felt in my life; for that moment his eyes never focused on me, they brushed by once, softly, like a cattail or a ghost, then fell shyly toward the ground in some inner contemplation too sad to be touched by a tender thought or the delicate brush of another’s care. You’d think God had forgotten his name.

So that’s what lonely looks like, I thought. Mr. Weis caught my stare and for a moment looked humiliated; then he blinked and said, “I got snot hanging out of my nose or something?”

He was shaking so intensely I thought the arms would rattle right off his chair.

I touched his shoulder. “Why are you so upset?”

“Because!” he snapped. “Just… just because, that’s all. Christ-five minutes once a week, is that too much to ask for?”

“Not at all.”

He stared off at something only he could see. I let my gaze wander for a moment but stopped scanning when I saw something that seemed really, genuinely, seriously wrong.

In one of the pens sat a very chubby gray rabbit. Behind the rabbit was a large German shepherd. Next to it lay a cat. In front of the cat a duck wandered back and forth. A long, glistening snake slithered in, out, and around all of them, occasionally stopping to lift its head to flick its tongue at someone’s nose. And perched on a pile of straw beside the entire scene was a gorgeous brown marsh hawk.

The animals stretched, touched and groomed one another, but made no sounds. Even the hawk was silent. This did not seem right to me. Considering what I knew of the various natures of the individual creatures in this pen, most of them should have tried to attack and kill the rest by now.

Then, almost as one, all of them looked right at me: Something we can help you with, pal? Take a picture, it’ll last longer.

In theory, The Peaceable Kingdom; in actuality, an icy touch at the base of your spine-at the base of mine, anyway. This might be peaceful and happy and healthy, but something here was just… off. Definitely off.

Mr Weis tugged at my shirt and said: “How’s that new Spielberg movie sound to you, that one with what’s-his-name from that space opera?”

“Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

“Supposed to be pretty slam-bang, from what I hear. I think maybe I could use a little slam-bang, how about you?”

“Sounds good.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d already seen it and that it left me with the mother of all headaches but had at least cleared my sinuses quite nicely, thanks very much. I knew Beth hadn’t seen it yet, which meant Mabel hadn’t, either.

It was a blast. I found the movie even more obnoxious, contrived, and over-the-top than I had the first time but, damn, was it fun. It took Beth and Mabel a little while to get into the spirit of things, but once they did, they went all the way with it, clapping and cheering along with the rest of the audience, and by the time the Ark itself was about to be opened, it was almost like the bad parts of that day hadn’t even happened; we were just four friends-scratch that-we were just a family out for a night of fun. Later we had a couple of loaded pies at Tammy’s Pizza and played every song on the jukebox while Mr. Weis regaled us with endless anecdotes from his glory days. Only once, at the end of the evening as we were driving home, did I give that package another thought. I knew damn well that Beth hadn’t had it with her when we left that morning, so the only place she could have gotten it was at the Keepers facility. In the cold storage area. But who’d given it to her, and why? And more to the point, why had she agreed to mail it out for them?

Mabel and I checked Mr. Weis back in that night. He hugged both of us before we left his room. The day had meant so much to him, it was so wonderful of us to take him along, did we think maybe we could do it again sometime soon? A movie and pizza again? He’d surely love that. I thought he was going to start crying. It was so out of character it seemed downright mawkish; as a result, I almost lost it myself, but Mabel-ever the graceful professional-assured him that we’d enjoyed his company, as well, and that, yes, we’d all do it again very soon. That seemed to please Mr. Weis-who gave me permission to call him Whitey from now on. I knew what that meant, and hugged him once more before we left.

Most of the truly significant moments of your life don’t come with a blare of trumpets and roll of timpani. Half the time you’re not even aware of their importance until well after they’ve tipped their hat to you on their way into the past. God knows most of the benchmark events of my life have only gained meaning through later reflection- why didn’t I realize this at the time? -but that day was different. As we went into the house that evening, Beth squeezing my hand with a hard, damp strength of feeling that told me she wanted to make love until we couldn’t breathe, I took a breath and filled myself with the night; the blackness above deep and comforting and nearly total, excepting a few distant stars that winked past the cold silver coin of the moon like children who’d succeeded in fooling “It” during a game of hide-and-seek. And I knew-with as much maturity and wisdom as I had within reach then, I knew -that something profound and irreversible had happened, that there would come a time decades from now when I would look back on this day, this night, this moment of her hand in mine as a smoky hint of autumn lingered under the summer night breeze, and I would be able to say with unbreakable certainty: This was it, right here. You can see it on my face. This time, this breath, this moment. It didn’t matter that I had no idea what exactly had happened or why it was so important, but sometimes you get a feeling in your core that is so clear and strong it can’t be anything but the truth in its most potent and undistilled form. Call it an epiphany if you want to be melodramatic, but I knew that this summer dimming into autumn as all summers must would be the last for me as I was right now; my youth was turning to look at me over its shoulder and smile farewell. Hope you enjoyed the ride, pal. It’s been a real kick, but you’re on your own now. Don’t make love with your socks on, never cross against the light, and don’t take any wooden nickels.

Right here. This moment.

This touch, this promise, this breath.

The last good night of my life.

A few weeks after our excursion to the Keepers facility, my father went into work drunk off his ass (which no one ever knew), fell into his press, and was killed instantly. When she hung up the phone after getting the news, my mother sat down as if every bone in her body had dissolved. She pretty much stayed like that for the next two months, with the exception of the funeral and a trip to the doctor for sedatives.

For my part, I wasn’t surprised. Dad’s drinking had gotten progressively worse over the last few years. It was only a matter of time before something terrible happened.

Don’t misunderstand, I loved him quite a lot, and I cried for three days solid after his death, all too aware of the empty spaces in the house and my life and the world where he should have been but was no longer.

Beth and Mabel were there every step of the way; from going with me to identify his body (what was left of it) at the morgue until I guided Mom’s hand to toss the dirt down on the coffin lid, they were there.

I walked out of the cemetery completely emptied of feeling. This was not the world I had grown used to. Dad wasn’t here, so this was another planet, an alien landscape, something out of a book or fantasy film. In the real world Dad would be bitching about dinner being overdone or the rain-delayed ball game or how I wasn’t doing anything with my life. Sure, he got on my nerves and embarrassed me sometimes and I don’t know that I ever much liked him, but I did love him and now would never have the chance to make sure he understood the difference. I should have said something to him sooner, should have found him the morning after I overheard him talking to Mom and asked him to tell me about his Downtown Sundays as a child, and I should have listened, and I should have smiled, and I should have been able to recognize my duty within those austere and lonely offices to tell him that I understood, and that I loved him.

The luncheon afterward was organized by a group of volunteers from St. Francis de Sales (the parish to which all my family belonged but whose church none of us had stepped into for over a decade until this day); the ladies had set up tables and refreshment stands in the new cafeteria of the grade school located right next door to the church. I was tired, I was sad, and I was hungry, but I couldn’t yet face the well-meaning friends and family members with their sincerely felt but empty-sounding platitudes, couldn’t look at the bowls of potato salad and platters of lunch meat and trays of homemade brownies, couldn’t stand the smell of the freshly brewed coffee, couldn’t sit beside Mom and watch her try to eat while an army of mourners passed by the table, each of them compelled as if by holy proclamation to put a hand on her shoulder and then mine as they made their way over to the baked beans or that great-looking apple cobbler that was disappearing way too fast.

As we were driving back toward the church, Mabel mentioned in passing that she was out of cigarettes, and I grabbed the opportunity for a reprieve.

“Drop me off on the square,” I said. “I’ll run into the Arcade News Stand and buy you some.”

The Arcade-a small, enclosed group of shops and restaurants that has been part of Cedar Hill since before I was born-was perhaps a ten-minute walk from St. Francis. I could get Mabel’s smokes, then go over to Fifth and Main, cut up to Granville Street, and be at the church before the first pot of coffee was empty. Everybody wins: Mabel gets her smokes, Mom gets a few minutes without my moping at her shoulder, and I get fifteen or twenty minutes alone.

No one argued with me about this, no one said my place was at the church, or that I was being selfish, or that it might seem thoughtless to other mourners in attendance. I loved all of them even more for this.

I was dropped off across the street from the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building. I stood there staring at the structure for a moment after they drove away. It seemed to me now that, thanks to Whitey, I shared a little-known secret with this place; down there, somewhere, stood a wall with the names of some of Vaudeville’s Greatest written on it, and what was before to me just an old hulk of an abandoned theater now seemed so much grander. I wished I could have gone in and seen that wall. Maybe I’d come back and try sometime.

I went to the Arcade and got Mabel’s smokes, but as I was getting ready to head on over to Fifth and Main I realized just where I was and what I had a chance to do.

On Downtown Sunday my dad went to the movies (either the Midland or the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building, they were right across the street from one another); then he’d get some candy or comic books afterward (the Arcade News Stand had been in the same place for fifty years); and then the old men sitting on the steps of the building on the corner.

Which meant the site of the old Farmer’s Building and Loan.

Less than two blocks away.

Without realizing it, I had already walked two-thirds of the same route my dad had covered every Downtown Sunday when he was a child.

It wasn’t exactly like following in his footsteps, and it wasn’t as if he’d known I’d overheard him that night or would ever know now what I was about to do, but I’d just been given the chance to honor his memory by retracing his steps through one of his best memories.

How could I not walk over there?

It would be nice to say that I saw the square in a completely different light, much as I had the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building, but the truth was this area of Cedar Hill looked and felt just the same to me as it had any of the hundreds of times I’d walked these streets; tired-looking though dependable brick- and wood-fronted buildings, some with shingled roofs, some with aluminum, others-old war-horses who’d stood the test of time and the seasons and were damned proud of it so why change now-still sporting thick layers of tar paper over two-by-fours: the sturdy, inoffensive banality of a small Midwestern downtown. Nothing about its current state, nor the way it existed in my own childhood memories, made it special.

What did make it special was knowing that, back there, just over that way, fifty or sixty years ago, the child who would grow up to become my dad had come along this exact path, walked past many of these same storefronts, and had probably used the same crosswalk I was approaching.

Maybe this could serve as some small gesture of thanks.

I passed the Hallmark store, the shoe store beside it, and was moving toward the crosswalk when a man in his thirties who’d been walking ahead of me suddenly veered to the right and kicked a small cat that had been pacing him for a few yards. The cat wasn’t being pushy or annoying, wasn’t running figure-eights between his feet as he tried to move along, it was just walking beside him, minding whatever passed for its own fuzzy business, when this jerk, for no apparent reason, decided to swing around and drop-kick it into a doorway.

The cat reeled ass-over-teakettle, spitting out one of those uncanny, almost macabre screech-yowls of pain and fear that you can feel all the way in the back of your teeth, then hit the doorway with a solid whump! before spin-rolling back onto its stomach, legs splayed. It scrabbled its claws against the concrete but quickly found enough purchase to stand and shake some of the What-the-hell-was -that- about? from its stunned and wide-eyed face. It narrowed its eyes, licked a corner of its mouth, gave the tiniest of shudders, and then released a thin, dinky meep noise so full of confusion and physical hurt that I was ashamed to be a member of the human race in its presence. It looked up at me and blinked as if to ask: Did I offend? Please don’t hurt me. I’ll give you rubbies.

I walked toward it, slowly, then knelt down and held out my hand. The cat gave my fingers a perfunctory sniff, then-in obvious pain-leaned forward to rub itself against my hand, the metal tag on its collar clicking against my watch band.

“Bad day?” I whispered to it.

Before the cat had a chance to answer I glanced up to see where Drop-Kick had disappeared to: he was turning down an alley between two buildings near the corner of the crosswalk. He’d never given the cat a second thought, just kicked the shit out of it to break up the dreary routine of his day and then kept going without so much as a backward glance.

It’s good to be exposed to such naked, unself-conscious displays of compassion; it enriches one.

I never stopped to consider that something might go wrong (whatever part of my mind that governed rationality was still wandering around back at the cemetery); I just rose to my feet and followed him double-time into the alley.

He sauntered along, then stopped for a moment, stretched his back, and knelt down to re-tie one of his shoelaces.

That’s when I took him.

I ran forward, pulled back my right leg at the last moment, did a half-pirouette, and threw everything I had into the kick; my foot connected solidly- wham-o! -with his ribs, knocking him back and down in a fast blur of flailing hands and other equally befuddled body parts. The side of his skull smacked against the alley floor and for a moment I thought he might have been knocked unconscious, but then he shook head, winced, and pressed both hands against his ribs, groaning.

I glowered over him. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that hurts? ”

“Oh, man… ow!-what the fuck’re you… oh, man…”

I thought I heard the soft crackle of chipped bone scraping against chipped bone; I know that wasn’t the case, but for that moment imagining that I did hear his damaged ribs whimpering under his skin filled me with a gleeful, nasty sort of satisfaction every person should feel once during their life, if only to know they never want to experience it again.

His face reddened under a fresh wave of pain, then he pulled in a deep breath and looked at me. “I’m gonna fuck you up, asshole.” And he began to stagger to his feet.

The smart thing to do was run.

So, naturally, I just stood there.

He slipped, his back pressed against the wall, then he caught his balance and shoved forward with one of his hands; as he did this he looked quickly up and down the alley to make sure there weren’t going to be any witnesses to the plague of biblical proportions he was about to unleash on my face; left, right… and then a slow double-take: Huh? What the-?

At both ends of the alley, sitting almost unnaturally still but with oh-so-attentive eyes, a group composed equally of dogs and cats of various sizes watched us with stark, unblinking interest. There must have been over a dozen animals in all.

Drop-Kick had almost fully pushed himself away from the wall when I shot out a foot and kicked his leg from underneath his bulk, sending him crashing ass-first to the ground one more time.

I stared at him, parted my hands before me- Well? -then turned and walked out toward the crosswalk.

The animals at this end of the alley moved so I could pass, but none of them seemed in any hurry to leave.

At the corner, the injured cat-now moving a bit more steadily-came up to me and rubbed its face against my leg. I smiled at it, thought about just picking it up and taking it home with me, then looked up when I heard the signal click over to “Walk.”

I stopped with one foot off the curb.

Across the street at the Farmer’s Building and Loan, an old hound dog sat on the top concrete step staring directly at me.

I knew this wasn’t the same hound dog from my dad’s childhood, I did, really, but there was an odd moment between seeing it and allowing its presence to fully register when I thought, Maybe…?

I shook it off but didn’t move to cross the street.

I looked down at the cat by my leg. It blinked at me, seemed to outwardly sigh, then turned its head in the dog’s direction.

From the top of the steps, the dog looked from me to the cat, and for the next few moments I just kept moving my gaze between them; the dog, the cat, the dog, moron with his leg cocked up in the air.

I pulled my foot back onto the curb just as the dog released a short, sharp bark. The cat, in response, moved its head up and down. They looked at each other once again, the dog licked its nose, and the cat blinked one eye.

Winked, rather.

The cat winked at the dog:

This meeting is concluded and the board has decided that rubbies were, indeed, the proper course of action under these circumstances…

The dog barked again, three times, much louder, and the cat released a long, high yowl, this one of the “Just-letting-you-know-I’m-here” variety.

When I looked at the cat now, I noticed for the first time the small blue plastic tag attached to the back of its ear.

In the back of my brain, something fumbled for a light switch and cleared its throat: Ah-hem. Hello. Over here. Anybody?

Where did I know this from?

Across the street, the hound dog lay down, its great floppy ears spreading out on either side of its head. I could not make out whether or not it also had a blue tag attached, but that thought fled with its tail between its legs as soon as I heard the guy back in the alley cry out.

The animals had moved into the alley and surrounded him. He was still ass-down against the wall, and a couple of the larger dogs-one of them a seriously grim-looking German shepherd-loomed on either side of his head, their noses so close to his ears I wondered if he could hear anything besides their wet, heavy breathing. The rest of the animals pressed near his sides and legs; every few seconds one of them would reach up and gently swat him with a paw, seemingly just to watch him jump or hear him yelp.

He saw me looking and said (not loudly, but with great panic nonetheless): “Hey, buddy… no hard feelings, okay? Could you”-He jumped as the German shepherd, with a low snarl, nuzzled his face for an instant-“gimme some help here? Call the cops or the fuckin’ pound or Wild Kingdom or someone?”

Though there was nothing overtly threatening in the way the animals stood, there was no doubt in my mind that this guy was going to be in a lot of painful trouble if they decided they didn’t like him; at least half of them, as far as I could see, had a small blue plastic tag attached to the back of their ear.

Hello? Anybody home? (Tap-tap) Is this thing on?

The cat nudged my leg again, then growled. Not at me; at the animals in the alley.

I remember this next very clearly: The animals, as one, turned their heads to look at the cat, the cat gestured with its head toward the hound dog across the street, and as soon as the animals’ attention was on the dog, it rose from the steps and crossed the street to take its place on my other side.

It sat there for a moment, then yawned, shook itself, and licked my hand.

The animals in the alley focused their full attention on me. If they’d had arms, those arms would have been parted before them, silently asking: Well?

Life gives you many odd and marvelous gifts on a daily basis, if you take the effort to notice: the tinny, distant chords of music from an approaching ice-cream truck; the geometrically perfect formation held by a gaggle of geese as they fly overhead; being the first person in the morning to see the streetlights turn off; scanning through radio stations on a car radio and suddenly coming across a favorite, back-then song you haven’t heard or thought of in twenty years; the sound made by your teeth as they bite into a fresh apple; the scent of newly baked bread or pastries wafting from the door of a bakery; the way an attractive woman passing you on the street holds eye contact a few moments longer than is really needed… gifts. Common enough, but strange and wonderful when you catch them.

And then there are rare moments when the odd, strange, and marvelous gifts decide to tag-team your ass: getting a phone call from a person you’ve only just thought of after many years, and finding that they’d only just now thought of you, as well, and figured what the hell; finding an old photograph that you had convinced yourself long ago you’d imagined as having existed; knowing exactly, precisely what someone is going to do or say several minutes before they do; or finding yourself in the middle of a downtown square one afternoon with a dozen animals silently asking if they should let this guy walk away unharmed or not, it’s your call.

Gifts wonderful and strange and not to be questioned too much when they’re bestowed upon you.

I almost laughed from the craziness of it, then simultaneously shook my head and waved my hands forward in a quick gesture of dismissal: He’s not worth it.

I turned to go. The hound dog and cat where nowhere to be seen.

When I looked back down the alley not three seconds later, Drop-Kick was completely alone. The animals had vanished as silently and as quickly and totally as they’d appeared.

He looked at me with an unreadable expression on his face.

For some reason I had the sense Dad had just said You’re welcome to me.

I shrugged at Drop-Kick and walked off toward St. Francis de Sales where my widowed mother waited among the mourners for her son to return and Mabel was probably chewing through the back of a chair because she still didn’t have her smokes.

Just as some mistakes are too monstrous for remorse, some moments of wonder are too sublime for anyone who wasn’t there to understand. I never told anyone about what happened that afternoon; it was mine, only mine, and would always remain so.

Beth and Mabel stayed at our house for a couple of days until things started to settle, but despite all good intentions we started getting on each other’s nerves. There are, in my opinion, three stages to helping the grief-stricken: 1) Is there anything we can do?; 2) What else do you need?; and 3) Christ, what is it now?

We were skirting dangerously close to stage three when Beth pulled me aside one night and said we needed to talk. Mabel was in the living room teaching Mom to play pinochle, so we decided to sneak out for something to eat. We ended up at the A amp;W Drive-In where a roller-skating waitress brought us a tray of root beers, hot dogs, and onion rings. There was something comforting in the way that plastic tray hung on the side of the car window, something of the old days, high school weekends, all-night record parties, dancing with your girlfriend in the autumn moonlight, maybe stealing a kiss in the lilac shadows.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Like maybe you want to smother me in my sleep but are too polite to say so.”

She smiled. “For as big as that house is, it has sure seemed cramped the last day or so, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I took a bite from the steaming hot dog. It tasted like the end of all summers.

“I think Mabel and I should go back home tonight.”

“I figured as much.”

“Are you mad?”

“No, not really. I mean, no, not at all. I understand.”

“It’s just… you and your mom need some time alone. We’ve done all we can but we’re just getting in the way.” Which was true; I’d lost count of how many times I’d nearly walked in on one of them in the bathroom or opened the refrigerator to find my last bottle of Pepsi had been drunk by someone else.

“Can I call you if I need you?”

“Of course. Any time, you know that. And you’re still going to give Mabel rides to and from work, right?”

“Right.”

“So it’s not like we’re never going to see each other ever again.”

There was something she wasn’t telling me and I said as much.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said, not looking at me. “You remember all the stories I told you about my mother? How she was this famous stage actress?”

“Let me guess-you were lying?”

“Wow. You figured that out on your own and everything- of course I was lying. My mother is an old barfly who’d screw a crippled walrus if it bought her a drink. The last Mabel or I heard, she was living in a flop house in Kansas City with some biker. That doesn’t matter-the thing is, I always sort of wanted to try my hand at being an actress. I did some plays in high school and I wasn’t bad-”

“-you never told me you were in any plays. I would’ve come to see you if-”

“-I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of you, all right? But things are a lot different now. I want to do something else in my life, something different, something… I don’t know… more. Welsh Hills Players are having tryouts for Pippin next week and I thought I’d give it a shot.”

“That sounds great! ” I said, turning toward her and taking her hand. “ Man, I bet you’ll have fun.”

“The thing is, there might be a lot of rehearsals, which means a lot of evenings where we won’t get to see each other, and I don’t want that to be a problem.”

I shrugged. “I don’t see why it should. I could even come and watch you rehearse, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“God, no. Just promise you won’t laugh at me.”

“I won’t. Or if I do, I’ll go outside where no one can see me.” I leaned over and kissed her. “What brought on this sudden desire to return to the stage?”

“The way your dad died.”

I stared at her. Ever since the night of the call I had tried not to think about the manner in which he’d died. Dad operated a massive punch-press. It had all but cut him in half when he’d fallen in. I knew that everyone said he’d died instantly, but what the hell does that mean, really? If he’d lived long enough to see those teeth grind down a second time, it was too long. It had to have been agonizing, the pain and fear. Laying there with your guts oozing out, watching as this massive roof of iron teeth came down at you.

“I don’t understand.”

She squeezed my hand. “Remember how you told me he’d wanted to raise chickens for a living, be a farmer? I kept wondering if that was the last thing that went through his mind when he died: ‘I should have raised chickens like I wanted to.’ And it made me so damned sad. To die knowing that you were never really happy, feeling like maybe you’d wasted your life and no one would give a damn or remember you.”

“Please stop,” I said.

“What is it?”

I was starting to cry again and didn’t want to. I’d wondered the very same things. Maybe if he’d gone ahead and tried his hand at farming, he would have been happier, would have felt that his life was worthwhile, wouldn’t have started drinking so much.

“Just… don’t talk about Dad anymore right now, okay?”

She reached up and wiped a tear away from my eye. “Okay.”

We sat in awkward silence for a few moments, then-for some reason, maybe because it was the first non-Dad related thing to pop into my head-I asked her something that had been on my mind, off and on, for a while: “What was in that package you mailed?”

She tilted her head and blinked. “What package? When?”

“The day we took the dogs out. You went in that back room and you had a package when you came out.”

She gave a slight shake of her head. “I don’t know what you’re… are you sure I had something?”

“Yes.”

She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Sorry. Parts of that day are fuzzy. I was pretty upset.”

There was something she wasn’t telling me, and I knew it.

Of course, since we hadn’t so much as kissed over the past few weeks, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

“So, who is he?”

“Who?”

“The guy you’re dating? Someone who’s trying out for the show, as well?”

She sipped her root beer and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him with you. I don’t like talking about other guys with you, okay?”

“Okay…?”

“I’m sorry I brought up your dad, but I just don’t want to reach the end of my life and have only regrets. Does that make sense? Acting is something I’ve always wanted to pursue, so I’m going to. And don’t you worry-I’ve got no illusions about going to Broadway or being in the movies. Community theater is the ticket for me.”

“And I can come watch you rehearse?”

“And you can come watch me rehearse.”

I couldn’t come watch her rehearse; the director-a pretentiously flamboyant small-town ar- teest who was so enamored of his own incomparable brilliance it was everything he could do not to fuck himself twenty-four hours a day-wouldn’t allow it. Beth got the female lead and was scheduled to rehearse four nights a week, then-as opening night loomed closer-every weeknight and Saturday evenings, as well.

I took a part-time janitorial job to fill the evenings. I liked janitorial work; you were alone, it was quiet, no one was breathing down your neck, and at the end of the shift you could actually see what your labors had accomplished: a disaster area was now rebuilt and tidy, things shone where before they looked lightly sheened in rust, the smell of the bathroom was pleasant and clean, nothing crunched underfoot as you walked across the carpet, the windows now glistened. Let’s hear it for the bad-ass with his mop bucket and Windex.

I finished each night in plenty of time to take Mabel to work. On nights when I knew Beth’s rehearsal would run late, I stopped in and talked with Whitey so he could update my growing list of character flaws. At home, I took care of dinner and laundry and paying the bills and making sure that Mom didn’t discover where I’d hidden the rest of her medicine; after the first time I caught her trying to take a triple dose of sedatives-“Oh, hon, I didn’t think it would hurt anything, I’ve just been real jumpy” (which I didn’t buy for a second)-I made it a point to get one of those pill trays and fill only one compartment at a time with only the prescribed doses. I did this three times a day. I wanted to trust her, wanted to believe that she’d never try taking more than she was supposed to… but I didn’t.

I started to understand why Mabel sometimes seemed so depressed at the end of her shift; despite telling yourself you were doing this for someone’s good, you felt somewhat like a captor.

The week Beth’s show was to open, I picked up Mabel after I got off work, as usual. She said hello and asked me how my night had been, then sat staring out the window, nervous and tense, chewing at her thumbnail. I asked her if everything was all right and she mumbled something that was supposed to be in the affirmative, then returned to silence for most of the ride. As the nursing home came into view, she cleared her throat and said: “You won’t have to do this anymore after tonight.”

“I don’t mind, Mabel, really.” She’d been doing this a lot lately, telling me how bad she felt about imposing on my time, how she’d just find another nurse to ride with; for a while that’s endearing, then it just starts to offend. I did not want anything bad to come between us. “You don’t have to find someone to ride with, I-”

“Oh, no, it’s not that at all.” She smiled at me, a full, cheek-to-cheek smile that should have been radiant but instead seemed an affectation. “I’m buying a new car tomorrow morning. Got it all picked out, have the down payment, the whole nine yards.”

I pulled into our usual parking space, killed the engine, and looked at the building. The Cedar Hill Healthcare Center no longer looked like the same place; two new additions (a larger and more up-to-date Physical Therapy unit, as well as a second-and nicer-visiting area) gave the place an almost regal, ersatz-exclusive appearance, and a third addition-what would be a friendlier employee break area, complete with a bunk room for those working double shifts-was nearing completion. Whoever had taken over the place was making serious changes.

“The new owners must have some capital behind them,” I said.

“You have no idea.” Her smile wavered for a moment, then came back just as bright and twice as phony as before. “Beth wants the station wagon for God only knows what reason, so we’re going to get that fixed up, and I’ll have my own car. Do you know this is the first time in my life that I’ll have a car that’s all mine? The very first time. It’s nice to able to afford new things, better things. For the first time in my life I don’t go to bed worrying about having enough to pay the bills at the end of the month. You have no idea how good that feels to an old gal like me. So I figure I deserve a new car. You can come over and see it. Maybe I’ll even drive you around.” Cheerful words, mundane words, words you hear in various combinations every day from various people; someone’s getting a new car, independence, go where they want when they want… nothing special in these words.

Except that her inflections were all wrong. I don’t want this to sound histrionic, because there was nothing overtly dramatic about it; it’s just that as I’d come to know what Beth was feeling through her body language and silences, I’d come to know Mabel’s moods through her speech patterns, her tones and inflections and pauses, and that evening they were wrong; her tone would rise where it should have lowered, she’d stretch out syllables for no reason, her volume would sometimes go from a normal conversational level to a near-shout to a conspiratorial whisper in the same phrase, once even in the same word. A stranger meeting her for the first time would assume that she was just a little tense and distracted; I knew that something dire was going on and she wasn’t talking about it, and it was going to end badly. I had seen this happen enough with Mom to know when someone was about to implode.

“Okay, Mabel, c’mon. It’s me, okay? What’s the matter?”

She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. “There shouldn’t be anything wrong. I don’t know why I’m acting like this. You get to be my age, you learn to live with things that bug the shit out of you; you learn not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Did you just skip to the end of this conversation or did I miss something?”

“Huh?” She looked at me, blinked, and shook a small but at least genuine smile onto her face. “I, uh… I’m sorry. I guess I drifted off for a minute.”

“What gift horse? What’re you talking about?”

She pulled in another drag, let the smoke curl in front of her face for a moment, then exhaled. “It’s been so great since they took over, it really has. We’ve got new uniforms, extra help, better food, the working atmosphere has never been so good, and the money… Lord, I’m making almost twice what I was making this time last year, and that’s on top of the great bonus we got for-” Her eyes flashed a quick oh-shit and she left the sentence unfinished.

“The bonus you got for…?” I prompted, then it came to me: “The confidentiality agreement. Is that it?”

“I really can’t. I just”-She reached over and took my hand-“really can’t talk about it. The way I figure it, I’m just about a year away from having everything paid off and being able to afford a house-not just rent a nicer one, but buy one. Do you know I’ve never owned a home? Isn’t that a pisser? It would be nice to spend the third act of my life in my own home. And if I don’t screw up, if I do what I agreed to and keep this job, then I can have all that. Is that so bad? Does that make me callous? Is it such a terrible thing to want an actual home and peace of mind? Christ, I’ve spent so much of my life worrying over one thing or another that by the time I took a real breath it was halfway over.”

“No one’s saying you haven’t worked hard for everything, it’s just-”

“-and I’m not going to find anyone, you know.” This followed by a phlegm-filled, bitter, ugly little laugh. “Sure, if I lived in San Francisco or Los Angeles or someplace like that, someplace where they don’t look down on you because you’re gay, I might stand a chance. But look at me-I’m an old gal. Whatever chance I had for a great romance in my life has long past, so if I’m going to be the lovable old-maid aunt, why can’t I at least be comfortable and content? Dammit, I’ve helped people, you know? I’ve cared for them when no one else wanted to-and not just because it was my job, understand. I did it because I wanted what was best for them. All of them. This is no different, really. Is it?”

Look up “bemused” in the dictionary and you’ll find a picture of my face at that moment. “What the hell is wrong, Mabel? Why are you talking like this?”

She squeezed my hand and opened the car door. “I have no idea. They say the mind is the first thing to go.”

I held on to her; I wasn’t going to let this drop. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“What I’m not supposed to. Maybe I’ll be able to explain it someday, but not now. I don’t know. I keep my word. I’ve always kept my word, that’s important. For right now will you just answer a question?”

“Sure thing.”

“Am I a bad person?”

“God, no! You’re one of the finest people I’ve ever met. Why would you even ask-”

She pulled away from me and closed the door. “I’ve got a ride for later. I’m going straight to the dealership when I get off. Come by later this week and see the new car. I’ll drive us to Beth’s opening night.”

I watched her go inside, then started the car and drove away. I was almost home when I jerked the wheel around, made an illegal U-turn, and went back. Maybe Whitey would still be up and could tell me something. Even if he wasn’t up, I’d shake his ass awake. I figured I was owed one genuinely rude interruption.

I parked in my usual spot and started to go through the back entrance.

It was locked. Not only that, but it now required a card-key to open. Something made a whirring mechanical noise over my head and I looked up in time to see a security camera pirouette on its wall-mount and point at me.

I did what we’ve all done at one time or another-made a goofy face and waved. A few moments later one of the regular shift nurses-Arlene-appeared at the door and used her card-key to open it. “Let me guess-Mabel forgot something?”

“Maybe I just wanted to flirt with you.” Arlene was sixty if she was a day.

“Maybe if I was twenty years younger I’d drag you into the linen closet and make you do more than flirt.” She opened the door wider and let me in. “But my husband wouldn’t like it.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” I said, moving past her.

“Mabel’s in the break room having coffee. Come get me when you need to leave and I’ll let you out.”

I pointed at the new lock. “Has there been much of this? I mean the new security?”

“They’re turning this place into something out of that 2001 movie, I swear. You need card-keys to move between units now, and every hall has its own camera and a microphone so we can hear if anyone calls out for help. You’d think we were guarding the gold at Fort Knox. There’re even three more full-time security guards, two inside and one covering the grounds for each shift. We’re getting to be quite the place, we are.”

“I don’t have to worry about being stopped or something, do I?”

“No,” she said, reaching into her pocket and removing a plastic credit-card-looking thing at the end of a dark ribbon. “Just make sure you wear this where it can be seen.” She draped the visitor’s pass over my neck. “You have to wear one of these at night-even a fixture like you.”

“‘Fixture.’ Oooh. I love it when you talk like an interior decorator. Tell me about accouterments next. Whisper about them slowly.”

“You are the most evil boy, aren’t you?”

“I get a lot of complaints about that, yes.”

“Who said I was complaining?” And with that Arlene led me to the unit and left me to my own devices. The break room was in the hall opposite the one leading to Whitey’s room, so it didn’t exactly take a lot of sneaking and skulking to get to his room-though I was anxiously aware that I was on camera now.

I passed the room which had been the former home of the Captain Spalding Brothers and slowed. The new occupant-who for the moment had the room to herself-was sitting in her wheelchair, asleep in front of a color television displaying a muted re-run of The Waltons. There was a vibrantly green potted plant on the windowsill, several books stuffed between a set of hand-carved cherry-wood bookends, themselves shaped like books; an antique Tiffany lamp whose stained-glass shade glowed softly from the 40-watt bulb underneath, diffuse sunlight warming church windows. A patchwork quilt lay neatly folded at the foot of her bed, while the head was covered in an assortment of small, colorful pillows. There were framed photographs hanging on the wall next to her bed; a black and white wedding picture, so faded around the edges it looked like something glimpsed through a fog; several color photographs of the same cat and dog taken years apart, the cat going from a bright-eyed gray-furred kitten to something that looked like an overused feather duster with a rheumy gaze, the dog journeying from its days as a square-bodied bundle of muscles and legs to an arthritic bundle atop an old throw rug that, like the animal lying on it, had seen better days. I wondered if the animals were still alive, and then why there were no pictures of children and grandchildren anywhere to be seen. Everything about the room and the woman sleeping in the chair whispered of weariness, of too much quiet, not enough voices and visitors. A lamp, a quilt, some books, a television, and frozen moments from memory framed on the walls; this is what her life had come down to. I wondered if any of those books were poetry collections, if perhaps it contained any Browning, if she had certain well-thumbed pages marked for easy finding or knew them by heart; did she ever fall asleep repeating snippets of sonnets in her mind as she looked at the frozen moments from her life?

My heart is very tired, my strength is low, My hands are full of blossoms plucked before, Held dead within them till myself shall die .

I knew Whitey would kick my ass up between my shoulders if he knew I was thinking these things. (“Know what your name would have been if you’d’ve been born an Indian? ‘Dark Cloud.’ Trust me on this. They wouldn’t have had to worry about having their land stolen by the White Man and then being systematically slaughtered, no. You would’ve depressed them to death!”)

I smiled at the thought, wished this sleeping woman pleasant dreams and a happy day to come (I also couldn’t help but smile at the bumper sticker someone had pasted to the back of her wheelchair: I ACCELERATE FOR FUZZY BUNNIES), then headed on down to Whitey’s room.

His door was closed.

I stood there staring at the thing, my poised fist frozen in mid-knock.

Maybe this was part of the new security measures, keeping the doors closed at night-but then why hadn’t Miss Acceleration’s door been closed, as well? No, this wasn’t what it appeared to be, it couldn’t be, I wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t allow it. Whitey might not be in the best shape, but it had only been three days since I’d last seen him (he wasn’t very talkative and insisted he wasn’t feeling well, though I suspected he was just depressed and wanted to be left alone) and I refused to believe that anything had happened to him. Mabel would have told me. I knocked, then waited for him to shout something insulting.

Nothing.

I grabbed the door handle and began to open it when the rest of it finally registered: his nameplate had been removed from its slot in the wall next to the door, the clipboard that held his chart was no longer hanging on its hook underneath his name, and the lights in the room were off. Whitey always kept the bathroom light on at night so he didn’t have to stumble through the dark to take a leak.

If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine, I thought. Right now it’s dark and you’re not looking at anything that confirms what you’re trying not to think about, so for this moment, in the dark, Whitey’s here and sleeping and everything’s the way it was the last time you were here.

The smart thing to do was not turn on the light. I’d lost too many people recently. Dad was chewed up and dead and gone, Mom might as well be dead for all the joy she found in her day-to-day existence, and I’d seen so little of Beth for the last six weeks she might as well have been in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. I would not allow another person to slip away from me. And the best way to ensure that would be to do the smart thing, and the smart thing was not to turn on the light.

I turned on the light.

Two beds, both empty. No television, no video tape machine, no pictures, no books in precarious stacks; nothing in the closets but hangers, nothing in the restroom except an unused roll of toilet paper, a full soap dispenser, and a tub and sink that were desert-dry.

I stood in the empty room shaking my head while something in the middle of my chest tried to snap through my rib cage. This was not-repeat not -happening. Maybe I’d gone into the wrong room, it could happen. So there I was back out in the hall checking the room number and it was the right number but that didn’t mean anything, Whitey was always bitching about how little space he had in there so maybe they’d just moved him to another room, a bigger room, one big enough to hold all of his stuff and leave space for his ego, left side first, I went down the left side of the hall first, checking and double-checking the names next to the doors and Whitey’s wasn’t among them, so now it up the right side, double- and triple-checking the names and it wasn’t there, either; I reached the end of the hall and went left toward the break room because Mabel was there and she’d know, she could tell me what was going on – unless she didn’t know, unless something happened earlier today and the detritus had already been cached away and no one had told her – the door to the break room stood half-opened. I started to push my way inside when I heard Mabel say, “It’s probably for the best,” but there was something in her voice that told me she was simply parroting a practiced response, that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but wanted whomever she was talking with to think she did. Then a male voice replied, “It’s always for the best, it’s important you remember that.” Then I had the door open and was standing there long enough to see that the man she was speaking to was dressed in an expensive gray suit with white shirt and blue tie and wore a bowler hat on his head that was pulled down to cover the top half of his ears-then he noticed me.

“This area is for sanctioned personnel only,” he said. His face and voice were both granite.

I reached down and fumbled at the thing hanging around my neck. “I’ve got a visitor’s pass.”

“That doesn’t matter-you shouldn’t be in here. What’s your name?”

Mabel’s face drained of color the second I answered his question but I figured it was more out of concern that she was about to get into trouble. I decided to play it safe and act as if I didn’t know her, like I was just some schlub off the street who couldn’t find his butt with both hands, a floodlight, and a seven-man search party.

“I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted anything but I was looking for… for my uncle, Marty Weis?” I pointed over my shoulder, looking directly at Mabel. “His room’s empty, ma’am. Has he been moved to another unit?”

Mabel released a breath and said to Bowler-Hat, “I’ll take care of this,” then walked over and gestured for me to move toward the nurse’s desk. As we walked down the hall she slapped an iron clamp that looked like her hand on my elbow. “How the hell did you get in?”

I looked back to see Bowler-Hat standing outside the break room, watching her escort me out. “Arlene let me in, she said-”

“-she shouldn’t have let you in. Unless it’s an emergency, there are now no visitors allowed after eight-thirty.”

“I’m sorry, Ma-uh, ma’am, I didn’t know.” She shot a quick thank-you glance at me when I said “ma’am.” “Where is he?”

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us,” she said, a little too loudly. She pulled me past the nurse’s desk toward the hallway where I’d entered; her entire body was rigid and we were moving a little too fast.

“Please tell me what happened.”

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us, sir. You can call the Admissions office after nine tomorrow morning.” We turned down the hall and moved toward the door. After a few steps Mabel looked back over her shoulder, then doubled her pace, yanking me along. Her grip on my arm tightened.

“That hurts,” I whispered.

“Jesus, I wish you hadn’t told him your name.”

“So what? Big deal-what’s he going to do, issue an APB?”

Mabel swiped her card-key as she none-too-gently spun me around and began to push the door open with my back. “Listen, you know I love you, right?”

“What the-aren’t you worried about him hearing you?”

“He didn’t follow us and this hall isn’t monitored. You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah…?”

“And you know I don’t say or do anything without a damn good reason, right?”

“Yeah…?”

“Good.” She blinked, then gave a weak, unreadable smile. “You need to leave right now and go home and not come around here or the house for a little while, a couple of weeks, at least, okay?”

“Where’s Marty? He didn’t… didn’t-”

“-Mr. Weis is no longer with us. That’s all I can tell you.” Then she silently mouthed the words He’s fine while slowly shaking her head. “Please do this for me, will you? Go home and stay away for a couple of weeks.”

“But… but what’s… I mean-”

“Do it for me, please?” This wasn’t just out of concern for her job-there was hard, raw, genuine fear in her voice. Before I could say anything else she pushed me outside, closed and locked the door, then spun around and returned to the unit, not giving me so much as a brief backward glance. I was just some schlub off the street.

Back home in the kitchen I put all of Mom’s morning medications in their compartment and then went to bed, where I lay weeping for another hour or so before there was a soft knock on my door and Mom stuck her head inside.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said in the same clipped, melodramatic way we’ve all said it when we’re upset and don’t want to say Everything is awful and I just want to die so leave me the hell alone, please.

She held the collar of her tattered blue housecoat closed as she looked out in the hall toward the stairs. “Well, try to keep it down, will you? Your dad will be upset something terrible if he comes home and finds you this way.”

I stared at her; she stood silhouetted in the doorway like some wisp of a dream that lingers in the eyes for a moment upon waking. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize, hon, it’s all right. We just don’t want to upset him. He works so hard.”

“I know.”

She started to close the door, then said: “Is it time for my medicine?”

“Not yet, you take it in the morning.”

“Well, it is the morning. It’s after midnight, isn’t it?”

“Go back to bed, Mom. Take it when you get up again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good boy, you know that?”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She looked at me for a few more moments, then closed the door.

After another half hour I got up and put on my headphones and listened to records until a little past eight-thirty. The songs-some of them were old even back then-wove a curious kind of safety cocoon; this one came out when I was in sixth grade; this one was playing the first time I told so-and-so that I liked her in the eighth grade and she didn’t laugh at me-didn’t kiss me, either, but at least didn’t laugh; and this one, this one I always listened to by myself because it struck at something deep inside me that I didn’t want anyone else to know about because they might make fun of it or find a way to use it against me when they were mad or just feeling mean and needed to take it out on someone.

Around nine I took off the headphones and called the Cedar Hill Healthcare Center, asking to speak to someone in Admissions. As soon as they answered I gave them the same bullshit story about being Marty Weis’s nephew and how I’d tried to visit him last night, cha-cha-cha. It wasn’t hard to sound scared and confused.

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us,” said the Admissions person.

“I know that, ma’am, I was just wondering if you could tell me where he’s gone.”

“Mr. Weis was checked out of our facility two days ago.” Was checked out, not Checked himself out.

“Can you tell me who checked him out? Was it his daughter from Los Angeles?”

“I can’t give out that information, sir, and no forwarding address was provided.”

This went on for about ten minutes, I was transferred to three different people, all of whom gave me the same story, word for word: Mr. Weis is no longer with us.

I hung up while being transferred yet again, paced my room for a few minutes, then lay back down on my bed and listened to some more music.

Then I fell asleep, and dreamed of Mom standing over her medicine in the kitchen.

I jolted awake, snapping up my head so fast I heard the bones in my neck crack and felt a sharp stab of pain.

Something had happened.

Something was wrong.

I had no idea how I knew this, but the feeling was too strong to be ignored.

Yanking off the headphones, I headed downstairs. If I remembered filling the compartment and replacing the lids on the bottles, then I must have put the meds back in their hiding place as I usually did; even half-awake, your body more times than not will remember certain physical routines even if your brain doesn’t.

She was sitting at the table, face-down, her nose pressed against the Local section of The Cedar Hill Ally. One hand was still clutching the newspaper, the other held the cup of now-cold coffee she’d taken the pills with.

The radio was tuned to the local classical music station. It was playing something from some opera, Mom being the opera fan.

On the counter, five bottles of prescription medications sat where I’d left them last night. The “Morning” compartment was unopened, as were all the bottles except one-the sedatives; that bottle lay on its side, displaying the depth of the nothing it contained.

Oh, hon, I didn’t think it would hurt anything, I’ve just been real jumpy.

I knew she was dead before I even touched her. I sat there, holding her hand and saying over and over again: “You rest now, Mom, you’ve earned it. You rest now, Mom…”

I wondered what song I’d been listening to when she’d died. I wondered if she’d tried calling up to me but I didn’t hear her because of the headphones. I wondered if she’d died thinking that her life had been wasted and no one would remember her. “… you’ve earned it. You can rest now…”

I wondered if her hands had ever held blossoms.

I made the necessary calls, I waited with her body until the coroner’s wagon and police arrived; I answered all their questions, let the police collect the items they requested, and agreed to come down to the station later that day and let them take my prints. (“A formality,” said the officer. “It will help us make a determination.”) After they left, I called Criss Brothers Funeral Home and told them what happened and, yes, I could come over in a little while and make the arrangements; then it was only a matter of gathering together all the necessary papers (insurance information, etc., which Mom kept in the same metal filing box with everything relating to Dad’s death), calling what few relatives Mom still had in the area, and going about the rest of the awful business.

A lot of the next several days is something of a blur, so I’ll skip around and just hit the high points, if you don’t mind: her death was ruled accidental, I was not charged with gross negligence or anything else, her doctor was quick to mention her depression and confused state of mind, and the fact that she’d lost her husband only four weeks before confirmed for everyone that the entire incident was a terrible tragedy. Her obituary ran three short paragraphs and read more like a job resume than the summation of a life. Her remains were cremated (she’d been very specific about this for as long as I’d been alive) and placed in the finest urn Criss Brothers had to offer. There was a brief and bleak memorial service held in the chapel at the funeral home with about thirteen people, myself included, in attendance. When all was said and done, I was left sole owner of an empty, paid-for house, and had a respectable amount of money left from their insurance policies. At twenty-one, I was “set” for a good while, provided I used my resources intelligently.

The memorial service was held the Friday morning Beth’s show was scheduled to open. The night before she called at eight-thirty from a phone at the theater. I hung up as soon as I heard her voice. Less than a minute later the phone rang again and I let the answering machine pick up.

“Listen,” she said, “we’re taking a dinner break. The dress rehearsal was a disaster and we’re running through the whole thing again at ten. We need to talk and-God! I just heard how stupid that sounds. I’m so sorry about your mom, I really am, and so is Mabel. Did you get the flowers we sent? I’d really like to come to the service tomorrow morning. I would’ve called sooner but I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to-”

I picked up the receiver. “I love you, Beth, and we should be together, and you know it. I feel so alone right now, and I could just

… never mind. I don’t think I want to talk right now.”

“Then don’t say anything, just listen for a minute, okay?

“Happiness scares the hell out of me, it always has. I mean, it’s great at the time but I know it’s never going to last. I didn’t come to live with Mabel right away, you know. Mom tried palming me off on other relatives for a long time, and I’d stay with them for a couple of weeks, a month maybe, but eventually they’d always send me back because I was in the way, or didn’t get along with their cat, or made them nervous or whatever. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, how I concentrated on changing myself, remaking myself so they’d like me better and want to keep me, it was never good enough. This went on for a few years, and after the first couple of times I learned how to adapt, okay? I wasn’t going to be in any place for very long, so I found a way to make fast friends. Mostly boys. If I put out, they didn’t treat me like I was some kind of dog. And I’d spent so long being treated that way I started to believe that’s what I was-I still do, sometimes. But you spread your legs for them and you’re the most beautiful girl in the world, even if it’s just for one night. I knew it was okay to enjoy their company and stuff and not care about the consequences because I wasn’t going to be around long enough for anything I said or did to matter. I learned to trust happiness only if it was temporary, because then it’s okay when it ends. You can always find another quick fix in the next place.

“Then Mabel took me in and that was that. I stayed. And that meant having to trust I’d be happy for the long run, but the long run wasn’t in my repertoire so I just kept acting like I was going to be moving on any day now. But I didn’t. I stayed. Then one day I meet the cutest little boy in the world while I’m in the hospital and even though he’s only nine he acts like he’s thirty and I know that he’s going to be something really great when he grows into himself. And he was, and I loved him-I still love him, even though he can’t see what a great person he is. I got… I got comfortable, all right? And I always associated ‘comfortable’ with bored, because I always wanted things to be new, do you understand? I hate that about myself, but things are only interesting to me when they’re new- that’s when I feel the most alive. So anytime I’d start feeling bored, I’d see someone else for a week or so and that was new, I made myself new with them, and it was exciting and unpredictable and when it ended, when I’d get back in sync with you, we were new again. I’ve just been so used to re-making myself for so long that I couldn’t stop.

“I know that doesn’t justify what I’ve done-what I’ve been doing-and I’m not trying to make excuses, right? I just wanted to give you an explanation because I do love you and I’ve hurt you so much and you didn’t deserve it and if there’s anything I can do, any way to make it good again, to fix things, to make you feel less alone-”

“-are you done?”

A soft breath, a softer swallow. “Yes.”

I looked at the room in which I was sitting, at the furniture and the small bits of dust here and there and the faded pictures on the mantel and decided that I couldn’t remain here. This was an alien shelter in an alien world where outside the walls people you thought you knew were just stacks of carbon hiding behind the scrim of humanity you put in front of them so you wouldn’t have to deal with what they really were.

“I’m sorry you got bored with me. And I’m sorry there’s no way this can ever be fixed. I can’t be your friend anymore. I love you… I love you too much in another way for that, so I can’t be your friend anymore and that makes me sad. Please don’t come to the service tomorrow, and please don’t ever call me again. I hope the show goes well. Break a leg.”

I hung up. She did not call back.

I spent the next two weeks making all the necessary arrangements to leave Cedar Hill, stopping only long enough to eat or sleep, neither of which I did in any great quantity. Pippin received decent reviews, especially for Beth.

I gave notice at work. I stored most of the furniture and all of the keepsakes. I hired a cleaning crew to come in and scrub the place from top to bottom. I hosed down the outside until the aluminum siding shone. I had a landscaper come in and fix the lawn, adding flowers and plants out front and a pair of small trees in the backyard. Both Mom and Dad had often remarked how they’d wished we had more shade back there.

One of the offices I cleaned nights was a downtown real estate firm. I showed up an hour early on one of my last nights and spoke with the manager, who was all too happy to help make arrangements to put the house on the market. I gave her all the necessary information on the house, as well as the bank account number where the funds were to be deposited, and told her I would call with my new address as soon as I was settled. We made copies of the keys, signed some forms, and shook hands.

I decided to go down to Kansas and visit my grandmother for a while. She was old and not in the best of health and had cried for an hour on the phone when I called to tell her about her daughter’s accidental death. She had neither the strength nor the money to make the trip to Ohio for the service. I wanted to be around her for as long as she might still be alive; I wanted to be around someone who’d known my mother as a child and could tell me things about her that I’d never known. Dad’s mother never entered into the picture; she never liked me and I never liked her, so there would be no love lost between us.

Two nights before I planned to leave, I was sitting in the middle of the emptied living room reading an excellent biography of the late blues guitarist Roy Buchanan when it suddenly occurred to me that I never knew what Mom’s or Dad’s favorite song was. I have no idea where the thought came from, but once it entered my head it would not leave, and soon-after polishing off half a twelve-pack of Blatz (Dad’s beer of choice)-I started to cry. It seemed to me that someone should have cared enough to ask either of them if they even had a favorite song and, if they did, should have cared enough to remember what it was. So I focused on that until my head felt like it was going to implode.

The ringing of the phone jarred something back into place, and as soon as I answered, the first thing out of my mouth was, “ ‘Kiss an Angel Good Morning.’ Mom’s favorite song was-”

On the other end, someone burst into sobs.

I shook myself back into the moment at hand and said, “Hello? I’m sorry about-who is this?”

Beth spluttered out my name, then said: “I’m s-s-sorry, I know y-you said not to call but s-ssomething’s happened and I… ohgod… please come over. I can’t ask anyone else t-to-”

I was sitting up straight, every nerve in my body twitching. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“… gotta… gottadosomethingwiththeanimals now, I d-d-don’t know what I’m supposed to… She said everything was okay, I asked her, you know? ‘Everything’s fine now,’ that’s what she said…”

Forget the lies and feelings of betrayal and the anger and rage and pain and jealousy and everything else; when someone you love calls you in the middle of the night in hysterics, you tell your pride to screw itself and go to them without another thought.

I pulled up in front of house and knew right away something wasn’t right. For one thing, it looked as if every light in the place was on; Beth and especially Mabel were frugal as hell when it came to utilities-neither one of them would have left that many lights burning; for another thing, the U-boat was gone and Mabel’s new car (a tan Toyota Tercel, a very smart and sensible car) sat in the driveway; it was well past two A.M. and Mabel should have been at work. The third thing I discovered when I went to knock on the door.

The house was unlocked.

This was not the worst neighborhood in Cedar Hill, but you wouldn’t live here on “Renter’s Row” unless you absolutely had to.

I entered and closed the door behind me. I called out for Beth and, getting no answer, Mabel.

Nothing.

I took a deep breath, my heart triphammering, and immediately began to cough and sneeze. It smelled like the place hadn’t been cleaned in days; everything was sopped in the stench of animal shit and old urine mixed with the musty scent of shed fur and… something else. Something meaty and rotten. It was so overpowering I ran into the bathroom and threw up.

Breathing through my mouth, I checked the kitchen and backyard, then Beth’s room.

She was gone, and so were all the Its.

Finally I knocked on Mabel’s bedroom door; when there was no answer I began to open it and saw a piece of paper that had been taped there but had fallen to the floor. I picked up and unfolded the note. It was from Beth:

I couldn’t stay here any longer. I hadn’t been home in a couple of days. She must have done it while I was gone. I’m like you now. I’ve lost everyone. I’m so sorry for everything. There ought to be a place for people like us. I hope you can forgive me someday. This is why I don’t trust happiness. It’s better to leave and re-make yourself. It’s always been the best thing. I love you. Always remember that.

I opened the bedroom door and (If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine.)

– turned on the light.

The first thing I saw were all the pink- and rust-colored feathers scattered around the room, on the floor, sticking to the walls and curtains and light fixtures, but as I stepped closer to the mess on the bed I realized that the feathers had once been white. The dull buzz of flies sounded in my ears. The carpeting grew more and more damp the nearer I came to the bed. There were probably a thousand other smells and splotches and sights but the closer I moved toward the bed, the more my peripheral vision faded out until I could see only through a small, frozen, iris-out circle.

The upper half of the mattress and headboard were splattered in blood speckled with chunks of bone and mangled tissue. She’d dressed for work before lying down and placing the feather pillows over her face. After that it was a simple matter of pulling the pistol out of the drawer in her nightstand, pushing and prodding into the pillows until she could feel the barrel’s position through them, or maybe she’d already had the gun in her hand before she lay down, or maybe – one of the stained feathers dislodged from the overhead light and brushed against my shoulder on its way down.

The gun lay on the floor near the bed. I wasn’t about to touch it or anything else in the room. My chest was so tight I thought my lungs were going to collapse. Something was strangling me from within. My vision blurred because of something in my eyes. I reached up to wipe it away but made the mistake of moving at the same time. I stumbled over my own feet and fell onto the bed. I heard the muted splash as I hit the soaked remains of the pillows and the body underneath. I felt heavy tepid liquid slopping between my fingers and soaking into my shirt. It was all over me. I panicked and tried to push away but only managed to slip and fall face-first into the worst of it. I scrabbled around like a crab on a beach, tangling myself in gore-saturated sheets and wet feathers until, at last, I managed to grip the edge of the headboard and pull myself up. I lurched around, trying to wipe the blood from my eyes until I bumped into the dresser. I looked up and saw myself in the mirror and almost lost it. At least I didn’t scream. Not once. As much as I wanted to just throw back my head and let fly with a howl to bring down the house, I didn’t. I backed away from the bloody thing in the reflection, blinked, and saw what was on the floor by the other side of the bed.

Patients’ files.

I’d watched Mabel and the other nurses at the home make notations in enough of these things to recognize one on sight. What the hell had she been doing, bringing these home with her? One was enough to get her fired, but she must have had a couple dozen piled there. Blood pooled over the top file and ran down the sides of the others like fudge on a sundae. A thin stapled stack of papers lay off to the side of the pile. It too was bloodied, but words could still be seen peeking through the smears here and there. I knelt down and leaned close. It looked to be some kind of contract. I saw the word AGREEMENT in bold-face type; the rest of the upper line was hidden behind a small slop of blood. I moved closer. I made out Mabel’s name, and the words “in strictest confidence hereby agree” and knew what I was looking at. I scanned down the rest of the page, stopped, and came back to some words about a third of the way down the page I had seen on my first pass but hadn’t let register. between Keepers and

I heard the echo of her voice from the last time we’d had a real conversation: And if I don’t screw up, if I do what I agreed to and keep this job, then I can have all that. Is that so bad? Does that make me callous? Is it such a terrible thing to want an actual home and peace of mind?

“What the hell did you agree to?” I asked the silence of the dead room.

Am I a bad person?

A dial clicked numbers in the correct sequence and all the tumblers fell into place and a door opened and something awful stepped out to make itself partially known.

… gotta do something with the animals now, Beth had said.

I don’t remember if I closed the door behind me when I ran out of the house, nor do I know if anyone saw me leave, but since the police never showed up on my doorstep after that night I have to assume that I was not seen-or that if I was, no one cared. Around here, you were not your brother’s or sister’s keeper.

Around here, you were not your brother’s or sister’s…

… you were not your brother’s…

… you were not your…

… YOU WERE NOT…

… I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths.

(Cutting things off a little soon there, aren’t you, pal?)

I smoothed out the issue of Modoc flat on my lap, then opened to the last page once again.

… YOU WERE NOT YOUR BROTHER’S OR SISTER’S KEEPER.

I began to tear it in half, then thought better of it.

“You can’t force me to remember the rest of the night,” I said.

I opened to a random page.

WOULDN’T TAKE ANY BETS ON THAT ONE IF I WERE YOU, GIL.

This time I did rip it in half, then threw the sections onto the barn floor and ground them in to the hay, mud, and stink with the heel of my shoe.

“That was mine,” said Carson from the far end of the barn.

“I’ll buy you another one.”

“That’s okay. I won’t need it.”

I faced my nephew and said, “Carson, you need to tell me what’s going on, all right? I read the comic, and Long-Lost didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

“That’s ’cause you wouldn’t let him.”

I blinked. “What do you mean by that?”

He sighed, then rubbed the back of his neck. “I think it’s good that you said you like swans, UncGil.”

“What the fuck do swans have to do with any of this?”

Carson stared at me for a moment. “Don’t you know what it is that makes them special?”

I stormed over and grabbed him by the shoulders. “To hell with swans, Carson. And fuck Modoc, all right? Look at me. I’m scared, Carson, do you understand?”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He looked on the verge of tears. “But I gotta tell you something, okay?”

“All right.”

He threw himself against me and squeezed so hard I thought he was going to dislocate part of my back.

“I love you, UncGil. You took good care of me. I’m gonna miss you.”

“You’re going to-whoa, there, wait a second.” I pushed him back and looked into his eyes. “You’re not going to miss me, you’re not going anywhere.”

He nodded his head, silver tears spilling down his face. “Long-Lost says it’s time.”

My breath caught in my chest. “Time for what?”

“For you to know the first part of his story.” Carson walked over and bent down, picking up the comic book-which was now whole again.

“Here you go, UncGil. It’s just on the first page this time.”

“How do you know this?”

He shrugged. “The Great Scrim, it… I dunno… it kind of is pulled real tight here-you know, like when you wrap a sandwich too tight in plastic wrap? It kinda tears in places? Well, because this is where the Magic Zoo is, the Great Scrim is real tight like that, and it tears in a couple of places. And Long-Lost, he can make things happen where the tear is.” He opened to the first page and offered the comic to me. “I can’t read what it says, only you can.”

I did not take it from his hands-I wasn’t about to touch the goddamned thing. Instead, I leaned down to read:

DO YOU REMEMBER THE DREAM YOU HAD WHEN YOU CAUGHT PNEUMONIA, GIL? THE RAIN, THE SILVER CLOUD MADE BY THE MIST? YOU WERE SITTING ON A HILLSIDE, WATCHING A BOAT SAIL AWAY, AND YOU KNEW YOU HAD FRIENDS ABOARD THAT BOAT? OF COURSE YOU REMEMBER IT, I SENT IT TO YOU. THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO ME, GIL. BUT MAYBE YOU NEED TO A QUICK BIBLE LESSON. TRY THIS: “ AND NOAH WAS SIX HUNDRED YEARS OLD WHEN THE FLOOD OF WATERS WAS UPON THE EARTH.

AND NOAH WENT IN, AND HIS SONS, AND HIS WIFE, AND HIS SONS’ WIVES WITH HIM, INTO THE ARK, BECAUSE OF THE WATERS OF THE FLOOD. “THERE WENT IN TWO AND TWO UNTO NOAH INTO THE ARK, THE MALE AND THE FEMALE, AS GOD HAD COMMANDED NOAH. “OF CLEAN BEASTS, AND OF BEASTS THAT ARE NOT CLEAN, AND OF FOWLS, AND OF EVERY THING THAT CREEPETH UPON THE EARTH, “AND IT CAME TO PASS AFTER SEVEN DAYS, THAT THE WATERS OF THE FLOOD WERE UPON THE EARTH. IN THE SIX HUNDREDTH YEAR OF NOAH’S LIFE, IN THE SECOND MONTH, THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF THE MONTH, THE SAME DAY WERE ALL THE FOUNTAINS OF THE GREAT DEEP BROKEN UP, AND THE WINDOWS OF HEAVEN WERE OPENED. “AND THE RAIN WAS UPON THE EARTH FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS. “IN THE SELF-SAME DAY ENTERED NOAH, AND SHEM, AND HAM, AND JAPHETH, THE SONS OF NOAH, AND NOAH’S WIFE, AND THE THREE WIVES OF HIS SONS WITH THEM, INTO THE ARK; “THEY, AND EVERY BEAST AFTER HIS KIND, AND ALL THE CATTLE AFTER THEIR KIND, AND EVERY CREEPING THING THAT CREEPETH UPON THE EARTH AFTER HIS KIND, AND EVERY FOWL AFTER HIS KIND, EVERY BIRD OF EVERY SORT. “AND THEY WENT IN UNTO NOAH INTO THE ARK, TWO AND TWO OF ALL FLESH, WHEREIN IS THE BREATH OF LIFE. “AND THEY THAT WENT IN, WENT IN MALE AND FEMALE OF ALL FLESH, AS GOD HAD COMMANDED HIM: AND THE LORD SHUT HIM IN. “AND THE FLOOD WAS FORTY DAYS UPON THE EARTH; AND THE WATERS INCREASED, AND BARE UP THE ARK, AND IT WAS LIFT UP ABOVE THE EARTH.” … EVER TAKE A LOOK AT THAT STORY AND ASK YOURSELF, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? AFTER ALL, GIL, WEREN’T THERE MORE ANIMALS ABOARD THE ARK THAN HUMAN BEINGS? BUT WE’LL GET BACK TO THAT… ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW IS THAT GOD JUMPED THE GUN A LITTLE BIT. NOT EVERY ANIMAL MADE IT ONTO THE ARK, BECAUSE NOT EVERY ANIMAL HAD A MATE. TAKE ME, FOR INSTANCE. I WAS THE FIRST ANIMAL, ALL OTHERS SPRUNG FROM ME… YET WHEN IT CAME TIME FOR THE RAINY-DAY CRUISE, I WAS LEFT BEHIND! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THAT HURT MY FEELINGS, GIL? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW ANGRY I WAS? HOW ANGRY I STILL AM? SO I WENT AWAY. WHEN GOD DESTROYED THE WORLD, HE OVERLOOKED SOMETHING… THAT ONLY ONE WORLD AT A TIME CAN BE DESTROYED. HE WAS SO BUSY PISSING ALL OVER THIS ONE, HE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE THAT I SLIPPED OVER INTO ONE OF THE OTHER ONES, WHICH I MADE MY KINGDOM. I’VE HAD TO START ALL OVER FROM SCRATCH, GIL, BUT THINGS ARE COMING ALONG NICELY. SO NICELY, IN FACT, THAT I’M READY TO ADD AN ADDITION, SO TO SPEAK. AND I THINK YOUR WORLD WILL DO JUST FINE. OF COURSE, I’VE HAD TO HIRE SOME… I GUESS YOU’D CALL THEM MOVERS. OR KEEPERS. A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME, BLAH-BLAHBLAH. I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG THIS WILL TAKE, GIL-RAW MATERIAL BEING SO DIFFICULT TO COME BY-BUT THINGS ARE WELL UNDER WAY. THE TEAR IN THE GREAT SCRIM IS GETTING WIDER EVERY DAY. NICE TO KNOW I STILL HAVE A FEW TRICKS UP MY SLEEVE IN THE MEANTIME. WHICH REMINDS ME-YOU MIGHT WANT TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO YOUR “NEPHEW” NOW.

Carson dropped the comic book.

He was shuddering; from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet, he was shuddering as if in the grips of a grand-mal seizure.

“Jesus- Carson! What’s wrong? ”

I moved toward him but he screamed and waved me back.

Outside the barn, I could hear the roaring of lions, the trumpeting of elephants, the growling of bears, the barking of dogs, the screams of loons. The walls shook as the animals began pressing against them from outside, clawing at the wood.

In the back of the barn, a massive shadow moved as Carson’s scale model of Long-Lost took its first few tentative steps.

Carson screamed again.

He collapsed to his knees as his face began tearing in half, he felt it- I felt it, felt every sensation chewing through his body and there was nothing I could do-felt the fire burning through his nose as he struggled to his feet and stumbled away from me, hoping that it was all over now, please let it be over, please let this be the last of it, but then his face began swelling around forehead and nose, swelling like a goddamn balloon, so he looked away, looked down at his hand and saw it pulsating through layers of dried mud, felt the cold thing crawling between his shoulders again, eyes twitching, and then his face split apart like someone tearing a biscuit in half, only there was no steam, just blood, spraying, spattering, geysering around, and he tried to look behind him and see the animals as they clawed against the walls of the barn, tried to see me, tried to see if UncGil was still there, but the pain was killing him because the cold thing shuddered down between his shoulders and began to push through, snapping his shoulder blades like they were thin pieces of bark, and he screamed, screamed and whirled and slammed himself into the wall trying to stop the pain, trying to stop the thing from getting out, but he stunned himself for a moment and slid down to the floor, leaving a wide, dark smear behind him, howling as the first thing sawed through his back and fluttered to life, he was on his hands and knees now, waiting, trying to breathe, breathe deep, and now, OHGOD now the second one was tearing through, making a sound like a plastic bag melting on a fire, pushing through, unfurling, and he could see them now because their span must have been at least fifteen feet, and he threw his head back to cry out, but he couldn’t make any more human sounds, so he screamed, screamed so loud and long that his eyes bulged out and his face turned a dark blue and then his scream turned into the wail of an angry bird of prey as his body jerked back into a standing position, his arms locking bent, his hands clenching, every muscle in his body on fire; writhing, shifting, bones snapping, he shrieked in the cage of the barn as his chest puffed out through his shirt and covered in thick layers of brown feathers and the flesh dropped from his body like peelings from an orange and he tried to move his arms, tried to grab something, then he jerked around from the waist and his arms dropped off, brittle branches from a burned tree, and he yowled again, louder than before, wishing that the pain would end and just let him die, then he fell back on his great wings and looked up into my face, into my eyes, and for a moment I thought I heard his voice whispering, I’m as much a part of you as you are of me , and then something snapped below his waist; snapped, wriggled, pushed up.

With one last shriek he jerked back as the spasm took hold of him, pushing the corded claws up through his groin.

And I stood facing a huge brown marsh hawk that stood nearly as tall as I did. It flexed its wings, then shook itself, spraying the walls with ribbons of meat and liquid that had once been my nephew.

I looked into its red marble eyes, then began backing toward the door.

The gigantic hawk that had once been my nephew stomped through the barn, its massive wings unfurling, making splinters out of the stall doors and rafters.

I turned and ran.

Outside, animals had gathered off to the side to watch.

Rhino, elephant, manticore, bear, gryphon, lion, centaur, cat, swan, and so many others I couldn’t see their features.

They had no interest in me.

They were watching the barn behind me as its roof splintered outward.

I heard a roar, and a screech, and the vibrations of something very, very large working its limbs back into life.

I ran across the field, not looking back, cutting myself on tree branches when the light of the moon was obscured by massive wings.

Somehow, I made it to my car and managed to get back on the road without killing anyone.

It never once occurred to me to go anywhere else but home.

Above me, the shadows of giant wings seemed to guide my path.

Or watch to make certain I didn’t try deviating from it.