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While I’m Away

Posted on February 15, 2008
Filed Under fiction, writings | 7 Comments

I knew there would be some good that comes of this blogging thing. And low and behold I was able to fashion a short story using snippets of my writing from the Madmarriage space. When I return from vacation I will have to FedEx this story and the first few chapters of Habeas Corpus to the wise mentors at the BU Creative Writing Workshop as writing samples. I wasn’t sure where I was going to find the material after having spent the entire year working on my novel, but it just presented itself. Like it was there all along. Many of you have read different pieces of the whole but no one has seen it all patched together. Take a look.

Faith Shepherd is a seasoned worrier. Without small children to fret about and follow after, issuing reprimands and warnings, she has, in her old age, turned her anxiety up a notch. Like a stereo that has been moved to the next room or to the house across the street, she feels she must increase the volume of her thoughts in order to be heard from her retirement community in Florida.

She has found her perfect pitch and projects her boundless concern up from the Southernmost state towards her grown children who she believes, have flown the nest without major incident all because of her constant vigilance against such things as falls down flights of rickety basement stairs and an uncompromising insistence on cleaning the lint filter in the dryer and turning the water off on the back of the washer after each use.

“There but for the grace of God go all with major appliances,” her children joke. Faith is deaf to this type of disdain. She speaks loudly into the phone, trying to traverse the space that is her son’s mental illness and substance abuse, her only daughter’s faltering marriage. She offers up a constant stream of commentary about the benefits of Vitamin C and Mammograms and yearly trips to the dermatologist.

There is no end to list of things she worries about. She watches network news to learn about tragic events like the condo fire sparked by a tea pot left to boil in an empty apartment or the story of the alligator that has dragged a jogger to her death on a clear and sunshiny morning. This type of evening melodrama acts as validation. She pours herself another tumbler of Scotch and settles in to her anxiety.

After several drinks, Faith’s worry becomes urgent and irrepressible. She is not dissuaded by the fact that her daughter is likely caught in the eddy of the evening, (knee deep in preparations: the evening meal, bath time and backpacks full of homework). Faith’s daughter takes her mother’s call with a measured patience. She knows that it serves as ten Hail Mary’s and the Lord’s Prayer, this daily conversation about the misfortune of others. Faith prattles on about the woman in her golf clinics daughter-in-law who has just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

“It’s the advanced kind. Incredibly rapid. She’s opnly thirty-two years old. And not expected to live another year,” Faith says.

Her daughter chimes in, because she knows it is coming. She’s heard it so many times before, “It’s like Gilda Radner. Ovarian Cancer – the silent killer.” They say it together, a concert of fear.

Faith has near perfect memory for the timing and circumstances of other people’s demise. The way some women store Christmas gift wrap and Easter chocolates bought on sale just after the holidays, Faith squirrels away ghastly stories of tragedy and suffering. She waits for choice occasions to trot out a specific morbid treasure, usually to underscore someone’s perceived recklessness. She talks about the man who blew himself up while digging the footer for a new brick walkway. She offers the story as warning to her son who has just rented a lawn aerator to use on the small patch of grass surrounding the converted Victorian in which he rents the first floor. “When people use power tools without first mapping out the underground gas lines, well, it happens,” she says with authority that comes with believing that “it” pertains to the senseless end of a perfectly good life.

Faith’s husband is a patient man, grown accustomed to the timbre of her fears. He spends long days on the golf course as recess from her domestic foreboding. But even he will say, when not in a conciliatory mood, “You make me want to drink and drive, to run barefoot on the fairway in a lightening storm, to drive blindfolded in a school zone.” He believes that accidents happen sometimes, but, mostly they don’t happen at all, and everyone muddles through somehow.

Faith Shepherd has convinced herself that just knowing these cautionary tales and repeating them will keep her safe, will prevent her ever becoming a victim. Surely I will never drown or die of electrocution, she thinks. She believes that death will be swift and unpredictable, from stroke or, at the worst, antibiotic-resistant staph infection. She is certain that she will not be felled by the preventable stuff, that which can be prepared for and warded off with a healthy dose of calcium and daily water aerobics.

And that is why she is so shaken, so terribly startled and insecure about the incident with the reindeer in the night. Someone has slipped into the gated confines of the Del Boca Vista retirement community and gathered all the statues of light-up Rudolphs, their little bulbs shining from the green lawns of retired couples trying for a little holiday spirit. The interloper has arranged the deer so that one mounts the other, their robotic necks slowly moving up and down, simulating the thrust and strain of the sexual act. The prankster has strewn empty condom wrappers at the scene and completed the staged reindeer-orgy by propping up half finished bottles of wine and discarded plastic champagne flutes in the coarse St. Augustine grass of the quiet neighborhood.

It is not only the lewdness of the scene that bothers Faith, but the fact that the prank was executed without anyone’s noticing a strange person, an unfamiliar car, an alien noise. The security guards, having checked the video tape recording for the comings and goings of all non-residents between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., find nothing that suggests anything but the ordinary departure and return of senior citizens.

Faith concludes that it was an inside job carried out by someone familiar and among them. Sexual thoughts, even of the wildlife variety, disturb her. She is reminded of the article she read in Newsweek about a perfectly normal seeming man, married, employed, the father of two children, who would strip naked, throw on a long coat and walk the sidewalks of his neighborhood exposing himself to mothers pushing infants in strollers and kids playing at the park, (a park that was properly fenced and gated). According to the article, it took months for the citizens of the community to identify the pervert as the family man who lived in the adorable house on the corner of Elm and Grove. He never wore a mask or hat or any kind of disguise. But it was just so hard for everyone to make the connection, so difficult to believe that one of their own was capable of such sexual deviancy, that their brains refused to see his likeness until he had flashed each and every one of them at least twice.

Faith vows that this same dumb disbelief will not dull her suspicions and she sees everyone at the rec center that morning as a potential perpetrator.

“It’s probably a widower. Like Dick MacDonald or Ted Edwards. It could have been either one. Solitude makes a person strange after awhile,” she says to her husband upon returning from yoga.

Her husband nods in agreement but secretly feels glad. He loves a joke of the harmless variety. He offers to do a load of laundry and, when the spin cycle is over, he gathers the clothes and dumps them into the dryer without checking the lint filter. He leaves the lever on the back of the washer in the ‘On’ position and grabs his golf shoes from the cubby in the garage. He rides his bike to club house with no hands and plays through the seventh hole while thunder rumbles ominously in the distance.

While her husband ignores the air horn blasts and flashing strobes of the golf course warning system, sounding off about the dangers of swinging a titanium club while jags of lightening part the sky, Faith is impatiently waiting for the electrical storm to pass so that she can safely phone her daughter in Connecticut, anxious to share the outrage of the night before.

Faith’s daughter, Lara Shepherd, who chose to remain a Shepherd even after her wedding day, is just rinsing out tea cups and preparing for dinner. She takes two ibuprofen from the bottle beneath the sink to ease the strain of having house guests. Lara’s husband has done nothing to help her prepare for Christmas. He will simply enjoy the additional meals and exceptional fussing that comes with their having company. For him, it is just another long weekend with the exception of a five course meal on Friday and the addition of pumpkin bread at Saturday morning breakfast.

Lara has come to accept the fact that her husband is a walk-on, someone who ambles in to every celebration only long enough to eat and belch and leave dirty napkins and crumbs on the dining room chairs. Now, some ten year’s later, her not having taken his name feels like a bit of brilliance. She is relieved to think that when they divorce she will not have to walk around in the cloak of his identity.

As far as company goes, her house guests are of a benign variety, her older brother and his son having little to no expectations. Her brother rents a two-room apartment in a decrepit old house in a forgotten mill town in Northern New England. His little boy visits on Wednesdays and every other weekend. They share bunk beds. A forty-two year old man on the top and a five year old boy on the bottom. They eat peanut butter and jelly on white bread. The immediate neighbor is a crack addict given to wandering the sidewalks in her bathrobe mumbling profanities and scolding God. Still, Lara has felt a compulsion to finish painting the dining room. She has made homemade pies and cleaned the bathrooms before their arrival.

Lara’s running the vacuum and washing the dog nose smudges off the storm doors incites her husband’s disdain. “You’re really pulling out all the stops for you clinically insane brother,” he observes. It’s his way of saying she should be out earning an income in order to pay someone else to clean their glass surfaces.

Immediately after giving her husband the finger, Lara leaves for the super market where she runs into her friend Cheryl in the dairy aisle. They exchange the usual pleasantries about holiday plans. Lara mentions that her Christmas will be quiet but for her crazy brother who will be visiting for the long weekend. She shrugs her shoulders and adds, “It should be interesting, at the very least.”

Lara is instantly sorry she has offered this personal detail when Cheryl replies, “Don’t I know it. My sister-in-law’s a nut too,” as if they share the very same version of familial shame. Lara can tell that Cheryl, with her Ugg boots and her Lexus SUV, is talking about an entirely different version of crazy. She is certain that Cheryl’s sister in law is no more unhinged than anyone from the Midwest given to wearing seasonally decorated sweaters and using the word ‘slacks’. With a wave and a strained smile, Lara moves on with her grocery cart full of whole cranberries in a bag, a loaf of French bread and green apples for the stuffing. She hurries home to box up all the alcohol in the house and clear the medicine cabinets, hiding all controlled substances in a box in the basement before her brother’s arrival.

Lara always performs mental calisthenics before his visits. Like stretching or slow breathing exercises, she has found that remembering childhood helps her gather the patience required. The previous Sunday, while adding the finishing touches of Westminster Gold above the door jambs, she was revisiting the family therapy sessions that began when her brother was first diagnosed. She remembered that their mother wept openly while the rest of them sat around bearing awkward witness to her grief.

Back then, Faith had not been crying for all the obvious reasons, because her oldest and only son, at eighteen years old, had just been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Depression. She had not been suffering for the fact that this same son had turned to LSD and marijuana and a heavy regime of Jack Daniels to self-medicate. Nor had she been weeping for Lara who, at the time, was in the habit of smoking at the bus stop and stealing beers from the refrigerator.

Instead, Faith had wept angry tears, spewed frustration and regret because, after a long day’s work, she was tired of returning home to a sink full of dishes and a family room littered with dirty shoes and discarded sweaters and candy bar wrappers and pet hair. The family spent hour after scheduled-therapy hour listening to their mother lament the life she had chosen.

Lara can see now that Faith had expected a surge of liberation, anticipated the gush of pride and independence that the feminist movement had promised. But Gloria Steinem had failed her. Each and every Sunday, after hosting open houses and ushering out-of-town clients from one potential home purchase to another, Faith had walked through the front door and felt the urge to shoot herself.

The licensed psychologist hired to help the Shepherds in their time of need had spent the allotted hour each week tamping down his pipe, relighting it, drifting in and out of sleep. He feigned quiet supervision as the family rushed from one undisciplined battle about household chores to the next. Their version of Sigmund Freud let them squabble about replacing the cap on the toothpaste and un-balling their socks before pitching them into the hamper as if this were the type emotional of progress he’d been trained to elicit.

A month later, all in the family, save Faith, staged an opposition to group therapy. Faith was forced to continue her visits to the psychologist alone. She punished them all for abandoning her in the hushed waiting room of Northeast Behavioral Associates by leaving notes on the bathroom and kitchen counters and on the top of the toilet – Remember to flush; Please replace the cap on the toothpaste. Eventually these memos just became part of the décor – seafoam green linoleum and hand written messages about removing pubic hairs from the soap.

After this kind of mental exercise, Lara is ready to welcome her brother who arrives late Wednesday afternoon. She makes tea while he inspects the dining room. “I think you need another coat in here,” he calls to her as his son drives a toy dump truck across the wood floor leaving a deep scar in the soft birch wood. Lara winces, having just rolled up the tarps and replaced the furniture. She knows her brother is right, but somehow she had convinced herself that no one else would notice the patchy bits of white showing through in spots.

While she and her brother press their tea bags with the back of their spoons, attending to the ritual of steeping as if it satisfies them in the same way as cracking a beer or pouring a glass of wine would have, she asks him what he remembers about those early therapy sessions. And he recalls them as she had, but with a more fluent memory of the time.

Lara says, “I’m glad you’re here.” She grabs her brother’s hand and squeezes.
“It’s comfortable sitting here remembering Mom as the lunatic in the equation,” he says. “It must have been comfortable then too, a welcome diversion, something we thought we could fix.”

Lara’s brother feels the sudden urge to brush his teeth for the third time since his arrival only an hour before. He excuses himself, mentioning the need for a nap. She hears the drone of the electric toothbrush from the second. Lara jumps up, remembering to remove the decorative pillow shams and beige linen spread on the guest bed. She rushes to stuff the expensive linens in the closet and replace them with an old quilt used to cover the furniture when the kids have the stomach bug.

Her brother enters the room just as she is shutting the closet door. He lies down on top of the old quilt and closes his eyes, his steel tipped boots poking over the end of the bed.
“Don’t you want to take those off,” Lara asks.
“Nah, what’s the difference,” he says, already drifting to sleep.

Lara returns to the kitchen to rinse the tea cups and start dinner. And, as if on cue, just as she whispers You’re welcome, Mom, the phone rings.

“Lara, honey, it’s Mom,” Faith still insists on announcing herself even though she knows that Lara has caller-i.d. The phone has shouted out ‘Faith and Paul Shepherd’ for all to hear and Lara has had time to decide whether or not to answer.

Faith retells the story of the reindeer, relishing the fact that she has more to share today then just details of a dinner party or some fact about a low pressure system and the threat of bad weather.

“Some creep has really caused a stir around here,” Faith says, emphasizing the jarring effect the incident has had on the quiet of her retirement.

“What about Dad? Is he upset about the reindeer sex?”

“You don’t think your father had something to do with it,” Faith asks.

“Sounds like something he might get a kick out of.” Lara is pleased with by the possibility that her father might have been behind something so clever, so completely un-retired.

“Your father was in bed by 8:30 last night. As a matter of fact, he’s been in bed by 8:30 every night this week.”

“He sounds depressed. Stuck down there in retirement-hell for Christmas.”

“Your father has never been depressed a day in his life. His idea of melancholy is golfing above handicap.”

Lara knows that Faith is right, that her father is a complete stranger to dark moods, that her own tendency towards depression comes directly from her mother. She is certain that it’s a mitochondrial signature, this lineage of grief. The line moving forward, from the very first woman, African Eve, right on down to the last, a daisy chain of misery, a tiny slice of DNA – the hot potato of ancestry.

As is typical of those who see life as a glass half full, Lara is already feeling the disappointment of Christmas. It’s not like being six years old again and believing, really believing, that Santa would bring her a pony despite the fact that there was no pasture or stable within a twenty mile radius of their family home. It is a less instant and devastating form of disappointment, more nebulous and corrosive than Santa’s failure to produce anything but a stuffed horse on the 25th. It is more the disappointment of a thousand meager, insignificant expectations. Almost imperceptible – all the tiny parts that fail to come together and create the working whole, as she has imagined it.

Last week, she decided to make holiday cookies with the kids who are five and seven, the perfect age for festive projects, she had thought. She began the task with visions of iced snowflakes, all delicate home spun decoration, and Santa’s with bright red, fur-lined coats made of carefully piped frosting, his boots black with tinted sugar. Grace and Oliver had insisted on using only the gingerbread-man cookie cutter. When row after row of gingerbread cookie shapes came out of the oven, the kids eagerly removed the rounded heads to create homunculous-people, cookie freaks with eyes where their necks should be.

When Lara pulled out the camera to photograph the floury mess she found that the digital jobbie read ‘ERROR’. She removed the battery. She turned the camera on and off. She knocked it firmly on the counter and, still, it read ‘ERROR’. She realized that all of Christmas would go undocumented because nowhere in the 1200 page manual did it refer to the ‘ERROR’ problem. Not in Japanese or German or Spanish or Dutch.

Three weeks ago, just after Thanksgiving, she threw a tree trimming party, setting it up to look just as it did in the magazine spread, pineapple glazed ham and garlic bread crumb macaroni, a roaring fire and a lifetime’s accumulation of ornaments waiting to festoon the tree. But the real, non-magazine spread children, the kids from the basketball team and the girl scout troop, were all suspicious of garlic and sharp cheddar. The real non-magazine spread children draped about her living room whined for hot dogs and didn’t give a damn about the provenance of each tiny ornament as they tore into the box, spraying tree trimming materials across the Persian rug. Ornaments shattered and were cast aside for the dog to consume. None of the kids wore bow ties or knickers. They arrived in faded jeans and torn sweat shirts. They had uncombed hair and unbrushed teeth.

In preparation for the party, she had bought a garland of white spruce and wove it round the banister and added twinkling lights and a gold leaf swag. She enjoyed the smell of fresh evergreen for only a day before the needles started dropping. Her mother’s warnings about flammability – the whole house torched for the love of one festive banister- penetrated her resolve. She removed the fire hazard just four days after its installation and clogged the vacuum hose cleaning up the pine needles. She hauled the Electrolux Diplomat all the way across state borders to have the detritus of white spruce removed from its internal organs.

Trying to be a good Mom, a fun Mom who watched kid’s movies and made popcorn, she had rented the modern Peter Billingsley classic, A Christmas Story. She had been looking forward to sharing the Red Rider bee-bee gun and the belching furnace and the little brother dressed up tight as a tick in his snow clothes with her own children. But Grace was unmoved by what Lara had remembered as comic brilliance. The little girl said over and over again, “When is it going to get funny, Mom? You promised it would be funny.” Oliver asked pointed and uncomfortably mature questions about the narration, “What does he mean when he says like sex, illuminated in the window?” Lara fast forwarded through the rest of the scene featuring the lamp with the exposed thigh and the fish-net stockings. Later that night she found Oliver in the home office googling the word ’sex’.

Lara had even been excited about the possibility of a white Christmas when it snowed six inches on the first Thursday of December. That was before there had been several icy wipe outs while carrying boxes to the car, boxes addressed to her parents in Florida. That was before she had bruised and pinched her elbow between the heavy sliding doors of their ancient garage while trying to find the snow shovel. After weeks of freezing precipitation the driveway has become a slick trail of death that she must brave each day on the way to school, to the gym, or to the mail box.

At some point, Lara had decided that the Christmas season might be improved by the introduction of the classics. She took the kids to the library to check out Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. The real one, unabridged, to be read in front of the fire at night. But the late 19th century masterpiece proved too dense, too inaccessible. Oliver and Grace were confused by intricacies of past, present and future. They had given up and fallen fast asleep on the couch by the time Lara uttered the famous phrase,

“What’s Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’”

Lara had nodded her agreement. “Here, Here,” she said aloud to the sleeping children and threw the book down on the coffee table.

Lara resists the urge to tell her mother about all her dismal attempts to conjure the holiday spirit. She can predict Faith’s response. She knows exactly what her mother will say, You should know better than to expect the children to sit still for Dickens, though she had forced such things on Lara and her brothers when they were small. Lara also suspects that Faith, worried about her daughter’s mental health, will suggest therapy, offer to pay for it even.

“How does your brother seem,” Faith asks before Lara can hang up.

“Fine, Mom. Really good, if you’re willing to overlook the fact that he’s a grown man who needs a nap at five in the afternoon.”

She doesn’t tell her mother that she suspects he’s using again. That after propping himself up on pain killers and caffeine for the three hour trip down, his body is now collapsing in on itself in the room upstairs while she, his sister, plays parent to his son.

“That’s a relief. This time of year can be so hard on the mentally ill,” Faith says.

“Look, Mom, I’ve got to run. The pasta is boiling over and Gracie’s in the bathroom and needs a wipe,” Lara says, omitting the fact that she really needs to hang up so she can pay full attention to the trouble unfolding at the neighbor’s house.

An ambulance, an emergency response vehicle and a state police car are in the driveway. Lara can see a gurney. The EMT’s give it a heave-ho and it is gone from sight. She can’t be certain who belongs to the body on the stretcher. She can’t make it out in the gloom of dusk.

All the grim excitement is obscured by the hemlock trees, the dense hedge between her yard and the Harrison’s, so thorough and opaque a barrier that she has, in two years, exchanged ten words, maybe twenty with the people next door.

She dashes to the second floor to get a better look. A woman, maybe Mrs. Harrison, (but Lara has only met her once so she can’t say for sure), slightly gray, wearing a wool pea coat and holding her purse across her chest, walks carefully up the icy walk and disappears into the house. The ambulance moves off slowly, no sirens, lights extinguished. It looks convincingly like the final moments of someone else’s tragedy.

A light goes on in the room above the garage – a single lamp, perhaps to read a book by while Mrs. Harrison eats supper in her lap avoiding the empty dinner table, trying to absorb the fact that a sudden cardiac infarction has taken her husband just two days before Christmas.

Lara witnesses all this from the east window of the master bedroom where, for months, she has been keeping a sort of spider-pet. The fact that she has come to feel something like affection for a lowly arachnid, bothers her just a little. She fears this unusual attachment is symptomatic of something and she dares not share it with anyone save her children who are capable and willing to forgive her feelings for the spider in the window.

She hopes it is just EB White and a children’s story that has influenced her otherwise sensible self into thinking that spiders have purpose and personality and a soft spot for doomed farm animals. Lara has protected the spider’s elaborate shimmering web the size of a bath towel. She has watched the spider since April, hanging from the center of her spectacular creation, shuttling with purpose to the fringes of her web to collect the insects that have blundered there.

Lara has witnessed the spider’s making tiny insect bundles, her eight synchronized legs working quickly to mummify her prey. She has wondered why the spider leaves the bugs to hang and marinate. Why she seems to wait and eat them later, when Lara is not looking.

Even though she knows that there must be some perfectly scientific reason, that the spider’s pause has nothing to do with respect for Lara and her squeamish distaste for death; though it is obvious that there must be some benefit to a few hours of subtle tenderizing (a spider’s version of brining, this mummification thing), still, Lara feels something like thankful for the perceived consideration.

Since early spring, Oliver and Grace have made it habit to charge into the bedroom to say good morning to the spider they have named Mama. And one such morning in mid-December, Lara noticed that Mama was bulging at the abdomen. She said, “I think Mama is going to have babies.” Whatever doubt Lara harbored about Mama’s pending reproduction, was swiftly cast aside as they watched the spider charge to the Northeast corner of her web, rip a struggling bug from the sticky strands and eat it on the spot, no brining, no mummification, just instant and terrifying savagery. Lara saw this unrestrained hunger as natural and necessary, akin to an engorged woman named Mildred, nine months pregnant and ravenous, tearing into a box of jelly donuts.

There was an instant of gleeful celebration before Grace said, “But then she’ll die. After the babies. Won’t she?”

“It’s the circle of life, honey” Lara said.

“Will she go to Heaven,” Grace asked.

And Lara hesitated, contemplating the fairytale version of things. But then decided to play it straight, the way she saw it, the version of death that has to do with soil and worms and the way a spider’s memory will have to live on in the minds of those who knew her.

“No. I think she’ll just be dead.”

“But there are dogs in Heaven,” Grace said. “Maggie said her dog went there. If there are dogs, then there must be spiders.”

And Lara thought, There is absolutely no way that Heaven has dogs. Heaven is, by definition, blissfully devoid of dog hair and dog shit and muddy dog prints on the back steps. She decided to allow Grace her belief in a Heaven complete with dogs and spiders. Maybe, just maybe, she thought, In Grace’s version of Heaven each Heavenly Dog has it’s own attendant angel in charge of grooming and bodily functions and driving to the pet store to pick up the human-grade dog food that costs $45 a bag and is the only thing the damn dog can eat without breaking out in hives and itching its rear-end raw.

“Will you go to Heaven when you die, Mommy” Grace asked.

“No, baby,” Lara said. “I’m afraid that I’m going someplace oppressively hot, populated by unattended dogs with diarrhea and food allergies and slobber.”

“What’s that place called,” Grace asked.

Oliver said, “Mom’s talking about Hell, stupid.”

After that morning, the spider went missing from her web for five whole days until last Tuesday night, just as natural as the turning of leaves in autumn or the waxing and waning of the moon, she there was again.

After days of her absence, Lara, unable to sleep, had thought to check for Mama in the dark of midnight. She went to the window and saw her there, gathering up the lower half of her web. She could barely make her out, struggling to drag in the perfect spectacle of it. Lara couldn’t tell if she was eating it or rolling it but it was clear that the spider was laying waste to her home, preparing for her final departure.

Upon waking and drawing back the drapes, there it was, another beautiful sparking web with one glaring omission, no spider hanging at the center. For two days, Lara gazed at the web, hoping, but nothing stirred. And, then this morning, as she was trying to muster the heart to tear that web, once and for all, from the window casing, Lara noticed a tiny pale little life making its way across the intricacy. It was Mama in miniature. The same in every way except stature.

Now watching Mrs. Harrison in the light of a single lamp above the garage, Lara wonders if it’s possible that Mama had remade her web, lovingly proficient with purpose in the final hours before her eggs had hatched. Lara thinks she may have been witness to the spider version of nesting. She carefully considers bringing that tiny spider in for the remainder of the winter, allowing it to live above the radiator in the bathroom.

Lara thinks that maybe, after all, the love of a spider is not so unusual. She convinces herself that it is not that different from the affection that Mrs. Harrison will share with her Golden Retriever now that her husband is gone.

She supposes that, after dinner, Mrs. Harrison will try for rest in a solitary bed that was once shared. In her fitful sleep, her feet will seek the warmth where her husband had lain and find it cold. She will invite the golden retriever to join her in the bed. The dog will be confused, having been relegated to the oval carpet by the foot of the stairs for nine whole years. She will stroke the dog’s fur and find it soothing.

Lara imagines that Mrs. Harrison once complained to friends about the dog’s shedding and his propensity to lift his leg on the living room couch. She thinks that probably, Mrs. Harrison has never considered herself much of a dog person, a pet person, really, and has always called the dog Pet Peeve even though his given name is Marley. Lara thinks that Mrs. Harrison is living the future now, a future with a dog in her bed, a dog for which she must remember to wake and administer pills for arthritis and eczema, two tablets daily, to be given with food.

Lara passes by the guest room where her brother still sleeps. She pauses, leaning heavily against the doorframe. His arms are sprawled out above his head, his frail chest rising and falling.

She envies him the fact that each morning he wakes up and sets out to buy one small cup of coffee, all the while hoping he has the money in his wallet to pay for it. She envies him the phrase, If you can’t fix it, fuck it, which is the sort of thing he says often while trying hard to believe it. It is a sort of mantra this phrase, an attempt to ward off paroxysms of anxiety. When mental chanting doesn’t work, there is the steady supply of narcotic pain relievers he buys from the pimple-faced buy on the corner.

Lara closes the bedroom door and heads downstairs to help Grace in the bathroom, to butter noodles and pour glasses of milks. She calls out to the little girl in the bathroom, “Make sure you wash your hands. With soap. While counting to twenty or singing the birthday song.” She sighs, giving in to the fact that each day she becomes a bit more like her mother, like Mrs. Harrison, like a spider intent on preparations, getting ready for a day when no one needs her and she can safely disappear.

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