She is just about to shower when Paul begins to rattle the knob and pound at the door. He knows how she hates to be disturbed while mired in the morning routine. Still he feels entitled to disturb his wife, unclothed, just stepping into the steaming start of her day. He is risking a full day’s wrath. Kate is given to enduring grudges, punishing his trespasses with protracted silences and the occasional nasty barb.

She has already wiped the countertop free of toothpaste and suspicious hairs. She has scrubbed the toilet seat with Tilex. She has used a damp paper towel to collect the lint and dirt and pet hair that had drifted into corners.

Paul is banging so hard that he can barely hear her call out, “Is it too much to ask? Just one shower? Undisturbed?” She wishes she has turned the lock. She has given up entirely on the notion that he might try to understand her need for quiet, the occasional moment to herself, and has taken to hiding out behind barred doors in the house they share with their two children on a quiet street in an expensive suburban town with planned parks and greenways and a dozen private elementary schools where she and her family are supposed to live out their lives, together and happy.

“I’ve got a question,” he says through the bathroom door. “Do you think there will ever be a morning when you don’t wake up a bitch?”

She is stretched thin and flinty from another bad night’s sleep. The long hours spent laying face up in the darkness of their room, watching the rapid revolutions of the ceiling fan, listening to Paul snore softly and mumble incoherent nothings in his sleep, have made her mad with wanting. She is deeply, deeply afraid that she may never sleep again. Each night a little worse than the last. A self perpetuating cycle of insomnia fueled by persistent thoughts of another man, not the one who moans softly and snuffles on the pillow beside her, but the one that lives across town, the one that has, subtly and sideways, invaded her day life, her night life, become the one true thing her hectic mind can rest on.

Because she hardly sleeps, she hardly dreams. She lies still and imagines. And it doesn’t feel that wrong or wanton, being there beside her husband and thinking of another. Because as hard as she tries to conjure this other man’s hands on her stomach at the small of her back, brushing softly her inner thighs, she can only imagine her head resting on his chest while his arms are wrapped tightly around her.

She is incapable of sexual thoughts of carnal lust and physical satisfactions. But she can almost feel him kiss the top of her head and her stomach aches with the sensation of something long wanted, finally fulfilled.

She is overwhelmed by a certain peace, by the notion that she would gladly die in this man’s arms. She drifts off momentarily and wakes to find herself very much alive and sick with wanting to slip back into the fleeting dream. She can’t quite recall the exact words he has spoken to her as he held her in this imagined and important embrace. But it has inspired flooding relief. It must have been something simple and pure like, I am here now.

Before laying down each night, she is never wholly aware of feeling dissatisfied or fragile, but now, at first light, it is all so completely wrong without him. She practically writhes with the indignity of it -this desire for completion – so un-progressive, so solidly antiquated an idea.

She climbs from the bed just before dawn to make her ritual tear around two miles of golf course and back to the smallish Southern Colonial that has been recently painted a deep coral color with crisp white shutters.

She hurries, pounding, panting sprinting through the quiet, forgetting to admire the day in its rose toned beginnings, consumed by this girlish crush, sick with the anticipation of getting there, ridiculously eager to begin shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation, anxious to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Kate hasn’t taken the time to detect the subtle shift of seasons, the increasing moisture in the air at daybreak, the languid whooping of the Myna birds as they prepare to fly south before the terrible summer and its lashing rains and bugs and horrific storms.

She is used to a more obvious heralding of spring; the dramatic resurrection of the daffodils, the collective scent of manure and early apple blossoms, the first bloom of forsythia and the return of the gold finches and robins. She is not equipped to notice the quiet shift that is winter to spring in the Tropics, her faculties of perception dulled and depleted by the energy expended thinking urgently about a man nearly twenty years her senior.

As Paul explodes into the bathroom, she stands poised on the edge of the tub, running clothes piled into the hamper, the bathroom full of the strong and reassuring smell of cleaning products.

“I’ve got an 8:30 conference call. Just need to grab something,” he says, removing a prescription bottle from the medicine cabinet, filling his dress pant pocket with a handful of Prilosec.

“What’s your day look like,” he asks, a stab at atonement for the previously nasty exchange, an attempt to reach her in the place she has gone recently, a location decidedly distant and distracted.

“Just more of the same. Astrid. Zaida. Jose…About ten other clients that promise to drive me mad,” she says. Omitting the name Ted O’Malley from the list feels like a tiny deception but one she is willing to live with.

“You need a new job or a new attitude. Either one. You choose,” Paul says.

“Since you’re feeling like my life-coach this morning, you could drop the kids at school for me,” she calls to him as he leaves the house. He simply waves as he walks out the front door. Either he hasn’t heard her request or has decided to ignore her. He is already checking his blackberry for phone messages and e-mails, busy launching a day that does not concern her.

Paul’s refusal to do carpool might make her late this morning and she hates the way she’s tried to dodge a duty she usually performs with some measure of satisfaction.

She has always liked to start the day by shaking each teacher’s hand before relinquishing control of her children. She has considered the morning meet and greet less an attempt to curry favor than an opportunity to give each instructor a look in the eye, to remind them of their precious charge, that they and they alone have been trusted to guide and advise her grade-schoolers in all things that happen between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. She has thought it advantageous that they have a healthy respect for her piercing gaze and her vise-like grip.

But in the last few weeks she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understood the basis for that kind of attraction until now. A mother to two children, a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age have little to do with it. There is an impossible and intoxicating allure in the flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She is caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only five weeks since she began working for Ted and his wife, landscaping their property on Alfonso Court. And just that quickly it has come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him, just briefly, in the morning before the sun is full in the sky, before the plodding and ordinary tasks of the day, has taken on the urgent tone of infatuation.

Initially, she was reluctant to help them revive the garden. When she first walked the property, she had thought the house hopelessly unattractive with its trite palm tree plaque above the front door, a leaky pool decaying in the back yard, the pink marble floor tile throughout the first floor. Among the tear downs on Alfonso Court, she considered it a questionable keeper. There was nothing but the low and grumbling sound of destruction on the block; one more pile of concrete rubble to haul away to God Knows Where.

But Ted’s young wife, Astrid, has insisted on the restoration. She has brought a sort of intensity to the task that underscores the fact that she feels the house possesses something like a soul. Kate thinks that Astrid has, perhaps, confused the concepts of rejuvenation and salvation, intent on restoring the building to its previous grandeur but with a modern injection of Feng Shui principles and some silly notions of death and rebirth that she’d picked up at an Ashram in India.

Kate has been simultaneously amused and irritated by Astrid’s tendency to suffer so acutely about things like the proper placement of the water feature. She has had to suppress giggles of disdain on several occasions, like when Astrid confessed that a Feng Shui expert counseled her to abandon the new house. The guru of questionable qualification had pronounced the whole layout inauspicious. Astrid had whispered this revelation as if saying it aloud would somehow activate the Dalai Lama to unleash unhappiness, cancer or, at the very least, ingrown toenails.

And at first, Kate had wondered about their peculiar arrangement. Ted and Astrid. She struggled to identify that which sustained their attraction, something beyond the obvious and the carnal. She imagined the temporary exuberance of their initial romance, long limbs tangled in late morning romps; the spontaneity a surprise to Ted, past mid-life. But now, she can see that their tolerance for one another has grown thread bare and strained. She enjoys watching Ted barely manage a tight lipped patience for Astrid’s decadence and the financial ramifications of her whimsy. She is acutely aware that Ted can hardly endure Astrid’s whimsical musings on paint color and leaf texture.

Kate can admit to herself, within the mental transgressions of her day, that Ted is not conventionally handsome. She can see his obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has gradually come to admire his more subtle attributes. She has noticed the effort he expends staying fit, the muscular definition of his chest and arms distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth. She has grown fond of his quick but shy smile and the strength of his hands.

It has become ritual for Kate and Ted to walk the perimeter of the property each morning. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules, allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. He seems to enjoy the effect he has on her, the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I don’t know the difference between a jasmine and a plumbago and still I rush home each night to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion,” he says. “It’s like you’re creating the Garden of Eden just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the bed of newly planted Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day?” She has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning in March and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone she hopes might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness. Later, remembering the remark, the gesture of his hand, she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She has begun to flirt and dabble, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his daily calls to go to voice mail. She saves his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, clever suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about perfectly ordinary topics like sod selection and installation schedules.

She allows herself to think of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self when replaying these voice mail messages in the quiet moments of her day.

She warms with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do to let him go each morning. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her away from her day destined to be increasingly dull and disappointing in the wake of their early morning encounter. Instead she is stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Occasionally Astrid walks out with Ted in the morning and he is careful to maintain a polite distance. He allows Astrid to do all the talking, excusing himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end.

“Sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she stings and hollows with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his apology for the forced distance. When it comes, that call is like the return of something elemental and sustaining. Her lungs and diaphragm expand into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

Finishing the last of her bad coffee, too strong, a murky cold blackness, Kate pulls up onto the newly installed lawn at a quarter to nine. (It has taken ten years to adapt to this ritual peculiar to South Florida. A native New Englander does not, at first, casually drive on lawns.) She is only fifteen minutes late and the driveway is already packed with a full fleet of vans and pick-ups that belonged to the electricians, painters, and various subcontractors madly revamping the house.

Kate has missed Ted’s departure by only minutes and she wilts with disappointment, seeing Astrid on the front steps, smoking, still in her morning robe.

As she makes her way to the front door, she steals furtive glances at the garden. There is something almost pornographic about the unrestrained fertility of the earth and the visible density of the air, heavy with pollen and the smell of ripening mangoes. The plants are a damp and startling green in the weak morning light. She congratulates herself as the garden appears to be blooming and expanding, struggling only slightly as the South Florida Spring, its ruthless sun and brewing heat, has just begun in earnest.
Astrid rises to meet her with a measured nonchalance as if she has not been waiting for Kate at all but been doing something far more important and has been interrupted at that essential task.

With shoulders hunched and feet shuffling, Kate braces for the cheek to cheek. Where she comes from, true warmth is a brisk handshake or a casual wave with an observation about the weather.

“I’m beginning to worry about the garden. We’ve spent $20,000 dollars so far and…” her voice trails off, and, as if for emphasis or maybe as an insult, Astrid tosses her cigarette into the planted bed beside the door.

Kate’s begins to sweat. Dampness develops in the creases of her baby-tee. She maintains a sense of calm by reminding herself that Astrid knows nothing of her affection for Ted.

Astrid sets off along the cedar mulch path, wending her way through the densely planted anthuriums, white throated spathiphyllum and fragile begonias, occasionally crushing a newly installed plant or tripping over a hose extension.

“What do you think about these plants here in the front of this bed? The one with all the dead flowers,” Astrid says.

From the beginning Astrid has insisted on Gardenias by the front door, caught up in the idea of them, their heavy fragrance evoking the pure essence of the South, their glossy leaves conjuring up gracious porches where sweet tea is served.

“Don’t you think the smell will be heavenly when we come and go?” Astrid had said in her way of making hyperbolic statements in the form of questions.

Kate had tried to talk her off the Gardenias. She always thought them a messy, imperfect shrub, never meant for close up scrutiny as all the deliciously fragrant blooms hanging bent and brown and dying, before they drop like crumbs. She has always thought it disappointing to get too close to a Gardenia.

“The Gardenias were your idea,” she says hoping Astrid will recognize the impatience in her tone.

Astrid sighs audibly and reached into her robe pocket for her cigarettes. As she cups the lighter and bends to the flame, her eyes grow bright with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She dabs at her eyes with the sash of her pink and silky robe that reveals tanned cleavage while catching suggestively around her legs. “It must be all the hormones and the pressure of this construction that just seems to go on and on and on.”

Kate begins to sink into a state of panic, thinking that, perhaps, she will have to speak of menstrual cycles here on the lawn, in the light of day.

“Ted and I are expecting. I’m a little off. Overcome at the strangest times,” Astrid manages between exhaling and crying and wiping her nose.

“Expecting what?” Kate asks.

“I’m three month’s along,” Astrid says glancing down her nose at the cigarette. “I know I’m going to have to quit, but the garden, the painting, the kitchen remodel, it’s all so discombobulating.”

Kate is too stunned for comment and they stand silently, side by side, watching the clogged fountain in the northeast corner of the garden struggle to produce a dribble up through the fountain head.

“Is this a surprise?” Kate finally blurts out before self edit.

“Ted’s not happy,” Astrid says. “He says he’s done the family thing.”

Kate senses that Astrid wants more than a discussion about Gardenias. She wants a friend, a fellowship. She craves shared secrets about deliveries and hemorrhoids and chapped nipples.

But Kate can manage only paltry attempts at consolation as she is suppresses her urge to vomit.

“Be patient with the plants, Astrid. We’re just entering the growing season now. All of this will soon explode with growth,” she says. “I’ll give Ted a call and let him know that we’ve decided to let things settle in,” she shouts over her shoulder, blundering to the car and ducking inside before she is asked to recommend pregnancy books or pre-natal classes, or even worse, before Astrid begins her regular musings on Ch’i and the proper direction of the universal energies.

Kate is foolish with tears as she grabs her cell phone and listens to the last four messages she has saved. She listens for even the slightest indication of his waning affections. Something she might have missed, some hardness, some measured distance in his voice. She finds nothing to suggest his disaffection and she feels the betrayal acutely though she knows she has no right to it.

She imagines Ted already at the office this morning, working up real estate deals, generating the kind of money required to resurrect 61 Alfonso Court in the manner compliant with eastern philosophy. And she rehearses the conversation she will have with him about Astrid’s concerns, carefully planning her comments in order to mask her outrage.

She dials twice but can’t force herself to press Send. She is afraid this is the end of it – the thing between them that never really began. Though she knows that this is as good a place as any to cut it off and resume her regular life, she is powerless to make the call.

Instead she cancels the rest of the day’s appointments and drives home to sulk and weep in the quiet of her empty house. She phones her best friend, Amy, who will surely talk her off the tottering ledge, will right her wobbling emotional stability.

She tells Amy everything including her inability to properly fantasize a sex scene with this man, that she can only conjure their holding each other in some sort of profound embrace.

Amy, nothing if not matter of fact and efficient says, “Oh honey, you’re way gone. I can tell because he’s become something like your very own version of God. You’ll be okay. Let yourself miss him. We all do, honey, we all do. Miss God, I mean.”

And Kate weeps softly with disappointment while she drafts a fraught letter, hand written and blurry at the edges, a note she will later crumple and tear and tuck safely beneath the cereal remnants in the garbage pail, a hand drafted good bye to man she hardly knows beyond the space he occupies in her brain.

In the days to follow, Kate finds herself driving by the house, feeling a little flare of happiness when she notices that Ted’s car sits alone in the driveway. She secretly celebrates Astrid’s absence, imagining her sporty Nissan gone to the grocery or to meditation class.

The grass at Alfonso Court begins to grow long. Leaves accumulate on the driveway that is still sullied with mud and the trappings of construction. She is remarkably satisfied by the way things are slipping into wild, lush abandon without her careful pruning and expert attention.

Her cell phone rings incessantly, all day – clients, contractors, Paul calling to say he’ll be late coming home. Again. Despite the phone’s cheerful chirp and chatter, Ted’s silence is deafening and distracting, enticing her to elicit the attention she needs above all else, beyond water or food or breath.

Kate conjures multiple excuses for stopping by Alfonso Court, deciding on the best, most believable one before committing to the task. She decides it is her duty to return there under the pretense of Gardenia surveillance. “I am merely keeping my word,” she repeats to herself as she approaches the front door. She declares, firmly to herself, I won’t stay long. The kids will need to be picked up, the dog walked before dinner preparations.

The sound of the bell is an echo in what appears to be a nearly empty foyer. She can see that the paintings and furniture, carefully selected and arranged according to Feng Shui principles, have been removed. There is scant evidence of inhabitance save for a pair of men’s driving shoes and a pile of mail on the hallway floor, just inside the door. Kate avoids looking at the plants, clearly suffering neglect. She pauses there, preparing, working herself up to the task of goodbye while Ted comes thundering to the door, uncharacteristically expansive and spectacularly drunk.

“Kate Adams? Well, come in. Join me. I’m set up for Mojitos.”

“That’s okay. I’m just following up on the garden. When I last saw Astrid I told her I’d come by and check things out in few weeks.”

“I appreciate that,” Ted steps aside and makes a sweeping gesture, ushering her inside though she has vowed to stay well outside that front door, poking around in the garden, making lists of maintenance requirements.

“Update,” Ted says. “Astrid’s long gone and I’m selling the place before sinking another dime. You don’t have to worry about fulfilling any promises you’ve made. You’re off the hook.” He leads her back to the kitchen overlooking the pool gone filthy green with neglect.

“Jesus, Ted, it’s a mess out there. You can’t put the house on the market with a yard looking like that. Let the guys come by and finish the driveway. Make it look appealing from the street.”

“It’s just an investment for me Kate. The whole idea was to flip it. To improve it only slightly and turn around and sell.” He is crushing mint leaves with the back of a spoon as he speaks, efficient and intent on his host’s task despite the fact that he is several drinks deep and his usual tailored appearance had been replaced by a more disorderly version of his former self, untucked, unpressed, like he’d been sleeping in that particular dress shirt and pair of pants for days.

“The whole project took on a life of its own. Astrid really began looking at this as a home not a return investment,” Ted says as he fixes her a drink in a suspiciously cloudy glass. She sips at it, sloshing it around, making polite and companionable sounds with her ice cubes. After all, she thinks, it’s not even four o’clock.

“Sounds to me like you’ll be needing something like a real home in another few months,” she says.

He glances up quickly, something wildly apologetic and shameful in the way he meets her gaze. “So you think I’m an asshole for not being enthusiastic?”

“No. I think you have every right to be wary of it, at your age. God, I’m tired of the parent thing and I’m only thirty-six.”

“Kate, she took everything. She’s staying with a friend in Pompano for awhile.”

“It’s just an argument. It’ll blow over,” Kate says, between gulps of her Mojito that she now drinks with vigor, needing something to do with her hands while sustaining uncomfortable conversation, the alcoholic equivalent of chewing her nails.

“Jesus, it’s more than an argument. It’s an existential divide,” he says.

Kate wonders at the powers of alcohol. How loose Ted seems with these private details like there is penance in having this conversation, here , with her, in the afternoon at an empty house, save for the clear rum and the tumblers and the sound of a broken pool pump.

Kate, sitting at the bar stool across from where Ted stands, feels her presence there inevitable, scripted, like she is the recipient of his shame.

He covers her hand with his own. She registers the weight of it as comfort and companionship. Their two hands like a pre-game cheer, resting there beside the glass she had drained of the sweet, severe taste of alcohol.

“Astrid’s beautiful, right? And, it was easy for me. Relationship-lite,” he says, fairly whispering this admission. “Promise you won’t get all righteous on me before hearing me out,” he says while moving around the granite island to sit on the stool right next to hers.

“I needed that light thing for awhile after what was long and serious and dramatic. Truth is, I was married to another woman for thirty-six years and she’s dying right now in Winston-Salem where she lives with her mother and sister while doctors pump her full of chemo and radiation and all the other shit that buys a person a few agonizing, painful years.”

He runs that very same hand, that was only minutes ago resting atop her own, through his hair with a restlessness and agitation that he’s been drinking at for some time.

“Marilyn’s leaving me is a long story that reflects poorly on me. But it was two years ago. You almost get over a thing before another one bites you in the ass.”

Kate fumbles with the spoon that has little specks of chopped mint pressed to its back. She suppresses a powerful urge to leave. She feels he deserves to tell this story, and she is perversely relieved that she had been wrong in her previous assessment. She had always assumed that he had deserted his former wife for the younger Astrid. The fact that he is the one that has been abandoned surfaces like hope. Now she won’t need to hold him accountable for such a severe disloyalty.

“I guess a person can kind of derail when faced with death,” Kate offers now, as consolation.

”No, it wasn’t sudden like that. Thirty five years after you’ve met someone, there’s not much left of the old charge. You keep at it because it’s the right thing to do, because you’re Catholic and watching the thing die on the vine is expected. When she learned she was sick again, she decided to leave. She didn’t have the energy to keep pretending. After the initial shock of it, I found a distraction…”

“How do you know what’s happened to her, to Marilyn, I mean?” Kate asks.

“I get information from our three sons. I wait for phone calls, updates about end of life care.”

Kate stands abruptly, urgently needing to use the bathroom if just to gather remove from Ted, to ponder the suggestion of that hand.

She talks to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her lips damp with rum, her cheeks glowing with drink. He is only sharing the truth with someone, anyone. There is no harm in this. She manipulates her shirt back into the waistline of her jeans, she smoothes her hair and purses her lips. She stares at herself long enough to discern the slight difference between her two eyes, one just a hair smaller than the other. And she returns to the kitchen where Ted offers her another full drink that he has busied himself with in her absence.

He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequate and attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.

And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the countertop to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that she has been working towards for months.

He is an efficient lover and it is a brief but satisfying coupling, free of promises or possessions, that allows her plenty of time to collect herself on the ride to parent pick up.

He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper anything profound that elicits a torrent of great relief. She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.

Despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other. She feels ordinary and slightly defeated. She begins to sleep again. She can feel herself returning to the present.

It is over as quickly as it began. And for a time, she is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth, like a schoolgirl with a secret. She suspects that, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul had already forgiven her this trespass.

Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the Gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.

I need your help today – on two counts.

One: You all seemed to have enjoyed the bit of fiction I shared yesterday and because I’m not sure where to go with it next, I’m interested to hear what my fair readers might propose as possible plot trajectory for my character and her love interest. Remember I’m not trying to write a romance novel so feel free to get all dark and moody with your suggestions. I prefer disappointment and distress but I promise to entertain ideas of love’s fulfillment if the circumstances are interesting. Please, discuss: How would you like to see the story resolved?

Two: I have heard this one song on the radio occasionally over the course of the past few years and I never seem to catch the name or the recording artist. I’ve searched iTunes with every possible title option I can think of and no results. So I’m going to sing it for you (please excuse the humiliating vocals) and hopefully one of you holds the information I seek.

The chorus goes, “All I want is to hold you in my armmmmms/All I want is to (pause) hollllddddd you in myyyy arms….

See and that’s all I can remember so it’s no surprise that vague iTunes searches using the words Hold You, Hold Me, In My Arms, etc. aren’t generating the results I need. It sounds like the song is performed by a Brit band but it’s not The Killers or Oasis. I’m stumped but intent on getting this one, so please, someone, put me out of my misery.

And lastly, can anyone tell me what the deal is with Idol’s David Cook. I really like him, he rocked the Lionel Richie this week and he’s by far my favorite male contestant. But then someone had to come along and tell me that he’s worked as an exotic dancer at a gay club. Is there truth to this rumor? Does it matter? I’m really only judging him on the vocals? Should I care whose lap he prefers to dance in? Since My Better Half refuses to watch Idol with me, I am forced to blog about it. I apologize.

And while this post is turning into something of a rant, I’ll also fill you in on the tooth fairy’s latest visit to the Madmarriage household. While O has become a doubter, he held true and steadfast in the face of temptation and didn’t spoil things for his little sister who happened to loose a tooth yesterday at school and came home all flush-faced excitement, anticipating the tooth fairy’s visit. O had a huge shit-eating grin on his face but several severe looks in his direction and he got all tight-lipped and serious, fully anticipating the extent of his mother’s wrath should he spill the beans.

While it’s a day of meanderings and mental wandering, I’ll share the best bit of trivia I unearthed today:

The Book of Lists’ 12 Most Unusual Items Sold on eBay as of 2001 all of which underscore the fact that there’s no accounting for taste, old food from fallen from a famous mouth is not just regurgitated spittle and, well, I’ll let number 12 speak for itself because it’s just better than fiction.

1. Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) broken laser pointer (sold for $14)
2. Honus Wagner “T206″ baseball card (rarest, most valuable trading card in the world; sold for $1.3 million)
3. Gulfstream private jet (sold for $4.9 million which was, at printing time in 2001, the most expensive item ever sold on eBay)
4. Oldest known pair of Levi’s jeans (sold for $46,432)
5. Man’s entire life possessions (still for sale at time of printing)
6. Justin Timberlake’s partially eaten French toast (sold for $1025)
7. Britney Spear’s chewed bubble gum (sold for $511.04)
8. Grilled cheese sandwich with purported image of the Virgin Mary (sold for $28,000)
9. Woman’s deceased father’s walking cane – his ghost included (sold for $65,100)
10. Three tablespoons of water from a cup used by Elvis Presley (sold for $455)
11. Texas snowball – fell on X-mas day, the first time snow had fallen in Texas in 109 years (sold for $92)
12. Man’s forehead for advertising space (sold for $37,375)

But in the last few days she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understand the basis for that kind of attraction until now. With her own children and a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age had little to do with it. The flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She has spent the past few weeks caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only three weeks since she’s begun working for him and just that quickly it had come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him has taken on the urgent and ominous tone of obsession.

When she had first been hired to revive his garden, she had not considered him conventionally handsome. There were some obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has grown to admire the effort he expends staying fit. His muscular distinction distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth.

And despite the initial lack of physical attraction, gradually she finds herself arriving at the property early, shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation in order to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Together they walk the perimeter of the property. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. Smiling and nodding, he enjoys the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I’m enjoying this so much,” he says. “I can’ wait to get home each evening to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion. It’s like the Garden of Paradise is beginning to grow just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the planted bed of Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day,” she has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone who might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness as she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She begins to play at being coquettish, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his calls to go to voice mail, saving his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, possible suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about sod selection and installation schedules. She allows his recorded voice to remind her of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self. She smiles with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or just to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do each morning to let him go. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her with him, where ever he is going; her day destined to go down hill after their early morning encounter, stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Some mornings his wife walks out with him onto the driveway and he is careful to let her do all the talking. He excuses himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end. “Excellent, excellent. All sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she will sting and hollow with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his call, needing his apology for the forced distance. It comes four or five hours after she has first begun to check for it. And it is like the return of something as elemental and sustaining as air, her lungs and diaphragm expanding into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

It isn’t more than this until it is…

So here I go complying with orders and re-issuing some old Madmarriage posts for your perusal. It’s a sort of best of compilation. With categories: The best post about friends, family, me, something I love and a wild card selection.

And the winner in the friends category just has to be Gift Swap Gone Wrong which is a sort of blow by blow of the evening I spent trying to make friends and, instead, alienating a town with my errant gift selection. Read it and weep right along with me.

The post that I will include to represent something that I love is called Closer to Okay, a suggestion that however imperfect my stabs at affection, I really do love my children.

My favorite family related posting has to be May the Road Rise to Meet You a treatise on how just how difficult it is to send the young-ins off into the big wide world without car seats and responsible bus drivers.

And the one bit exclusively, indulgently, unabashedly about me is obviously The Self Interview of last April.

A post that just needs to be included here and therefore will take the Wild Card spot is Louse in the House, proof that I was dancing dangerously close to insanity last March.

Enjoy the regurgitation and since I’m supposed to coerce new friends to play along: Gypsy at Heart, edj of Planet Nomad, liv and flutter – have at it.

Mizmell has tagged me and I am supposed to grab the book nearest to my left elbow and open to page 123. I am to find the fifth sentence on the page and copy the next three sentences after the fifth here in this blog. And while three sentences in the middle of a book aren’t usually all that telling or descriptive of a novel or a writer’s talent as a whole, when I selected the book nearest me and opened to the designated page, I liked what I found. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Amy Hempel is a wizard with words and even the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences of the 123rd page do her justice. I keep her compilation of short stories on my desk beside the laptop. I begin my day with her. Opening the book at random and finding inspiration in the way she strings a sentence together.

This is how it looked: a car in the driveway, a light on upstairs. But nobody answers the door. I know what I would have done as a child if there was somebody home on Halloween night who did not bother to answer the door. I would have come back with shaving cream and eggs, with toilet paper and friends.
~Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

She’s nailed it. It’s a simple thing but she has conjured memory: me and Megan Cisneros tormenting the neighbors who failed to produce adequate loot on Halloween night with mailbox pranks and doorbell ditching and all manner of obnoxiousness well into November. Now, twenty year’s later, I can only think that the citizens of Fredrickson Road can thank their lucky stars that paint ball had not been invented in 1983.

But there are other books here in the stack beside my laptop and I can’t resist the urge to see if these authors, the ones I begin my day with, like stretching my calve muscles or exhaling deep breathes, the ones who help me prepare to write, will they manage the same brilliance on a random page, mid-story?

Next in the stack is Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.

“Bill, divorced only once, is here tonight with Debbie, a woman who is too young for him: at least that is what he knows is said, thought the next time it is said to his face, Bill will shout, “I beg your pardon!” Maybe not shout. Maybe squeak. Squeak with a dash of begging.”

Okay, I allowed for four sentences but they were short and the fourth really just modified the third and seemed too brilliant and utterly necessary to Bill’s character and predicament to have left it out.

I could go on like this forever. The stack of books beside me is rather monumental. I could open each at random and see what wordy treasure lies within. It’s an enticing way to spend a weekend, but, in the interest of time and because memes are supposed to be short, slap dash, even whimsical, I’ll just do one more. It’s here and it’s handy: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

“I have donated to the couple from the women’s shelter, and to the little boy from the youth group, to the woman from the Green Party, the kids from the Boy’s Club, the pair of solemn teenagers from SANE/FREEZE. The Berkeley-ness of Berkeley, so charming at first, is getting old. The bell rings.”

The bell rings. Did you read that? Of course the bell rings and Eggers has me reading on to see who will answer the bell, to find out which needy pan handler is on the doorstep. This is the beauty of Eggers, I think I’ll read three sentences and a half hour elapses and I’m well into page 150 when I remember that I’ve got a post to finish.

And just for kicks, I want to see how I stand up to the professionals. So I randomly select a page from my own story, Habeas. Since I have not written 123 pages, I settle for page 43, five sentences in:

“The interior of my mother’s car her true reflection, a jumble of paper coffee cups, packages of wasabi peas and soy nuts, a full ashtray, discarded tank tops and blousy skirts, windows clouded with road salt and the dingy filth of cigarette smoke, the windshield hazy and opaque with neglect. She bends forward over the steering wheel and her arm shoots out in front of me at every stop as if to stall my possible trajectory through the front windshield. I am forever ten year’s old in her mind.”

There’s my shameless pitch for my own writing and for that of Hempel and Moore and Eggers and of course for Amazon book sellers and all things reading related. Go forth and be literate. (I’m supposed to tag some others, so Jennifer, Slouchy, Xsd and Ron, if you’re having a slow week and feel like sharing a passage from the book beside your left elbow, please play along.

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.

****
Now I stop to use the bathroom, to refuel, to eat luke warm burgers from damp foil wrappers. I arrive in Northfield, tired and nostalgic, a persistent drizzle obscuring the familiar pitch and roll of a landscape that is childhood.

Northfield is now a town in flux. For a hundred years before now, it’s been a town not trying too hard.- no steepled church on a pretty town green surrounded by antique homes with black shutters, no boutiques or coffee shops, not even a proper grocery store; only a post office, a cemetery long neglected that sits beside a squat, beige brick building that was the Congregational Church, built there in the fifties as some modern manifestation of form following function and ornament as crime – all that has changed since commuting an hour to and from the city had become normal, expected even.

The residents of Northfield have begun parceling off their land and selling to developers. There are now cul-de-sacs and by laws and cable services with high speed internet access. There is a Super Stop and Shop, Dunkin Donuts and no shortage of foreign cars with halogen head lights and satellite radio.
But the Northfield I grew up in was a town populated by the descendants of farmers, people who had long since given up tending to live stock or working the fields, with empty barns and pastures gone to weeds and thistle, holding space between small neighborhoods of working folks and people looking for lonely. As children, we expended great effort to find fun in the quiet sameness of the place.

There was always Jim Dings frequently found in the bushes along Union Street, a spreading wetness at the crotch, muttering profanities. His wife would hide his car keys when he was on a real bender. The only way he could continue his drunk was to ride his bike or walk five miles when the liquor ran out. And with the single minded devotion of a true addict he would keep at it until he had fallen off that bike on the way to the packie.

I remember the singular thrill that was Dings coming, weaving his way towards town, as we rode the bus home from school. No matter if there was a biting North wind or rain or sleet, as I remember it, that man would be short sleeved and hatless. We’d all dig into our backpacks for leftover lunch items, empty soda cans, apple cores, whatever we could lob from the windows of the bus as they hurtled by. It hadn’t been all that cruel considering that Dings was blackout drunk and operating outside of himself. Not one of us would have had the courage to ridicule a grown man like that if he had not already made himself such a laughing stock.
There were a few guys like that in Northfield to make my father’s trespasses seem minor. What’s a raised fist every now and again, some chronic unemployment, when you have people like Dings to compare yourself to?

The truth about my familial situation didn’t begin to crystallize until one optimistic spring day, warm enough for playing outdoors and spreading a picnic blanket in the patch of sun near the Calleaux’s pool, still covered in the blue plastic liner of Winter. Jessie Calleaux and I ate row after row of sugar wafers straight from the package as we watched the ants march towards the crumbs they had scattered. Mrs. Calleaux, the kind of woman who defined herself in terms of in-ground swimming pools and trips to the Caribbean in February, went on about removing the pool cover and bringing down the table and umbrella from storage up in the garage.

“I hope Jerry laid enough bait up there this winter to discourage their eating holes in the lounge cushions,” she said to her bored audience, more concerned with cookies crumbs and squashing ants with the bottom of our juice cups. “We had to buy all new pool furniture last spring. Destroyed by rats.” She offered this fact as warning, what could happen to even the best families if diligence about rodent control was disregarded.

Jessie’s Dad was one of the few men in town then working somewhere far from Northfield, making the commute in somber gray suits with a plastic clip hanging from his breast pocket that said Jerry Calleaux, Management Services. He spent weekends in colorful polo shirts and did Dad-like things about the house and yard like lay rat poison, clean the pool and prepare square patches of soil in the sunny part of the yard for Mrs. Calleaux to grow zinnias and tomatoes and rosemary.

“My Mom uses Ex-Lax,” I offered, brightly. “For the rats I mean. She swears it makes them shit their guts out.”
Mrs. Calleaux sucked in her breath sharply. Her sudden intake said, Such words from a little girl, without actually uttering it aloud. And it was then, right then, on the first warm day of my ninth year, that I realized we were somehow strange and hopeless for my Mom’s being in charge of things like Ex-Lax for rats and my knowing how to use curse words in a way that could make a grown woman uncomfortable.

JUST? THAT’S ALL? Interesting word choice.

I’m not sure how he manages blase and flippant when talking about drafting ANOTHER brilliant and concise short essay that best represents me, a better one than the first time around (the flippancy and the need for better are implied. But I figure if I can’t do better than last time why bother? Apparently, my last attempt wasn’t good enough). And then there’s the task of twirling off three new short stories before the March deadline. It’s not that I haven’t been writing since last Spring, it’s just that I’ve been working on a novel and the fair admissions staff at this particular university discourage applicants from submitting long fiction. A fact I probably should have considered long before mid-January.

And with American Idol starting up again this week, I feel quite like one of the hopeful contestants that follows Randy and Simon and Paula from audition stop to audition stop though she is ridiculed and rejected at every location. She enters the room with her number pinned to her chest, sure that the audition in Seattle will be different from the one in Tampa, convinced that this time her talent will be heard and appreciated. She can see their name in lights. So alluring is the notion of someone important finally taking her seriously, that she is blind to one important fact – she is only marginally talented. In the pursuit of her dream she has become an earnest but laughable fool who has presented herself, once again, as a glutton for punishment.

The whole nation groans along with the three judges each and every time she throws her name in the ring. It’s just too painful to watch. The audience covers their eyes and holds their breath just waiting for the audition to be over, for her to finish her pitchy tune and be booted from the room; resolved to return to next year’s auditions with a new hair do and some kick-ass cowboy boots because she has convinced herself that it must have been the outfit.

I figure if I am resigned to the ridicule, if I fully expect rejection and just plain forget to go to the mailbox for all of April and May, then I just might survive the painful period of waiting. Unlike American Idol, the process of rejection from this esteemed Master’s program is a long one. Just long enough to allow all hopeful applicants to fully fashion the image of their acceptance, to imagine themselves attending titillating writing classes with accomplished professors before lowering the boom of denial.

As an adult, who is expected to have plans and goals and something always on the horizon, it’s so incredibly hard – the not knowing. So I’ll pretend I know already and just do it, fashion a personal essay that is passable and professional and maybe just the thing that moves them this time around. I’ll slip a few chapters of Habeas Corpus in the mail, ignoring the warning to avoid long fiction, I’ll shove it all in a manila envelope, not the fancy black leather binder of last year. It’s the equivalent of showing up to the American Idol auditions in a bathrobe. It’s the proof that I’m crazy jaded and not too worried about collecting another rejection letter. It is liberating to act as if I don’t want it that badly. It’s fuck if I care. It’s a lie.

Faith Shepherd is a born again 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 truly found her stride and projects her fretting from the Southernmost state up towards her three grown children who she believes have flown the nest without major incident, with relative health and middling success, 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 now that she is not near enough to hear them. She doesn't even sense their disdain as she speaks loudly enough into the phone to traverse the space that is her eldest son's mental illness and substance abuse, her only daughter's faltering marriage. She offers up a constant stream of commentary as to the benefits of Vitamin C and Mammograms and yearly trips to the dermatologist. There is no end to list of things she worries about and, often, maybe once a week, one of these horrible, 'preventable' accidents happens to someone, somewhere. When she learns about the condo fire or the alligator attack on the evening news, she feels something like validation and resumes worrying anew.

Yesterday she called her daughter who was busy making dinner for her own children, caught in the five thirty eddy of meal and bath and homework, to tell her all about the friend of a woman in her golf group's sister-in-law who has just been diagnosed with Ovarian cancer. She called it the 'advanced kind'. "It's incredibly rapid, debilitating, she's only thirty-two years old," she said. "Not expected to live a year." And her daughter chimed in, because she knew it was coming, she'd heard it so many times before, "It's like Gilda Radner. Ovarian Cancer. The silent killer." They said 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, waiting for the best time to trot out a specific morbid treasure, usually to underscore someone's perceived recklessness. She tells the one about the man who blew himself up along with his entire neighborhood block while digging the footer for a new front walk as warning to her son who has just bought a lawn aerator. "It is the perfect example of what happens when people use power tools without first mapping out the under ground gas lines in the yard," she says and cannot understand why he has hung up on her.

Her middle child, the doctor with the lovely wife and perfect fair-haired daughters, has not spoken to her in weeks. The way he tells it, when he called to tell her the family dog had jumped to its death from the back of his pick-up truck speeding down the highway, she was gleeful and proud of her clairvoyance, practically celebrating the loss. "That's the last I-told-you-so that I'm going to listen to, Ma," he said. The second hang up in so many days.

Her husband, the father of her children, 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, every once in awhile when not in a conciliatory mood, "You make me want to drink and drive, to run barefoot on the fairway with an umbrella 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 thinks 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. Death will be swift and unpredictable, from stroke or antibiotic resistant staph because she was certainly not going to 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. It seems that someone has slipped into the gated confines of the Del Boca Vista retirement community and staged a little hanky panky. All the statues of light-up reindeer, their little bulbs shining from the green lawns of retired couples just trying for a little holiday spirit, have been arranged 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 event by propping up half finished bottles of wine and discarded plastic champagne flutes in the coarse St. Augustine grass of the quiet neighborhood.

It's not the lewdness of the scene that bothers Faith, but the fact that the joke 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 tanned and wealthy senior citizens.

Which, to Faith, indicates it must be an inside job. Some one familiar and among them, given to wandering the streets at night thinking about sex. Sexual thoughts, even of the wildlife variety, disturb her. She is reminded of the article she read in Newsweek some years back. A perfectly normal seeming guy, married, employed, the father of children, would strip naked, throw on a long coat and walk the sidewalks of their neighborhood exposing himself to mothers pushing infants in strollers and children playing at the park that was properly fenced and gated. It took months for the citizens of the community to identify him as the family man who lived in the adorable house on the corner of Elm and Grove even though he never wore a mask or a hat or anything type of disguise. 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. Their brains refused to see his likeness until he had flashed each and every one of them at least twice.

She vows that this same dumb disbelief will not color her suspicions and she sees everyone at the rec center that morning as a potential perpetrator. She tells her husband after she returns from yoga, "It's probably a widower. Like Lowell MacDonald or Phelps Edwards. It could have been either one of them, they've been alone so long. Solitude makes a person strange after awhile."

And her husband chuckles and 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 with his name on it in the garage. He rides his bike to club house with no hands and plays through the seventh hole even though thunder rumbles ominously in the distance.

“But we’re friends, Chad. I mean really, really friends,” I said, stepping back a little to see him in the darkness.

“Exactly. I can eat sunflower seeds and watch baseball with you. All day. Without your ever mentioning the fat content of a seed. I love that,” he laughed, drawing me back into his chest. I could feel his clavicle against my temple.

Bob Dylan growled from the stereo,I’ve seen love go by my door/It’s never been this close before/Never been so easy or so slow.

“You need to live someplace that is warm and dry, without pets.” I said, reminding him that I was once and always from New England, that New England could have humidly oppressive summers and spring was yellow with pollen and bees and rag weed. I reminded him that I loved dogs, dogs that were great shedders, dogs that slobbered with aplomb.

“So where does that leave me? Allergy free and alone,” he suffered my resistance with humor.

I had always pictured him living in a one bedroom apartment on the West Coast, wearing loose clothing and sandals, reading lots of books. I had imagined that on weekends he would surf and paddle. I had never imagined that I’d play a role in Chad Gabbard’s post-collegiate life.

“Most women are psychotic. You’ve said that. Those are words from your mouth,” I said.

“Not you. A beautiful girl who acts like a guy. We could have children together and name them all Cal. You know, for Cal Ripken?”

“I’m your best friend and I’m gonna be honest with you. I have no idea who Cal Ripken is and you’re stoned,” I said with firmness, a trumped up severity.

There had been an awkward phone call a day later, his effort to apologize. He had asked me over for Milwaukee’s Best and bong hits. And we’d laughed and resumed friendship and failed to notice that this was our version of courtship, this quiet folding into one another. Two months later we rented a canine-free yet dingy trailer in the town of Grafton where Chad would play mountain-man for the summer. Our post-collegiate belongings mingled and merged, CD collections sorted and shelved, sheets and towels in neutral tones purchased.

Mom had tried to talk me out of going but only in a half hearted, I’m-too-tired-to fight-you-on-this, kind of way. And she had two things working against her in this argument. First, there was the general absence of conviction. The more she insisted that I should only abide the lure of engagement rings and well padded savings accounts, the more I could sense that she was uncomfortable arguing for tradition and appearances. Second, she had her own history with which to contend. At seventeen, Mom moved out of her parents’ three-story, antique home with its coastal views and terraced gardens and ran off with my father, one of the tennis pros at the yacht club. He had admired her long legs and her short skirts and, probably, screwed her regularly in the men’s locker room on weeknights. With his easy, wide grin and courtside tan, my father found it simple to talk her into doing something she would, for the rest of her life, regret.

As Mom tells it – when she’s defending the place she had made for herself in the world – Dad, with his quick charm and wicked drop shot, had all kinds of potential. He was offered a full-time pro position at the Junior College just outside of Northfield, only two weeks before the Fall semester was to start. She insists that there wasn’t long to think it through and she hadn’t yet learned about the drinking.

Dad didn’t keep that job for long. And Mom, when pressed, talks vaguely of restraining orders and a sad girl named Melissa in the way a person hints at something shameful. She’ll say in self defense, What was I going to do with a baby on the way and hastily acquired marriage certificate? Their town hall wedding was witnessed by Mom’s hairdresser and Dad’s only friend from the tennis circuit that had not yet given up on his total lack of discipline and his tendency to show up to matches horrifically hung-over. By the time I was born, he had quit tennis all together. I have never even seen a photograph of my father holding a racket.

Mom’s stubborn perseverance after years of obvious connubial failure was, I can only guess, an effort born of spite and malice, a way to offer up a giant middle finger to her own parents who passed a year or so ago, but not before ignoring their daughter, her hastily acquired husband and their only grand daughter for several decades. They were hard, uncompromising people and the day their daughter left with Don Bensley was the day they began denying her all access to the life of clanking halyards, lobster rolls and crisp pressed tennis whites save for a monthly check they sent without a note, without any correspondence at all, not even word scratched on the memo line – a monetary contribution to ensure their daughter’s exile.

I know there was nothing conventional about eloping. Not back then. It was an act of defiance before its time. The Summer of Love was still eight years off when Mother looked past money, class and a stable future for the sake of some romantic notion. When Dad began to spin off on his very own version of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test but with whiskey and cheap beer, she was already anchored in the stuff of convention: motherhood, work, mortgage payments. Haight-Ashbury, the Beatles, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had no resonance with her.