In Search of Lost Time, II

Here’s a story I wrote six years ago, revised, sent to lit mags, revised and revised, then put away (gave up on?). It’s not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of art. It makes me happy, if a little nervous, to release it. I’m not great at letting go. I thought the story would be published somewhere big. Two editors I trust told me it would be better as a novel. I want more for Lou and for Anne. I want them both to live their joy. I might make that happen one day. But “one day” is the enemy of art. So, here you go. If you like it, let me know.

Bomb Cyclone

Lou knew his brother wanted him to finish his portion of packing as quickly and silently as possible, then fuck off to California until the next funeral, but Lou was trying to understand their mother and so he continued reading out loud from her annotated book, which reminded him how much he missed not only his mother but also the stage, the thrill of the first on-book read-through.

“The pink and white flame of the chrysanthemums would gleam in the November twilight, during moments like those in which, as we will see later, I was not able to discover the pleasures I desired,” Lou read, looking up at Richard to see if there was any trace of curiosity on his stern face. Not even a glimmer. Same as when Lou starred in West Side Story in high school. Their mother forced Richard to go opening night. Afterwards, over mozzarella sticks and nachos at TGI Friday’s, Richard and their father talked about football, never once mentioning the show. Their mother kept saying Lou had done such a good job, until Lou told her to shut up about it already.

“Less than a day, that’s how much time we have,” Richard said, tearing a square of bubble wrap from the roll and starting in on their mother’s Hummels.

The brothers had been working four days, having fought D.C. traffic the moment the priest said “Amen” at the burial, arriving at the house an hour later, where Richard skipped lunch to start on the closet while Lou ate a sandwich and acclimated to being inside the house he’d vowed never again to visit. Richard packed and packed, avoiding Lou’s burning question—as he’d been doing all week—with work. Richard sheathed dinner plates in pages of newsprint from the pile of Washington Posts in the mudroom, dug through bureaus and closets to bag clothing, separated paperwork from the filing cabinet into three stacks: shred, keep, recycle. Richard was getting it done because Richard was perfect, so Goddamned good, Mom’s favorite, the son who had bought a house down the street and given her a granddaughter. How could he not want to know where their mother had been going? Especially after Lou found the books?

“She underlined that whole thing, and put three lines under ‘not able to discover the pleasures I desired,’” Lou said.

“She liked to read and make notes,” Richard said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“She read Tom Clancy and Elmore Leonard. This is every volume of In Search of Lost Time, annotated, underlined, starred,” Lou said.

“The real estate agent will be here at four o’clock tomorrow. Can we please get this done?”

“Where was she going?” Lou said.

“Not this again,” Richard said. He dropped the figurine of the rosy-cheeked girl kissing her rosy-cheeked brother; it landed on the brick hearth, cracking the boy’s arm clean off. “Fuck me! Ellie loved that one,” Richard said, immediately beginning the search for glue. God forbid the guy stop moving for ten seconds and risk having a fucking feeling or two.

“She hadn’t driven on a highway in ten years,” Lou said.

“I think you’re clinging to details because you can’t accept that she’s gone,” Richard said, twisting the glue’s orange tip. “And you can’t accept she’s gone because you never visited. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You feel guilty and you think you can fix your relationship with her, even though she’s fucking dead, by figuring out where she was going and why she read Proust. The best thing you can do for her now is to help me clean out her house and let her rest in peace.” He pressed the statuette’s broken pieces together, making white glue ooze from the crack. Didn’t he know Elmer’s wouldn’t hold? That he needed the clear, Crazy kind? Lou wished he hadn’t kept asking, wished Richard would have just kept saying “I don’t know, we don’t have time, it doesn’t matter.” There was no talking to Richard when he launched a rant.

“Fine, let’s just get this done,” Lou said. He set the book on the table next to their mother’s tattered arm chair and went to the kitchen. The window over the sink still had no curtains, though Lou had shipped a new set to her several months ago. He picked up the coffee mug on the counter and ran his fingers over the word Nana, tearing up. From the cupboard, he took down more mugs (Teachers get an A+, Natural History Museum, Columbia), soothed by the sound of snow-melt swooshing from the gutter and emptying into the yard. The storm had knocked down the garbage cans and strewn trash across the lawn. He would clean it up once he finished the cupboard, bring the barrels around front and put them on the curb with the rest of the stuff that Richard designated trash. Where was she going? Why did she hide those books? Henry hopped onto the counter and Lou startled. His mother had told him about the cat on one of their recent Sunday phone chats, but Lou had forgotten. Henry purred and rubbed against Lou’s hand.

How could Richard be utterly uninterested? Their mother’s car had fishtailed in the whiteout and spun onto the shoulder on the Jersey Pike, south of Trenton, where, according to the police report—which Lou had studied as if a director demanded he be off book inside an hour—she might have survived had the eighteen-wheeler not hit the same ice patch and tipped over on top of her Subaru. Their mother, who would rather walk to the store down the street every day than drive a half mile once a week. The next mug he grabbed didn’t seem right: It’s Wine O’clock Somewhere. Their mother didn’t drink. Or, wait…was that even true?

Richard was right. Lou felt guilty. He’d ridden cousin Colleen’s coattails to Los Angeles a dozen years earlier and had only come back for funerals, always staying at a hotel in the city. Even Colleen visited the house a few times and she was only a cousin. A cousin without whom Lou would have remained the family loser. Within a year of graduating from USC, Colleen’s first feature won every award at Telluride and shot straight from the festival circuit to a lucrative wide release, while Lou, five years Colleen’s senior, could barely get small parts on D.C. stages. Riding the subway from Vienna to auditions at Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Studio X, and the Anacostia Playhouse, Lou had turned twenty-seven and had begun to notice with creeping dread all the other men waiting with him on the platform in pressed ties and gleaming shoes that clicked with a certain seriousness when they boarded the train, a sharp sound Lou associated with money, with manhood. Colleen had paid for Lou’s plane ticket to Los Angeles and helped him get a SAG card. After landing a string of high-paying commercials for American Express, Chase, and Wells Fargo (having cultivated bland good looks by cutting his shaggy hair and fixing with Invisalign what that one critic called his “extraordinarily villainous smile” after that one thrilling night he went from understudying Iago to inhabiting his skin), Lou had remade himself into the face of corporate banking (by studying those men on the subway) and could never bring himself to go back to the house in Northern Virginia for fear that upon crossing the threshold he would remember that beautiful time in his life when he could have made real art had his spine been sturdier, had he decided to not give a shit what his father and brother thought of him. His mother had believed in Lou’s talent, had said he could live in the house as long as he liked, had not a single doubt that Lou would make it if he just kept going, but Dad and Richard had begun to ask, almost daily, when Lou planned on getting a real job. They said it without coming out and saying it: faggot.

His father, dead a year, yet still hanging around inside Lou’s head. Lou had almost come to the house for the funeral after-party, but had thrown up on his way there, mucking up the passenger seat of the rental car with his anxiety. He went to the car wash, then to Reagan, calling his mother to say he’d written down the wrong departure time. She’d said she understood, wished him a safe flight, said maybe he could be there for Christmas.

Now that Lou was in the house, the feelings he had been resisting during a dozen years of avoidance would not yield to his usual stress-relief strategies. There was not enough meditation in the world to soften his shame over giving up on himself and his work. His life. He wished he’d visited while his mother was still alive, to tackle those feelings head-on and make his mother happy in the process. The cat cried. Lou scratched it’s ear, said: “Where have you been hiding all this time, little beauty?”

****

A white, whirling disc crawled up the green screen, hiccupped, stalled and started, spiraled in the herky-jerky manner of a stop-motion, digital representation of a meteorological event, a symbol of a storm.

“Bomb cyclone,” the weatherman said.

“The hell is that?” Anne said, yelling at the TV from her tattered arm chair. She ignored the whistling tea kettle in the kitchen, and turned up the T.V. The weatherman’s voice blared: “collision of arctic and warm air, accumulation up to three feet, strong winds, expected to span the entire Eastern Seaboard.”

“You mean, a Nor’easter?” Anne growled.

Leslie would love this new-and-improved terminology. A classroom, in Leslie’s facile lexicon, became a learning space, and when Anne stopped by the high school last month to pack her last box of books collected over more than forty years of teaching, her final trip to a classroom that had been empty when she took the job, she found the girl bulldozing her neat rows of desks to create a “democratized conversation circle.”

She wondered when weathermen had stopped wearing ties, and if her annoyance at this sartorial subtraction meant that she was finally and forever out of touch.

Henry, the cat who had topped Ellie’s Christmas list—now curled on Anne’s loveseat, returned to her last month by self-righteous Richard—narrowed his eyes and meowed, then repeatedly licked his paw and ducked under it, his ear flattening and springing back into a triangle after every stroke. Richard had transported the cat in one of those carriers with bars on the door, the animal’s mewling and scratching at the walls of the grim container heightening the impression that he had been locked in a portable prison.

“I tried to tell you,” Richard had said, as if Anne were his child, “your granddaughter doesn’t want to change the kitty litter, gags at the smell, can’t remember to open a can of Fancy Feast twice a day. She didn’t believe me when I told her cat hair could be hard to control, clings to your clothes. She can’t handle a pet, not right now, maybe never.”

Anne had refrained from informing her son that it was his duty, as Ellie’s father, to instill in the child a sense of commitment to her aspirations, particularly when reality contradicted fantasy. She didn’t understand how Richard could allow his daughter to give up so readily. Had he attempted in any meaningful way to usher Ellie through the adjustment phase of caring for a living creature? Given his hyper-focus on the pitfalls of feline caretaking—which he boorishly enumerated, ad nauseam, never varying his message, as if every cat’s negative characteristics were as fixed as a tally of ingredients for a pie recipe that relies on absolute rigidity in item and measurement—Anne believed Richard had predisposed the girl to overblown anxiety over the minor inconveniences and small disruptions of pet ownership, thus precluding her from experiencing the joys and comforts a cat might endow. Ellie hadn’t taken care of the cat because Richard had believed she couldn’t. Though Anne had wanted to tell Richard to make the kid stick it out, she kept silent. When Richard showed up on her doorstep, caged cat hanging from the end of his arm like a brusque businessman’s overloaded briefcase, she decided she did not want to have another fight, or be that aged mother: the persnickety nag, the old-fashioned schoolmarm, the scold. Anne had smiled, taken the cat, and apologized for her gift-giving folly.

Lou would have loved the cat. Lou would have been kind and gentle with the creature, would have encouraged Ellie to be patient. Lou! So talented, her secret favorite. But Lou was in California and Anne needed Richard, so she had to pretend the cat was a bad idea. Had to keep Richard happy. Had to behave. Richard had withdrawn the last time they argued, over little cubes of nougat Anne made from boiled sugar-water, a staple treat from Richard’s childhood that he had forbade Ellie from eating. He had lectured Anne—over-enunciating in a way that Anne recognized from her early teaching days, when she spoke to difficult students as if they disobeyed her for lack of intellect—on the harmfulness of sugar and, what was more, the trust for which he needed assurance when Anne babysat Ellie. Anne had called him ridiculous. Richard had picked up his ball (Ellie) and walked away for a month. At seventy-two, Anne still walked three miles a day and wasn’t afraid to climb the step-ladder in the pantry to bring down a bin of flour or a jar of marinara, but she’d started seeing commercials and headlines about old people falling or being scammed. Everyone said you had to have an emergency contact close by. Play nice, she thought, taking the cat and asking Richard in for coffee.

Anne had been surprised that Ellie had told on her. Until then, Anne had delighted in conspiring with her granddaughter to construct secret moments of miscreant joy strategically executed outside the bounds of Richard’s tyrannical reign, and the kid had always kept quiet. Ellie would not have tattled on Steven, Anne’s husband, who had broken every rule in Richard’s child-rearing tome—dipped the pacifier in his Eagle Rare nightcap, encouraged unshod feet in the backyard, and swore like a sailor within the girl’s earshot.

 “It could be several hours before it makes landfall, or it could go out to sea,” the weatherman said. Anne shook her head, annoyed at the ambiguous prediction, the gutlessness of it. She powered off the T.V. The kettle screamed into the silence.

“I’m coming,” she answered, as if the kettle might calm itself. In the kitchen, she reached for her favorite mug, the one Ellie painted at Color Me Mine, four bright balloons encircling the letters of the only meaningful name associated with Anne anymore: Nana. On the verge of filling her cup, Anne paused, distracted by a black band of movement out the window over the sink. Racoons at the trashcans again. Richard had sprayed poison, set traps, and she hadn’t seen the little bandits since, more than two months gone. Why today? She rapped on the glass. One looked up, its mask frosted silver in place of solid black, which at one time must have been so dark as to seem indelible; its claws worrying some scrap of nourishment beneath its twitching snout; its height impressive as it stood on its hind legs: the mother. Three adolescents scavenged the overturned can, crawled inside and emerged with food wrappers, a banana peel, and the bare, bony carcass of a chicken Anne had roasted for a week of dinners. The young hunters waddled through the strewn garbage, oblivious to Anne’s attempts to shoo them. Yet the matriarch must have been impressed by something in Anne, Nana’s natural tenacity communicated even behind glass, because the animal curled back down to all fours, gathered her brood, and led them away. Anne could not help but laugh, leaning on the sink and shaking her head at the sudden fun of the spectacle outside: the mother skirted each and every one of Richard’s supposedly strategically set traps.

She surrendered Ellie’s balloons and grabbed her travel thermos, filled it, the steam fogging her glasses, steeped two Earl Grey teabags, and moved about the house assembling road-trip provisions. She would make it to Brooklyn Heights by mid-afternoon to say goodbye to Susan, though the very thought of witnessing her in an advanced state of decline made her something more than sick.

“Henry,” Anne said. “You’re on your own for forty-eight hours. The food dish is full, the kitty litter clean.”

The cat meowed, stood, arched his back and clawed the arm chair as if the furniture were a scratching post. Beads of fabric balled up around his untrimmed claws. The chair was too old for Anne to give any thought to protecting it, to care much about its condition. Henry seemed to plead: don’t go.

****

It was the bed that undid Radhika. Two men hauled it into the brownstone in pieces, walking back and forth to their double-parked van, the draft and footfall of their comings and goings evoking a twinge of nostalgia for the parties she and Susan had hosted here, their guests flowing in through the propped-open door in the hours just beyond nightfall, dozens of people ducking out intermittently in buzzing gaggles to smoke on the stoop, Susan among them. Back then, Radhika eyed the door until Susan stepped back inside, blanketed in the earthy perfume of weed, a scent Radhika loved to inhale from Susan’s hair. When Radhika kissed Susan, she sipped the taste of pot from Susan’s lips, because smoking the stuff herself gave Radhika the jitters. Susan’s kiss delivered the perfect contact high. The door remained open until dawn, when the guests hailed cabs on the sidewalk or descended into the High Street station. Radhika had carried bags of trash to the curb while Susan slept. They hadn’t hosted a party like that in more than two decades, their soirees dwindling first to tame dinner parties, and lately to the occasional visit from a lone neighbor bearing beige casserole.

The men unloaded the parts piecemeal: rails, foam mattress, waterproof sheets, metal frame, stiff legs, an outdated remote control attached to a thick cable like a rat’s tail. When they had at last brought in every part and set each one down like scattered puzzle pieces in search of structure, Radhika left them alone to assemble the bed in the den, where Susan had requested its placement because of the way the afternoon light lay itself down there, strong and warm. She went to the kitchen to puree Susan’s lunch.

Hospice had suggested packaged soft foods—yogurt, powdered mashed potatoes, Ensure—when, three weeks ago, Susan failed to swallow the smallest bites of chicken masala and cedar plank salmon, but Radhika refused to stop cooking for her wife. She pulled from the refrigerator the Tupperware container labeled “roasted turkey” and put a few pieces in the Cuisinart, heated the gravy in a saucepan, and clicked the food processor’s lid onto the shaft. Alternating between pulse and blend, Radhika watched the pinwheel blades slice chunks of meat and spit splashes of gravy at the plastic dome, coughing and growling as they eviscerated a meal she spent hours preparing, churning it down to a viscous gruel.

Startled to hear a man’s voice directly behind her, Radhika gasped and put a hand to her chest.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” the delivery man said, “we’re all set.”

“That was fast,” she said.

He handed her a clipboard, which she signed, feeling, as she always did when signing for Susan, like a criminal, a fraud, though Susan had given her power of attorney without hesitation, almost a year-and-a-half ago, when the cancer came back.

She slid the pen into the metal ridge of the clipboard and walked the men out the front, refusing their offer to help transfer Susan—who had asked that strangers not handle her—then went in the den to see how she might arrange the room for Susan’s comfort. She stood at the foot of the empty bed, astonished at the harrowing sum of its conjoined parts, which had moments ago seemed so harmless in their unassembled sprawl.

****

As the morphine wore off, Susan thought only of blood. Blood on the table, the floor, her gloves. She was back in the operating room, trying and failing to reverse what would be her first fatality as a surgeon, six years into her career. She had not yet seen this quantity of blood flow out, then be pumped fruitlessly back into, a single patient. Her incision had been precise and the tumor came out of the kidney easily enough, but the vein refused to stop spewing blood. She thought of Anne, who had decided against a career in medicine and gone instead into teaching, a lovely, low-risk profession. As the blood spewed from her patient, Susan desperately wished she had done the same.

The nurses scrambled, the tech laid a dozen absorbent pads. She had prepared for blood loss: additional large drips, invasive monitors, six bags of cross-matched blood on hand. The patient, strong, fifty-nine, a father, a hiker, a man for whom sickness had been a foreign country until now, and for whom the threat, however minor, of a compromised lifestyle was worse than the risks associated with cutting out the tumor instead of removing the kidney entirely, had insisted on the partial removal.

“You can live a long, healthy life with one kidney,” Susan had said. “The success rate for full kidney removal is high. We take out the whole thing and there’s less cutting, it’s clean.”

“I want both of my kidneys,” the patient had said.

 The morphine, she needed it. Where was Radhika with the little eye-dropper she pressed to Susan’s inner cheek every four hours? Susan’s head throbbed, blood pumped red hot and poisonous through her veins, and in every joint from neck to ankle white hot currents of unspeakable pain surged.

“Blood, two bags, now,” Susan said.

“We’re out of cross-matched supply,” the nurse said.

“Don’t be stupid. There’s always O negative.”

The tech suctioned, the monitors bleated. There was no plan in place for this quantity of blood. No matter how many times she packed the site with swabs to dam the flow, no matter how many swatches of hemostatic gauze she placed over the vein to create a clot, she could not make the blood coagulate. It flowed like water from a perfectly functioning faucet.

“Please,” Susan shrieked.

****

The rails surrounded the bed in the den like electrified barbed wire, threatening and mean. Radhika had been paralyzed by the thought of Susan, in all her expansiveness, trapped inside this meager cell for the rest of her life, even if it was only another day, a week, maybe two. Susan’s cry broke the spell. Radhika ran to the bathroom to get the tiny vials.

****

Richard turned on the T.V. Lou alternated between downward dog and plank, cycled through warrior poses, then went to the book box again. The pizza would arrive any minute. It was almost midnight.

“Who’s Susan?” Lou said. He held a photograph that had fallen out of The Joy Luck Club.

“What is Time magazine, Alex,” Richard said. Their father had always deducted points if you didn’t say “what is.”

“Susan and Annie, senior year,” Lou said, reading the back of the photo.

“Mom’s college roommate, Mister Detective,” Richard said. “You don’t remember her?”

“Why would I remember her?” Lou said.

“Tallahassee,” Richard said. “Wait, wait, I mean What is Tallahassee!”

****

Anne had been holding it for thirty miles, having vowed to no one other than herself to make it to New Jersey before stopping, when the blue sign with its familiar white lettering beckoned: Rest Stop. Willpower, she said to herself now, as a second sign came into view, this the final one, the two-mile marker before the off-ramp, which was conveniently situated on the left for seamless access to Maryland House, where she could not only use a clean bathroom but also get a Nathan’s Famous hotdog. When Lou was in first grade, Richard five, Anne and Steven did this same drive to spend Christmas with Susan. Anne had been surprised back then at the depth of her annoyance, which felt uncomfortably akin to hatred, over Lou’s constant need to pull over for bathroom breaks. In college, Anne had made dozens of trips between Fairfax and Manhattan without stopping.

After four years at Columbia Anne couldn’t take the noise of the city, the pressures of Ivy League rigor, the distance from her parents. She moved back to Northern Virginia hours after graduation, and felt relief every day for the next two years. Teaching high school chemistry was a bit of a snore, but the math teacher two classrooms down was a great dresser with an aloofness Anne found irresistible. Two years later, on their honeymoon, Steven said his initial chilliness had been calculated, that he could feel it working on her. It wasn’t until the last-minute whim of a holiday get-away with the kids, that Anne, knee-deep in marriage and motherhood, began to experience a sense of regret that would only worsen over time.

She could see Maryland House now, and neither bladder nor appetite would cooperate with her determination to press on. She slowed and signaled, a little ashamed of her diminished willpower, a little delighted to indulge herself.

****

One of the machine’s countless clipped beeps hung in the acrid air of the operating room, a sustained high note, the aria of a life letting go. Susan ripped off her gown and slammed out into the scrub room, swearing through tears, scouring her hands in scalding water.

****

Radhika rubbed Susan’s head, whispered to her as she squirmed and moaned.

****

In the waiting room, the patient’s wife stood as Susan approached. Before she could say the two dreaded words, I’m sorry, Susan slid into a morphine haze.

****

Lou could not stop looking at the photo. Their mother sat behind a table littered with squat bottles of amber booze, a plate of cheeses—a cheddar wheel, a brie triangle, a rectangular block of Swiss, knives with rounded handles sunk into their pale skins—assorted bowls and empty beer cans. She looked up at the woman named Susan, who stood in the foreground, in front of the table, laughing at something out of frame. Lou suspected his mother was not meant to be in the photo, that the photographer had shot her inadvertently.

“Holy shit, I remember her,” Lou said.

“Yeah, of course you remember her,” Richard said. “Mom’s best college friend. She took us to FAO Schwartz on that trip. What is Lake Mead, Alex.”

The laughing woman in the photo had bought them each a toy soldier. When their father took Richard ice skating the next day, Lou stayed behind with his mother and Susan. He remembered the feeling of being with the two women, comfortable and quiet.

****

No lines at the bathroom or the food court. The grates were up at Phillip’s and the sub shop, the neon signs devoid of their glow. Nathan’s and Starbucks were open.

A yellow sign with red lettering, Cuidado, Caution, stood split-legged outside the women’s room, though the tiles it straddled had long since dried. The lights in the bathroom revealed every bit of Anne’s age. She dug lip balm from her purse, dropped it, bent to pick it up, and straightened to find a pale girl preening in the mirror.

“Oh! You startled me,” Anne said, her nervous laughter filling every empty stall, ricocheting, multiplying, creating a chorus of anxious old women.

The young woman, early twenties, waifish and angular, stopped applying lipstick but held the tube in place and forced her reflection to smile at Anne’s reflection. She wore a black cocktail dress and pumps, surely holdovers from the night before, selected in the context of dim lighting and passed hors d’oeuvres, too dressy and dark for any daytime event except a funeral, which would have certainly called for more solemnity: covered knees, for instance, and a neckline that did not plunge. Her hair fell forever down her back, past her waist, glossy and smooth, an obsidian lake. Anne pressed lip balm into her own parched lips, aware that the balm’s invisibility forgave imprecise application and masked the slight unsteadiness of her hand. As she worked the balm, Anne tried and failed to look away from the girl, who had returned to focusing on her own reflection as she carefully painted her smile the color of blood. Anne had never been that young, she thought, even though she had once been the girl’s age.

It had been nearly a year since she had seen Susan, the night of Steven’s funeral, after the party at the restaurant, when the two of them had stayed up all night, Susan digging up a lime when the vermouth ran dry, switching seamlessly from martinis to gimlets. Anne wasn’t certain how long she had slept when the sun came crashing through her bay window the next morning and she woke to find Susan watching her from the window seat, empty gimlet glass resting loosely in her hands, a lime wedge drained of juice clinging to the rim, the rind pale with ripeness.

“I should go,” Susan said. “It was good to see you. I’m sorry about Steven.”

Anne ran backwards through the years, un-birthed two children, slid the ring box back across the linen tablecloth toward Steven, declined Principal Moore’s generous offer, persevered in New York after Columbia, and remained in Susan’s bed every night after that one night when they were twenty.

“Thanks for coming,” Anne said.

She had meant to visit New York when Susan started chemo, but going to the city meant spending time with Susan’s wife, whose jealousy Susan did not notice and Anne could not endure. Anne had been surprised when Radhika called yesterday to say it would only be a matter of days.

“She would want you to be here,” Radhika had said.

Anne squeezed blots of relish from three packets and ate her hot dog while playing cell phone solitaire. When she looked up, snow was falling sideways. Within ten minutes it had blotted out the blacktop in the parking lot and obscured the lines of demarcation between parking spaces, burying the boundaries inside of which motorists could come to an orderly stop. The woman with the red lipstick couldn’t have pulled away long ago, yet she left no tracks.     

****

Susan had called Anne over and over in the dark days after that operating room debacle. She memorized Anne’s voicemail greeting. She left no messages.

****

Lou righted the trashcans and dragged them to the front, the wobbly wheels making an echoing racket as they scraped down the driveway. He stood there on the sidewalk next to the barrels and the heap of trash bags, and cried until his head throbbed. He wiped his eyes and wondered if the trash collectors would accept all of Mom’s stuff.