such a big deal. Finally I quit. When I got my training at Doggie, Do I said, ‘I quit. I’ve had it!’ Why don’t we try the grocery.”
Macon felt confused for a second. Then he said, “Oh. All right.”
“You go into the grocery, put Edward on a down-stay outside. I’ll wait here in the car and see if he behaves.”
“All right.”
He climbed from the car and opened the back door for Edward. He led him over to the grocery. He tapped his foot twice. Edward looked distressed, but he lay down. Was this humane, when the sidewalk was still so wet? Reluctantly, Macon stepped into the store. It had the old-fashioned smell of brown paper bags. When he looked back out, Edward’s expression was heartbreaking. He wore a puzzled, anxious smile and he was watching the door intently.
Macon cruised an aisle full of fruits and vegetables. He picked up an apple and considered it and set it down again. Then he went back outside. Edward was still in place. Muriel had emerged from her car and was leaning against the fender, making faces into a brown plastic compact. “Give him lots of praise!” she called, snapping the compact shut. Macon clucked and patted Edward’s head.
They went next door to the drugstore. “This time we’ll both go in,” Muriel said.
“Is that safe?”
“We’ll have to try it sooner or later.”
They strolled the length of the hair care aisle, all the way back to cosmetics, where Muriel stopped to try on a lipstick. Macon imagined Edward yawning and getting up and leaving. Muriel said, “Too pink.” She took a tissue from her purse and rubbed the pink off. Her own lipstick stayed on, as if it were not merely a 1940s color but a 1940s formula — the glossless, cakey substance that used to cling to pillowcases, napkins, and the rims of coffee cups. She said, “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night?”
“For—?”
“Come and eat at my house.”
He blinked.
“Come on. We’ll have fun.”
“Um…”
“Just for dinner, you and me and Alexander. Say six o’clock. Number Sixteen Singleton Street. Know where that is?”
“Oh, well, I don’t believe I’m free then,” Macon said.
“Think it over a while,” she told him.
They went outside. Edward was still there but he was standing up, bristling in the direction of a Chesapeake Bay retriever almost a full block away. “Shoot,” Muriel said. “Just when I thought we were getting someplace.” She made him lie down again. Then she released him and the three of them walked on. Macon was wondering how soon he could decently say that he had thought it over and now remembered he definitely had an invitation elsewhere. They rounded a corner. “Oh, look, a thrift shop!” Muriel said. “My biggest weakness.” She tapped her foot at Edward. “This time, I’ll go in,” she said. “I want to see what they have. You step back a bit and watch he doesn’t stand up like before.”
She went inside the thrift shop while Macon waited, skulking around the parking meters. Edward knew he was there, though. He kept turning his head and giving Macon beseeching looks.
Macon saw Muriel at the front of the shop, picking up and setting down little gilded cups without saucers, chipped green glass florists’ vases, ugly tin brooches as big as ashtrays. Then he saw her dimly in the back where the clothes were. She drifted into sight and out again like a fish in dark water. She appeared all at once in the doorway, holding up a hat. “Macon? What do you think?” she called. It was a dusty beige turban with a jewel pinned to its center, a great false topaz like an eye.
“Very interesting,” Macon said. He was starting to feel the cold.
Muriel vanished again, and Edward sighed and settled his chin on his paws.
A teenaged girl walked past — a gypsy kind of girl with layers of flouncy skirts and a purple satin knapsack plastered all over with Grateful Dead emblems. Edward tensed. He watched every step she took; he rearranged his position to watch after her as she left. But he said nothing, and Macon — tensed himself — felt relieved but also a little let down. He’d been prepared to leap into action. All at once the silence seemed unusually deep; no other people passed. He experienced one of those hallucinations of sound that he sometimes got on planes or trains. He heard Muriel’s voice, gritty and thin, rattling along. “At the tone the time will be…” she said, and then she sang, “You will find your love in…” and then she shouted, “Cold drinks! Sandwiches! Step right up!” It seemed she had webbed his mind with her stories, wound him in slender steely threads from her life — her Shirley Temple childhood, unsavory girlhood, Norman flinging the screen out the window, Alexander mewing like a newborn kitten, Muriel wheeling on Doberman pinschers and scattering her salmon-pink business cards and galloping down the beach, all spiky limbs and flying hair, hauling a little red wagon full of lunches.
Then she stepped out of the thrift shop. “It was way too expensive,” she told Macon. “Good dog,” she said, and she snapped her fingers to let Edward up. “Now one more test.” She was heading back toward her car. “We want to try both of us going in again. We’ll do it down at the doctor’s.”
“What doctor’s?”
“Dr. Snell’s. I’ve got to pick up Alexander; I want to return him to school after I drop you off.”
“Will that take long?”
“Oh, no.”
They drove south, with the engine knocking in a way that Macon hadn’t noticed the first time. In front of a building on Cold Spring Lane, Muriel parked and got out. Macon and Edward followed her. “Now, I don’t know if he’s ready or not,” she said. “But all the better if he’s not; gives Edward practice.”
“I thought you said this wouldn’t take long.”
She didn’t seem to hear him.
They left Edward on the stoop and went into the waiting room. The receptionist was a gray-haired woman with sequined glasses dangling from a chain of fake scarabs. Muriel asked her, “Is Alexander through yet?”
“Any minute, hon.”
Muriel found a magazine and sat down but Macon remained standing. He raised one of the slats of the venetian blind to check on Edward. A man in a nearby chair glanced over at him suspiciously. Macon felt like someone from a gangster movie — one of those shady characters who twitches back a curtain to make sure the coast is clear. He dropped the blind. Muriel was reading an article called “Put on the New Sultry, Shadowed Eyes!” There were pictures of different models looking malevolent.
“How old did you say Alexander was?” Macon asked.
She glanced up. Her own eyes, untouched by cosmetics, were disquietingly naked compared to those in the magazine.
“He’s seven,” she said.
Seven.
Seven was when Ethan had learned to ride a bicycle.
Macon was visited by one of those memories that dent the skin, that strain the muscles. He felt the seat of Ethan’s bike pressing into his hand — the curled-under edge at the rear that you hold onto when you’re trying to keep a bicycle upright. He felt the sidewalk slapping against his soles as he ran. He felt himself let go, slow to a walk, stop with his hands on his hips to call out, “You’ve got her now! You’ve got her!” And Ethan rode away from him, strong and proud and straight-backed, his hair picking up the light till he passed beneath an oak tree.
Macon sat down next to Muriel. She looked over and said, “Have you thought?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you given any thought to coming to dinner?”
“Oh,” he said. And then he said, “Well, I could come. If it’s only for dinner.”
“What else would it be for?” she asked. She smiled at him and tossed her hair back.
The receptionist said, “
She was talking about a small, white, sickly boy with a shaved-looking skull. He didn’t appear to have quite enough skin for his face; his skin was stretched, his mouth was stretched to an unattractive width, and every bone and blade of cartilage made its presence known. His eyes were light blue and lashless, bulging slightly, rimmed with
