Stories: All-New Tales

before they went to get it checked. And this time, Sarah had kept her home from school waiting to see if it was a virus, or strep throat. They’d done what they were supposed to do as parents; they’d listened to the doctors; they’d played by the rules-and by dinnertime, the rules didn’t apply. Children weren’t supposed to die of strep throat, but then again, you did not have to look far for the shouldn’ts. All over this world there were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury; there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons. All over this world impossible things were happening that never should have.

Abe realized he would play I spy for a thousand years, if he could.

THE NEXT DAY, WHEN Abe left for work, Sarah cleaned. Not just a cursory vacuum and floor mop, mind you, but toilets scrubbed by hand and radiator registers being dusted and the washing of the walls. She went into her drawers and bagged all the sweaters that did not fit, and the new pile of pants that ended above her ankles. She got rid of the travel coffee mugs and gravy boats and cherry pitters she never used, weeding through the kitchen drawers. She organized Abe’s clothes by color grouping; she threw out all the medicine bottles past their expiration date. She wiped down the shelves of the refrigerator and tossed the capers and the mustard and the horseradish that hadn’t been used except for that one recipe months ago.

She began to organize the closets in the house-the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor-and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri. It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf-the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter. One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote-control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit-treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love. She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.

Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall. She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and sent him careening into the bathroom. She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eye shadow, a whore’s version of happiness.

When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension. “How are you doing?” Abe asked.

“Fine,” Sarah said. In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth. “I’m fine.”

She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard’s worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future. She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage. Because it was not trash day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine’s edge. She waited, until this bag full of what she’d lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.

PHARMACISTS LIVE IN MINUTIAE, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don’t even know exists. Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebie he’d gotten at some conference in Santa Fe. It was funny-a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. It was that simple, he understood now. You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.

He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died. He regretted the fact that he hadn’t hugged her in front of her friends after her fall concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride. He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family. He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.

Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills. But he had to keep hiking up his pants-they were riding that low on his hips. Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter. It would make sense that he was losing weight-he hadn’t been eating, really-but the belt suddenly didn’t fit at all. There simply wasn’t a notch where he needed it to be; he’d grown that thin, that fast.

Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place. He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking-around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home. Olaf’s, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.

He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man’s Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants. He was aware that he hadn’t been to a bar during the day since he’d been a drummer a lifetime ago. There were five people at the bar, even this morning, and they weren’t the sort of folks you found in bars at night. These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night’s memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.

Abe climbed onto a stool-and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it. “Have you got Jameson?” he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.

“Nice try, kid,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

The bartender shook his head. “You got any ID?”

Abe was forty-two years old, and he could not remember the last time he’d been carded. He had gray hair at the temples, for God’s sake. But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual. “I don’t,” he said.

“Well, then,” the bartender said. “I ain’t got Jameson. Come on back when you turn twenty-one.”

Abe stared at him, confounded. He jumped off the stool, landing hard. The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate-glass windows of bakeries, in puddles. When you lost a child, did you lose the years you’d spent with her, too?

A WEEK AFTER THEIR daughter’s death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her. She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue. She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers as she folded them over after doing the wash. She’d be in one room and hear the music of her daughter’s voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.

Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her. He would close his eyes and try to conjure up his daughter’s face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the edges a little more each day. He found himself spending hours in her bedroom, inhaling the smell of her strawberry-mango shampoo still trapped in the fibers of the pillowcase, or poring through the books on her shelves and trying to see them through her eyes. He went so far as to open her finger paints, stand stripped to the waist in front of her tiny mirror, draw her heart on his chest.

ALTHOUGH SARAH’S MO WAS usually to do the opposite of whatever her mother told her to do, this time, she took her advice. She showed up at the church, shuddering as she remembered the hymns that had been played at her daughter’s funeral, steeling herself for the absence of the coffin at the altar. She knocked on the pastor’s office door, and he ushered her inside and gave her a cup of tea. “So,” the pastor said, “your mother’s worried about you.”

Sarah opened up her mouth to say something snippy and typically awful, but she caught herself in time. Of course her mother was worried. That was the job description, wasn’t it? That was why she had come.