The Most Dangerous Thing

he would have to say is: blond girl, brunette girl, three boys with their hair cut way short, and everyone would say, Oh, the Halloran boys, fat Gwen, and that dark-haired girl they play with.

“And you came all the way down here. Huh. You going to come visit me again?”

It sounded more like a request than a question. Why would we come here again? What was the point of visiting this strange old man, who smelled bad and couldn’t sing?

“Sure,” said Sean, our spokesman.

“I need some canned goods,” he said. “Beans, soup. And I wouldn’t mind some new shirts. I like them flannel shirts, but I need T-shirts, too.”

“Sure.”

Why not agree? We were never going to return here. It was a far walk, something to do on a summer’s day when you had all the time in the world. Come Labor Day and school, we wouldn’t have the time. What was the harm in promising that Leia, Han, Luke, Carrie, and Go-Go would return?

We were back within the week, with all the things he requested.

We called him Chicken George, after the character in Roots, which had aired the previous year. He never seemed to remember our names, nor notice when we slipped and used our real ones. He asked almost nothing of us, beyond the canned goods and old shirts we pulled from our parents’ homes, and each visit was the same: he would play his guitar, singing in his caterwauling style, and Go-Go would dance his dance, flinging his body around as only he could. It shouldn’t have been fun and yet it was, if only because it was a secret among the five of us. There was no one else in Chicken George’s life, no one else who knew of him or cared about him. He was ours, a new toy.

And, in time, we treated him as all children treat their toys-with increasing carelessness and indifference.

Chapter Nine

F or four years, Gwen has lobbied for the right to telecommute, only to receive the most infuriating argument in the world from her boss: she wouldn’t like it. As if she were a child who didn’t know what she wants. But then, Gwen has always hated pronouncements about her character, anyone else’s attempt to define her. She tolerates this tendency, just barely, from loved ones, although Karl’s observations about her these days are hurtful. But she cannot stand it when anyone else attempts to sum her up. She would hate to be profiled in her own magazine, which allots a few breezy sentences, equal parts biography, description, and idiosyncrasy, to summing up someone’s entire character. Besides, her request should be considered on its merits, not on her publisher’s belief that he knows better than she what she wants.

But in caring for her father, Gwen has quickly discovered her publisher is right: she’s not built for telecommuting. Not that she ever wanted to work from home every day. Her work life involves too many meetings and lunches and functions for that to be feasible. But she thought everyone would thrive if she were allowed to work at home one day a week, shutting herself away with her reporters’ copy, free from the interruptions of the workplace. In her father’s house, she has discovered there are even more distractions away from the office than there, and she can’t even blame her father, a stoic patient, almost to a fault. He never asks for anything from her and can barely force himself to seek the day aide’s help.

Gwen keeps cooking, for instance, rationalizing that she is trying to find dishes that are gentle, yet not insulting to her father’s palate. Homemade puddings and soft-boiled eggs in delicate sauces, milk shakes and smoothies. She has tackled the rather messy job of dusting his books, a task he used to do every year but has clearly ignored for at least a decade now.

And then there is her mother’s closet.

Gwen was a senior in college when her mother died. Back then, she was still very much the family baby, still young enough to be allowed the privilege of falling apart while Miller and Fee, proper adults, stepped in and helped her bewildered father make arrangements, short- and long-term. Tally Robison’s end was at once shockingly fast and excruciatingly slow, six weeks from diagnosis to death. It was agreed that Gwen should stay in school, up at Barnard, until the semester ended or she was summoned home. She submitted her final paper on an eerily balmy December day, then returned to her apartment to find the message light blinking on her machine, something that had once heralded only joy, usually in the form of a new conquest: Come home now. It didn’t occur to her to spring for the Metroliner, as the fast train was known then, and the old NortheastDirect wheezed its way down to Baltimore, indifferent to her urgency. By the time she arrived at University Hospital, her mother was dead.

“She was out of it the past two days. She wouldn’t have known you,” Fee said, meaning to comfort her. Or did she? To this day, Gwen can’t help wondering. With her dark hair and eyes, Fee looks exactly like Clem and Miller, which is a kind way of saying she is plain. Although not what anyone would call butch, she always disdained Gwen’s girly-girly ways, her flirtatious style of wheedling. She probably resented the way that Gwen was raised practically as an only child, not to mention the duties thrust upon Fee as Gwen’s primary babysitter, starting at the much too young age of eleven. That was when Tally started going to the ceramics studio in Mount Washington, or was it the weavers’ collective in Clarksville?

Gwen feels bad now, looking back, at how she acted. It was as if her mother’s death had happened only to her. And, maybe a little bit, to her father. But not to Miller and Fee. Her brother and sister, edging toward thirty, seemed old to her. They had jobs, spouses, children. Well, Miller had all three, and Fee was living with the woman she would one day marry. It was part of the natural order for them to experience death. But not Gwen. She moped around the house through Christmas break, of help to no one, unaware that there was any help to be provided, that death required anything besides mourning. Then she went back to school and wrote a lot of poetry in between her journalism assignments, never stopping to consider that Miller and Fee had lost their mother, too. She did think a lot about how Mickey failed to come by over the holidays, which functioned as an open-ended mourning period. No Mickey, although she had remained in the area when her mother moved to Florida. The senior Hallorans made a dutiful visit. Mrs. Halloran brought crab dip, which Gwen’s father wasn’t sure was safe to eat.

That was almost twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century, and now Gwen is approaching the half-century mark, only five years out. She realizes some of her mother’s things must still be in the house. True, the jewelry was divided between the sisters long ago, not that Fee has much use for Tally’s jewelry, although she insisted on taking a coral squash blossom ring that Gwen coveted. Other things have been boxed up, donated to thrift stores. But the closet is still quite full, and Gwen keeps returning to it, losing hours in it. Each dress has a memory. Some even hold on to Tally’s signature perfume, Shalimar.

So Gwen is sorting through her mother’s clothes, putting aside items for Annabelle’s dress-up chest and appropriating some more timeless things for herself-cashmere sweaters, a fabulous wool cape-when the doorbell rings. She shouts to her father’s aide that she will answer it and runs down the stairs to throw open the door.

“Mrs. Halloran!”

She looks awful, understandably. Puffy, sleepless, possibly unwashed. But she carries a dish in her hands. More crab dip?

“You didn’t have to do this,” Gwen says. “I should be doing this for you.”

“Oh, it helped take my mind off things.” She looks around, as if in search of something.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Gwen asks. “My father is napping, but if he wakes up, he’ll be happy to visit with us.”

“Tea would be nice.”

Gwen takes the plate to the kitchen and peels back the aluminum foil. They are store-bought cookies, she recognizes them from the wake. And not even good store-bought cookies. How had throwing these leftovers on a plate helped to distract Mrs. Halloran from anything? Gwen doesn’t want to be unkind, but there is something hostile about these cookies. She struggles with the etiquette of the moment. What would be ruder: putting them out with the tea or leaving them in the kitchen? Gwen arranges them on an elaborate pink-patterned plate, then washes Mrs. Halloran’s white plastic one while the tea brews. She assumed Mrs. Halloran would follow her into the kitchen, but from the sound of things, she is moving around the living room, probably wondering at the