Her mother sighed. “No. I don’t know where I put it, now. I’m sure it’s here somewhere . . .”
Exasperation rose in Pru’s chest. She’d left the list with her mother months ago, tacked up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. It had been more than a year since Leonard had died, but the basement was still full of his things. He’d liked to collect useless antiquities: broken clocks, pocket watches, old black telephones, manual typewriters that typed in script. It was the same impulse that had inspired in him his daughters’ antiquarian names, Prudence and Patience. After he’d discovered eBay, during the last year of his life, the stuff had multiplied exponentially. There were packages from Florida and Minnesota that he’d never opened. It was nothing you’d make any money from, and Nadine couldn’t bear to just toss it all in the trash. Pru made a mental note to find the list, the next time she was home, and moved on to the next topic.
“Well, did you ask Mrs. Kovaks about selling the house?”
“Oh, Pru. I’m not ready to leave here yet. Not with Patsy and Annali just down the street.”
That was always the reason Nadine gave. Pru wished she lived closer, so she could help Nadine with some of these things. Patsy, of course, was there every day for dinner, and could easily be helping. But it didn’t seem to bother her in the least that the house was losing whatever value it might still possess while her mother read The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and ignored the unmoving disaster in the basement, the crumbling roof, the clogged radiators.
“And what about your health?” Pru asked. It was an obligatory question; she knew she would never get any other answer than the one she got:
“Fine, fine.”
“Are you going to confession?”
“Oh, yes,” her mother said, with interest. “Are you?”
“I’m not actually a Catholic,” Pru said.
“Oh, that’s right,” her mother said. “I keep forgetting. Why did I let your father talk me into that, I wonder? Confession’s a wonderful thing.”
“What do you even have to confess?” Pru asked, with a smile. “Tell me. I really want to know. Cleaning Maudie’s clock?”
“Oh,” said her mother. “This and that. My life isn’t as exciting as you girls’.”
“My life isn’t exciting, Mom.”
There was silence.
Then Nadine chuckled. “Well . . .” She heard Annali in the background, beginning to fuss.
“Well, what, Mom?” she pressed. Maybe her mother was getting ready to tell her something about herself, something Pru didn’t know, that would explain how she’d ended up alone on a Saturday night, again, jobless, loveless, and hungover. She held her breath, waiting.
“Hon, I better get our Peachy off to bed.”
“Okay. I wish you were here with us, Mom.”
“Oh, me too, honey. Me too. Call us in the morning, all right?”
PHAN, AT THE VIDEO STORE, WAS WEARING A 1980S Journey T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, when Pru came in later that night for a DVD to watch on her laptop. The hair was still green. He smiled at her, and Pru wondered what it would be like to sleep with him. Since the breakup, she’d begun to do that more than was normal, she felt. Anyone she looked at, she wondered what they’d be like in the sack. The driver of the 42 bus. Her neighbors. Men in the elevator. The silent woman behind the counter at the souvlaki place. Apparently, her loneliness knew no bounds, had no preferences as to gender or age or attractiveness. It was loneliness that could unhinge you quicker than anything, she was beginning to think.
Coming out of the video store, she almost ran straight into the man who had helped her ditch the TV. John Owen, she remembered. He was again wearing chef’s pants, splattered with grease, and his hair was messed up.
“Hi, Prudence,” he said. He looked tired, and the smile he gave her was rather lifeless.
She felt some instinct to hurry away. She was still embarrassed about the night she’d met him.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” John Owen said, falling into step with her. “I sort of thought you’d show up at the café.”
“The café?” she said.
“The Kozy Korner,” he said, gesturing down the street. “It’s my place.”
The divey eggs-and-coffee place. She’d sometimes stopped in there for a coffee on her way to the Metro station, back when she had a job. “Oh, that’s how I know you. So you’re the guy who saved us from Starbucks?”
“With my very last dime,” he said. “And I’d do it again.”
“Listen,” she said, “I am so sorry about the other night. I’m embarrassed, really.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be. How have you been?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “I’m getting really good at pool.”
“You play pool?”
“No,” she said. “I mean yes, but I just meant . . .”
“Ah,” he said, apparently not even listening to her. “So what happened that night?”
She’d like to have said something funny. But she couldn’t think of anything, and clearly he wasn’t the jokey type. “My boyfriend broke up with me.”
He nodded. “That part, I got. It was just that you said you didn’t love him very much. I was wondering why you were so upset, if you didn’t.”
“Well, I’d just lost my job, too. I just can’t figure out where everything went wrong. It seemed like it was all going along according to plan. Then, kaplooey.”
“I know kaplooey,” he said. He held up three videos. “Any idea why a happily married woman would rent these?”
She was a little afraid of seeing pornographic titles, something bizarre and relationship-ending. Instead, they were Shirley Valentine , The Hours, and A Doll’s House. The common theme being: women desperately unhappy in their horrible, dying marriages.
“Your wife’s?”
“I believe so. Yes. I mean, I knew she was unhappy, or she wouldn’t have left me, would she?”
“I’m sorry—I’m confused . . .”
“Oh, sorry. First, she left me. Then I found these in the drawer of her bedside table. It’s funny, I have never in my life looked in
