“I haven’t read it,” I say. “But I think I know what it says. So how about a skeleton with something driven through its heart?”
“I’m afraid my grandmother’s interest was landscape.”
“I bet you could do it.”
“Sailboat riding on waves?”
“My idea is better.”
“But out of my field of expertise.”
“Tell me the truth,” I say. “I can handle it. Did you buy groceries to cook that woman dinner?”
“No,” he says. “Also, remember that you dumped me, and then for a finale you married some jerk, so I’d be entitled to do anything I wanted. Then you call and want me to make a corpse with a stake through its heart because you don’t like your new sister-in-law, either. Ask yourself: Am I so normal myself ?”
Banderas nearly topples me, then immediately begins sniffing, dragging the afghan off the sofa. He rolls on a corner as if it were carrion, snorting as he rises and charges toward the bedroom.
“That’s the letter?” Vic says, snatching the envelope from the center of the table. He rips it open. “Dear Sister-in-law,” he reads, holding the paper above his head as I run toward him. He looks so different with his stubbly beard, and I realize with a pang that I don’t recognize the shirt he’s wearing. He starts again: “Dear Sister-in-law.” He whirls sideways, the paper clutched tightly in his hand. “I know that Tim will be speaking to you, but I wanted to personally send you this note. I think that families have differences, but everyone’s viewpoint is important. I would very much like—” He whirls again, and this time Banderas runs into the fray, rising up on his back legs as if he, too, wanted the letter.
“Let the dog eat it! Let him eat the thing if you have to read it out loud!” I say.
“—to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner, and also to offer you some of our frequent-flier miles, if that might be helpful, parenthesis, though it may be a blackout period, end paren.”
Vic looks at me. “Aren’t you embarrassed at your reaction to this woman? Aren’t you?”
The dog leaps into the afghan and rolls again, catching a claw in the weave. Vic and I stand facing each other. I am panting, too shocked to speak.
“Please excuse Tim for disappearing when I came to the door of the Oaks. I was there to see if I could help. He said my face provoked a realization of his newfound strength.” Vic sighs. He says, “Just what I was afraid of— some New Ager as crazy as your brother. ‘I’m sure you understand that I was happy to know that I could be helpful to Tim in this trying time. We must all put the past behind us and celebrate our personal Thanksgiving, parenthesis, our wedding, end paren, and I am sure that everything can be put right when we get together. Fondly, your sister-in-law, Cora.’ ”
There are tears in my eyes. The afghan is going to need major repair. Vic has brought his best friend into my house to destroy it, and all he will do is hold the piece of paper above his head, as if he’d just won a trophy.
“I practiced this afternoon,” he says finally, lowering his arm. “I can do either a train coming through the mountains or a garland of roses with a butterfly on top.”
“Great,” I say, sitting on the floor, fighting back tears. “The butterfly can be dreaming it’s a man, or the man can be dreaming he’s . . .” I change my mind about what I was going to say: “Or the man can be dreaming he’s desperate.”
Vic doesn’t hear me; he’s busy trying to get Banderas to drop a starfish costume he’s capering with.
“Why do you think it would work?” I say to Vic. “We were never right for each other. I’m in my fifties. It would be my third marriage.”
Carefully, he creases the letter a second, then a third time. He lifts the scissors out of their small plastic container, fumbling awkwardly with his big fingers. He frowns in concentration and begins to cut. Eventually, from the positive cuttings, I figure out that he’s decided on the train motif. Cutting air away to expose a puff of steam, he says, “Let’s take it slow, then. You could invite me to go with you to Thanksgiving.”
Coping Stones
Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn’t it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch, perpendicular to the original? That way, he could walk out of the kitchen in the winter with his cup of freshly brewed coffee and his vitamin drink (those mornings when he went to the trouble to make it) and enjoy the late-blooming flowers on an enclosed, heated porch. In the summer, he could set up a makeshift desk— probably just the card table—and not have to worry that rain would ruin his paperwork. There was so much paperwork! His wife, Barbara, used to manage most of it, but she’d been dead for more than eight years, and, except for what his accountant did and the occasional question he asked his tenant, Matt, he dealt with it all himself now, and not a bit of it had anything to do with medicine.
Matt lived in Cahill’s renovated barn. Thirty-two years old, he had already suffered a divorce (at twenty-four) and the death of his second wife, who’d been knocked out of her kayak by a low-hanging branch and drowned, in Canada. Several times during the past year, Cahill had noticed Matt coming home with a woman, but he’d also noticed that the woman—or women—almost always left the same night. Once, he had been lured into playing a game of croquet with Matt and a woman named Leora, but usually he avoided contact when Matt had company; he felt that Matt became sour and withdrawn when women were around, as if he were still suffering through adolescence. But Matt—Matt was his preoccupation. Cahill had the sense to extend fewer dinner invitations to his tenant and friend than he wanted to, because the man needed his freedom. If Barbara were alive, and if Matt’s wife had not died, Matt would no doubt have been living somewhere else, and Cahill would have had more interesting things to think about. It was just that his world had shrunk since he’d retired.
Right now, Cahill was talking to a man Matt had nicknamed You Know What I Mean, a tall, perpetually windblown-looking carpenter whom Cahill had recently advised to have what he felt sure was a skin cancer removed from the side of his nose. His real name was Roadie Petruski, and, as Roadie tried to smooth down his electrified hair, Cahill listened to his beliefs concerning pressure-treated wood: “You know yourself, Doc, these things leach into the environment. Before you know it, your lungs are Swiss cheese, you know what I mean? This genetically engineered corn, the Europeans don’t want nothing to do with it. But us? We always got optimism. You probably read about rat kidneys shutting down when they was fed the stuff ? I read it in one of those doctor’s- office magazines—meaning no disrespect. My advice is always to seal up pressure-treated boards with the best
