Читать книгу Rock, Paper, Scissors - Naja Marie Aidt - Страница 9

A man cuts across the street in the city center. It’s drizzling. The traffic is earsplitting and intense, from shouting to dogs barking, from roadwork to the wailing of ambulances and the cooing of doves, from children screaming in their strollers to the metro rumbling beneath the streets, from hyperactive teenagers to the muttering homeless, from buses to street hawkers. Thomas crosses the street, a thin leather portfolio tucked under one arm, an umbrella under the other, and on his heels a plump, blonde woman hustles to match his pace. When she’s almost at his side she clutches his jacket, her cotton coat flapping behind her like a tail or a kite, and glances about wildly. A car races toward them at high speed. She gasps and lunges ahead, and at last they’re safe on the sidewalk, and Jenny lets go of Thomas. She says, “Can’t you use the crosswalk like a normal person? You almost got me killed.” Her eyes are wide and bright.

“Have you been crying?”

“I wasn’t crying.”

“It looked like you were crying back there.”

“Maybe I was crying on the inside. I was dying of hunger.” She raises her chin defiantly and begins to walk. Thomas follows. They head down a side street, away from the noise, a long, narrow street, poorly lit. It’s 6:30 P.M. and darkness expands around them. The air is cool. A raindrop pelts Thomas’s cheek, and before long they’re seated opposite one other at a table in a small restaurant. Thomas’s eyes roam across the objects between them: a green ceramic bowl filled with olive oil, a breadbasket, salt and pepper shakers, a carafe of water, and two mismatched glasses. Jenny’s chubby white hand fidgets with a napkin. Then she leans back and looks at him. “What did you think about the lawyer? Should we hire him?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“I guess not. Why were you so late?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was hesitant.”

“Hesitant? Why hesitant?”

He smiles at her and lights a cigarette. “Does it even matter now?”

“Do you have to smoke?”

“Yes.”

“Are you even allowed to smoke here?”

“Yes. What are you going to eat? You want a glass of wine?”

“I want a Bloody Mary. And pasta with pancetta. And a salad. Remember the olives we had the last time we were here? You think we can get them again?”

The waiter, a stooped older man with wavy black hair, takes their orders and disappears into the kitchen. When the door swings open, Thomas sees two young men, one hunched over some steaming pots, the other grappling with a frying pan. In the warmth of the kitchen, their faces gleam with sweat. But it’s cool in the high-ceilinged room they’re in. Thomas shivers. A middle-aged woman behind the bar polishes drinking glasses. The restaurant isn’t even half full. “Remember when Dad brought us here the night of the accident, after you’d been to the emergency room? We sat over there.” Jenny points at a table next to the window. “I think it must’ve been this same waiter, back when he was young. You were pale as a sheet. How old were we?”

“I was eleven, you were nine.”

“And we got to order whatever we wanted. All I ate was chocolate cake. Three slices.” She laughs suddenly and loudly. “Ha! You were pale as a sheet, though nothing had happened. Nothing serious. Bumps and bruises. Just a few bumps and bruises.”

The waiter sets steaming plates before them. The bartender places a red drink, a pallid stalk of celery poking out of it, in the middle of the table as if it were meant to be shared.

“Just a few bumps and bruises,” Thomas repeats slowly, pushing the drink toward Jenny. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Eat your food. Cheers.”

She raises her Bloody Mary so that the lamplight shines through the red liquid. “Ha! Just a few bumps and bruises!”

“That actually looks like blood,” he says, pointing at the glass with his fork. Then he bores into his oxtail and shovels the sauce with his knife. The waiter limps back carrying a half-empty bottle of red wine along with a plate of olives. But Jenny isn’t happy. “They aren’t anything like the ones we had last time. Plain, tasteless. I bet they got them at the local supermarket. Try them yourself. Everything gets worse over time, everything, everything. Doesn’t it?” Thomas refuses to try the tasteless olives. He takes a swig of wine, and says: “Dear Jenny, you’re always complaining. Everything doesn’t get worse over time, everything gets better. We’re rid of Dad, for one thing. Think about that. And he’ll never come back. Except in our most terrifying nightmares.”

“How can you be so mean? You’ve always been mean. It’s a constant, neither worse nor better with time. But everything else gets worse. Love and marriage. Our bodies fall apart. Hideous! Things get uglier. Doors, buildings, chairs, cars. And silverware.” She pokes her fork at him. “Yup, even silverware gets uglier and uglier, and people get uglier and uglier. Just think of Helena and Kristin’s twins, how they dress so tastelessly you wonder if it’s a joke. They sent a photograph at Christmas, Kristin must have taken it—she’s such a terrible photographer—and . . .” She stops abruptly, sets down her fork, and smoothes her shirtsleeves. Then she looks directly into his eyes. “You’re also getting uglier. You really are. You were handsome once. You looked like Mom and her brothers.”

“Can we talk about something a little more uplifting?” Thomas smiles at Jenny, but she shakes her head, and says: “I don’t know. I’m not doing so well. You think we can save a few odds and ends from Dad’s apartment before it’s cleaned out?”

“There’s nothing there, Jenny. Just a few ugly, ugly things.” He smiles again, and now she too smiles, despite herself. Her teeth are yellow, her mouth wide and red. A sudden gleam in her green eyes.

“I want the toaster. It’s special to me.”

“Then take it. No one will know. What do you want with an old toaster?”

“Come to think of it, did he have anything personal in his cell?”

Thomas lights another cigarette and shakes his head. The bartender’s playing some strange music, a kind of languid disco.

“A notebook and a stack of porn mags. His watch.”

“What was in the notebook?”

“Nothing. Doodles and some phone numbers.”

“He didn’t even have a photo of us?”

“Don’t be childish, Jenny. Of course he didn’t have a photo of us.”

“I want dessert. And coffee.”

Jenny orders ice cream and coffee for them both. She devours hers greedily, starting with the maraschino and then working her way through the layers of ice cream, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream. One moment she resembles a little girl, the next a broken, overweight prostitute. A charming prostitute, Thomas thinks, surprised. He imagines how she’ll look in twenty years. The skin of her cheeks will be slacker. Her hair will be thinner. Maybe her hands will shake. Casually he glances at his phone. No messages.

“How’s Alice?” he asks.

“She’s got a new boyfriend. Again. I don’t like him.” She licks the last of her ice cream off her spoon. “You should see how he gropes her in public. He’s reckless.” She looks out the window. It’s pouring now. Runnels of water stream down the enormous panes. “It’s not easy having kids, Thomas,” she says dreamily, still holding her spoon. Then she collects herself. “Well, anyway, I’ll go pick up the toaster tomorrow.” She tries to smile, but he can tell she’s on the verge of tears. He takes her hand and squeezes it, feigning solemnity:

“Take the bus right to his door, Jenny.”

She can’t help but laugh. A moment later, she squints at him, giving him a hard glare. “Okay,” she says. “Listen. This is how it was: We sat right over there, at the table by the window, and Dad said: ‘Order whatever you want.’ He didn’t care, he said. At first I didn’t believe him, but he was serious. You remember that? He snorted and groaned. Sweat dripped from his temples down his cheeks. Remember how sweat used to run down his temples? Who’d called him anyway?”

“You know. Someone from the emergency room. I waited for hours. Do we need to discuss this?”

“Yes, we do. Dad visited you in the emergency room, then what?”

“Jenny . . . let it go.” Thomas stares resignedly at her.

“Come on. Then what?”

“Something had happened. I sprained my left arm, banged my head, and injured some vertebrae.”

Jenny leans back smiling patronizingly, almost gleefully.

“It’s true,” Thomas goes on, annoyed. “And the first thing he said to me when he walked into the room was, ‘What the hell have you done now?’ He didn’t care that I’d been hit by a car. He thought it was my fault.”

“Did you walk in front of the car, or what?”

“No, and you know it.” Thomas feels anger surging in him, his voice growing shrill. “It was speeding, it turned the corner, it hit me, I landed on the hood. You know all that. Maybe the sun blinded him. It was spring.”

“Who was blinded by the sun?”

“The driver! But it wasn’t my fault.” Thomas sighs loudly. “I was going to buy bread . . .”

“Yes.” Jenny flares her nostrils and turns away, eyebrows lifted. “I waited for you in the hallway. Waited and waited. But you never came.”

“Like it was my fault!”

“I’m not talking about fault. I’m just saying you never came. I was so hungry my stomach hurt. I just sat there, squatting, leaning against the wall. Remember how dark it was in that foyer? How deep it was? The bulb on the ceiling, the brown walls? Ugh, they were really brown. When you were alone in there, it was like they were alive. There were shadows and . . . black holes.”

“Black holes?”

“Yes. Black holes. I was so scared.” Jenny’s eyes are moist now.

Thomas shrugs. He signals the waiter, orders another coffee.

“I was scared, Thomas,” Jenny repeats, earnestly. “Look at me.”

“He was wasted,” Thomas said.

“No, he wasn’t. You’re blowing things out of proportion again.”

“Yes, he was. He was wobbly on his feet. You think I couldn’t tell when he was drunk? And you could too. He stank. Listen, Jenny. I had a concussion, a black eye, a scraped head, and a sprained arm, and all he did was stand there wobbling and blustering like an idiot. He stared at me, he stared out the window, he sat down, and he stood up again. He hobbled around the room in that uneasy way that made us nervous, and that—”

Smiling, Jenny shakes her head.

Thomas points at her. “It made you nervous, no matter what you say.”

“But I wasn’t even there!” she interrupts him.

“No, but I was, and he just walked over to me and grabbed my arm. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, despite the fact they wanted me to spend the night at the hospital. It was embarrassing, but he didn’t care. He yanked me out of the bed and shoved me into the elevator. I remember that shove clearly, because I had so many bruises on my back. Then we went home and picked you up—”

“In a taxi,” Jenny interrupts.

“He didn’t say a word the whole ride.”

She straightens up when the waiter pours her coffee. She says, “I remember that. The taxi. How we drove here and could order whatever we wanted.”

“And why do you suppose that was? Was it a punishment or a celebration?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean by ‘punishment’? I ate as much chocolate cake as I could, but you,” Jenny points at him. “You just sat there moping—and what did you order again? Soup?” She snickers. “Soup! It made him angry. But c’mon, it’s so weird to order a ridiculous bowl of soup, the cheapest thing on the menu, when for once you could have whatever you wanted.”

“I was sick!” Thomas sets his cup heavily on the saucer. Then he lowers his voice. “Can we just drop this? Why do you want to talk about this?”

“Drop what? You had soup, you didn’t touch it, he got angry, and then you fell off the chair.”

“I fainted, Jenny. I was nauseated, I was freezing, I was in pain, my head was spinning, I couldn’t eat that fucking soup.” His voice is a savage hiss, but Jenny laughs again, lightheartedly.

“You fainted because you were hysterical! Don’t you think? That’s what I think.”

Thomas shakes his head, stares at Jenny, lights a cigarette, and blows air through his nose.

“Okay,” Jenny says. “We won’t talk about it anymore. But the chocolate cake was really good. And you were so pale when you came to. Ha! He almost had to carry you to the car, though he didn’t want to. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, you threw up on the living room carpet when we got home. All because of a few bumps and bruises.”

“It was a concussion!” Thomas practically shouts. “A concussion for God’s sake.”

They stare at each other a moment, then each loses focus. Thomas zones out, his eyes resting on two men bent over their pasta. One of the men dabs his mouth with his napkin; the other says something, and the two laugh at the private joke. Thomas smokes greedily and drains the last of his cold, bitter coffee. Jenny gnaws at her pinky nail. She goes to the bathroom. Thomas thinks of his father’s kitchen, the toaster. The smell of the kitchen, the sound the cupboard next to the stove made when you closed it, how it stuck when you tried to open it. And the toast that would pop up, almost always too burnt at the edges, was like coal against his teeth, like tinfoil. He asks for the check. Jenny returns and begins to rummage in her purse. She fishes out a tube and slathers her hands with cream. A faint odor of menthol spreads around them. Then she begins to talk about her night shifts at the nursing home. About her modest salary and Alice and her friends who eat all her food. “What am I going to do?” she says, raising her hands only to let them drop heavily to her side. Thomas is exhausted, doesn’t say much. He pays, and they say goodbye outside the restaurant. Jenny is under a red umbrella, and Thomas is under a black one. Rain lashes the sidewalk with such force that it bounces off as if it were coming from both above and below. She offers him a key. The word Dad is etched onto a small piece of blond wood attached to the key ring. “I’m going out there tomorrow,” she says.

“Say hi to Alice!” he calls out as she walks away. She raises her arm dismissively but doesn’t turn back. Maybe she’s begun to cry. For a moment he feels a prickling jab of tenderness for the plump, swaying body disappearing around the corner. Then disgust. Then tenderness again.

At home Patricia’s sitting in front of the computer, her coat on. Her striped scarf has fallen to the floor. She leans forward, craning her neck, her face to the screen. The hallway light spills into the half-lit living room. She’s put a bowl of oranges on the coffee table. The cat sleeps in the armchair. Thomas stands in the doorway observing her. “Hey,” he says finally. She glances up. “Oh, hi baby. I’m almost done. Sorry, it’s just these pictures for the catalog. The graphic designer keeps putting them in wrong . . .” She stares silently at the screen, he stares at her back. The living room: still life of woman with averted face. Thomas goes into the kitchen, where a tower of dishes is stacked up. He washes his hands and drinks a glass of water as he gazes out the window. He can see the river and the lights on the other side of it. A lightning bolt flashes across the sky, a thunderclap booms far away. It begins to rain. “How’d it go?” Patricia calls out. “Okay,” he mumbles, putting down his glass. He walks into the bedroom and sits on the bed. He picks up his pillow and buries his head in it. This is how I smell, he thinks, it’s me, this aroma, the smell is me, it’s what I give off and what I leave behind, traces of my aroma: me. I am here. I am in the pillow. It’s frightening. Then Patricia appears in the doorway. “What are you doing?” He tosses the pillow aside. “Is something wrong?” She’s taken off her coat, and her hair is gathered in a ponytail. There are wet splotches on the knees of her stonewashed jeans, and her mascara has left black marks around her eyes. Must be from the rain. “You look tired,” he says. “Have you even had dinner?” “I had a sandwich on the way home. We don’t have any bread.” She sits beside him. “You have sauce on your collar.” He nods. With her nail she scratches a little at the dried sauce. She strokes his cheek. She puts her arm around him. “Where’d you eat?” she asks softly. “At Luciano’s. Jenny insisted.” He puts his arm around her, and they sit like that for a while. He can’t stop thinking about how stiff and clumsy it feels. They undress in silence, she brushes her teeth, naked—he’s already in bed—and she brushes her hair. “How’s Jenny? Was she impossible? And what did the lawyer say?” Patricia sits on the edge of the bed and touches his arm. She has goose bumps on her thighs. Her dark hair scatters across her face when she yanks the hairband from her ponytail. “Are you free of your father’s debt?” He closes his eyes. His body is heavy as lead. His heart beats languidly, as though drugged.

“Yes. If there is any,” he says, his voice raspy. “We’ve renounced everything. There shouldn’t be any problem. The county will pay for his funeral. But Jenny’s insisting that we have a ceremony.”

“Oh, no.”

“Why ‘oh, no’?” He speaks with difficulty. It feels as though half his mouth is anesthetized. Patricia lies beside him on her back. The duvet rustles when she gathers it around her.

“It’s just . . . the people who’ll attend. You know. That guy Frank,” she says in disgust, “do you think he’ll come? I’m sure he will. And the fat one, what’s his name again?”

He’s almost asleep now, his leg jerking, halfway into a dream about a circus. In it he’s moving slowly through high grass, getting closer and closer. He hears music. The grass is crawling with grasshoppers.

“Thomas?” She tugs at his arm. “Thomas. We should have sex now. It’s been weeks.”

“I can’t,” he mumbles, “I’m sleeping . . .”

He hears her distant sigh, then rolls onto his side. And he’s back with the circus. A girl on a carousel screeches with joy; she resembles Jenny. He senses the grasshoppers’ presence, a tickle, a sound, at once claustrophobic and alluring, and in the dream he regards his dirty, sunburned hand and realizes that he’s a boy, not a man as he first thought.

The next morning he wakes at dawn. The sun’s shining through the slats in the blinds. Patricia’s fast asleep, her mouth open. Apparently she’s been pulling at her hair again, which she sometimes does in her sleep, because it’s completely rumpled on the left side. A strange habit. Carefully, he touches her shoulder. Her breasts look like two pink cupcakes. For a moment he feels a strong desire for her. Then it fades. He crawls out of bed, makes coffee, showers, shaves, and gets dressed. Patricia stumbles sleepy-eyed into the kitchen and sits at the little table in the corner. He pours her a glass of juice. “When will you get home tonight?” she asks. “Can you stop at the store on the way back? We don’t have anything. Buy some good bread.”

She has a late meeting, so they arrange to make dinner at eight. He slurps the last of his coffee, then kisses her neck and cheek; she pulls his mouth to hers and pushes her tongue into it. He’s brushed his teeth, she hasn’t. “Get a bottle of wine, too,” she says, smiling. He removes his coat from the hook and stuffs the folder under his arm. He leaves the umbrella. Outside the air is mild and fresh after last night’s rain, the plane trees’ dense cluster of branches providing comfortable shade all the way to the train station. He loves their mottled trunks. He smokes a cigarette, and feels wide awake. He cuts across the street. Thomas O’Mally Lindström cuts across the street whistling with the sparrows circling overhead, after which he turns the corner and disappears into the darkness, down a long, dingy stairwell on his way to the train.

Dressed in a light-blue shirt, Maloney kicks the coffee automat. His curly hair is still damp following his shower, or maybe it’s his sweat. Thomas suspects that he’s screwing Annie, their employee, and maybe they’ve just had a tryst in the back room. Maybe Maloney’s got high blood pressure. He’s grown heavier over the past few years, and he sure likes his fats and salts. These are the kinds of thoughts rumbling through Thomas’s head when Maloney shouts: “I hate this machine! Peter! Peter! Go get some coffee. Milk and sugar. You need money?”

Thomas shakes his head, smiling.

“It’s always on Fridays, have you noticed that? Always on fucking Friday when you fucking need your coffee the most. I’m calling the company to let them know they can pick up their machine and shove it up their asses. I won’t pay another penny on the installments for this piece of shit.” Maloney’s already on his way out of the office. “Are the deliveries arriving today? Did you talk to them?” he shouts. Thomas follows him. Maloney flicks the switch for the chandelier, Eva rolls up the vacuum’s hose; they exchange a greeting. She says, “Have a good weekend” in her oddly whispered, self-effacing way, bowing her head shyly—but what could she be shy about?—and dragging the vacuum cleaner into the hallway. She can’t be the one he’s fucking, Thomas thinks, inserting the key in the register. Now Maloney’s on the phone with the company that delivers their stock, and it sounds as if they aren’t coming today. He slams down the receiver and sighs. “Why does everything have to be so fucking difficult?” It’s a big store, a desirable location, and it’s been a paper and office supply shop for nearly one hundred years; they’ve maintained as much of the old, dark wood as possible. The chandelier hangs from the huge rosette on the ceiling, which is cleaned thoroughly with a toothbrush, and they’ve carefully renovated the built-in cabinetry with room for especially fine decorative paper and gold leaf. The broad wooden planks have been polished and lacquered. When they opened the store, Thomas spent weeks lying on the floor sealing the cracks with tar. That was a warm summer, he recalls, and I hadn’t met Patricia yet. Maloney was young and trim in those days, and he was dating a nougat-skinned beauty whom he consistently referred to as “the sex kitten.” In the evenings they drank beer at a café around the corner and discussed how rich they’d be if they did everything right. Right. What the hell is right? Thomas wonders. For a moment he feels the urge to kick the coffee automat—since it’ll have to be returned anyway. Instead he sits behind the counter and turns on the cash register screen. Pale sunlight cascades through the tall windows. Morning traffic rumbles in the distance. “Soon people won’t have any need for paper,” Maloney says. “Who writes a letter nowadays? Who can even write by hand? Tell me. And books? They’re on the way out, too. People sit around fiddling with their stupid digital devices on the train. Have you noticed that? Wuthering Heights and Thomas Mann. It’s a joke. He and the Brontë sisters would turn in their fucking graves.”

“Maybe they do.”

“What?”

“Turn in their graves.” Thomas looks out the window. Sees Peter balancing coffee cups and a bakery bag, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Did you know that Peter smoked?”

“No. Nor do I fucking care,” Maloney says. “What a goddamn morning. I think I’ll go home.”

“That must be why he’s always chewing gum. To hide it. The smell.”

Maloney calms a little once he’s had two cups of coffee and gobbled a chocolate croissant. There’s an enormous zit on Peter’s cheek. Annie’s wearing a red dress that accentuates her wide hips; her arms are thick, and her mouth is small and narrow, with thin, tight lips. “Okay, we’re doing inventory today. You do rows one through four, Peter. Annie, you do the rest.” Thomas nods at her. “Don’t count the pasteboard. We’ve ordered more.”

“But they haven’t arrived yet,” Annie says.

“No, they haven’t,” Maloney says, sourly. “Turn in your lists to me before 1:00 P.M. We need to send our orders by 3:00.”

“It’s usually before 4:00, isn’t it?” Annie raises her chin and looks at Thomas.

“But today it’s before 3:00,” Maloney says, and Thomas asks: “Are we doing the books?”

Maloney nods, then dries his cheek with the back of his hand. “I’ll start.”

A moment of silence. Everyone’s thoughts seem to turn inward, sleepily holding their breath as if it was very warm. But it isn’t very warm.

“What time is it?” Peter asks.

Maloney points at the wall clock behind them.

“Oh, yeah,” Peter says. “Sorry.”

Annie stands and moves her big butt into the store.

They open at 9:00 A.M. Annie and Peter begin, shelf by shelf, holding their lists under their arms. They look like two well-behaved students. Or assistants at a library. But Annie already looks older than when they hired her only a year ago—as if working in the store has worn her down. Thomas cleans the pen and pencil jars. Standing behind the counter, he gazes around the high-ceilinged room, letting his eyes roam across the products. He thinks: Half of everything here is mine. I have done it right. Then the door opens, and a mother with two small boys enters. They’re looking for tissue paper, felt-tip pens, and a printer cartridge. Between customers Thomas reads the newspaper, and at 10:30 he goes out to the sidewalk to smoke. It’s windy. Rotten leaves billow in the air and swirl around the street; the sky is suddenly dark and overcast. Earlier he’d found a notice in the local paper: “Convict Found Dead in Prison.” He tore it out and shoved it in his pocket. As long as Maloney doesn’t start in about selling party supplies, he thinks, extinguishing his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. That has never been the purpose of Maloney & Lindström. I should also quit smoking.

Annie hands in her list before Peter does. Thomas is hungry. He drifts about aimlessly, adjusting things on shelves. Not surprisingly, the two small children left their greasy fingerprints on the silk paper. He flips over the two most visible packages. A group of twelve- or fourteen-year-old girls tumble through the door giggling and at once filling the store with their exclamations and shrill voices, their all-encompassing noise. With their eyes made up and clinking armbands. He doesn’t have the strength to deal with them. He makes eye contact with Annie and signals for her to watch them. It’s not unusual for girls that age to steal. Small flocks of girls, and always during lunch break. He suspects they go into all the stores on the street, one by one. Last time a girl stole a handful of panda bear erasers and one of the big electric pencil sharpeners. She had hidden them in her hat. He would have called her parents, but she cried in such a shameful, desperate way that he let her go. He finds Maloney staring out the office window. “What’s up?”

Maloney starts. “Halfway there.” Thomas closes the door and sits on the edge of desk. “Are you sleeping with Annie?” Maloney stares dumbly at him, then bursts into laughter. “Thomas!” he says, “What are you talking about? Annie! What thoughts you have in your little head.” Grinning, he leans back, stops laughing. He eyes Thomas. “What’s going on with your dad? Did you talk to the lawyer? Yesterday, right? Let’s go get some lunch.” Maloney’s in the habit of asking questions and not waiting for a response. They retrieve their coats from the hallway closet and tell Peter they’re going on break. Maloney orders a sandwich with extra bacon, Thomas the soup of the day and a salad. They sit in the far corner, as usual. “They’re coming to pick up the coffee automat on Tuesday,” Maloney says, shoving a rather too large bite (bacon smothered in mayonnaise) into his mouth with his finger. “I let them have it, this little underling who sounds like someone jammed a carrot up his ass, telling me all about the rules—when the fucking piece of shit doesn’t even work.”

“Maloney . . .”

“Someone has to make sure things work.”

“My sister’s taking the death pretty hard.” Thomas hears how formal he sounds—the death—but he can’t say “my father’s death.” He can’t say “my father.”

“Oh, Jenny with the blonde hair,” Maloney mumbles, chewing energetically. “I did bang her, though it was a long time ago now. But Annie? How could you think that? Ha! She’s gained weight, hasn’t she? Your sister? So has Annie for that matter.”

“She has to go to the apartment, she said.”

“Jenny’s so . . . emotional. Isn’t she? Tears and laughter mixed into one. It’s like she can’t quite control which emotions connect to which expressions. What is that called again?”

“Histrionic.”

“No, sensitive. It’s a charming character trait.” Maloney looks at him while cleaning his teeth with his tongue.

“It’s almost over, Tommy. When are you dumping him in the ground?”

“Tuesday.”

“I’ll come if you want me to. You haven’t touched your soup.” Maloney wipes his mouth with his napkin and drains his soda. With two fingers he lifts a leaf of lettuce from Thomas’s plate, then lets it drop. “I remember Jacques. His glistening gray suit. Was it grease? Was it greasy? Is that why it glistened?” He glances up from Thomas’s salad. “I’m coming to that shitty funeral, whether you want me to or not, okay?”

“Okay.”

They stop a moment to admire the show window, which they’re both happy with, before they enter the store. It’s 2:00 P.M. Customers are beginning to arrive. It’s already busy: Annie works efficiently behind the register, while Peter advises people, retrieves items from the storeroom, and crawls up the ladder if anyone wants something from the top shelves. Thomas feels a momentary pang in his stomach, a rapping in his soul, a delight for the store, for its bustle, for the fact that they actually own this place. That he’s made it this far. That he’s risen out of the shithole he grew up in. That the store’s actually successful, the employees, their employees, his shelving system (his own certain sense of style). That they don’t have carpet on the floor. Satisfaction for his satisfaction, oh, satisfaction for satisfaction. Because recently a kind of lethargy has crept into him, a certain undefined disquiet or boredom (is it boredom?). But at this moment a twinge, a pang, when he strolls through the store nodding at customers and warmly greeting the sweet visual artist with the studio around the corner; she’s looking for colored acrylics and can’t find the magenta or the ultramarine. He calls for Peter, and Peter immediately goes to the basement, and the visual artist smiles gratefully. Walk down the short hall, open the office door, get the rest of the accounting done before closing time. He’s just sat down to it when Jenny calls.

“Oh, Thomas . . .” He can’t tell whether she’s sniffling or there’s some other sound in the background. “Oh God, it looks awful here . . .”

“What looks awful?”

“This place looks AWFUL, Thomas.”

“Are you in the apartment?”

A strange sound emerges from her.

“Of course it looks awful there. What did you expect?”

She snorts hysterically.

“Call a taxi, Jenny, go home. I’m hanging up, and you’re calling a taxi. Okay?” He hears her sitting down on something soft and creaky. Must be the armchair.

“C’mon, Jenny.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t stand up.”

“But you just sat down.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can hear you.”

“What can you hear? You can’t hear anything! You have eyes in the back of your head, you spy!”

“You’re sitting in Dad’s moth-eaten armchair staring at the television.”

“There’s no television here anymore.” Her voice quivers. “Someone took the television, Thomas. The apartment’s been ransacked. Everything’s gone, everything. It’s so dusty here, so disgusting . . .”

“Of course it’s dusty. I’m hanging up now. Call a taxi.”

“Don’t you give me orders! You always give me orders. I’ve never been allowed to decide ANYTHING for myself. Always you. Or Dad. Or some other fucking stupid bastard!” Jenny breathes excitedly into the phone, seething. He has never heard her say fucking before. Now her mouth is close to the receiver, her voice dark and husky, thrusting the words: “They have ta-ken the tele-vis-ion, Tho-mas.”

Maloney enters the office. He glances curiously at Thomas. Thomas writes “Jenny, hysterical” on a slip of paper.

“I’m hanging up now. Bye, Jenny. Bye.” He hangs up.

“I need to pick her up,” Thomas grumbles. “I don’t know if I’ll be back today.”

He gets to his feet, snatches up his briefcase, and removes his coat from the hallway closet. Then he rushes through the store without saying goodbye to anyone, despite the inquisitive look Annie gives him. The glass door glides closed behind him. He lights a cigarette, hails a cab. Before the cab arrives, he gets Jenny on the phone again. Howling now and incoherent.

The last time he saw the apartment was many years ago. It’s in a narrow, indistinct redbrick structure squeezed between two taller buildings, the tallest of which is now apparently equipped with balconies. Small trees have been newly planted on each side of the street. A woman carrying a child strapped to her chest leaves the playground across the way. The playground is also new. A fire station used to be there. He remembers the constant howling of the sirens when he was very little. Then it’d been razed, leaving an empty space where local kids hung out in great, squealing flocks, and where he and his friends built a fort made of boards (and one summer, in this fort, they’d smoked their first cigarettes, which they took turns stealing from their fathers). But the building looks the same. The windows haven’t been replaced. There’s no intercom. Even the door with its chipped blue paint is the same. Thomas shoves it open with his foot and steps into the stairwell. A steep stairwell adorned with something that was once a wine-red runner—now so filthy it’s nearly black. The wood creaks under him, the timer light clicks off. He locates the light switch and continues up to the fourth floor accompanied by the ticking of the timer light. As children, he and Jenny couldn’t reach the switch, so they had to feel their way forward in the darkness. He puts his hand on the railing. The hand recognizes each turn, each crack, each unevenness. The pungent odor of rot and mothballs is so familiar that he doesn’t even notice it at first. But suddenly it nauseates him. His father’s apartment door is open.

Jenny’s sitting in the dark on the edge of their father’s unmade bed, staring at the wall. The curtains are closed. The floor is strewn with papers, clothes, overturned lamps, and shards of glass. The air is thick with dust. A dresser has been knocked over, and the arm of a shirt sticks out from one of its drawers. Thomas enters the living room. There’s more light here. The television is missing, and so is their father’s record collection. The coffee table is also gone, as well as the silverware—the hutch is open. A dish with a flower motif, which belonged to their grandmother, has fallen to the floor and cracked down the middle. An apple core lies beside it. He goes back to the hallway and closes the front door. The nasty odor of decay wafts from the little kitchen. The apartment has been empty for probably a month and a half. Jenny stopped by only once after their father was arrested, to water the plants. But someone else has clearly been here. Thomas goes to Jenny in the bedroom. She’s still sitting on the bed, now with their father’s pillow in her lap. He squats before her. “Come. Stand up. I’m taking you home.” “Someone broke the lock,” she whispers, running the back of her hand across her mouth.

“It doesn’t matter, Jenny. Stand up.” He takes hold of her hand and tugs on it. But Jenny won’t stand.

“What have they taken?” she asks.

“I have no idea. There’s nothing here.”

“The coffee table and the television,” Jenny whispers.

He clutches her arms and hoists her forcefully to her feet. “We’re going now. C’mon.” She sniffles. Leans heavily against him. He wraps his arms around her, embraces her. She smells of warm, spicy perfume and nervous sweat.

“Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s over. He’s dead, it’s all over. We don’t need to worry about anything.”

“Oh,” she moans, “oh, oh, oh. I’m so tired. I’m so tired.” Thomas guides Jenny through the living room, where several wilted cacti with long, gnarled limbs are collecting dust on the windowsill. Now he notices an armchair lying on its side. It’s been slashed, and he can see the gray lining inside. In the stacks of paper on the floor is a photograph of their mother. “The toaster,” Jenny says, tottering out to the hallway. He picks up the photograph and puts it in his pocket. Jenny’s already in the kitchen. He follows her. A swarm of tiny flies buzz lethargically in the sink. The smell is unbearable. Something indefinable and gelatinous has formed a green stain on the kitchen table. Jenny braces the toaster under her arm and gets to her feet. She stares at the floor as though turned to stone. Thomas shakes his head. “No. Don’t do that. C’mon,” he says, brusquely. “You’re coming with me.” And she actually follows him, but when they reach the hallway, she pauses again and slides her hand along the dark brown wall. “See,” she says. “Here it is.” She takes his hand and guides it across the cracked paint, and he can feel the inscription that Jenny etched into the wall the evening he’d gone to the emergency room. Thomas is stupid. She laughs suddenly and loudly. Then she slides to the floor with a thump and begins to sob. He doesn’t have the energy to console her. He leaves her there and returns to the bedroom, where the smell is less offensive. He rights the overturned dresser and opens the drawer, the one with the shirtsleeve poking out. Inside he finds their father’s threadbare sweaters, his socks bundled in pairs, and a few pairs of underwear. The air is thick with dust and stale, stuffy heat, combined with the stink from the kitchen, sour and abominable. He checks the other bedroom, still furnished with bunk beds plastered in stickers, the ones they’d slept in as kids and also when they were older, when he was much too tall to sleep in it and had to curl into a fetal position. Standing stock-still, he regards the fading green wallpaper and its minute white vines. All the sleepless nights he laid waiting for their father to come home. Jenny’s uneasy sleep, her getting up and pawing around on the floor looking for her pacifier whenever she’d dropped it. Her whimpering. And then the relief he felt when he finally heard the key in the door, and Jacques’s heavy footfalls crossing the wooden floorboards, on the way to the kitchen for a beer. This was followed by the smell of cigarette smoke billowing through the apartment. He can almost smell it now, can almost hear their father rummaging in the living room. Then he’s overcome with dizziness. He staggers across the room and parks himself on the lower bunk, dropping his head between his knees. “What are you doing?” Jenny stands in the doorway, her raised eyes moist with tears. After a moment she sits beside him. The thin, stained mattress slumps under her weight. She begins to hum. Then she says, “Look, my little goldheart!” She sounds like a five year old. She runs her index finger over the sticker. “And the angel and the purple smiley face Aunt Kristin gave me . . .” Something seems to move at the outer edge of his vision, but when he turns his head there’s nothing. He stands. “Let’s go,” he says, panic-stricken, grabbing Jenny and towing her along, but she won’t come with him, she wants to return to the bunk bed. She says, “Stop it, Thomas,” and goes limp, holding onto first the bedpost and then the doorjamb. But he tugs, pulling her all the way into the hallway. Just as she’s about to stumble over the doorstep, he punches the door and kicks it. “Fucking hell,” he shouts, “Fucking piece of fucking shit!” He kicks at the door again. “Piece of shit!” Kicking harder, the wood snapping. He yells, “I hate this shitassfucking place!” He’s hot now, he wants to set fire to the entire building, he wants to choke the life out of Jenny; he kicks the door again, buckling the frame, anger thundering through him.

“Thomas,” Jenny whispers.

“FUCK!” Thomas roars. The neighbor’s door opens and an old woman sticks her head out. “I’m calling the police!” she cries in a shrill, thin voice. Jenny steps toward her. “But it’s just us, Mrs. Krantz. Thomas and Jenny, Jacques’s children, you remember us, don’t you?” Thomas balls his fists and breathes heavily, clenching his teeth. Mrs. Krantz hesitates.

“You scared me.”

“Jacques is dead,” Jenny says.

“Jacques is dead? Jacques O’Mally?”

Thomas starts down the stairs. He hears Jenny speaking in a low voice, suddenly clear and normal, almost ingratiating. “Mrs. Krantz, have you heard any strange sounds coming from the apartment recently? It looks like it’s been burgled. Have you heard anything suspicious?”

“Burglars?” Mrs. Krantz stutters nervously. Jenny continues, “Yes, it’s awful. Have you heard anything? Can you remember seeing or hearing anything?” Thomas can’t stand Jenny constantly repeating herself. Mrs. Krantz, he notices, has come all the way out into the hallway. She’s wearing a hairnet over her wispy, curly hair.

“Have you heard anything coming from my father’s apartment?”

“I don’t hear so well,” Mrs. Krantz says, tugging on her long earlobes. “Everything gets worse over time, everything, everything. It’s hopeless . . .” She squints and points down the stairs at Thomas. “Is that your brother? I remember him.”

“But you haven’t heard anything?”

Mrs. Krantz shakes her head. Thomas’s legs itch. If Jenny says “have you heard anything” one more time he’ll scream. Then he’ll murder her.

“We need to go right now, we have things to do,” he says curtly. “C’mon, Jenny.”

“It was so nice to see you again,” Jenny says, offering her hand to the old woman.

At last Jenny totters down the stairs, the toaster under her arm. Mrs. Krantz waves her bony gray hand, and Jenny waves back. Thomas is already outside in the sunlight, his cigarette lit. His pulse gallops. A thin layer of cold sweat covers his back and belly. Instantly he’s drained. The sun hammers down through a blue sky, blinding them; they sit side by side on the stoop, overwhelmed by discouragement and exhaustion. Jenny steals the cigarette from Thomas and takes a deep drag. “You don’t smoke,” he says, grabbing it back. “Can you believe Mrs. Krantz is still alive?” Jenny says. “She was such a loathsome bitch, a mean, nasty, wicked bitch. Remember that time she claimed we’d tortured her ugly mutt?” Thomas nods, but Jenny continues, agitated. “Just because we were friendly enough to walk the dog when she was sick!”

“I remember, Jenny.”

“Remember how he beat us that night? And now here she is, being all nice to us. The loathsome bitch! I should have punched that pig right in her face.” Thomas looks at Jenny. She looks angry. Then comes a faint smile and a moment’s life in her green eyes. He smiles tiredly. She squeezes his arm. A bus drives past, spraying them with dirty gutter water, but they remain seated. The afternoon sun is getting lower. For some time, they are quiet. School’s out and kids are scurrying cheerfully down the street. The boys tease the girls, the girls tease the boys. Bodies hopping and dancing and running and jabbing and slapping and pinching and gesticulating. A red-haired girl leaps onto the back of a skinny boy. Thomas suddenly feels rinsed and cleansed by the loud and happy cries of laughter from the herd. Then he remembers they’re not allowed to be here. They don’t have access to the estate. When he stands, his left foot’s asleep and his knees are stiff. Only now does he notice how cold the air is. “Don’t tell anyone we were here,” he says, squeezing Jenny’s arm.

He walks with Jenny to the station and takes the bus back to the store. It’s almost completely dark now. Maloney’s done with the accounting. The shipment arrived today after all, and now it’s in place. The chandelier’s yellow light makes the store seem smaller and cozier. Annie’s on her knees sorting something in a cabinet, Peter’s leaning against the ladder blowing an enormous bubble with his chewing gum, then it pops in his face. He seems more stooped than usual. Thomas drops into a chair in the office, sighing. “Have a pastry,” Maloney says. He’s sitting with his legs propped up on the table and riffling through a catalog. He pushes a plate filled with cream cakes toward Thomas. Thomas pokes at a strawberry with his teaspoon, then sets the spoon down. “Someone was in the apartment. Everything was ransacked.”

Maloney peers up from his catalog. “Junkies?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe it was a while ago.”

“But it looked recent.”

“How could you tell?” Maloney sets his feet on the floor and inches closer. His gut bumps against the edge of the table.

“There was an apple core on the floor. It wasn’t dried up, it was fresh. Only a tiny bit of brown.”

Maloney leans all the way back in the boss’s chair: one long, fluid motion. “You sound like an amateur detective. Some kid could’ve tossed an apple core there, especially in that neighborhood. Don’t you think you should close the book on your father’s story?” A strip of Maloney’s stomach is visible between the elastic of his pants and his shirt, which has slid up.

“He never did a goddamn thing for you while he was alive, and I’m sure it’ll be the same now that he’s dead. You look like someone who needs a drink. We can ask Annie to lock up.”

They sit at the bar. The bar wraps around them in a very safe and inviting way. Thomas is on his second martini, while Maloney slurps the last of a piña colada. The girl behind the bar smiles at them under sharply trimmed, bleached bangs, and the music is just their style—as if she knew precisely what they liked. And now they’re acting kind of goofy, unrestrained. Thomas has nearly forgotten about the break-in and Jenny’s naked, frightened face. His glance lingers on the girl’s eyes, which are dolled up in black. Are they blue or gray? Maloney says, “Maybe Peter’s gay.” And Thomas says he thinks Peter’s a virgin. “But the kid’s twenty-two years old, for God’s sake.” And Thomas says, “You can’t talk about anything but sex.” “What about you?” Maloney answers, and then Thomas’s cell phone rings for the third time—he’s ignored it until now; it’s Patricia. “I need to take this,” he says, pushing the door open and stepping onto the sidewalk as he grapples with his cell. Cool wind whips at his face.

Patricia’s already home, she says, it’s past 8:00, and they’d agreed to have dinner. Did he buy wine? Bread? Chicken? Vegetables? Thomas stabilizes himself against the wall with his left arm. “I’m coming,” he says. “I’m taking a taxi right now. I’ll bring Chinese. And beer. I’m sorry, hon, I lost track of time.”

“I don’t want Chinese,” Patricia says angrily, “and you sound trashed.”

Maloney isn’t at all happy that Thomas needs to go, but he doesn’t even stand up when Thomas gathers his things and pays the bill. They say their goodbyes. Maloney calls out, “See you later!” Thomas trudges up and down the street, but there’s no available cab. Through the steamy glass door he can see Maloney seated among a group of younger men and women, whom he’s already begun to entertain with wild gesticulations. Out here it’s cold as hell. Thomas heads toward the wider boulevards, buys beer and cigarettes at a deli. He’s freezing and shivering, and finally a taxi pulls along the curb. It’s a pleasant ride through the city. I love the lights and the darkness, he thinks, lights and darkness, and just like that they’re at the door of his building. It’s all too quiet here, he thinks. And I haven’t bought any dinner, I can’t go home without any dinner. Thoughts like flies and stinging insects: Where are my keys? An apple core, the stench in the kitchen. If she doesn’t want Chinese, I need to go all the way down to the tapas place, it’ll take at least fifteen minutes.

When he balances through the door with a tall stack of takeout containers resting on the palm of his right hand, he drops his key and is almost dumb enough to bend down and pick it up and thereby drop the containers with all the food, but he manages not to. His head’s buzzing. He licks his lips, a raspy dryness in his mouth. The long hallway is high-ceilinged, painted white. He hears Patricia approaching from the living room in her bare feet. She pauses a few feet away. “Sorry,” he says, forcing himself to smile. “It’s been a strange day.” She tilts her head. The light lands on the left side of her face, the high cheekbone, the ear. “I was wearing a dress, but I took it off.” She tosses her hair back, lifting her chin. “I thought we were going to have a nice evening.”

With his back he pushes the door shut, then sets the containers on the low table under the mirror.

“And we will, won’t we?”

He catches a glimpse of himself, ruddy-faced, bags under his eyes. Then he advances toward her, and reluctantly she falls into his embrace. “You smell like alcohol,” she says into his neck, “and I’m hungry.”

She’s wearing something that looks like pajamas, but he’s not certain they are pajamas. Silk that hangs loosely from her, no doubt very expensive. Patricia spends a lot of money on clothes. Patricia wants a baby. Patricia’s ambitious, but she wants a baby. She crawls onto the sofa and bites into an artichoke heart. She raises her beer to her mouth and drinks. Then, shifting herself, she points at the tapenade. She’d like some of that, too. In the blue armchair Thomas sits arching forward, longing for a cigarette. But then he’d have to go all the way down to the street, and that wouldn’t be the best thing to do right now; it’d be downright rude. He shovels some lettuce into his mouth and bites into a hunk of bread, realizing that he hasn’t eaten anything since lunch. When Patricia’s full, he eats what’s left in the containers, and when he’s emptied the containers, he leans back, lethargic and sleepy. Patricia, apparently no longer angry, asks how his visit to his father’s apartment went. He can’t muster the strength to tell her how it looked, so he tells her about Mrs. Krantz instead, trying to make it sound light and funny. “Her voice sounds like . . . like some screechy kid pissing in a potty.” Where that came from he doesn’t know, but Patricia smiles, her eyes growing friendlier. “Did she sound like the screechy kid or the piss hitting the potty?” she asks. Thomas returns the smile. Staring into each other’s eyes, they are in harmony, everything they have together is in that moment, a fraction of a second. Then Thomas glances away. “I have no interest whatsoever in going to the funeral. I’m considering not going. Why should I go? For whose sake?”

“For Jenny’s, I guess.”

He doesn’t answer that.

“Do you think your aunt and Helena will go?”

“No. But Jenny’s probably invited them. I can’t deal with Jenny either, for that matter. All of this means nothing to me, I don’t want to be involved.”

“But Thomas. Isn’t it best that we go, get it over with? At least then you’ll never regret not going.”

“But I can regret that I went,” he says, standing. The city glimmers in the darkness, under a yellow half-moon. Patricia sighs and collects the containers.

“We’ll go out afterward and have some champagne, just you and me. We’ll celebrate when it’s over,” she calls out on her way to the kitchen. Slap, slap, the soles of her bare feet against the wooden floor. Water running in the sink. She’s rinsing the plates, no doubt. Thomas opens the window and lights a cigarette. He leans across the cornice and blows smoke into the cold, damp night air.

Patricia returns to the living room. She stops, preparing to say something, but hesitates. Instead she says, “Want me to put my dress back on?”

He turns toward her, making sure the hand holding the cigarette remains outside. “You don’t need to. I’d be fine if you just took your clothes off.” She regards him solemnly. Then she smiles and begins to undress. He doesn’t have any desire for this at all, but now there’s no way back. So ridiculously compliant of him, just because he felt guilty for coming home late, for smoking indoors when he’s agreed not to, for not making dinner for her, for not talking with her. For coming home drunk like a loser. Now she’s naked and standing in the center of the room, her fair skin almost golden in the half-light of the reading lamp. He looks at her hips, her pubic hair, her smooth thighs. He looks at her belly, a little distended. Her breasts and her long arms, her slender throat. Her skin is slightly wrinkled right above her knees. Her eyes are so black. He takes a deep drag of his cigarette, then tosses it away. He thinks of Annie’s big ass and quickly begins to remove his pants—he needs to be fast now, when, miraculously, he’s erect—and soon he’s spinning Patricia around and draping her over the sofa. He gets on his knees behind her and eases into her, his eyes closed; she gives herself to him, she’s soft, he pulls her close, and just when he’s about to come everything grinds to a halt. He notices a fly on the wall and wonders what it’s doing alive this time of year, then images of his father’s apartment rush through his mind, the bunk beds, the smell, it nauseates him, he draws himself out of her, lies on his back on the floor, turns his head away when he hears Patricia sit beside him, sure that she’s either eyeing him worriedly or accusingly. Soon he hears her stand and go to the toilet. He feels his spine against the floor, the pain. He’s tall and thin and bony. His shirt curls up along the hem. He’s still wearing his socks. But a little while later, after they’ve gone to bed, she does everything she can to be good to him, patiently and expertly, so expertly that even though he doesn’t feel up to it or want to, she succeeds; she knows his body, knows precisely which stimulations arouse him, and he gives in at last. He’s relieved that it feels good to enter her. She makes faint, delicate noises, and he sees her quivering eyelids. When he finally comes, with enormous relief and oddly jarring grunts, her eyes are radiant now, her gaze fixed and sated. She removes a stray lock of hair from her mouth, tucks the duvet around him, and turns out the light. Then they fall asleep.

On Saturday morning Thomas wakes early, his heart thumping, stressed, uneasy. It’s 6:00 A.M., still dark outside. Patricia sleeps with a hand on her belly, and the bed smells like old man. He rolls over, tries to get his pulse under control. Can’t. He goes to the bathroom, drinks water. Then back to bed. Falling asleep seems impossible, yet he must’ve slept, because it’s suddenly light outside, and he’s dreamt, and now it’s 9:30. Patricia’s up, and his telephone beeps with a text message. Drunk with sleep, he reads, “you need to help me, the toaster doesn’t work, j.” For God’s sake, she’s got to stop this now. Instantly, he’s pissed. Feeling the tension in his neck, he kicks off the duvet. “stop it,” he writes. “aren’t you sweet, thanks a lot,” Jenny replies. He curses under his breath and steps into the shower. He pulls on pants and a sweater, clean socks, running shoes. In the kitchen Patricia sits swaddled in her duvet, reading the newspaper. She drinks coffee. She’s bought bread and butter at the bakery. There’s also juice. “Good morning, honey,” she says, sliding over so that he can sit on the bench. She’s done the dishes. A half-empty bottle of beer rests on the kitchen table, and she’s put the food containers in a garbage bag and swept the floor. But she didn’t use the dustpan: dust and crumbs are heaped in a little pile in the corner, near the sink. Thomas pours coffee and butters his bread. Jenny texts, “knew I could count on you.” He falls for it every time. She feigns helplessness and insinuates that he doesn’t care about her, and so he comes leaping to her aid after all, motivated by a guilt he has no reason to feel. But not this time, hell no. “fine,” he responds, skidding his cellphone across the table. “What’s going on?” Patricia asks, looking at him. “Nothing. It’s just Jenny. She’s obsessed with the stupid toaster.”

“Toaster?”

“I can’t explain it. And it’s boring! Ridiculous. She’s trying to manipulate me, as usual. I guarantee she’s bored. Alice is off with her new boyfriend all the time, she says, and Jenny just sits staring at the wall.” He hears how hotheaded he sounds, how loudly he’s talking. Already he regrets it, but he can’t help himself now.

“She’s working, though, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but when she’s not working. She works the late shift. All she does is eat, all day. And stare. That fatty.” Thomas slams his cup on the table. “I’m going for a walk.” Patricia looks at him, surprised, then returns to her newspaper with a shake of her head. He’s almost never angry. Now he’s boiling with rage. He takes the stairs down from the sixth floor, tramping hard on the steps, pounding his fist on the elevator at every level. Luckily he left his cellphone back in the kitchen, otherwise he would’ve called and given her an earful. The temperature outside is colder than yesterday, the wind’s blowing from the west. A plastic bag dances in the gusts. He should’ve worn a jacket. He fishes his cigarettes from his pocket and finally gets one lit after several attempts. Fucking wind. Maybe the door of his father’s apartment was busted a long time ago. Maybe it was just some junkies, like Maloney suggested, who’d stolen the silverware and a few pieces of furniture, or some drunken second-hand shop dealer, or some boys, or maybe all of the above in several rounds. Maybe it really was some kid throwing an apple core through the door on his way down the stairs. But it was in the living room. Thomas turns a corner and the wind lashes his face. The park on the other side of the street seems gloomy in this gray weather. An old woman with two small dogs is practically flying through the air. A band of youths hang around the benches at the park entrance. Farther down the street there’s an ambulance, and the EMTs are maneuvering a stretcher into the vehicle. His rage dissipates once he’s trudged around the block. Yet he still has no desire to go upstairs to Patricia. He decides to go grocery shopping. The supermarket is filled with families chugging around with large carts and piling them with items. There’s a line at every register. The families with children appear to be buying groceries for the entire week: milk, bread, frozen foods, cereal, huge packages of toilet paper. Thomas removes products from the shelves, but the entire time his ears ring with a high-pitched note of irritation. And when he puts his items onto the belt—goat cheese, red onions, crackers, sparkling water, and a whole bunch more—he suddenly stops. Every single one of these people will die. Every single person, no matter how old they are. The ones babbling cheerfully, clowning around, having a good time, arguing and talking, or lonely or hunted or sad or happy or relieved—even plain joyful—they will all die. Maybe soon. They’ll lie like wax figures in some morgue. Their insides and their flesh will swell and rot, bacteria will explode inside their bodies and make them stink like dead cows in 95-degree heat. He looks at a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman behind him, at the young blond man at the register, at a grandfather holding his small grandson’s hand. They’ll all be disgusting corpses. Maybe very soon. The grandfather actually looks like someone who might kick the bucket any day. The kid could run in front of a car. The woman could have a terminal illness without knowing it. Him too. Even him. Maybe he’s got cancer. He slides his card through the machine and grabs his bags. He has a headache, a hangover, and stiff legs. The glass door glides open and nudges him back onto the street with a puff of warm air. Son of a bitch. Their father lay with his eyes closed, his dark hair combed back; one of the guards had found him, dead as a doornail on the floor. Heart attack. A white sheet covered his body. When they removed it, he was wearing prison garb. “Yes, that’s him,” Jenny had said, though no one had asked them to identify the body. She took a step back and squeezed Thomas’s arm. He felt nothing but loathing. There he lay, a corpse, already pallid and stiff. He recognized with a cool indifference some of his own features: Yup, that’s how I look, too. It was as if their father resembled a boy or a young man, and yet didn’t. His features were smooth, wrinkle-free. The dome of his forehead, his jutted chin, his broad mouth, his thick lips. His face expressed nothing. It was clear that he was no longer a human being. Yet it was unmistakably him. The body, a form for the life that had been inside him, like a mold one lifts a cake out of. The cake had been eaten. Their father’s big hands were crossed over his abdomen; they’d probably struggled to set them just so, or maybe they’d hurried, as soon as he’d been declared dead by the prison doctor. With a sudden tenderness, Thomas imagined several female officers with keys and pistols in their belts standing over the deceased, washing his ears, cleaning his nails. Arranging him, getting him ready. But it was the nurses who’d fixed him up. Those hands unnerved him; they were the same ones that had filled so much of his childhood. The hands he and Jenny had kept a close watch on, the entire time, those fast, unpredictable hands. Their father wore the ring with the black square on his little finger. He’d inherited it from his big brother, who’d been in the foreign legion and died when he was twenty-six, and he’d always promised Thomas that it would be his some day. “When the time comes, you’ll get the ring, Thomas. Before my brother got it, it was my father’s. When I die, it’ll be yours. And your son will have it after you.”

“But you can’t die,” he’d said, anxious. He was seven years old.

Their father had laughed out loud. “Ha! I’m not planning on it!”

Thomas wanted nothing to do with the ring. They must’ve forgotten to remove it when they prepared his body. Jenny squeezed his arm. “He looks so different,” she whispered. She’d visited him at the prison, so she must’ve known. He hadn’t seen his father’s face in many years. Outside it was cold, but the western sky was soft pink, golden. The bushes shivered when they walked toward the road. Thomas had taken the package containing his father’s possessions from the cell; they’d just handed it to him, without asking whether he wanted it or not. He could have chucked the whole thing in the garbage can on the way home, but the package now lay at the bottom of the bedroom closet, on top of his shoes. He’d first realized he had it when he got home. Later he’d opened it and found the pathetic dirty magazines, the notebook with telephone numbers sloppily scratched in, and the watch with the worn leather strap—which the old man had owned for as long as Thomas could remember. Every time he raised his arm to smack him or Jenny, or just raised his arm threateningly, pretending he was going to hit them—which was almost worse than the punch itself—he’d seen the reflection of light on the face of the watch and tried to tell what time it was. As a way of shielding himself. Like whistling when you were being beaten. Or reciting a verse in your head when you were being yelled at by the teacher, in front of everyone. Later he sang pop songs to himself, but around his sixteenth birthday nothing worked anymore, and so he began to fight back. Though he was taller and bigger than his father by the last year he lived with him, his father was almost always superior, except the one incredible time when Thomas had managed to haul him down to the floor and sit on his chest staring directly into his eyes, hissing: You will never hit me again, you bastard. He was agitated by so many emotions that he nearly lost his breath. As well as a strong desire to cling to his father’s body, to feel his arms around him: tears, love. Their father had only smiled and shook his head, clucking his tongue. And Thomas stood and walked to his room. The next day he ran away from home.

Wind rips at the enormous white tarpaulins covering the façade of the adjacent building. He still has no desire to return to Patricia, but he can’t stay out here. A woman opens a window on the second floor. He meets her glance for a moment, then her face disappears behind a checkered cloth that she shakes out vigorously. Crumbs and fluff billow in the air like snow. He takes the elevator up and carries the grocery bags into the apartment. The bathroom door opens, and Patricia exits with a towel around her head. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Every time you walk through that door you say ‘I’m sorry’.”

“I know,” he says.

“Did you go to the store?”

“Just picked up a few things.” He turns and grabs the bags and walks down the hall. He gives her a quick peck on the cheek as he passes by; she smells like fresh laundry, but there’s also this hint of earthiness, of wet soil, which he always finds off-putting. He sets the bags on the kitchen table and checks his cellphone. Jenny has called several times. She’s sent three text messages: “please can’t you help me?” and “I’ll take it to the shop then” and a half-hour ago: “aunt k called.” He hears Patricia setting up the ironing board in the living room. With the phone in his hand he opens the bedroom door. It’s cool and dark in here. He sits on the bed. His clock ticks faintly. He doesn’t want to call. After a short time, Jenny answers, out of breath: “What do you want?”

“What’s up with the toaster?”

“It doesn’t work.”

“Why are you obsessed with it? Why do you want that old piece of shit? Why are you harassing me?”

“Am I harassing YOU? I think you’re harassing me. Why won’t you help me?”

“Don’t waste your money taking it to the shop, that’s crazy. Don’t waste your money on him.”

“He’s dead. It’s my toaster now.”

“Don’t you hear how ridiculous that sounds, Jenny?”

“Should I hang up now? Stop it, Alice, I’m on the phone!”

“What’s she doing?”

“Badgering me for money. Won’t you just look at it?”

“Only if you tell me why you’re so obsessed with it. Why didn’t you take a painting instead? Or Grandma’s dishes?”

Patricia stands in the doorway, a stack of creased shirts over her arm, and looks at him sharply. Then she leaves.

“Because,” Jenny sighs, her voice softening. “That is, because, you know, it meant a lot to me when I was a child. When we made toast. We lived on bread, Thomas. It was magical to me, it could make plain things interesting. Toasted bread was fragrant and tasty, especially if we had butter or jam. I know it’s nostalgic. But it’s a good memory. For me, at least.”

Now it’s Thomas who sighs. “A good memory. Do you really mean that?”

“Yes.” Long silence. “I’d like to hold onto that good memory.”

“It sounds like you’ve taken a course on positive thinking.”

“I haven’t. I’m just thinking that I might as well make the best out of it.”

“Out of what?”

“Well—I don’t know. Everything.” They fall silent. He hears Alice clattering in the background, and a television. Jenny clears her throat.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll look at it. Will you be home in an hour and a half?”

“I’m always home, Thomas.”

They hang up, and he sits staring at his shoes. Then he stands and walks back to the kitchen. While he puts his groceries in the fridge, Patricia comes in. She says, “You seem very strange.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because that’s what I think.”

“Are you trying to start a fight?”

“No.”

“Have I done something wrong?”

“No. But you seem strange.”

“Oh, Patricia. Stop. I’m just not quite myself.”

“How so?”

“Restless. Odd.”

“What do you mean ‘odd’?”

“Claustrophobic.”

“Claustrophobic? Do you want to talk about it?”

He looks out the window. “I’m going over to Jenny’s soon. I promised I’d help her with something.”

“I’m going with you.”

“You don’t have to do that. I won’t be long. We can see a film later.”

“Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, then I’m coming with you.” Patricia gives him a look, challenging him to tell her she can’t come. Her eyes bore into his. “It’s been a long time since I saw Jenny and Alice.” Thomas glances at the floor. And so Patricia gives up her ironing and goes with him. The sky’s blue, and the green river water reflects the treetops and the silhouettes of houses. The train screeches slowly southward, out toward the suburbs that form a broad and frayed ring around the city: public housing high-rises and wide swaths of rundown row houses, body shops, storage sheds. Huge factories surrounded by barbed-wire fence, smaller industrial plants. A junkyard here, a warehouse with a big wind-swept parking lot there, a lumberyard, then more of the tall cement towers where people are crammed together beneath ceilings thick with asbestos, the best of which have access to a boxlike balcony. Though she’s now on a sugar-free diet, Patricia has bought an apple pie. She squeezes his hand. They walk through the streets where young men hang out in front of delis and fast food joints. A whiff of beer and smoke wafts from the bars; they pass the shopping plaza with the movie theater, where people stand in line at the ticket window. A gaggle of women scowl at Patricia when she stops to pick up her silk scarf. The elevator rocks threateningly. It snails its way up to the eighth floor. It smells of piss here. They look at each other the entire way up, but say nothing. Alice opens the door. She seems surprised. “Look who’s here!” But she gives Patricia a hug and lets them enter. For a moment Thomas thinks: She looks like Mom. But that’s probably just his imagination. Alice is small and slender and has a prominent nose and a pretty, curvy Cupid’s bow like her father. Her golden-brown skin is smooth and fine, her dark eyes almond-shaped and a little crooked. She’s shaved her head. A snake tattoo threads its way up over her neck to the back of her head. She’s only just turned eighteen. Dropped out of school, unemployed. For a moment, Thomas recalls her sitting on his lap when she was little. The way she’d held onto his neck when he carried her. Now she steps to the side so he can enter the apartment. And here comes Jenny, smiling, from the kitchen; she looks hot and sweaty, her lipstick seeping into the small wrinkles near her mouth. She sees Patricia and says: “You’re here?” Patricia smiles and hands her the pie. The kitchen is a mess, and a large pot simmers on the stove. “How nice. I was just making some soup.” Jenny washes her hands. “I thought Thomas might want some lunch, but maybe you’ve already eaten?” Thomas leans against the fridge. One can see a long way from the kitchen window: the forest in the distance, high-rises, other parts of the city. When he leans forward and glances down at the area between the buildings, his stomach lurches: networks of trails, a playground, parked cars. A few children run across one of the fields wielding a kite on a string. It swirls in the air and flutters back and forth in the wind, and it looks as though they can barely hold onto it. He turns. The soup is sludgy and gray, and smells nauseatingly of cabbage and pork fat. Patricia converses politely, Thomas watches a flock of geese. Or are they ducks? He goes to the living room, where the curtains are drawn. Darkness, low furniture, a whole lot of embroidered pillows on the sofa. On the wall a number of faded drawings from when Alice was a kid, signed with large, clumsy letters. For the world’s best mom. Congratulations Mom. A reproduction of a picture of a deer standing beside a lake. A framed photograph of himself and Jenny. In it, they are young and standing under a tall tree. Jenny’s skinny. She’s wearing a white dress and her thick reddish-blonde hair spills to her waist. He just looks like an overgrown boy. They hug each other, smiling. Their feet are bare. Maloney was the one who’d taken the photograph. Light flickers between the green leaves. A walk in the woods. A very long time ago. It smells stuffy in the apartment, and he wants to open a window, but marches down the hallway toward the bedrooms instead. The shelving units have seen better days. A bunch of bric-a-brac, some books, washed-out bed linens and towels in untidy stacks. A door is ajar. Alice is lying on her bed with a man. Thomas hurries back to the kitchen. Jenny has ladled up the soup, there’s no way out of it now. “Alice and Ernesto! Lunch!” Jenny shouts. “Is that her boyfriend?” Patricia whispers. Jenny nods, and rolls her eyes and shakes her head resignedly. They sit around the little camping table. Jenny passes out pink napkins adorned with teddy bears. Thomas grinds peppercorns over his bowl. Unidentifiable chunks of fatty gray meat bob around in the murky liquid. He lifts a piece of overcooked cabbage with his spoon and lets it fall back into the soup. What is she thinking, serving such dog food. She knows that he—that he can’t. That he has better taste than this. That this is . . . The kids drift in. This Ernesto is only a head taller than Alice, but he’s broad and muscular. His hair is short, black, and shiny. He greets them politely, introduces himself. He must be older than Alice, Thomas thinks, feeling discomfort, both at the soup—which actually tastes like food served at an institution—and Ernesto’s hairy hands, one firmly planted on Alice’s thigh as he shovels soup into his mouth with the other. Alice stirs her spoon around her bowl and picks at a piece of bread. “How are you doing?” Patricia tries. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.” “Really good,” Alice says. “Are you still looking for work?” Alice nods disinterestedly. “No, you’re not,” Jenny says. Ernesto glances up. Alert. Solid jawline. “And how about you?” Patricia regards him with interest. “Are you a student? Are you in college?” All of a sudden she sounds rather strident. He smiles curtly. “Hardly,” he says in a calm, friendly voice. “I’m a musician.” “Really, how exciting—are you a singer?” He shakes his head. “Drummer.” So that’s why he’s so muscular, Thomas thinks, clearing his throat. “Ernesto plays in a really cool band,” Alice explains, pushing her bowl aside. “They’re super awesome. You can listen to them online, if you want. They’re called El Pozo.” She stands. “They just sit around, doing nothing at all,” grumbles Jenny. “You don’t do a thing. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“Thanks for lunch,” Alice says.

“There’s an apple pie,” Patricia says. “If you’d like to eat some later?”

Alice vanishes into the hallway. She’s in an awful rush. Ernesto turns in the doorway and, smiling, reveals a relatively nice set of teeth. There’s a noticeable gap between the front two. “Thanks for lunch, Mother Jenny.” Then he’s gone. Jenny and Thomas exchange glances. “Mother Jenny?” he says softly. “What the hell does he mean by that?”

“I have no idea,” Jenny says, ladling more soup into her bowl.

“Doesn’t he have a mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“He seems sweet,” Patricia says, raising a yellow-brown drinking glass to her mouth.

“He’s not. He’s a snake.”

Patricia swallows, then puts down her glass. “Why a snake?”

“I can just tell. He’s lazy and slimy. They just lie in bed all day fooling around. Alice is being dragged down to his level. Into the mud. Before him it was another guy. He was actually worse. An arrogant bastard, to put it mildly. She’s got a new boyfriend all the time.”

“I can find out if we have a job for her at the museum.”

“If she’s even able to handle a job,” Jenny says bitterly, putting her spoon down. “I honestly don’t know what I should do with her. She hates me.”

“Oh, stop, Jenny. She doesn’t hate you,” Thomas says. He’s irritated, dark waves in his belly. “She’s only eighteen.”

“But where does he live, this Ernesto? Here?” Patricia asks.

Jenny gets to her feet and rinses the bowls. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?” Patricia wraps a lock of her hair between her fingers; no one says a word. Patricia glances curiously at Thomas, but what does it mean? He needs to smoke, he can’t breathe, he has to leave. “The toaster,” Jenny says coolly, “it’s over there.” She nods in the direction of the big closet at the end of the kitchen table. “Can you please look at it now?”

Thomas fiddles with a little fucking screwdriver. The women are seated in the living room drinking tea and eating apple pie. As far as he can see, Jenny’s drawn the curtains—which is better than nothing. The door’s ajar, but he can’t hear what they’re saying. Are they laughing? Yes, Jenny is, and now Patricia too. The toilet flushes. Heavy steps in the hall, it must be Ernesto. The toaster is unbelievably greasy and revolting and littered with old crumbs. That he’s really sitting here prying it apart in this kitchen fills him with disgust—that he’s agreed to do it. Insanity. That old feeling of deep-seated anger at Jenny and all the guilt that comes with it hits him like a slap. It’s so incompatible. The sobbing. There’s no development in our relationship at all, he thinks. It’s as if her entire personality exists to play the role of victim, huge and hollow, for my benefit only. So I can fill the holes with my shame, my strange, indebted need to protect. The screwdriver slides from his hand, he’s warping the screws. He props the toaster between his knees, braces it tight, and tries again. It’s big and clumsy, probably at least as old as he is. He has no idea how you pry such a thing apart, he just keeps unscrewing the screws and removing all the parts that come loose, when the screws no longer hold them together. Suddenly it breaks in two. The shell of thick plastic falls apart. Thomas gawks at the guts of the toaster. And all at once he jerks his head back.

Fastened between the now detached outer shell and the heating coils, on either side, is a thick packet wrapped in tinfoil and taped carefully together with clear, yellowed tape. At first he simply stares. Then he manages to pry them out. He hears Patricia’s voice approaching. Feverishly he stuffs the two packets under his shirt, then under the waistband of his pants. When she steps into the kitchen, he’s back to sitting over his work, replacing the screws in the tiny holes. And what part belonged where? He hadn’t organized the pieces in any manageable way. He’s beginning to sweat.

“Is it tricky?” she asks, filling the pot with water.

“Nah,” he says. “Not really.”

Patricia sets the pot on the stove and turns on the gas jet. “Tell me when it’s boiling, okay?” Then she leaves again.

He’s warm and cold, his heart races, his hands tremble. What the hell did he find? A mass of disjointed thoughts swirl through his brain, but there’s no up and down to anything. What the fuck is it? Who put the packets there? What the hell’s in them? He screws and screws with the terrible doll’s screwdriver that keeps rotating crookedly on the thread, and now Jenny comes out and stands beside him, her hands at her side.

“Can you figure it out?”

“Well, I’ve taken it apart and put it back together, at least,” he mumbles. “We’ll see if it works.”

“Could you tell what was wrong?”

“Nope,” he says, tightening the last of the screws. “It probably just doesn’t work. Broken.”

He puts the toaster on the table, and Jenny immediately grabs it and plugs it into the outlet above the table.

“Oh, look!” She claps excitedly. “It works! I said it would! Oh, thank you, Thomas. Look, it works!”

And it does. The small coils glow orange. “Patricia, come out here. Your man is a genius with a screwdriver. Come see!”

They all stand admiring the rather smoky toaster. A burnt odor hangs in the kitchen.

“Can you smell it? Oh, I love that scent. Right before the toast pops up.”

She’s crazy, Thomas thinks. The pot whistles. Patricia pours water in the teapot. Excited now, the women return to the sofa.

“Come on, Thomas, have some apple pie!” Jenny’s eyes are lit up like a child’s.

When he clambers to his feet, he can feel the packets against his belly. What the hell’s in them? He yanks the cord of the stinking toaster from the plug and walks stiffly out to the others.

Jenny suddenly looks more like a diva than a washed up, underpaid, slovenly, scarred at-an-early-age, frustrated nurse’s aid. She throws herself upon the leather couch, props a leg on the easy chair, and her dress slides up to reveal a fleshy, milk-white thigh. Her cheeks are flushed and she seems both lazy and shamelessly sensuous. Thomas can tell it makes Patricia uncomfortable. Even Jenny’s voice is sultry. When Alice enters with a mug and plops down beside Patricia, pouring herself some tea, Jenny’s motherly love knows no bounds.

“Did you tell Thomas and Patricia who sent us a letter yesterday, sweetie?”

“Just a letter from my dad.” Alice slurps her tea cautiously.

“Isn’t that incredible? Alice and I couldn’t believe our own eyes, isn’t that right, sweetie?”

“From Ahmed?” Thomas interrupts, nearly choking on a bite of pie. “Why?”

“Yeah, Alice. Why?” Jenny smiles, her eyes half-closed.

Alice puts her mug down. “He wanted to tell me I have a little brother.”

“What?” Thomas straightens up. “Where?”

“The letter was sent from his mother’s address,” Jenny says. “If she’s still alive, or if he’s moved into her house, he didn’t say.”

“He sent a photo. It’s a cute kid,” Alice says, her face breaking into a little smile, a brief flash that vanishes almost instantly.

“He looks like you did when you were a baby, sweetie. A beautiful child. And you look like Ahmed.”

“She also looks like you,” Patricia says, “and your mother.”

“Did he send money?” Thomas asks.

“Nah.”

“You haven’t heard from him in ten years.”

“No, but now we have heard from him.” Jenny smiles. As if it was something to smile about, Thomas thinks. Ahmed let his daughter down. The tinfoil crackles against his belly whenever he moves. Carefully he leans back in the wobbly chair.

Jenny takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. “In our family the men don’t take very good care of their children. It’s a tradition. But you don’t have any children, Thomas, so you don’t count.”

Patricia mumbles: “Not yet, in any case,” and Alice sits up, says: “Not all the women take good care of their children, either, as far as I can see.”

“What do you mean, Alice?” Jenny struggles to sit up straight. “Why do you say that?”

“As far as I know, your mother left you two.”

Jenny sinks back again. “Right, well, but we had Aunt Kristin.”

“Oh, did we now?” Thomas looks at Jenny

“She was a consolation of sorts. In any event, we lived with her that summer.”

“That was a week at most.”

“I hate it when you’re so superficial, Mom,” Alice says in a high, clear voice. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Hey, now,” Jenny mutters.

“Aunt Kristin let you live with your father. She couldn’t handle you two. You told me yourself. And your father was a bastard.”

“Exactly,” Thomas says, smiling at Alice. “He was a bastard.”

“Exactly,” Alice says, returning the smile. Suddenly there’s a connection between them.

“Hang on,” Jenny says. “Aunt Kristin wasn’t much older than you are now. Of course she couldn’t keep us . . .” Now it seems as though Jenny’s about to fall asleep. Her eyes fall shut.

“Do you have a smoke, Thomas?” Alice asks. He fishes a crushed pack from his breast pocket, and offers one to Alice. They light their cigarettes. Patricia glares at him disapprovingly, but it’s oh so good to feel the smoke in his lungs. Alice ashes on an empty pie plate.

“Are you sad that you never hear from your father?” Patricia asks.

She shrugs. “I used to be. But not anymore. Since I don’t really know him, I couldn’t care less.”

“Be happy you don’t,” Jenny snuffles. “But he’s got himself a cute kid, just like you were once.” Did she drink port before they arrived?, Thomas wonders. Or popped pills? Does she pop pills?

“She still is!” Patricia squeezes Alice’s shoulder. “Please visit us soon. You can bring your boyfriend, if you’d like.” Alice seems younger and happier for a moment. She leans against Patricia and wraps an arm around her. Then, suddenly, Ernesto is standing in the doorway in his undershirt. “There’s pie?” he asks, showing everyone his toothy smile.

Thomas and Patricia push open the door to the street and are almost blinded by the light. Thomas glances up at Jenny’s windows, and sure enough, he sees a flapping arm; he returns the wave. They take a left toward the station. Patricia draws inward, says nothing. Thomas discreetly shoves his hand under his jacket and shirt and touches the packets. The tinfoil seems to have loosened here and there, no doubt there’s plastic underneath. Their father lay on a plastic sheet. Jenny insisted that the nurses dress him in his own clothes. So they did. Meanwhile they waited outside, and it took a long time. Maneuvering such a rigid cargo of flesh and bones must be strenuous work. The sounds in the hallway were hard and raw. The entire time he felt one little shock after another: a door slammed shut, then voices, then footsteps coming or going. As though all sounds were magnified. Jenny clutched the sleeve of his jacket and wouldn’t let it go. They stared at each other, but said nothing. She hung on his sleeve. Then the nurses returned, each of them flushed and warm. One disappeared, while the other began removing a thin rubber glove from her left hand. Her disposable smock rustled softly. “So he’s all set,” she said. Jenny thanked her, clasping her hands in her own. An ambulance was called. They could see him here or at the hospital chapel. But Jenny wanted to see him in his “usual surroundings.” Their father now wore a torn, dark-blue shirt and gray flannel pants. But the nurse had left the yellow windbreaker hanging on a chair. It was made of nylon. Maybe she’d considered how, when he was shoved into the oven, the flames would shoot through the windbreaker with its raging fire. Thomas tried to imagine it. Raging fire. Within seconds, the material would curl up and melt and the stench would be terrible.

“Would you like to sit with him for a bit?” the nurse asked kindly. “I can bring another chair.”

“No thanks, we’ll stand,” Thomas replied.

“The car will be here shortly.” She smiled, then was gone. The door closed.

“I hope we can find our way out again,” Thomas said. Jenny eyed him reproachfully. Then she tugged at the white sheet covering their father’s shins, and the toe tag appeared, neatly cinched around his right big toe with a little bow. His naked feet looked awful. The nurses hadn’t clipped his nails. Thick, horny yellow nails on crooked toes.

“Gross.”

“Thomas!” Jenny put the sheet back. There was an overly sweet, nauseating odor in the cell, mixed with Jenny’s spicy perfume. They stood there. An odd silence. The very silence, Thomas thought. The innermost essence of silence: the silence of death. Everything ends. Everything has ended. A long time passed and a short time passed. The late afternoon light fell softly through the armor-plated window. A glimpse of greenish sky. The cell was impersonal, lacking any trace of their father, who had lived here for four weeks. Maybe the staff had cleaned it up before they’d arrived. The nurse popped her head in the room. The car was ready. Jenny sniffled and shot a final glance at the body on the cot. When they exited the cell, they saw two porters rolling the folded-up stretcher from one end of the hallway to the other; they also saw the thick plastic body bag their father would be stuffed into, but they didn’t stop to see him being wheeled off. The nurse followed them out and shook their hands. Then they signed a piece of paper, and the package with their father’s possessions was placed into Thomas’s hand. The heavy doors fell shut behind them. Jenny looked about for the ambulance when they were outside in the fresh air, but neither one of them could see it. “Maybe it’s parked on the other side of the prison,” Jenny said. A bird tweeted cheerfully in a tree above them. “Don’t you think? Don’t you think there’s a parking lot on the other side?” She sounded so anxious. “Yes, probably,” he said. She tucked her arm under his. “I’m quite certain there’s a parking lot over there, aren’t you?” Then they walked along the huge, wet lawns observing the green and rose-pink sky, and as though automatically they headed in the direction of the train station cafeteria, where they sat next to the window and ordered the weak coffee they served with a whole lot of sugar. They froze like icicles. “We’re parentless now,” Jenny said, her lips quivering. Then she went silent. It was as if they were children again, slouching wordlessly at a small gray table under a slightly too-bright source of light. Just like they used to in the evenings in the kitchen at home. There’s something childish about us, Thomas thought. That’s what we have in common.

Patricia clutches his arm and picks up the pace. The sun’s so clear and strong that it stings their eyes. In the light, her dark hair has a reddish sheen. She squeezes his arm. “Can you and Maloney hire Alice for the store? She needs to get out of that apartment. You think she could clean, or something?”

“I don’t know, we’ve already got Eva, you know. I can’t just fire her. And every position is filled. Peter’s apprenticing. We won’t be rid of him for another two years.”

“I just think we ought to help her, Thomas. She’s smart enough, don’t you think? And after all, she’s your only niece. And mine. She’s the only child in the family.”

“She’s not a child.”

“Yes, she is. An overgrown child.”

“Didn’t you mention a job at the museum?”

“I’ll look into it tomorrow. I just thought it would be good for her to spend time with you, that you could maybe train her.”

He scrutinizes her.

“What?” she asks.

“Do you really think it’d be good for her to spend time with me? Don’t you think it’d be better for her to get away from all this shit as fast as she can, especially her mother and her family? She’s young. She could get the fuck out of here.”

“Get away? How? With what? They’re living off nothing. Now they have this Ernesto eating their food, too, it looks like.”

“And some food it is.”

“Yeah, that soup was something else.”

“It was inedible.”

“But back to Alice—she’ll have to save up some money before she can start her own life. Wouldn’t you agree?”

They’ve reached the platform and can see the approach road as well as scattered fields planted with evergreens. In other places the evergreens are interspersed with wild, young deciduous trees and thickets. A yard with tall stacks of brown cardboard surrounds a shed and the squat gray building of a recycling center. To the right of that, a discount supermarket. They can just make out the river that snakes around Jenny’s part of the city. As if the river’s avoiding this tainted area, where the schools are terrible and the child mortality rate, poor nutrition, learning difficulties, criminality, and drug abuse are well above the median. Jenny has lived out here since Alice was born. Back then there was hope; there were new constructions—parks, playgrounds, schools with façades painted in bright colors. There was a community center, a library, a sports arena. Here, it was believed, the children would play in the fresh air and the adults would help each other build a real community. Everyone would thrive. In less than twenty years the whole project has hit the skids. Now there’s neither money nor the will to do anything about it. All the idealistic students who’d begun their lives out here have long since departed, handing the area to those forced to remain.

“Isn’t that right, Thomas? She needs to save money.”

He nods distractedly.

“Could you at least talk to Maloney? He knows Jenny too. Would you do that?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll try.”

“Should we to go to the movies?”

The train rolls in. Before he does anything else, Thomas wants to go home with his packets. But of course he can’t say that.

That’s how he ends up seeing a two and a half hour-long film, as the packets dig deeper and deeper into the skin of his belly. He doesn’t dare shift them. He tries to fall asleep. Patricia squeezes his now clammy hand and eats popcorn with the other. The film has prolonged stretches without dialogue. It’s set in an attractive but crumbling city. Patricia whispers: “Look at that. See how beautifully it’s filmed.” Every sex scene turns Thomas on, and that doesn’t help ease his discomfort. He slurps soda, which gradually grows lukewarm and flat, and then he dozes off, but Patricia yanks on his arm. “You’re snoring!” He wants to straighten himself up in his seat, but he can’t because of the packets. When the film’s over, she insists that they eat a proper dinner after eating that awful soup, and she pulls him through the streets and down alleys and even deeper into the oldest quarter in the city down more alleys, until they stand outside the narrow, black-lacquered door of a little restaurant. There she orders kebab and several salads and a bottle of red wine that has a thick and revolting taste of raisins and barrels of oak. Still, they swig it down rather quickly, and when it’s empty, Patricia takes his face in her hands and pulls him across the table, planting a wet kiss on his mouth. “I love you,” she says hoarsely, smiling in the glow of the candlelight. “Last night was amazing. You’re so wonderful, honey.”

He leans back in his chair. “I thought you said I was strange?”

“You are strange. And wonderful.”

“So are you. Are you ovulating?” He can’t help himself.

“If I’m ovulating then that’s my business.” Patricia glares at him, cool, disappointed. “And if you want to know when I’m ovulating, then you’ll have to pay attention to my cycle yourself. And if you don’t want to get me pregnant when I’m ovulating, then you’ll have to take care of that yourself. I love you even when I’m ovulating, Thomas. But seriously, why must you ruin my happiness at being here with you? Why do you feel this need to do that?” As she talks, she shakes her head slightly.

“You know very well it has nothing to do with you, hon. I just don’t want kids. We’ve discussed this a thousand times. I don’t want kids, Patricia. I really don’t.”

“And I just don’t get that.” She stands. “You’re mean, Thomas.” She turns and disappears behind a red curtain. Probably the bathroom. For a moment, he’s afraid she’ll leave. Mean, yes. That’s exactly how he feels. In the full sense of the word’s two meanings. He hopes she’ll return soon so he can go to the bathroom, because he needs to shift the packets. It feels as though they’ve gnawed an open wound into his skin.

When Patricia returns, a hurt expression on her face, Thomas stands and goes behind the curtain. The bathroom’s impossibly small, and he can barely squeeze in. Once he’s able to close the door he can hardly turn around. The stench of urine hangs in the air, the light is low and intimate, the walls adorned with dark purple, velvet wallpaper. There’s a cracked mirror over the microscopic sink. He fumbles with his zipper and nearly drops one of the packets onto the floor. In the muted light it’s impossible to see whether or not they’ve damaged his skin, but it feels that way. He has this irrepressible urge to open the packets, but it would take too long to get them sealed up again, so he settles on examining one with his hand (it has to be bundles of money) and shoves them into the waistband of his pants, next to his groin. His heart races, a sweet chill ripples up his back and his neck. Shivering, he washes his hands under a thin jet of cold water and goes back to the table, but Patricia’s gone. The waiter bustles worriedly about: “Your wife left. Here’s the check, sir. I hope you enjoyed your meal.” Thomas pays the tab and just manages to see Patricia turn the corner. He reaches her only when they’ve come to more heavily trafficked streets (the packets prevent him from running), and it’s obvious that she’s been crying. She curses at him, cries again, she’s unhappy, she doesn’t understand him. She plants a seed of guilt, he feels guilty, he feels angry, he feels restless. They take the bus home. Patricia sniffles a lot, and a nearly-orange moon rises in the dark sky like a faint half circle. He consoles her and apologizes, but Patricia turns away and jerks her hand back. “I think I’ll die if I have a kid,” he says. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she mumbles thickly. “I really think you need help, Thomas.” At home she goes to bed immediately, and he knows he ought to sit at the edge of the bed, talking to her gently and calmly, reassure her that he loves her. But he can’t do it. Instead he locks himself in the bathroom and, when he’s finally removed both the tinfoil and the plastic film, quickly forgets about Patricia. He sits with ten bundles of bills in his hands. New crisp bills. Big bills. Five bundles in each packet. He counts them. His hands tremble. The money must have come from their father’s final, measly coup. Though he doesn’t know the details, he guesses that someone double-crossed him and got him busted. Soon it becomes clear that the coup hadn’t been so measly after all. He counts the money again. It’s an enormous sum. His head spins. Jacques must’ve been involved in something huge. Something truly dirty. Carefully he sets the bills on the bathmat, parks himself heavily on the edge of the tub, and lights a cigarette. Goddamn. What do I do? I’ll take the money to the police, nice and easy, on the way to the store tomorrow. He stares at the laundry basket. No, I’ll hide the money. No, I won’t hide the money. I’ll give the money to Jenny. No, that’s too dangerous, and she wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’ll hide the money anyway. Now his eyes wander across the black mosaic floor tiles. No, I won’t, I’ll take the money to the police. I’ll give it to charity. No. For God’s sake, how dumb can a person be. I’ll ask Maloney to hide the money. Someone will come looking for it, don’t be naïve. But not at Maloney’s—no one would look for it there. He closes his eyes. In no way can he involve Maloney in this—Maloney can’t keep his mouth shut. I definitely won’t say anything to Jenny.

Or Patricia, either. I’ll put the money in a safe deposit box at the bank. Like I’m in some fucking movie. Idiot. I have to think about it. I’ll decide in the morning, I’ll sleep on it. The old fool, hiding money in the toaster. He probably felt like a gangster, smart and resourceful. The idiot. It was almost as though Jenny had intuited the money was in there, but she couldn’t have known that. Thomas flushes his cigarette butt down the toilet and slides the window open a tad. He pulls a bill from one of the bundles and holds it up to the lamp. It’s legit all right. Watermark and all that jazz. He packs the money back up and tiptoes down the dark hallway. He pours himself a tall glass of whiskey in the living room and gulps it down, grimacing. It occurs to him that there’s an old microwave in their storage unit in the basement. He smiles. He thinks: I’m smiling like crazy because I am crazy. We might as well stick to kitchen appliances, he thinks, if that’s the way the old man wanted it. I’ll put them down in the microwave then. He draws his keys out of his pants pocket, carefully closes the door behind him, and takes the elevator down. The basement is dark as a cave. He fumbles for the light switch and suddenly he can’t remember where their storage unit is. Every unit is numbered, one after the other in a system of hallways running lengthwise and crosswise. But which number is theirs? Is there some sort of system? There are iron doors with bars for each of the small compartments. Through these bars he can see moving boxes and worn-out furniture. It’s not here. Or here. He begins to sweat. The heat from the boiler room is unbearable. The smell of dust clings to his nostrils. The light clicks off. He turns the corner onto a new, long hallway. And another. This one’s like a passageway, narrower than the others. His footfalls ring metallically on the hard floor. At last he catches sight of an orange plastic chair that he’d used in his kitchen before he moved in with Patricia. And there are the boxes filled with summer clothes. And the microwave, way in the back. He can feel his heart hammering. In with the bundles, close the oven, slam the door shut. A thought rumbles through him: Is this secure enough? He’s about to open the door again—because of course the money should be taken to the police, what is he thinking? what kind of person is he? But now he wants to get out of the basement. Now he’s panicking. What if he can’t find his way out again? The bundles will have to stay there until morning, in any case, and nothing will happen to them between now and then. Desperate and downright afraid, he bumbles around the basement searching for the exit. He keeps finding new hallways, new light switches that click off, new fucking signs on doors with new combinations of numbers. He wants to be calm and composed, but he’s not calm and he’s not composed. At last he finds a door and enters an unfamiliar stairwell. Out on the street he lights a smoke. His torso is wet with sweat, and his throat is constricted; it’s as if there’s an iron hand wrapped around his chest, squeezing him, as if someone shielded behind iron is screaming in his face. In the silence of the street at night, he can see that he’s wandered off, down in the basement, in the completely opposite direction of his own door. He’s four doors from his own. It almost makes him smile—it’s so laughable, this. His watch shows quarter after 1:00 A.M. The wind has settled. How long did he stumble around in the darkness like a scaredy-cat? Slowly his breathing returns to normal, his pulse calm. A scooter motors noisily past with two youths on it, the girl tightly clutching the young man; each wears a black helmet. He catches a glimpse of the girl’s long legs in skinny jeans. Her blonde hair spilling down her back. The moon vanishes behind a dark cloud. His shadow towers long and ghostlike on the street. When a humpbacked old man with a squeaky, nasal voice calls to his dog on the other side of the street, Thomas jumps, frightened. “Come, Bingo, you old scoundrel. Come to Papa.” Later in the night, rain begins to fall, heavy and monotonous. A powerful sense of unreality trails him into his dreams when he finally falls asleep close to morning, just as the first sliver of daylight wedges through the blinds. He dreams of the basement, and once again: the little girl on the carousel, her facial expression now distorted; grasshoppers everywhere; the sensation of suffocation; stagnant warm air.

The following morning the wind has picked up again. Patricia goes to yoga at 10:00 A.M. She doesn’t seem angry with him, but she’s quiet. Thomas wanders anxiously through the apartment the entire morning. He can’t think about anything else but the money in the microwave. At 11:30 he’s so jumpy that he decides to go for a jog, to rid himself of his unease. Against a strong wind, he pants around the park four times. More than once he has to stop for a drink from the water fountain. The sun breaks through the layer of clouds. When he returns, Patricia’s listening to music. It sounds like Schubert. She’s scrubbing the kitchen sink.

“Tina and Jules are coming to dinner at 7:00. They’re bringing Stella.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“No particular occasion.”

“You didn’t tell me anything about this.”

“Tina called just now and I invited them over. Is that okay?”

He pulls a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge.

“Are you angry about it? Why are you angry? They’ll put Stella to bed and probably go home early. It’s been so long since we’ve seen them.”

He pours water into a glass and chugs it.

“Thomas?” She dries her hands and puts them on his shoulders from behind. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m tired and confused and don’t have any particular interest in sitting around talking about literature and recipes while a two-year old races around makes a mess of everything,” he says somberly. “My father just died.”

She sighs. She sits on the edge of a chair. A short time passes before she says anything more. He thinks: She’s making an effort.

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t think his death affected you all that much. I thought you were mostly relieved. But—”

“I am relieved!” Thomas has an uncontrollable urge to be left in peace. Schubert’s piano sonata worms into his brain in an unbearable way. She sets the scouring pad aside and removes her rubber gloves.

They sit opposite one another at the small, black-stained table; the water faucet drips, and large gray cloud formations flit swiftly across the sky. The sun disappears behind the clouds and the light in the kitchen changes, like a curtain closing on a stage.

“Do you want me to cancel?”

He shakes his head.

“We can invite Maloney to join us, if you want. And Jenny?”

“Hell no!”

Her eyes darken, and she looks down.

“I’m just not myself, Patricia. I can’t explain it. Weird things are happening.”

She props her elbows on the table and looks directly into his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” He fiddles with a box of matches, scratches at the sulfur. “But I’ll survive this dinner.” He attempts a smile. Takes a deep breath. The nape of his neck tingles unpleasantly. He thinks again of the money.

“Okay. I’ll do the shopping and make dinner. I thought we could broil a turbot in the oven. With melon and raspberries for dessert.”

He nods.

“Do you want to take a shower first?” He shakes his head. She squeezes his hand and leans across the table to put her free hand on his cheek. “You’re warm. You don’t have a fever, do you?”

He doesn’t have a fever. Still seated, he stares out the window listening to her clattering in the bathroom, blow-drying her hair, opening closets and cupboards in the bedroom. He sighs, thinking: “You should be drinking champagne and dancing on tables, you’re free, a free man. You’ve just inherited a considerable amount of money.” But he has no desire to dance. He stands up and turns off the music in the living room, crawls onto the couch, and pulls a blanket all the way up to his chin, still miffed about having dinner guests and Schubert, and he’s amazed at how his body instantly grows heavy as lead, how his breathing almost at once becomes slow and calm, how his lower lip relaxes, slips down, how a little drool trickles from his mouth and splotches the pillow, how the wet stain grows cold against his cheek. He wonders how his body can go from being agitated to being calm so quickly. Off in the distance he hears a train. A truck slowly and loudly—a kind of snort—rumbles down the street, and the whole time the wind, the wind: howling and whistling like a huge, unthinking creature racing through the world without knowing what it’s supposed to do.

It feels as though only a few minutes have passed before he hears the key in the door. Startled, he sits up. Patricia walks past the living room, bottles clink, water runs, something is plunked heavily on the table. He lies down again, closing his eyes. Wafting from the coffee table is the scent of oranges. Soon she enters the room carrying a bouquet of purple tulips in a vase, casual, relaxed, wearing a tight-fitting dress, her eyes are dark with makeup. She looks stately, mature, formidable. She sets the vase down on the low shelf, rearranges the flowers a bit, and then admires them. She stands stock-still, as if lost in thought. When he shifts slightly on the couch she turns, surprised. “Oh, you’re on the couch? I didn’t realize you were there.” Thomas takes a shower and gets dressed. Pulls a sweater over a white T-shirt. He slumps on the kitchen chair while Patricia prepares the fish and washes the lettuce. The radio plays pop music and commercials. They share a ham and mustard sandwich. Staring at him from the cornice is a dove. He runs his hand through his hair. Patricia sets the table in the living room and uncorks the wine. He promises to mix the drinks when the guests arrive. But he doesn’t want drinks. He gets to his feet, restless. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks. Patricia shakes her head. “Just sit down and relax.” Not long after that he removes his sweater, puts on a blue shirt, and thrusts his socked feet into a pair of black shoes. There’s still that crawling sensation under his skin, as if the rustle of the money has moved directly into his body; it’s unpleasant, a sweet tingling that makes him short of breath and hyper alert. His short nap has put the wheels in motion again, the swirl of his thoughts, the trembling, that feeling of the clear divide between himself and the room he’s in, hysterical joy, suddenly, but also a thick clump in his throat that he wishes he could spit out. The guests will be arriving any minute.

Back in the kitchen he pulls out the vodka and the cranberry-grapefruit juice. He removes some limes from the fruit drawer in the fridge. He prepares Sea Breezes. “But it’s not summer,” Patricia says. “Exactly,” he replies. The fish is in the oven, everything’s ready. Patricia pours him a glass of red wine, and it occurs to him that it’s been a long time since he had a smoke. Maybe he can get in a quick trip to the street before Tina and Jules arrive with their pampered tot. Patricia seems happier now. He kisses her neck (and hates himself for thinking: I’m kissing Patricia’s neck, it’s a gesture); she squeezes his arm with one hand while removing her apron with the other. “I’m going to put some music on,” she says. “But not Schubert,” he says. “No, not Schubert,” she says, smiling and disappearing into the living room. On the street the wind continues to blow, but not as strongly. The darkness is charcoal-gray, dense. It’s drizzling. The humidity’s rising again. He leans against the wall, sucking smoke deep into his lungs. The sharp, bitter taste of tobacco fills his throat. A couple leaves the building on the opposite side of the street; they seem to be in love, clinging to each other, laughing. Jules’s car rolls up to him. “You standing there poisoning yourself?” Tina waves from the backseat. And then they begin to unpack, the kid and all the things that are, apparently, needed to take a toddler out for a few hours: some kind of device that can be put on a chair so that the kid can reach the table, a diaper bag, another with baby bottles, a little blanket, another bag, an apron made of oil cloth. Thomas tosses his cigarette butt into the gutter.

Up in the apartment, they toast and converse and chase down Stella, who’s drawn to the bathroom, though her mother won’t allow her in there because the “floor is slippery, you could fall and hurt yourself.” They sit at the table and the guests praise the fish. “It’s just right, not at all dry. I love the herbs you used. Is it marjoram? Chili? Ginger?” and the wine is nice, and the big white plates, the silverware—“Is it new?”—and Patricia’s good taste when it comes to furnishing the apartment. “It’s impossible to keep the place in order when you have a child in the house,” Tina says, almost apologetically. “We pick up all the time and still it doesn’t help.” And Jules adds: “Hell, we might as well let it stay messy.” But Tina doesn’t agree. “Then you’re just giving up.” Patricia nods and smiles and takes a sip of wine, while Thomas drains his sea breeze.

“We can never find anything. She’s got this compulsion to move things around. Recently it was the car keys. She can reach the top of the cabinet in the foyer now . . .”

“Right,” Jules breaks in, “that’s where I usually put the keys.”

“Now he keeps them in his pocket,” Tina goes on. “But when I have to use the car and he’s not home, it’s a problem.”

“Why don’t you have a spare set?” Patricia asks.

“That’s a good question. We did, but we think Stella tossed them in the trash,” Tina chuckles.

“In the trash?” Patricia says, shocked, giggling. “What a little scoundrel!” Thomas is truly bored. Jules grumbles off and on. Then Stella howls, alarmingly loud, and they all get to their feet and run in separate directions. “Where are you?” Tina shouts nervously, and of course Stella’s in the bathroom. She’s lying in the bathtub, her legs splayed along the sides of the tub, red-faced, screaming piercingly. Evidently she’d crawled up onto the edge and slipped in head-first. They console her and babble. Stella bawls heartrendingly on her mother’s lap and they all look only at her. Chubby red cheeks, bright shiny eyes, a sweep of curls and ears fine as tiny, rose-pink shells. They wipe away her tears—even the tears seem cleaner than an adult’s tears. A large bump has begun to form on her forehead. She rubs her eyes and suddenly stops howling. She’s caught sight of some candles on a low shelf, and decides she absolutely has to go investigate; her little body squirms and fidgets to get down. Tina lets go of her only to stand up immediately and follow her. “No, no, no. You’ll burn yourself. Hot. Stella will burn her fingers.” Then Patricia rushes in with ladles and plastic bowls and energetically shows her how she can drum on the bowls. “Music!” Instantly and eagerly Stella’s absorbed in a new activity, but only for a moment. Thomas glances at Jules, who fills his wine glass to the rim and chugs it down greedily. “Great wine,” he mumbles. His eyebrows have grown bushier. He has gray hairs. But his eyes are the same, ice-blue and insistent. He’s a few years older than Thomas.

They eat fruit and drink coffee. Tina takes Stella into the bedroom to put her to bed. It takes a long time. Meanwhile Jules talks, not surprisingly about literature, his voice gravelly and sloshed. “The biggest problem at the moment must be this tendency to write autobiographies purporting to be novels. It bores me more than words can say.” Jules is an incarnate fan of the Big Story. How a younger man can be so conservative is beyond comprehension. He’s not really old-fashioned in any other way. For many years he was an editor at a large publishing house, but he lost his job when Stella was a baby, and now he earns his living teaching at a couple of universities. Is he bitter? Old fashioned? No, Thomas thinks, and observes Jules, now withdrawn, rubbing his nose. He stayed home with Stella when she was a baby, for seven months. It’s only when it comes to literature that he’s conservative. But is he? Or does he just not buy into all the fads? In the exact same way that he himself insists on selling paper in a virtually paperless era, even displaying his wares in the old dark cases? Does it make him conservative? Is he conservative? Jules has stopped rubbing his nose. Tina returns, blinking at the light, an almost victorious expression on her face. “She’s asleep!” It’s now 9:30. With a sigh, she sits.

“You truly belong to the old world, Jules,” Patricia laughs.

“You can say that again,” Tina says, draining the last drop of her coffee. “What are you all talking about?” She’s an economist with a full-time job; she earns a lot of money, much more than Jules. Jules was fired because he was too selective. Too passionate, but his “passion” wasn’t the kind that brought the publisher a lot of revenue—he rejected nearly all of the manuscripts that fell into his hands. It was said that he worked against his own self-interest. But, as he slumps across the table now, he appears gentle and nearly transparent. Patricia says something about poetry and images. Then she talks about a novel she read that made a lasting impression on her. It was both autobiographical and very moving. Jules shakes his head. “Not my thing.”

“But have you read it?”

“Certainly not. Nor will I ever . . .”

He turns toward Thomas, his eyes swimming: “Tell us a funny story, Thomas. How’s it going at the store? Do you and Maloney get drinks after you close? Do you make good money?” Thomas begins loudly rattling off all sorts of stuff. He grins hysterically at things that aren’t especially funny. He gets to his feet to illustrate how Peter and Annie walk. He’s filled with an energy he can’t control, and now he mimics Annie’s voice. Patricia looks at him, aghast. Thomas is standing in the center of the room. Then, just as quickly as the mania had come over him, his bubble bursts; exhausted, he sinks into his chair. I’m myself again, he thinks, relieved. And then: Myself? Who? Patricia continues to stare at him. Thomas figures that they’ve gotten past the literature portion of the evening amazingly fast, which means they’ll soon be talking about recipes. But in this he’s wrong. Because Patricia says: “Thomas’s father just died.” And Jules and Tina turn and gaze at him quizzically. “Oh, no,” Tina says, covering her mouth with her hand.

Later, Jules nevertheless returns to the subject of autobiographical literature. “People have got to stop their naval-gazing bullshit and write real stories. What the hell is wrong with fiction? The idea that it’s truer and more real to write about yourself is nothing but the unreflective extension of individualism and the childish self-centeredness of our stunted generation. We’ve let ourselves be stunted. There’s no will, rebellion, or idealism in us. No solidarity. And now, apparently, we feel the need to spew our self-absorbed, narcissistic, self-pity over literature as well. It’s enough to make you vomit!”

“What do you mean by ‘self-absorbed, narcissistic, self-pity’?” Tina asks, glancing at Thomas, who shrugs. But before they get an explanation from Jules, Patricia begins to speak. “Maybe fiction is old-fashioned, maybe the novel as a form isn’t especially interesting anymore. We see the same thing happening in the visual arts. The personal vision, the private story, the individual finds a greater truth, and so does the recipient—”

“The recipient? Oh, SPARE ME! I’ve just answered your question! It’s not at all true, and those goddamn private stories belong in a fucking diary or on some tasteless reality TV show!”

“But Jules, at least listen to what she’s saying . . .” Tina looks tired.

“Besides,” Jules continues, undaunted, “everything you’re saying was disproven long ago. I’m talking about the novel as a form of art. As a concept. The great novel. The autobiographical tendency shows that today’s ‘literati’ don’t dare trust fiction, don’t dare trust art as a creative power, they don’t understand it and so don’t bother with it. They just say it’s unusable because it’s not ‘true’! It’s too damn dull, narrow, and populistic! And completely spineless!”

“Autobiographical works can also be great literature. You’re the one who’s old school. Why this focus on the great story? What kind of crap is that?” Patricia raises her voice. “How can you rule out the possibility that the novels you love include autobiographical elements? Of course they do! And those writers who say they’re writing autobiographical stories can be lying. No one knows that. But does it even matter? Anything that’s presented in an interesting way is valid. What matters is the form. The way the material is shaped. How it’s used. That’s what makes art! For example, the book I read,” Patricia says, pointing angrily at Jules, who immediately interrupts her: “Obviously novelists can draw on their life experiences, but to insist on it as if it were a fucking hallmark! No, you’re confusing things, believing it’s so fucking modern.” Swaying in his seat, Jules reaches for his glass. “You’re a lemming, Patricia!”

“C’mon, Jules. You can’t say that,” Tina says feebly. She lowers her head in shame and picks at her napkin. Patricia shakes her head obstinately and drains her glass. Thomas admonishes himself: You’ve got to say something. Your silence is painful.

“How can you teach literature to young people when you have that attitude?” he asks. “Do they put up with it? Don’t they just sit there staring at their electronic doodads and each other while you lecture?”

“Shit, I’m teaching them what’s worth knowing. The great classics of world literature, and by that I mean proper books, and it’s completely irrelevant when they were written. And luckily not all contemporary writers are shit. On the contrary, Patricia! This is just some kind of pathetic tendency that we’ll all have forgotten about in fifty years. The problem isn’t the autobiographical part. The problem is calling it literature, to put it ahead of fucking literature! That’s how stories are being reduced for God’s sake!” Shouting now, Jules gets to his feet.

“No, they don’t!” Patricia tries to talk over him. “Polyphonies arise. Multiple voices! It’s an investigation into what a narrator can do. A narrator isn’t necessarily one voice. This is about new ways of understanding identity. It’s also happening with visual art!”

“STORIES ARE BEING REDUCED!” Jules throws his arms in the air.

Tina shushes him. Then she addresses him sternly, as if to a dog: “Sit.” And Jules sits.

Patricia sighs. “But it is literature, Jules. You can’t deny that.”

Jules shakes his head, cursing. Thomas can still hear Jules’s and Patricia’s voices, their rising and falling; they sound more subdued now, but he can no longer make out what they’re saying. It’s just sound. He’s gliding through the darkened basement. He can feel the money against his belly. His heart hammers hard and irregularly, and on his way through the darkness he bumps into something. A body. A large, warm body blocking his way. And then, as if bellowing from some deep cave, a voice booms right in his ear: “Who’s there?” There’s a choking embrace. Flesh, damp skin, matted hair. He’s trapped by bones and flesh. He’s held in this embrace, this strong and living thing that won’t let him go. But is it alive? Or is it a zombie? He starts, frightened, and is yanked brutally from his seat of his own volition and tumbles to the floor. The others stare at him curiously. “What happened?” Patricia asks.

He shakes his head. “I just need to go to the bathroom.”

He splashes water on his face and washes his hands. He breathes deeply, tries to suck the air all the way to his diaphragm. But the presence of the overwhelming body hangs inescapably on him. There was nothing human about it, and yet: Who’s there? And what is it? What was it? He’s tipsy, but not drunk. Or is he? Did he fall asleep? Was he dreaming? He returns to the others, who’ve apparently not changed topics. Jules shouts: “Pass me a smoke, Thomas!” and impatiently extends his hand. “If they don’t want to learn anything, then they can just piss off!” He looks up, a wild expression in his eyes. Tina glances apologetically at Patricia, and Thomas lets Jules have a cigarette, though smoking is forbidden in the apartment. Tina glowers in dismay as the two men smoke, no doubt thinking about her daughter, the pure, unblemished body in the bedroom.

“There’s a lot written about the body,” Patricia says. “We also see it in the visual arts. Gender, the body, a new understanding of the biological condition. It’s quite different from the theory observing gender and body as something learned, something one bears on you. Now you bear it in you. It’s really interesting. And . . .” “I completely disagree,” Jules coughs. “It doesn’t have jack shit to do with gender and body. Let’s have more gender and body, but not if one has to hear some fucking narcissist or other befouling one’s brain with his ridiculous life story.”

“You’re hopeless,” Patricia grins, setting down her coffee mug. “Yes, he is,” Tina smiles, relieved. No, he’s not hopeless, Thomas thinks. And now you can go home. I can’t take any more. But they make no motion to leave. Jules looks as though he needs to cool off. He smokes and stares out the window.

Tina hurriedly asks how Patricia’s doing, and she explains a little about her work with the next big exhibition at the museum. She’s the director of the museum store. They’re about to order related art books. She’s having trouble getting the exhibition’s poster ready, and the catalog’s still unfinished, the graphic designer is impossible. Chitchat. Something about a yoga teacher. Vacation plans. A few spiteful remarks about a mutual girlfriend’s divorce. Jules has zoned out, disheartened, tired. He’s dropped ashes onto the floor. Finally Tina stands. “We should go home now. Stella gets up at 6:00 A.M.” Reluctantly, Jules rises. They gather Stella’s things, which are scattered around the apartment. It takes an eternity. At last Tina scoops up the sleeping girl. Patricia tucks the blanket tightly around her. Jules is already out in the hallway. “I’m sorry,” Tina whispers. “I don’t know what got into him.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Patricia says, caressing Stella’s cheek. “We’re friends.” Thomas follows them down and helps them pack the trunk. Stella whimpers sleepily in her car seat. Jules gives Thomas a long, firm hug. “Good to see you,” he breathes, “and stay away from that book Patricia read. Not only does it sully the reader, it sullies itself. It’s unbearable, Thomas.” He seems genuinely unhappy. Then they drive slowly, as though in search of something, down the street. He shouldn’t be driving, Thomas thinks, the man’s drunk. But it’s too late now. He lights a cigarette and walks around the block. The streetlights are orange. The light forms soft, particulate clusters under the lamps. Everything seems surreal. As though the law of gravity has been abolished, and at any moment he could float up into the night sky. It’s not windy anymore. The feeling of the animal or the body, or whatever it was, has finally left him. He feels completely empty. Like being surrounded by some other species, he thinks, that’s what it’s like. Upper class snobs. I’m still only just barely a part of that world. I’m playing myself. But I’m not anything more than what I’m playing. Never ever. It’s disgraceful. He grinds his cigarette with his foot. Then it starts to rain. A fine, insistent rain.

Back in the apartment Patricia has cleared the table; there’s a cross breeze because she’s airing out, and the apartment is ice cold. She’s already begun washing the dishes. When he enters the kitchen she turns, her hands dripping. She looks directly at him. “I want a baby, Thomas,” she says.

He awakes in a daze, a nasty taste in his mouth, the telephone ringing in the living room. Patricia’s side of the bed is empty, her duvet having slid halfway onto the floor. His body seems petrified: warm, immovable. Naked, he gets to his feet. The telephone rings a second time. It’s Maloney.

“Where are you? It’s 10:00 A.M. We’re getting a big delivery in half an hour. Are you sick, or what the hell’s going on?”

He mumbles a promise to hurry. His cock hangs loose and pale between his legs. His pubic hair’s crawling toward his bellybutton, as though on its way to his head. Scratching his back, shivering, he stumbles to the bathroom, turns on the shower. Patricia left no note on the kitchen table, as she usually does whenever she leaves without first waking him. After Jules and Tina had gone, he’d been too worn-out to discuss having a baby versus not having a baby, and she’d become irate and disappointed, telling him that he had no dreams for the future, that he had zero ambition. He’d gone to bed. Had collapsed and practically fainted into sleep.

A half-empty cup of coffee and a small bottle of red nail polish are the only traces of her. He downs a glass of water and eats a banana as he buttons his shirt. Outside the rain has ceased, but the air is bone-chillingly cold and full of moisture. He trots to the station and is barely able to squeeze into the packed train car, where people stand like sardines in a barrel, with their bodily odors and their bad breath and their pretty faces and their ugly warts; with their youth and their age and their illnesses and their morning eyes, full of disgust or indifference or radiant with resolve and expectation. He presses himself between a fat businessman reeking of aftershave and a schoolgirl wearing an enormous backpack; she’s listening to music and holding the safety bar to keep her balance. The backpack thumps into Thomas each time the train halts. He’s never late. Now he’ll have to listen to Maloney ribbing him the rest of the day. But Maloney’s in ridiculously good spirits this Monday, bursting with energy and barking orders; he and Peter have already begun unpacking the delivery, which sits in a small mountain of cardboard boxes on the floor right inside the door. Annie slashes them open with a box cutter, removing items, while Maloney makes sure they’ve gotten what they’ve ordered and paid for. The atmosphere is good, focused; only Peter, as usual, is slow and shy. Thomas joins in, and the work agrees with him. It’s simple, it’s manageable: most of the boxes need to be taken to the basement and the products arranged properly, shelf by shelf, by number and name. The slick boxes have to be shoved into place and stacked and organized. Thomas knows the basement like he knows his own pocket; it’s their treasure chamber, and it has nothing in common with the dark, dusty labyrinth he’d rushed around in Saturday night. Now it feels as though that never happened, that it was all a dream, a fantasy, a figment of his imagination. He grows warm, he puts eight boxes of plastic folders on the shelf, he presses the felt-tip pen against the cardboard and writes the folders’ colors clearly and legibly on the front of each box. They’d started doing this after they hired Peter. He was never able to find the right colors; maybe he’s colorblind. Maloney’s whistling a tune down the aisle near the glossy paper. Hunched over, Peter lugs the heaviest boxes of paper downstairs. “We’re also missing H4 and B2 upstairs,” Annie says, clearing her throat. “And recycled Double Demy gray.” “What about white?” Maloney calls out. “Didn’t that bookkeeper buy the last of it yesterday?” Annie goes upstairs to check. But there must be customers in the store, because she doesn’t return. Thomas follows Peter up the narrow stairwell to bring the rest of the stuff down. They’ve often discussed replacing this stairwell with a new and wider one, so they could haul a dolly up and down and spare their backs. But Peter’s young and fairly strong. And isn’t that why you have an apprentice?, was how Maloney put it when Thomas brought up the idea. He needs a cigarette. He tugs the last boxes through the store and out to the hallway. Peter sticks his pale, acne-scarred face through the hatch, ready to grab them. They work in silence. Thomas hands Peter the boxes, Peter balances them down the steps. “I’ll take it from down here!” Maloney shouts from within the depths of the basement, though they could’ve heard him easily if he’d used his normal voice. But Maloney needs to make noise, to shout. There’s no life without noise—that would be his motto if he could formulate it. But that’s the thing with Maloney, Thomas thinks. He doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know much about himself, it doesn’t interest him. Maloney acts and suffers and parties and rages and loves and hates, and it’s all noise. Is this an expression of a simple, beautiful life? Now he thrusts his red face past Peter, who’s struggling with a large box. “Time we have some friggin’ coffee!” “Now?” Thomas says, “Shouldn’t we finish first?” But Maloney can’t wait. Peter has to brace himself against the uneven basement wall as Maloney’s corpulent body presses him out on the edge of the stairwell. Here he stands, teetering and about to fall. It’s a long way down. “Be careful, Peter.” Thomas points at the pale-faced apprentice, who at that moment lets go of the box and grabs hold of something. The box lands with a heavy thud on the basement floor. “What the hell was in that?” Maloney asks, squeezing himself up the stairwell. He stands beside Thomas, huffing now. They stare down through the hole in the floor. “Sorry,” Peter says. “But I was about to plummet.” “Plummet? It’s not a damn mountain. What’s in the box?” Peter looks almost frightened. “Come here, kid.” Maloney offers his hand and hoists Peter up. “I think it was glass,” Peter whispers. “Candlesticks.” Maloney sighs heavily and walks into the office. “Go down and check whether or not it’s all smashed,” Thomas says.

Thomas stands in the doorway of the office and gets Maloney’s attention. “Who ordered candlesticks?”

“I did.”

“I thought we agreed no party supplies in the store.”

“Candlesticks are not party supplies. Candlesticks are decorations.”

“Decorations are party supplies. Besides, we don’t sell ‘decorations,’ either.”

“C’mon, Thomas. They’re damaged now anyway. I’ll cover the costs.”

“I don’t like the thought of you ordering tasteless things behind my back.”

“For God’s sake, Thomas.”

“You know how much I hate party supplies.”

“And I love them. The kitschier the better! Novelty toys and clown noses! Balloons and fake beards! Bibs for grown men with pictures of naked ladies!”

Thomas shakes his head, grumbling.

“But candlesticks aren’t kitschy,” Maloney continues. “I’ve carefully selected them so that I wouldn’t offend your aesthetic sensibility. They’ll sell like hotcakes.”

Maloney looks at Thomas. Then Thomas turns to leave and bumps into Peter, who’s returning to give his report.

“Fourteen red candlesticks smashed, eight transparent, seven green, and only two blue. All in all, one hundred twenty-nine candlesticks aren’t broken. I’ve thrown out the damaged ones and noted them on the purchase order. Thirty-one pieces were lost.”

“Good work, Peter. Go out and have yourself a smoke now.” For a moment Peter looks flustered, but then he goes. A wide smile crosses Maloney’s face.

“They’re even tinted?” Thomas says.

“They look awesome,” Maloney smiles, propping his legs up on the desk. “You can take a few home to Patricia on my tab.”

Time passes. Lunch and more coffee. Maloney takes a nap on the office floor, his legs tucked under the desk. Toward evening, Thomas assists Maloney in filling the empty slots on the shelves by putting out the recently received products. Envelopes, letter paper, notebooks. They discuss arranging a spring cleaning of every shelf and cabinet, but when? And can Eva do it by herself? Can they afford to hire additional staff to do it? If they decide to go ahead with it, Thomas thinks they should be on-hand to make sure everything stays in order and nothing gets damaged. He imagines Eva emptying a bucket of dirty, soapy water on the gilt-edged paper that he now holds in his hands. “We did it last year with Peter and Annie,” Maloney says, dropping to one knee to fill the pencil cases in a metal box on the lowest shelf. “We didn’t even pay them extra, did we? That was drudge work.” They decide to speak to Eva. “Because I won’t do it again, I tell you,” Maloney announces once he’s on his feet again. After that, he entertains Thomas by telling him about his trip to the bar over the weekend. He’d played pool and drunk piña coladas, then he’d gone to a different place and had beer and played more pool, until a few guys he knew showed up with some women. They’d wound up at some place with live music, where they danced, and Maloney found himself dancing, mostly with a girl named Lauraine, who was very blonde and a little older. “But she had these fantastic hips.” He succeeded in coercing her home with him, and they’d executed a coitus uninterruptus, despite the fact that he’d been piss drunk. “You can keep the coitus uninterruptus part to yourself next time,” Thomas says. No longer does he see images of water spilling onto letter paper, but Maloney in his bed having sex in the gray morning light; he imagines the gently intertwined flesh, hears the half-choked sounds. “I think it was quite a feat,” Maloney remarks cheerfully. “But I slept all Saturday, and Sunday I washed clothes, did that sort of thing. Then Jenny visited me in the evening.”

Thomas stiffens. “Jenny visited you? Why?”

Maloney shrugs. “I think she just needed to talk.”

“But you haven’t even seen each other for years.”

Maloney smiles. “You don’t know anything about that. Love doesn’t fade that easily.”

“Jesus. I don’t understand anything.”

“There’s nothing to understand. She just swung by. Wanna get out of here?”

According to the clock, it’s already past 7:00. They’re finished now and carry the empty boxes to the door. Thomas slowly dims the chandelier. The fading sunlight is gorgeous, and dusk gradually begins to appear in the corners. Maloney gets their jackets and locks the door behind them. They haul the boxes to the recycling container and break them apart.

“I’m in the doghouse with Patricia,” Thomas says, turning up his collar. “She keeps bugging me about having a kid.”

“Would it really be that awful?”

“Yes. You don’t want one, either. Right?”

“I’m not like you. You’ve got Patricia and your good taste. All I’ve got are dubious encounters with bleach-blondes and a one-bedroom apartment with a ‘nice’ view. Ha!”

“But I really don’t want one, Maloney. You know that. I mean it.”

“Go home now and talk to her. Are you having a mid-life crisis or what? I’ll see you in the morning. Remember to set your alarm clock.”

Maloney clasps Thomas’s arm as he talks. Then he pats him gently on the shoulder and pulls his hat over his forehead. Then he’s gone. Thomas braces himself against the wind and heads toward the train station. What’s Jenny up to? Why does she need to talk to Maloney? He feels violated, misled. But how? Confused and exhausted, he piles into the train, squeezes in between people and their smells. My life is one continuous repetition of activities and tasks. Maybe I really don’t have any drive, and now I’m going home to an unhappy Patricia, and that’s all my own doing.

But Patricia isn’t unhappy. She’s set the table and is frying chicken and vegetables in the big wok. She looks vigorous and sexy; her mouth is the same color as her newly-painted red nails, and her skin’s damp from the moisture in the kitchen. Thomas took the stairs up and he’s out of breath, but greatly relieved, almost joyful. The apartment seems warm and cozy, and his anxious concerns about the money in the microwave and Jenny’s visit with Maloney give way to thoughts of enjoyment, pleasure, food. He pours white port wine and fills glasses with seltzer, he slices a lemon and drops a couple wedges in each glass. Lots of ice. She puts the glass to her red lips and swallows the bubbly, refreshing liquid. “The catalog’s finally finished,” she says, pleased. “It’s off to press tomorrow.” They eat in the living room and watch a film after they’ve washed the dishes. Neither of them mentions yesterday’s argument. They lie close to one another, their bodies intertwined on the couch watching TV. She fingers his earlobe, he plays with her hair. Suddenly she strips off her panties and goes wild. She stands, she drops to her knees, she straddles his face, she’s wet and tart; she whimpers and moans and comes but is eager for more. His head tingles with arousal. This body is alive, he thinks, we’re alive. Patricia’s desire is overwhelming and unencumbered. She doesn’t hold anything back. When she opens her mouth and growls or screams it’s both frightening and ecstatic, a powerful force rising within her. She thrums and sweats and rolls her eyes. At last they fall together onto the carpet, exhausted; he pulls the condom off and ties it into a knot. Patricia’s face is quite soft now and it fills his vision. But when they’re lying in bed, it’s the money he thinks about. What the hell do I do? Nothing, he thinks. Let the money stay where it is. His sore cock is shriveled up, shrunken, still moist. Patricia sleeps like a child under the white duvet. Oh, peace. Remember this now, he tells himself, you can relax, there’s nothing to fear. We just have to get past that stupid funeral.

Tuesday morning is like gold flowing through the streets: a new warmth in the air, dust floating in the sunbeams, it’s as if the sky has expanded overnight. The sounds of the city seem more cheerful, their resonance deeper. People seem happier, lighter. Look, a woman smiles broadly, a young man waits for an old woman with a walker, a child’s brown eyes shine like chestnuts in the backlight. Spring’s on its way, Thomas thinks, walking from home all the way to the store, because who wants to take the train on a day like this? How fitting that spring arrives today, the day the old man burns in hell. That works for me, there’s hope, a new path to forge, free of old grudges. Free of old grudges is a strophe in one of the old man’s favorite songs, a schlager from his youth, and Thomas can’t help but smile, a kind of schadenfreude. Because he, Thomas, is the free one and not the deceased; that’ll teach him (but what can a dead man learn?). These are the energies that buzz through Thomas O’Mally Lindström, who for the occasion is wearing a blue suit. He won’t bury his father wearing black. He buys coffee in a grungy deli and smokes a few cigarettes. He crosses the street and takes a pleasant detour through a lush park, where mimes and young musicians are already performing, where people soak up sun on benches, where dogs yap and cavort on the triangular lawn. Jenny sends him a text: “remember, 1:00 P.M.” And he responds: “why did you visit maloney sunday?” She answers: “mind your own business.” Very much against his wishes, Jenny had an obituary printed. He discovers this when he’s sitting in his office absentmindedly perusing the newspaper: “Jacques O’Mally departed us suddenly. May his soul find peace. Children and grandchildren.” Grandchildren? But there’s only Alice.

“She must’ve thought it sounded better in plural,” Maloney says, his entire head stuffed inside the filing cabinet. “And it does, too. Children and grandchild—you can’t write that.”

“May his soul find peace. What the fuck is that?” Thomas snaps, shoving the newspaper aside. “She is nuts.”

Maloney pops red-faced out of the cabinet and straightens himself up. “She’s a drama queen, Thomas. Jenny loves drama. A funeral is an incredible drama. Think about it.” Thomas groans. “I’m guessing it’ll be a pretty entertaining afternoon,” Maloney says, dropping into the boss’s chair. Annie enters the office and says they’re out of thumbtacks. But they were in the delivery yesterday. She can’t find them. Send Peter to the basement. He’s not at work. He’s not at work? He had to go to the doctor, something about a rash. A rash? Annie doesn’t know anything more than that.

Thomas wanders about the store for a few hours and assists some customers. He talks to the accountant, mails some documents, checks the ledger from last week. Patricia calls and asks for the chapel’s address. Peter comes back from the doctor’s; he has ringworm. This little nugget of news gets Maloney going. He slaps his thighs, howling with laughter.

“Ringworm is contagious,” Annie whispers. “Did the doctor say anything about that?”

“We’re not exactly in the habit of fondling Peter’s torso, are we? Or maybe we are?” Peter looks down. Maloney bursts into laughter again. “Does it itch?” Annie says worriedly. Peter nods. “Go get some lunch, Peter, and order something for the worm. Put it on my tab! It can have whatever it wants. Oh, that’s classic. Ringworm!”

Thomas sighs. “I apologize on Maloney’s behalf, Peter.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Maloney chuckles, ruffling his own hair. “I’d like a large turkey sandwich with extra bacon and pickles. Cranberries, but no tomatoes, please. They just make the bread soggy.”

Peter leaves, and Annie washes her hands at the little sink in the hallway. Thomas gets her attention in the mirror. “We need to leave for a few hours this afternoon. We have to go to an interment.” She nods, drying her hands thoroughly on a paper towel.

“I thought he was going to be cremated,” Maloney says.

“He is.”

“Then it’s not an interment, Thomas. Loosen up, man!” Maloney shouts. “Jesus Christ, I’m hungry!”

They eat, and in no time the office smells like a classroom, boiled egg, sweating salami. The store is quiet. “Must be the good weather,” Peter remarks, cautiously.

“We need to do a spring cleaning,” Maloney says, food smacking in his mouth, “is that something you’d all be interested in?”

No reaction.

“We’ll pay you, of course.”

“You didn’t last year,” Annie says firmly.

“But we will this year.”

“No thanks, I’d rather not,” Peter says quietly.

“Me neither.” Annie looks at Maloney, defiant, but Maloney’s focused on holding his sandwich, which threatens to fall apart. “Why the hell didn’t you ask them to put a toothpick in it, Peter? Look at this shit.” He leans forward to snatch up a piece of greasy bread from the floor.

Peter slurps his cola. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down with each gulp. “Well, I’m going back to work,” Annie says, tossing her crumpled sandwich paper in the trash on the way out. Maloney belches and says: “We’re off in ten minutes. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Thomas opens the window and sucks a pleasant breath of fresh, mild air into his lungs. “Did you order a new coffee automat?” he asks Maloney.