Naturally it was at the very top. On the dusty lid, mice had left tracks like footprints in the snow. He wiped it off with a tissue before handing the box to Ella.

  Traditionally the card table went against the front windows, beside the loveseat, to take advantage of the good reading lamp and its three-way bulb. In her later years, before she fell ill, every Thursday his mother hosted her bridge club, her church friends gossiping over finger sandwiches and Prantl’s almond torte as they doubled and redoubled one another. The table and padded folding chairs hailed from that era, a matching set in dark avocado Naugahyde. Shoulder to shoulder, Ella, Emily, Arlene and Margaret huddled around the light like a team of surgeons, turning the pieces right side up, culling the straight edges that formed the border.

  “Are we using the picture?” Ella asked.

  “No,” the other three answered in chorus, and Margaret tossed the box on the floor, where Rufus sniffed it before settling again. Though the worst of the storm had passed, he was sticking close to Emily.

  Henry stood behind her, watching them sort through the pile. Outside, the lake was gray, the rain falling in long streaks through the black background of the garage roof. It might have been evening. The room was silent, only the peeping of the boys’ video games sifting down from upstairs. For dinner they were having his favorite, chicken à la king, and any minute Kenny, whose sweet tooth rivaled his own, would be back from Haff Acres with hot pies.

  “We can squeeze in if you want,” Emily said.

  “I’d just slow you down.”

  No one denied it, the silence prompting laughter. He didn’t mind.

  “Ta-da,” Arlene said, fitting two edge pieces together.

  “It’s a little early for a ta-da,” Emily said.

  “Ta-da,” Margaret said.

  “All right,” Emily said, “if that’s how we’re going to play it. Ta-da.”

  “Ta-da,” Ella said.

  “You guys are sharks.”

  “You know what you could do for me,” Emily said, and for an instant he feared she was going to ask him for a glass of wine in front of Margaret. “You could build us a fire.”

  “Yes,” Arlene said as if she’d been thinking the same thing. “I’m freezing.”

  “Your wish is my command.” It was a saying of his father’s, lifted from some movie about a genie, and as he knelt and shoved crumpled newspaper under the grate, he thought it was true, he would do anything to make them happy.

  It took quickly, roaring, warming his cheeks. “Ta-da.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said, and turned back to the table.

  Rufus waddled over to lie on the hearth, using Henry’s foot as a pillow.

  “You are one spoiled dog.”

  Outside, the rain came down. He stood at the mantel, ignoring his craving for a scotch, transfixed by the sight of the four of them working side by side. If they could just stay this way, but the spell was delicate, and their happiness, like all happiness, temporary. He thought he should take a picture.

  Kiss the Cook

  In the kitchen, Emily took him aside like a spy. “Margaret wants to make dinner for everyone tomorrow night.”

  He was immediately annoyed, as if his plans had been ruined.

  “I thought we were doing burgers and dogs on the grill.”

  “We can do them for lunch. She wants to contribute.”

  “I understand that she wants to contribute. She doesn’t have any money.”

  Emily looked over her shoulder as if he was being too loud. “She’s not going to spend a lot of money. She’s going to make that pasta with the pine nuts you said you liked.”

  “I do like it, I just don’t want her spending money she needs for other things.”

  “I think it’s good she wants to do this, so that’s what we’re doing. I’m just letting you know.”

  “I guess I don’t get a vote.”

  “No,” she said, “you don’t. And you’ll like it.”

  “I’m sure I will,” he said.

  The Evening’s Entertainment

  Though at home Henry watched the Pirates every night, here, by design, they didn’t have cable. The antenna, being obsolete, could pick up only a couple of snowy channels from Buffalo and Toronto, limiting their choices to old VHS tapes or DVDs rented from the Blockbuster in Lakewood. Kenny and Margaret were members, and once or twice a week, depending on the weather, they’d take the children down to choose the latest releases from Disney and Pixar, animated fables Emily found irritating and juvenile. As the girls grew older, she tried to interest them in black-and-white classics like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice that she and Arlene would end up watching together. Despite their differences, their taste in movies was surprisingly similar, both of them preferring the costume dramas and romantic comedies of their adolescence to anything modern. Kenny tended to go for low-budget horror flicks from the fifties that were supposed to be scary and fun, but which seemed to everyone else—the boys included—ludicrous and unwatchable. Margaret liked science fiction that addressed social issues, since her politics and Hollywood’s generally agreed. Henry enjoyed westerns, a genre that operated by an older code. It was a rare film that kept everyone’s attention, partly because the set was small and all the way across the room, and partly because they had books to read and games to play and puzzles to finish. They could watch TV anytime, and yet every night, after the dishes were put away and they’d settled in, inevitably someone asked, “Who wants to watch a movie?”

  Because they’d been too busy during the day to make the extra effort, tonight’s film came from the permanent collection—Raiders of the Lost Ark, selected by Kenny with the boys in mind, since the girls were hostages to the puzzle. Henry, who’d watched the original swashbucklers at the Regent in East Liberty, riding the trolley by himself and blowing his route money on licorice whips, took the recliner in the corner and followed the plot at a remove, reading an old Smithsonian article about Lewis and Clark, glancing up and getting lost in the action so that the two stories blended. Eventually he set the magazine aside to stoke the fire. He had to reach over Rufus, who lifted his head but didn’t move.

  “Don’t mind me,” Henry said.

  They were making progress on the clipper ship. The border was done, and a dark corner of sky streaked with lightning. They’d segregated the pieces by color—a small island for the ship, a massive raft for the sea.

  “Ratsafrats,” Arlene said when one didn’t fit.

  “That’s a lot of water,” Henry said.

  “We’ve done it before,” Emily said, nodding encouragement at Ella.

  Behind him the tape stopped, making them all look.

  “Who,” Kenny asked, “is ready for pie?”

  “Oh, I’m so full,” Emily said. “Maybe just a sliver.”

  “A sliver of which? We have cherry and we have peach.”

  She put her hands over her mouth like one of the three monkeys, as if afraid to speak. “Both?”

  It was a popular choice. Besides the pies, he’d stopped and gotten ice cream. He took their orders, enlisting the boys to serve.

  As Justin was coming through the doorway, he dropped a fork, leaving a dribble of vanilla on the carpet, and stood there paralyzed, as if he might cry.

  “It’s okay,” Margaret said, taking the plate from him and turning him around by the shoulder. “Go get a clean one.”

  Of all the children, he would have the hardest life, Henry thought, with Margaret for a mother and Sarah for a sister. He didn’t include Jeff in his calculations, and realized that after discussing it with Emily so long, he’d accepted the divorce as a fait accompli. He was tired, otherwise he would have dismissed the idea as the passing notion it was (the boy was five, no clumsier than any child, and exhausted). Instead, unguarded, he followed it to its conclusion. He hoped he was wrong. He’d been sensitive too, a hermit and a worrier, and he’d done all right.

  They ate, watching Harrison Ford drop through a trapdoor into a pit of snakes. Rufus faced the boys, intent, making Henry shoo him. The cherry pie was tart. When Emily couldn’t finish hers, Henry polished it off, knowing it would give him heartburn later.

  “Oof,” Arlene said. “Too much.”

  “I’ll do the dishes,” Margaret said.

  “Thank you, dear,” Emily said.

  Usurped, Henry picked up Lewis and Clark again, doing his best to ignore the blaring music and Keystone Kop Nazis. The movie went on and on, one cockamamie escape after another. His legs were jumpy, and he shifted in his chair. It had to be past the boys’ bedtime. They’d worked hard today. He thought of tomorrow and the antenna, how to get it down without damaging the gutter. The town landfill wouldn’t be open Sunday or Monday. When he’d read the same sentence three times, he set the magazine aside and stood. His hips were stiff. In the ring of lamplight, like competing teams, Arlene and Margaret concentrated on the bowsprit, Emily and Ella the sails. It was too late to put another log on the fire, and he consolidated the remaining pieces with the tongs, gathering the brittle embers beneath them. Rufus sat up and yawned, his long tongue curling.

  “Does he need to go out?” Emily asked.

  It was still sprinkling, the air damp. Rufus crisscrossed the lawn, sniffing the grass while Henry stood at the door of the screen porch, looking beyond him at the blurry lights on the far shore. The wind rose, and fat drops spattered in the trees. “Quick quick. Quick like a bunny.”

  Normally it would be too late for a treat, but Henry relented. Emily, busy coaching Ella, paid them no attention.

  The house felt stuffy after being outside. His gut was sour and he chewed some Tums. The movie refused to end. He took his seat again and tried to read, but the article was dull and the room was warm, and soon, though he fought it, lolling, blinking to stay awake, his eyes closed and he dozed off. He sat slumped over the magazine with his head bowed and his mouth open like someone dead, his thick breathing making the boys giggle and the girls turn around.

  “Henry!” Emily said. “Go to bed.”

  Night Owls

  He woke, as he so often did now, at an absurd hour, a slave to his prostate. The curtains were dark and the time on the clock was demoralizing. Beside him, Emily slept with one arm flung above her head as if passed out, Rufus curled on the rag rug next to her instead of his bed. Henry pulled his robe on over his pajamas, tottered down the hall and peed by the glow of the nightlight, his jowly twin watching him in the mirror. The volume, as always, was underwhelming, a weak stream, despite the pills he took every day.

  He wondered how Dr. Runco was doing. He hadn’t thought of him in weeks, which seemed wrong. They ought to send a card, though instantly he realized how ridiculous that sounded. Flowers. Something. Emily would know what.

  He trusted Kenny had banked the fire, but decided to check anyway, since he was awake. Beneath the grate, pillowed in ashes, a few embers still burned. He’d just picked up the shovel when he heard, distinctly, right outside, the murmur of a woman’s voice—unmistakably Margaret’s.

  He stopped as if caught, his head cocked. It was past three. Who was she talking to? He strained to make out the conversation, listening to the rhythm of her words, as if that might provide a clue.

  Arlene was her confidante. A fellow black sheep, she thought she understood Margaret better than any of them, but it was too late for her to be up.

  Maybe she was on her phone, because she seemed to be explaining something at length. Michigan was an hour behind them. He pictured Jeff on the other end, raised from a sound sleep, lying in bed with his arm over his face, patiently enduring her accusations.

  Eavesdropping like this reminded Henry of all the nights he stayed up waiting for her to come home as a teenager, his anger turning to guilty concern as the hours passed, only to have her stumble in at four in the morning reeking of dope and Southern Comfort, her lipstick smeared like a bar girl. Once, in the middle of winter, her so-called friends dumped her on the front lawn, covered in vomit. In the morning, heading off to the bus stop, he found a pair of her underwear in the snow. At dinner, she argued with both of them, as if there were a world in which this was acceptable, and then to punish them, ran away.

  He crept toward the door, shovel in hand, ready, if challenged, to say he’d heard a noise. He sidled closer, keeping to the shadows, and peeked through the window.

  Margaret occupied one half of the glider, still talking, but not on her phone, and not to Arlene. Beside her, facing the lake, absorbing her spiel without a word, sat Kenny, the two of them gently rocking in the dark.

  She went on, holding out her empty hands as if carrying an imaginary platter, then letting them drop. With the house buttoned up, Henry couldn’t hear what she was saying, only her tone, raised in protest one minute, quietly resigned the next. Aware that he looked like someone from a cartoon, he leaned in, turning his head, and pressed an ear against the cold window.

  As if she’d heard him, she abruptly stopped, and he shrank back into the shadows.

  She flicked a lighter, the flame illuminating her face, bent and touched the tip to a skinny hand-rolled cigarette. She blew out a cloud and passed the joint to Kenny, who took a hit.

  Though he’d hoped they’d outgrown it, he wasn’t entirely surprised. He supposed it was better than smoking it in the cottage. Though Emily complained, sometimes after the children were in bed, when it was too buggy outside or raining, Arlene had a last cigarette on the porch, so there was precedent.

  Margaret started in again, softly, spinning her tale as if they had all the time in the world. What kind of shape would they be in tomorrow? When they were younger, Henry would have thought nothing of interrupting, making them hide the weed, reminding them to lock up before they went to bed, an unsubtle hint. Now that they were adults it was harder to play the stern father, and rather than embarrass all three of them, he retreated.

  As he was returning the shovel, careful not to ring the blade against the brass stand, from the porch came a great blast of laughter. It was a shock, and after what he’d seen, baffling. Though he couldn’t say why, for an instant, with the habitual self-doubt of the outsider, he suspected they were laughing at him.

  Safely back in bed, he decided he was just being paranoid, and maybe jealous. There were nights after the war he and Arlene stayed up long after everyone else was asleep, stargazing on the end of the dock or taking a canoe out and letting it drift in the middle, lying back, the only sound the water sloshing against the hull. As if his voice belonged to the darkness, his words rose, hung for a moment and sank into the lake. In his own way he’d been as lost as Margaret, and while he’d spared Arlene the worst (he would never tell anyone about the boatman they killed by mistake, or the bombed monastery, or the gypsy girl they found crucified upside down), he would always be grateful to her for listening. His deepest fear (also unspoken, being unspeakable) was that in the despair and confusion he knew so well, Margaret would kill herself. Discovering that she and Kenny shared the same bond as he and Arlene heartened him, and in the vague, floating reaches before sleep, he was reassured, knowing they could at least talk to each other.

  The Five Warning Signs

  In the morning his fingertips were numb, tingling as if still asleep. While Emily went to put on coffee and water Rufus, he opened and closed his hands like a transplant patient, shook them like a swimmer on the starting block, trying to get some circulation going.

  Though it regularly happened at home, he blamed the bed, a double, much narrower than their king, with a groove worn down the middle that pushed them together. It was hard to get comfortable, a problem made worse by his hips hurting, and his back, and his bad knee. All night he shifted, trying to find the right position, finally settling on his left side, spooning Emily with his left arm stretched high over her head, behind her pillows, and then in the morning his shoulder hurt and his fingers were numb. It wasn’t anything new or surprising, just another annoying reminder of the body’s inevitable decline.

  The first few times it happened, he’d told Emily.

  “That’s not good,” she said, and the following Sunday passed him a Parade magazine with an article listing “The Five Warning Signs of a Heart Attack.” Yes, his cholesterol numbers were terrible, but even Dr. Runco agreed, as a symptom, indigestion was too broad. Emily didn’t care. For months she had Henry taking baby aspirin until another study refuted the claim.

  He heard her in the bathroom. The toilet flushed, followed by the squeak of the faucet and water running, then the squeak again. He kneaded his fingers, wringing them until the feeling returned. When she opened the door to let Rufus in, he was able to pull the covers aside and invite her back to bed. Morning had been their time, a bar of pure light from the east window warming her skin.

  “It’s eight-thirty,” she said. “I’m going to go take my shower.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  To assuage his disappointment, she leaned across her pillows and gave him a kiss, automatically fending off his hand.

  “And take that dog with you.”

  “I will,” she said, collecting her towels.

  When she was gone, he stretched out, sprawled across the bed, wide awake, flexing his fingers. His arthritis was worse than the numbness, being permanent. Every day they hurt, but he would never say that. She worried enough. There was no point upsetting her by telling her something she already knew.

  The Last Antenna on Manor Drive

  What he should have done was have Kenny cut the top off with the Sawzall. A wide herringbone array, it was made of aluminum tubing, a softer grade than the lawn chairs, a piece of cake for a titanium blade. They’d have to break it down for the recycling anyway. But Henry came up with this solution only afterward. Just as Emily didn’t trust him on the roof, Henry didn’t trust Kenny on the roof with the Sawzall. Despite his bloodline, as Emily once noted, he didn’t have the engineering gene. The idea was to keep it as simple for him as possible. Just balancing with the bolt cutters would be tricky enough.

 

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