Richland

I walk out past the big tanks on Tank Drive and hook a left on Theatre, then take a right on Rosefeld and cut across the street to pass by the old middle school. I loved this school, but Richland let it fall apart. They relocated the kids to a building a half mile away, which I can see from the old school, across the field, across the highway. Too bad. I liked walking past the building when school was in session. The secretaries would sometimes go to their cars as I walked past and say hello; the teachers looked young and healthy, the children happy. I liked hearing the principal speak into the intercom in the morning, to the children milling about by the doors, eager to get inside. They made the children who got there early wait till 7:45 before entering. At 7:42 the principal's voice carried across the adjoining fields, across the road, up the street, into our study window. I never caught the text of his address, but the rhythm and cadence each day seemed precisely the same, like a recording that played over and over. I'm recently divorced, forty-eight years old. The window is now exclusively my ex-wife's window. The study is now her bedroom, and our old bedroom is now her study. That's how I knew I wasn't coming back, when she switched the rooms.

There is an Italian restaurant we both like, which we go to once a month. Though divorced, we go there still. It's slim pickings in this town, the search for a date, so most times we just date each other. We sat at dinner the other night in this very restaurant, and she said to me that our divorce had been a mistake. I was taking her out for her birthday. We had eaten our steak tips, our pasta, our calamari. She had put one that was still intact on the end of her fork and made it dance around the table, impaled and dangling. We laughed. Then she told me how much she regrets how things turned out.

"It could be worse," I said. "Imagine how the calamari feel."

Last December we went there for our last anniversary. In a bid to get a good table, I made the mistake of mentioning to the woman who took our names that it was a special occasion. Right in the middle of our quiet discussion about lawyer fees and timetables, the hostess and wait staff brought out a small cake lit with candles, singing to us about our happy day. We're very civil people; red-faced, we thanked the woman and the singing waiters, and smiled. We kept the irony to ourselves, though there was a time in my life, at least, when such keeping in might have made me burst.

I am walking past the football stadium, where they are redoing the turf, replacing natural grass with something more permanent and damaging, when the man who rides his bicycle compulsively rides past. He says hello, but I've already looked away. I say hello back to him, but he is already fifty yards away on his speedy bike. He is about my age and rides his bike, I imagine, to keep in shape. His hair is almost as gray as mine, but too long. As a rule, you have to keep it short when it turns, especially if it recedes. Look at homosexuals, I want to say to him. They keep hair like ours very short.

I can't tell you how many times I pass this man. I see him coming, usually, from quite a distance, so I have half a mile in which to curse him. He peddles hard when he sees me, he races past. "Hellooo," he says, shouting. "Hellooo," I say, but he's already gone. He doesn't come back this time, content to ride elsewhere. Perhaps he has ridden the bike to his garage and gone inside his home, wherever home might be.

In the curve by the high school, on the right, the...