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Pinestead, she stopped for the sunset. The ‹ery disc sank in ‹ve minutes , highlighting the hidden shapes of clouds. A path across the water turned red. Yes, she was unprepared, she didn’t know why Sean was so happy, tonight, for the ‹rst time in weeks. She hoped he didn’t think that his daddy would be waiting for him. How would she ever know the next direction to take with him, with the girls, though somehow she wondered if it might be hardest on him. She knew that it was unfair, this intuition that somehow the girls were going to be able to handle their grief better. It wasn’t fair, but there it was. She realized that for an hour, or more, she had been free of that rotating spur of pain. As she thought about it, the pain started up again, started to ›utter beneath her breastbone. “Oh, please,” she said. “Stop it.” She reached across to Sean and touched his hair, let her hand fall on his leg. “Are we there, Mom?” he mumbled. “How many miles?” “Eight,” she said, making something up. “Eight. Go back to sleep.” 2 She woke to a glass-blue, sparkling morning, and when she checked the face of the lake she saw a light chop rushing down the center— a wind from the north. When she opened the bedroom closet to ‹nd a sweater she caught a whiff of Jim’s shirts. They hung next to her own, along with his plaid corduroy jacket. She put her face into his shirts and breathed a smell that sometimes clung to Jim, that unmistakable smell of clothes that overwinter in a pine-board closet. She put the corduroy jacket on and rolled the cuffs over her wrists. With the ‹rst, perfect cup of coffee she walked outside, across pale, bristly grass—it had been dry these past few weeks—down to the dock. The waves were picking up, turning to whitecaps. Jim liked to take the canoe out in water like this. Any kind of water, come to think of it, wild or smooth as a mirror. She walked to the end of the dock, and there he was. Fleshy, immortal , just about to laugh, but a ghost. A ghost about to laugh at her. Jim standing ‹fty feet out from shore in water that came to his ribs, 11 so she could see his powerful arms and pectorals, his long-waisted torso beginning to add fat—that layer of fat over muscle that made him impervious to the cold water. Unless the day was scorching hot, Mary would always have to swim vigorously or ‹nd herself shivering, but he played games with the kids, dared them to swamp the canoe, taught them to swim. She could see him as clearly this morning as if his ‹gure were revealed in a hole cut out of a celluloid sky. He laughed outright and dared her to come on in. Too late. Never again. We’re too late for each other, Jim. Something happened. She stared across the water at him for several minutes, stunned. Why stay here, then, if it was going to hurt like this? And yet Pinestead was the best of Jim. These were the best reminders or would be, someday. Back in Chicago it was Jim with his mind on work, whenever she saw him, or falling asleep in the big chair in front of the ‹re with a bottle of beer in his hand so she’d come over and remove it before it toppled and maybe ‹nish it herself. The kids playing around him, happy enough to have him in the same room, if that was all they were going to get, and usually it was. And the city was so full of things that were no good in his absence. Jim had made things tolerable, shared the hardship. Jesus Mary and Joseph, that was the worst, no Jim to complain to, the week’s bills coming to her eyes alone, no one to help her understand the day’s news. She couldn’t ask him to help her make sense of this world where some terrible things kept happening, and no one else wanted to talk about them. Summer days she walked into a room ‹lled with iron lungs at the Children’s Hospital, a child stricken with polio in each one. She couldn’t shout, “Oh, Jim, look at what’s going on! Help me live...
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