Why People Say Two Thousand

My mother and husband died nineteen days apart, and the next time I put on shoes it was four months later. The cable was disconnected, yellowing newspapers were logjammed on the porch and Brisket and Chervil had hunkered down with Sonya next door in the name of reliable food. Using her spare key, Sonya had also kept me fed, coaxed me to bathe, laundered my appalling bedsheets, handed me sleeping pills and assured my father, when he called, that I would be up and about again eventually.

She was right. One day in early September, for no reason I could name, I got up from bed with the cloudy intention of doing something. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of jeans, intrigued by how baggy they were now, and stepped into the back yard.

In the late-afternoon light, I went through bills. On Gary's credit-card and cell-phone statements, I wrote, "Deceased" and paid the late penalties. There were no bombshells in these pages, no suspicious calls to distant area codes, no string of charges to a lingerie shop. Mostly just calls home, to me at school, to his office at the hospital, to his sister, his parents. The MasterCard showed the annual fee for our Cheese of the Month Club membership, a wedding gift we'd kept renewing every year. Discovering the white cardboard boxes at the front door delighted us out of all proportion, as if we forgot every month—we did forget—that we had engineered this little surprise for ourselves. I hoped Sonya had taken the boxes that had come over the summer.

I went to the garden and pulled out the desiccated tomato and basil plants that I'd planted after Mom, before Gary. Brisket, announcing herself with a croaking meow, emerged from the bushes that divided our yard from Sonya's. She closed her eyes and permitted me to scratch her fat orange head, then wandered off to rub her cheek on the pile of uprooted plants. It was a social call only; she and Chervil were Sonya's cats now.

I was caught up on bills. I had no pets to care for. All at once I wanted only to be with my father. I wanted to hear about his sad summer and for us to be sad together. Beyond a few short calls, I'd been so useless to him since Mom had died. I packed, left a note with Sonya and drove the six hours to Illinois.

Dad hugged me before I was completely out of the car. It was after midnight, and I hadn't called ahead, but the house was lit like a party the guests had snuck out on. In the kitchen, a radio blared staticky jazz music. A pot of coffee hissed on its hot circle. The sound of sizzling onions from a TV cooking show floated in from the next room. Even Dad's clothes ran counter to habit: dark blue sweatpants cinched tight around his waist, accenting his paunchy stomach. The hood of his sweatshirt, of the same dark blue, was bunched up behind his head.

He turned down the radio. We sat with our coffees and smiled shyly at each other. The sizzling onions from the TV filled the space between us, almost like talk. I resisted the urge to reach over and flatten his hood.

After a few minutes he said, "You were right. People do say two thousand."

All during 1999, we'd debated how years would be pronounced in the new millennium. It was my view that everyone had been intoning "the year two thousand" for so long that they would keep saying it. Two thousand one. Two thousand two. Dad banked on twenty-oh-one, twenty-oh-two, because twenty follows nineteen, always has, always will. Gary ignored us on the grounds that the year two thousand was the last year of the second millennium, and he wasn...