An Ornithologist's Guide to Life by Ann Hood

I have to.” He walked right past Dora and pointed foolishly like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz . “Which way to the kitchen?”
    Dora put her hand on his arm. Startled, she dropped it just as quickly. She didn’t expect muscles under the shirt. And standing close like this she saw that he was taller than he’d seemed at the bus station.
    â€œYour mother gave me so few restrictions. Calling Rebecca is one of them. I’m sorry.”
    He looked at her and she knew that really, she couldn’t stop him.
    â€œYou love her, I suppose,” she said.
    He laughed, a barking sound that Dora didn’t like onebit. “No. But I don’t think I should have deserted her. I don’t think I should have been sent away for the entire summer to live in this podunk town with an old lady.”
    Dora took a step back, away from him, rubbing her arms up and down.
    â€œI mean,” Peter said, “who are you, you know? My father kills himself and you vanish. Do you know what I’ve been going through for five whole years? You have no idea.”
    She did know, of course; Melinda had filled her in. But what Dora said was, “I hardly think your father killed himself.”
    That bark again, then Peter stuck his face in hers. “What do you call it when someone smokes so much cocaine that they jump out a fifth-story window running from imaginary monsters? Huh?”
    Dora reared up to her full height, five feet, eight inches. She had always believed in the benefit of calcium and as a result had not shrunk like other women her age. Why, Madeline Dumfey had died a full three inches shorter than she had lived.
    â€œAn accident,” Dora said, “I call it an accident.”
    D ORA DID NOT see the point of dwelling on her losses. But often, at night, they seized her and shook her awake. Sometimes she found herself groping for Bill on the other side of the bed, reaching and reaching as if her life depended on finding him there until, finally, panting, she had to remind herself that he had died on April 14, 1983, from lung cancer. A picture of him taking those last gasping breaths in a hospitalbed would come to her and she would close her eyes and press the lids hard until it vanished.
    Other times she awoke thinking she had to call Madeline about one thing or another and then a strange uneasiness took hold as Dora remembered that Madeline was dead. They had known each other since 1943 when they worked side by side as secretaries at the army base in Quonset Point. Dora wore her hair in a Veronica Lake peekaboo cut back then; Madeline favored more of a Gene Tierney wave. They went together every Friday afternoon after work to Isabella’s Parisian Hair Salon in Wickford to get their hair done. Both of them had slim hips, good legs, a wide collection of shoes. They shared nylons, a real commodity back then, and lipstick. They double-dated, covered for each other when they wanted to give a guy the bum’s rush. They stood up for each other at their weddings; Dora wore a deep maroon velvet for Madeline’s and Madeline wore an icy blue satin at Dora’s. Those were the things that came to mind when Dora woke up with an urgency to call Madeline: the smell of the chemicals at their beauty parlor near the base, the feel of a nylon stocking sliding on her leg, the crush of velvet against cool skin on a November morning.
    Since Peter had arrived, what woke Dora was the feeling that she needed to check on the children, the way she would when they were young. She used to walk through the darkness of the house and slip into their rooms and make sure they were breathing. First Tillie, a neat sleeper, on her back with her covers tucked under her chin. Then Dan, often upside down in his bed, his sheets and blankets a tangle around his waist and feet. Dora would stand and count their breaths before climbing back into her own bed, satisfied.

    P ETER SAT IN the kitchen, ate entire boxes of Oreo