Mislaid by Nell Zink

there into a Dumpster at a wayside. Except the Cher records, which he abandoned on the shoulder of a deeply shaded back road, to make sure no one would suspect he had anything to do with them.
    “You’re suffering from female trouble,” Cary told Lee over lunch at the Bunny Burger. “It’s time you sought professional help.”
    “A shrink only helps when you don’t know what you want. I feel I’m in touch with my desires, thank you.”
    “I meant a psychic. Your aura is navy blue.”
    “Cary.” He used the tone his daughter used to say “Daddy.”
    “I took a course at Edgar Cayce,” Cary protested. “My ESP is very strong!”
    “And when did you get the diagnosis? In the poetry workshop business, we always wait until the check clears.”
    “I have a heightened sensitivity to feelings. Some people only know what you’re feeling when you’re looking at them, but us psychics can feel it over hundreds of miles. We’re tapped into the web of life.”
    “And what do you call people who know what you’re feeling and don’t give a shit?”
    “That’s why they call it female trouble.”
    “My wife is masculine as a mailed fist,” Lee said, paraphrasing a necktie ad from a magazine. “Did you get it on under the pyramid yet?” The Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach was famous for its rooftop pyramid, modeled on the geometric eternity machines of the Egyptians, under which lunch meat would not spoil and orgasms were exceptionally rapturous.
    “You want my help finding them or not? You got anything on you now that belongs to one of them? Something related to them, a picture or something.”
    “Peggy gave me these gray hairs,” Lee said. “And she might have bought me this shirt.”
    “Let me touch it.”
    Lee held out his arm. “And? What’s she feeling?”
    Cary closed his eyes and stroked Lee’s cuff. “Oh, yes. It’s almost there. Her emotions are coming into focus. I can read you now, baby. It’s so strong. She thinks you need to lose twelve pounds.”
    Lee turned his dispassionate gaze on his sandwich. “With friends like you, who needs marriage?” he said, taking a large bite. He thought of Montaigne and Étienne, and felt something was missing from his life.
    Lee’s parents hired a private investigator, who drove to Caroline County to see whether she was at her parents’ house. Just because they said she wasn’t there didn’t mean she wasn’t there. He reported back that the Vaillaincourts’ apathy made his blood run cold, as a hardened professional. Peggy’s mother had referred him to her husband, as though the search were a business matter, and Mr. Vaillaincourt had told him, “She knows where to find us!” He claimed to be expecting a call any day. If it never came, well, that was Peggy’s problem.
    The Flemings understood the Vaillaincourts better than the detective did. A ruling class is made up entirely of hardened professionals, insofar as it does not sire sissies. Where more sentimental men might remark of their daughters’ marriages, “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son,” Peggy’s father had been heard to say no such thing. When two females vanish from a patriarchy, both of them attached to a homosexual, the ripples can be truly minimal.
    Soon the detective, a working-class townsman, sympathized with Peggy. If a woman ran away from people like that, mightshe not have reasons? He didn’t have to know Lee was gay to dislike him. He had other reasons to feel distaste for the Flemings, such as the way they confined him to their front hall, never asking him to come in or sit down.
    With his assistance, they placed a newspaper ad featuring Peggy’s senior portrait from high school. The picture showed a big-eyed, arrogant girl in an off-the-shoulder drape. Her long hair, straightened on curlers under a dryer hood for the occasion, was pinned up into a chignon. The likeness was not good. Lee had neglected, in ten years of marriage, to take a close-up