Nancy Culpepper by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

her, and Nancy can hear him breathing into his pillow. She waits to hear if he will cry. She recalls Jack returning to her in California after Robert was born. He brought a God’s-eye, which he hung from the ceiling above Robert’s crib, to protect him. Jack never wore the sweater Nancy made for him. Instead, Grover slept on it. Nancy gave the dog her granny-square afghan too, and eventually, when they moved back East, she got rid of the pathetic evidence of her creative period—the crochet hooks, the piles of yarn, some splotchy batik tapestries. Now most of the objects in the house are Jack’s. He made the oak counters and the dining room table; he remodeled the studio; he chose the draperies; he photographed the pictures on the wall. If Jack were to leave again, there would be no way to remove his presence, the way the dog can disappear completely, with his sounds. Nancy revises the scene in her mind. The house is still there, but Nancy is not in it.
    In the morning, there is a four-inch snow, with a drift blowing up the back-porch steps. From the kitchen window, Nancy watches her son float silently down the hill behind the house. At the end, he tumbles off his sled deliberately, wallowing in the snow, before standing up to wave, trying to catch her attention.
    On the back porch, Nancy and Jack hold Grover over newspapers. Grover performs unselfconsciously now. Nancy says, “Maybe he can hang on, as long as we can do this.”
    “But look at him, Nancy,” Jack says. “He’s in misery.”
    Jack holds Grover’s collar and helps him slide over the threshold. Grover aims for his place by the fire.
    After the snowplow passes, late in the morning, Nancy drives Robert to the school on slushy roads, all the while lecturing him on the absurdity of raising money to buy official Boy Scout equipment, especially on a snowy Saturday. The Boy Scouts are selling watersavers for toilet tanks in order to earn money for camping gear.
    “I thought Boy Scouts spent their time earning badges,” says Nancy. “I thought you were supposed to learn about nature, instead of spending money on official Boy Scout pots and pans.”
    “This is nature,” Robert says solemnly. “It’s ecology. Saving water when you flush is ecology.”
    Later, Nancy and Jack walk in the woods together. Nancy walks behind Jack, stepping in his boot tracks. He shields her from the wind. Her hair is blowing. They walk briskly up a hill and emerge on a ridge that overlooks a valley. In the distance they can see a housing development, a radio tower, a winding road. House trailers dot the hillsides. A snowplow is going up a road, like a zipper in the landscape.
    Jack says, “I’m going to call the vet Monday.”
    Nancy gasps in cold air. She says, “Robert made us promise you won’t do anything without letting him in on it. That goes for me too.” When Jack doesn’t respond, she says, “I’d want to hang on, even if I was in a coma. There must be some spark, in the deep recesses of the mind, some twitch, a flicker of a dream—”
    “A twitch that could make life worth living?” Jack laughs bitterly.
    “Yes.” She points to the brilliantly colored sparkles the sun is making on the snow. “Those are the sparks I mean,” she says. “In the brain somewhere, something like that. That would be beautiful.”
    “You’re weird, Nancy.”
    “I learned it from you. I never would have noticed anything like that if I hadn’t known you, if you hadn’t got me stoned and made me look at your photographs.” She stomps her feet in the snow. Her toes are cold. “You educated me. I was so out of it when I met you. One day I was listening to Hank Williams and shelling corn for the chickens and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what. Talk about weird.”
    “You’re exaggerating. That was years ago. You always exaggerate your background.” He adds in a teasing tone, “Your humble origins.”
    “We’ve been together fifteen years,”