Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt

second wife had been the one to go on talking to my grandfather. Not the first—the first left, licking salt from the wide rim of her glass; the third, we knew, was spending Daddy’s money. My grandfather said to me, “We wanted you to hear this,” and I think I remember it happening this way; there was another in the room, not just my father and my grandfather but my father’s second wife.
    We were told—my grandfather told us, speaking to me, “Your father is tired; he needs a rest.”
    I saw my father’s head fall forward—monk’s bald spot, mad curls. Broad, broad-hearted, rufous chest, a squalling red—my father was alive and in the world and feeling everything extremely.
    Did she move to touch him, the blur behind, whoever else was in the room—because I didn’t. In the face of that face then lifted to me, I smiled to hear him name a place, which when I heard it, I might even have been there, or else my memory is so profligate and willfully confused, but I think I always knew this place where my father was going. In a long car that gentled over the grated threshold, my grandfather took him, and sometimes, me, past swells of lawn and more lawn, wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees. Odd men they were I saw standing in the spiny leaves, pinching winterberries; bent-over figures in discourse with the air. How could my father sleep here? I wanted to know, but the second wife was in the car, too, saying it was hard to be surprised this way, come upon by family.
    “Visitors is what we are. We won’t stay long,” my grandfather said, and we had made it through the lunch when we saw the other slinkers in the damp strawed beds, heard them call, “Professor!” bow and smirk; and I thought he seemed pleased, my father, until he turned to ask, “Why this?”
    “Why what?” my grandfather asked. “Tell me what. What are you asking? What is it you want? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you are doing?”
    My grandfather said, “You have no idea,” but my father kept behind, speaking rapidly, voice soft, my father asking why when the windows whirred up, and he was left turning in the turnaround to see us go. A man in a short robe, left unsashed, how did it feel tohim, I wondered, the worried, furrowed inside seam of his short robe’s pocket?
    In the coats he left behind, I had gritted my nails on the inside seams of Father’s pockets, gritted and sucked them clean.
    I did not see him then for a time that passed in the way of winter, colorless and stubbled and flat. The days clicked past same as hangered linens from my grandfather’s laundress, underwear cupped in puffs next to slips—my own, only my own, nothing of my father’s the way it had been when we shared in the last house a dresser, a closet, a bathroom down the hall.
    My father’s knocking, I thought I heard it, and I remembered.
    “What,” Grandfather said, “you must remember what.”
    “See here,” my grandfather said to the company—not her, but men like my grandfather with vacation faces, smooth and oiled and brown. Same suits, thin cuffs, glint of heavy watches when they signed. Here and here and here—so many papers.
    “What am I a party to?” she asked when she arrived, knife-pleated skirt and filmy blouse, spectacles for reading, a pair for seeing out.
    “This,” my grandfather said, as surely as he cleared his throat or pulled at his eccentric too-big clothing;and the second wife came to where we stood hooding our eyes from the dazzle at the window. Water from such a height was a dizzying coin—that, and the hard shore, the palings of trees, and closer to the house, at our feet from the window, the raw paving of my grandfather’s terrace, a stony estate designed to withstand winters that cracked the very roads—to whom now would all of this be given?
    I didn’t quite ask, really. I hoped to be polite. “How much do you have, Grandfather? For how long has this been yours?”
    My