Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt Page A

grandfather said for as long as he remembered. He was born in the bedroom where he once slept with a wife. He said, “I have always been comfortable.”
    I wanted to be comfortable.
    In the sunroom with the easy men in pearly colors, I spoke freely of my father and of what I had seen with and without wives, waking to my father in his sleepless disarray, a man in tears, kissing my foot and saying I had saved him—my father always threatening death—rolled playbill in his pocket, at my face his sugared breath: We should, we should.
    “Yes,” she said. “I have seen him with her in this way and been afraid.” His temper, for one, as when the milk had boiled over—scalded; and of course, he wouldn’t drink it, but argued through the rising light before he took his sleep. “Insomniacs,” she said, “are true accountants; they are smug about the time they keep. But he sold the family silver,” she said.
    “He is not rich,” my grandfather said.
    I did not tell them what my father had bought me, but I wore the earrings and the small, slight clothes hehad said I would grow into—and I had. Even as my grandfather spoke, I was lifting off elastic from where it pinched me.
    Breasts, my own.
    Breasts, hands, long, thin feet and water-thinned soles—mine—walking the cold stones of my grandfather’s terrace, the cold knocking me just behind the knees every time; but not so with her, the second wife in broken shoes, a generous sweater; she was warm.
    She asked, “Did you ever think I heard you? Did you wonder if I knew?”
    I had wondered if there was other breathing in the room, a greater dark near the doorway rimmed in downstairs light, and which wife standing, the second, third, or first—in this way alike, watching or sometimes driving for him when Daddy said he could not concentrate to drive—made sick by just the entrance at Grandfather’s gate.
    “Was it for money that we came here?” I asked—all those Sunday dinners with the slavering roast sliced bloody on the tines of the carving tools. Grandfather’s rare meat and garden vegetables, not the lunch we had on visits to my father’s last new place, but Sunday dinner and the long white afternoon in a room where we sat reading until supper.
    Quiet, the gaping stairways still and cold, cold air hissing through the sills—the rooms I looked into were dark and cold except for where my grandfather was reading Sunday’s papers after the visit to my father; or it might have been after the visit from the pearly men—or any Sunday, really. It might have been that we were alone, long years alone, my grandfather andI, the wives fled and the cook’s night off, so what were we to do but what we did? We took the afternoon’s roast, and it seems to me this happened: My grandfather gave me a knife and fork and said, “Take what you want,” and we cut into the bleedy meat and picked at it standing, not bothering with plates, with no one there to scold for what we did, pouring salt into a spoon of juice and drinking from a meat so raw it still said Ouch! at a prick from the tines of my grandfather’s enormous bone-handled fork.
    My nails were grimed with cinder, my lips a smear of grease.
    Complicitous season, winter, the day blacked as sudden as did the hallway from my room to his, and we often did not make a visit to my father. We often stayed at home, saying we would only have to turn around again, and so we did not visit—or phone, as my father complained to me, brushing his lips against the mouthpiece of the phone, voice over ocean on the holidays’ connections, sometimes cut off.
    The way my father talked! Tremulous show-off, he was, all fustian to-do when in the last new place we saw him with his friends, the same we always caught peeking in on us together. “Still here!” my father said, as if another place were possible. “Come in, please, come in.” We were introduced again, but I remember no one’s name. Even the faces are gone. We had come to see