not want to feel like a bad person.
Fatuma walks for three hours to get firewood. She always goes with other women, but they know they are not safe. Safe is not a word spoken here .
And then for Helen, with the heat banging down on her, sunlight shrieking across the bright blue pool, there was a sudden and unexpected feeling of vast indifference. This loss—for it was a loss not to care about the warmth, the bougainvillea, to have this morning dissolve into merely waiting for Jim to return from golf—the loss was enough to feel, in another moment, something close to anguish, and then it rocked back into place: indifference. But it had done damage; Helen shifted on her chair, crossed her ankles—for in that moment of almost anguish her own children seemed lost to her; some brief spasm of her mind caused her to envision herself in a nursing home, her grown children visiting with crisp solicitude while she said, “It all goes so fast”—meaning life, of course—and seeing the look of sympathy on their faces as they waited for enough time to pass so they could leave, their own urgent lives pulling them. They won’t want to be with me, Helen thought, as this very-real-feeling-moment knocked around in her head. Never had she thought this before.
She watched the fronds of a palm tree swirl gently.
Just a silly wives’ tale, women in her book group had told Helen when she fretted about her son—her last child—heading off to college in Arizona. Empty nest is freedom, they told her. Empty nest invigorates women. It’s the men who start to crack up. Men in their fifties have a hard time.
Helen closed her eyes against the sun and saw her children splashing in the play pool in their yard in West Hartford, the moist skin of their little limbs pure as they crawled in and out; saw them as teenagers moving down the sidewalk in Park Slope with their friends; felt them curled up next to her on the couch on the nights when the family gathered to watch their favorite TV shows.
She opened her eyes. “Dorothy.”
Dorothy turned her face toward Helen, the black sunglasses aimed at her.
“I miss my kids,” Helen said.
Dorothy turned back to her magazine and said, “You’re not singing to the choir, I’m afraid.”
4
The dog was waiting at the door, wagging her tail anxiously, a German shepherd with white on her chin. “Hey, pooch.” Bob rubbed the dog’s head, and stepped into the house. The house was very cold. Zach, who had said nothing on the ride home from jail, went immediately up the stairs. “Zach,” called Bob. “Come talk to your uncle.”
“Leave him alone,” Susan called back, following her son. A few minutes later she came down the stairs wearing a sweater with reindeer across the front. “He’s not eating. They put him in a cell, and he’s half dead with fear.”
Bob said, “Let me talk to him.” He added, more quietly, “I thought you wanted me to talk to him.”
“Later. Just leave him. He doesn’t like to talk. He’s been through a lot.” Susan opened the kitchen door and the dog came in, looking guilty. Susan poured dry dog food into a tin pan, then went into the living room and sat on the couch. Bob followed her. Susan pulled out a bag of knitting.
So there they were.
Bob had no idea what to do. Jim would know what to do. Jim had children, Bob did not. Jim took charge, Bob did not. He sat with his coat on and looked around. Dog hair was scattered along the mopboards.
“You have anything to drink, Susan?”
“Moxie.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
So they were at war, as they had always been. He was captive in his coat, freezing cold, and with nothing to drink. She knew it, and kept him that way. Susan never drank, as their mother had not. Susan probably thought that Bob was an alcoholic, and Bob thought he was almost, but not quite, an alcoholic, and he thought there was a big difference between the two.
She asked if he wanted food. She said she thought she had a
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