The person who owned their house was not connected to the hospital. He was an entrepreneur named Ian who had made a bundle in the nineties on some sort of business software and who for long stretches of time lived out of state — in Ibiza, Zihuatanejo, and Portland — in order to avoid the cold. The house came furnished except, strangely, for a bed, which they bought. On their first day they found food in the refrigerator with not even mold but dust on it. “I don’t know,” said Dench. “Look at the closets. This must be what Ian was using. With hooks this strong maybe we don’t need a bed. We can just hang ourselves there at night, like bats.”
With Dench she knew, in an unspoken way, that she was the one who was supposed to get them to wherever it was they were going. She was supposed to be the GPS lady who, when you stopped for gas, said, “Get back on the highway.” She tried to be that voice with Dench: stubborn, unflappable, keeping to the map and not saying what she knew the GPS lady really wanted to say, which was not “Recalculating” but “What in fucking hell are you thinking?”
“It all may look wrong from outer space, which is where a GPS is seeing it from,” Dench would say, when proposing alternatives of any sort, large or small, “but on the ground there’s a certain logic. Stick with me on this one. You can have all the others.”
There were no sidewalks in this wooded part of town. The sap of the stick-bare trees was just stirring after what looked like a fierce fire of a winter. The roadside gullies that would soon warm and sprout joe-pye weed and pea were still just pebble-flecked mud, and KC’s dog, Cat, sniffed his way along, feeling the winter’s melt, the ground loosening its fertile odor of wakened worms. Overhead the dirt pearl sky of March hung low as a hat brim. The houses were sidled next to marshes and sycamores, and as she walked along the roads occasionally a car would pass, and she would yank on Cat’s leash to heel him close. The roads, all named after colleges out east — Dartmouth Drive, Wellesley Way, Sweet Briar Road; where was her alma mater, SUNY New Paltz Street? — were glistening with the flat glossy colors of flattened box turtles who’d made the spring crossing too slowly and were now stuck to the macadam, thin and shiny as magazine ads.
HOSPICE CARE: IT’S NEVER TOO SOON TO CALL read a billboard near the coffee shop in what constituted the neighborhood’s commercial roar. Next to it a traffic sign read PASS WITH CARE. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real. The largest part of the strip was occupied by an out-of-business bookstore whose plate-glass windows were already cloudy with dust. The D was missing from the sign so that it now read BOR ERS. In insolvency, truth: soon the chain would be shipping its entire stock to the latrines of Swaziland.
Cat was a good dog, part corgi, part Lab, and if KC wore her sunglasses into the coffee shop he could pass for a Seeing Eye dog, and she a blind person, so she didn’t have to tie him to a parking sign out front.
The coffee shop played Tom Waits and was elegantly equipped with dimpled cup sleeves, real cream, cinnamon sticks, shakers of sugar. KC got in line. “I love this song,” the man in front turned to say to her. He was holding a toddler, and was one of those new urban dads so old he looked like the kidnapper of his own child.
She didn’t know what she felt about Tom Waits anymore: his voice had gotten so industrial. “I don’t know. I just think one shouldn’t have to wear goggles and a hard hat when listening to music,” she said. It was not a bad song and she didn’t feel that strongly about it, only sorry for her own paltry tunes, but the man’s face fell, and he turned away, with his child staring gloomily at her over his shoulder.
She ordered a Venti latte, and while she was waiting, she read the top fold from the top paper in the stack below the shrink-wrapped CDs by the register. When she finished, she discreetly turned the paper over and read the bottom fold. This daily, fractured way of learning the front-page news — they had no Internet connection — she had gotten used to and even sighed about amusingly. Be resourceful! So their old newsletter had advised. This way of bringing Dench his morning coffee (she drank her half while walking back, burning her tongue a little) and getting the dog a walk was less resourceful than simply necessary. Sometimes she missed the greasy spoons of old, which she had still been able to find on the road when the band was touring and where a single waitress ran the register, the counter, all the tables, calling you “honey”—until you asked whether they had soy milk, at which point all endearments ceased.
Now she walked back via Princeton Place, a street she didn’t usually take, but one that ran parallel to her own. Taking different routes fortified the mind, the paper had said today. This street contained a sprawling white-brick house she had seen before and had been struck by — not just its elegance and size but the magical blue sea of squill that spread across its sloped and wooded lot. She had once seen two deer there, with long tails that flicked like horses’ and wagged like dogs’. And once she had seen such a deer close-up, along the road’s edge on Dartmouth. It had been hit so fast it had been decapitated, and its neck lay open like a severed cable bundle.
Cat nosed along the gullies and a little up the driveways, whose cracks were often filled with clover.
She stared at the wings of the white-brick house, which were either perfectly insulated or not heated at all, since there was still unmelted snow on the roofs. Suddenly an elderly man appeared by the mailbox. “Howdy,” he said. It startled her, and his stab at gregariousness belied his face, which bore a blasted-apart expression, like that of a balding, white-haired Jesus on the cross, eyes open wide and worried, his finely lined mouth the drawstring purse of the aged and fair.
“Just getting my newspaper,” he said. “Nice dog.”
“Hey, Catsy, get back here.” She tried to pull the leash in, but its automated spring was broken and the leash kept unspooling.
The man’s face brightened. He had started to take his paper out of its plastic sleeve but stopped. “What’s the dog’s name? Cathy?” He did not scrunch up his face disapprovingly when he failed to hear what you said, the way deaf people often did. But he did have the recognizable waxen pee smell of an old man. It was from sweat that no longer could be liquid but accumulated like scaly air on the skin.
“Uh, Cat. It’s part family name, part, um, joke.” She wasn’t going to get into all the Katherines in her family or her personal refrigerator magnet altar to Cat Power or the general sick sense of humor that had led this dog, like all pets, to be a canvas upon which one wrote one’s warped love and dubious wit.
“I get it.” He grinned eagerly. “And what’s your name?”
“KC,” she said. Let that suffice.
“Casey?”
“Yes,” she said. A life could rhyme with a life — it could be a jostling close call that one mistook for the thing itself.
“We live the next block over. We’re renting.”
“Renting! Well, that explains it.”
She didn’t dare ask what it explained. Still, his eyes had a wet dazzle — or an amused glint — and were not disapproving. Cat started to bark loudly at a rabbit but then also turned and started barking at the man, who took a theatrical step back, raised the paper over his head, and pretended to be afraid, as if he were performing for a small child. “Don’t take my crossword puzzle!”
“His bark is worse than his bite,” KC said. “Get over here, Cat.”
“I don’t know why people always say that. No bark is worse than a bite. A bite is always worse.”