Spencer stared at Babson for a second to let it sink in. Then he resumed eating his square of spice cake. “Hmph,” he said with his mouth full. “Wowf.”
Babson ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know why I brought all this up,” he said. “I think I was just trying to make a point, you know. That nothing ever goes perfect in life. Not even a picnic.”
Spencer finished his cake. He saw the cat as calico in his mind. He didn’t know why, but he felt certain it was a calico. He thought he might ask Babson what the cat looked like, but then he moved past him in a friendly way and said: “Well. Back to work.”
By the time he reached his desk, Spencer had made up his mind to go on a picnic. He’d go Saturday, first thing. March wasn’t quite picnicking season, but he had his mind set on it. His hope was that he would come across something like Babson had come across. Something that required either saving or slaying. Something that needed mercy. Spencer considered the various ways this could happen: a dog in a well, a duck wrapped in some discarded fishing line, a deer with its legs caught in an old cattle gate. Any of those would suffice.
Saturday was cold and royal blue. Spencer woke and dressed in a new pair of jeans and a new gray sweatshirt and a new jacket that featured a little icon of a basketball player dunking. Spencer had never been a basketball fan, but the jacket was something he could buy now that he didn’t live with people who would ask him why he’d bought it. He made a cup of instant coffee and while he drank it, he watched the grocery bags in the fence flap in the breeze. Then he went to the nice grocery, the gourmet one that sold baskets and macaroons and French cheese and he bought a basket and macaroons and French cheese. He also bought wine. And a corkscrew. When all that was done, he drove thirty miles out of town until he came to a large swath of land that was maybe part of someone’s farm, maybe government land.
Spencer left his car on the gravel shoulder. He climbed over the guardrail and over a fence and he walked until he came to a meadow of dry winter grass tucked between two long stands of walnut and cedar. He spread out his basketball jacket and sat on it. He broke off some of the cheese. He ate a few macaroons. He opened the wine and drank straight from the bottle. He tried to figure out a way to balance the bottle without it tipping over, but it was too precarious, so he had no choice but to drink it all. After a while, he lay back and closed his eyes. It was cold, but he tried to imagine what kind of animal he might come across in a plain place like this. Maybe a coyote or a dairy cow. Maybe a hawk dragging a broken wing. Spencer went in and out of sleep. He felt he was attached to a balloon. He felt he was lodged in a deep crack in the earth. He felt he could not remember his name. Then something came into view. It was the toile camelback couch from the two-story. There in the cold field in his half sleep, he saw what the people printed on it were doing. It was a story. Of a family. Of a woman with apples in her lifted apron. Of two children, a girl tying ribbons in a pony’s mane, a boy sailing a boat with some sort of stick. There was also a man, leaning against a towering elm and playing a flute. It was the sort of world where a father might go out into the world, smiling and properly dressed, and buy his children something. A ball, a kite, or better yet, a cat. It was the sort of sunlit universe where there was little to do. Where the wind never rose above a breeze. Where a husband might show up on his old doorstep and press the doorbell and present his family with a kitten. It was a world where nothing had to be explained. Gifts could just be presented and the presenter could stay or leave. There were no obligations.
At this, Spencer woke fully. He sat up and looked around. The sky was no longer blue but white. He gathered the empty bottle and the cork and corkscrew, the tin of macaroons, what was left of the cheese. He put the things back in the basket. He stood and put on his jacket. Then he walked out of the field and up to a small hill. In one direction, he could see his car, in the other he could see where he had just been. He closed his eyes and saw himself buying the cat. He saw himself ringing the doorbell. He saw himself handing the cat to Melody and Levi. He saw their joy and Cassandra’s sorrow. Then he saw himself leaving. He saw himself leave again and again, over and over. Going from his old house to his new couch until it, too, was completely worn out.
LONELYHEARTS
LENORA’S FIRST HEART arrived in a box of Rice Krispies. It fell into her cereal bowl with a damp thud, and for a brief moment she mistook it for a hunk of roast beef. It was crimson in spots and silver in others—as if it had touched a hot skillet—but when Lenora, startled, splashed it with some 2%, the heart turned an all-over vivid fuchsia and fully came to life.
It twitched off a few grains of puffed rice and sputtered for a time, its veins and arteries unfurling like bean sprouts. When it finally found its bossa nova, it thumped the cereal bowl clear across the table and onto the floor, where the bowl shattered. The heart escaped, dancing out of the kitchen and into the hall, where Lenora trapped it with an overturned spaghetti strainer, the way she might secure a loose hamster.
Lenora bathed the heart in the kitchen sink. She washed the cereal from it with care, as well as some dust and lint and two fragments of cereal bowl. When she was done, Lenora set the heart on a potholder and stared. Its beat was now serene, and Lenora, single and childless, felt a rush of self-satisfaction she had always assumed was reserved for the married or maternal. She retrieved her old fishbowl and filled it with tap water and three iron tablets. She added six drops of red food coloring. She placed the heart in the bowl and the bowl on her bedside table. By bedtime, its beat had synced with hers. It was better than a pet. Maybe even better than a baby or husband.
Lenora’s second and third hearts arrived as a pair on her front stoop, in a Styrofoam box packed with dry ice and marked as fresh seafood. These two hearts were smaller and pinker, and not content in glass bowls. They only kept beating when Lenora let them perch on her shoulder like lovebirds, so she let the hearts have their way. When Lenora had to leave the house, she put the hearts into the refrigerator, where the cold, at first, sent them into a temporary hibernation, and she was able to go to the bank, the dentist, the grocery. But after a while, this tactic lost its effectiveness, and the two tiny hearts, furious when abandoned, wreaked havoc inside the fridge, smashing the butter flat and spilling soy sauce and ketchup. Eventually, Lenora let the two hearts perch on her shoulder all day. She went out less. She worked from home. She let a tooth nag her for longer than a tooth should nag someone. Lenora became a hermit, but she also became necessary.
The next ten hearts came into Lenora’s life in quick succession. In her mailbox, a giant brown heart. In her backyard, a violet one under a fern. On the hood of her rarely used car, a dried-out specimen that required an hour of compressions. Bewildered by her new charges, Lenora took to wearing sunglasses. She wore a floppy brimmed hat and tried to never look down. She thought that this approach might keep her from seeing hearts, but the hearts found her anyway. They followed her home on brisk walks around the block. They appeared in her bed when she pulled back the sheets. Lenora could not escape the hearts. Eventually she had thirteen in total. They bounced on her shoulders, they jumped at her ankles. Save for the original heart, which was content in its bowl of metallic, pink water and never gave Lenora any trouble, the twelve other hearts demanded everything of Lenora. And Lenora gave them everything she had. Why shouldn’t she? The hearts loved her like she had never been loved.