the closed window and door and with all the appliances in the house going, for he didn’t see anyone get up to turn them off, “I swear I never wanted to leave you two, it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, in the world, the universe, whatever’s more than that, for you mean everything there is to me and leaving you is like a death that’s quick but pain filled and unforeknown and-foretold — I don’t quite know what I meant by the last part of that but it sounded right and may be — that I’ve always loved your mother from the minute I set eyes on her, second, instant, and that instant to maybe a minute after it across a room filled with partygoers, chatter and tobacco smoke — some day if either of you want I’ll tell you about it and exactly or as close as I can get to it and if my memory by then’s still good, how I felt and what I remember her response to me was when I finally did get up the guts to go over to her to introduce myself — it’s true she and I have had our spats and brawls but we seemed till now to have been able to talk them out, I don’t like her illness any more than you do, condition, affliction, hate it, damn it, would kick its ass in if I could, but occasionally it gets to me in other ways, that she can’t do almost anything she used to like helping with the cooking, cleaning and shopping and your homework and getting you kids to your various activities and schools and just seeing the things around the house that need picking up before someone trips over them and breaks a limb, so all the extra work I have to do, and while I’m at it all those tedious to good books with the horrible readers of them on tape she gets I also if I’m in the house have to listen to, I didn’t want to storm out of here looking and acting like such a fool, I don’t like pretending I know where I’m going now and what I’m going to do, I’m in fact trying to find out why I did what I did before by talking about it and related things here with you,” they wave only their fingers this time and turn around, Olivia putting Alex’s arm around her shoulder and holding it there and with her other hand holding her book close to her face, Eva back on Alex’s lap and kissing his visible hand, Alex and Denise laughing now and jabbering when the laughing stops, they don’t turn to the window once, he doesn’t understand it, if he were Alex he’d look and see what he’s doing out there and then tell her and then for them both to smile and wave to him that it’s all all right and to come back in, he wishes he knew what they were talking so actively about, vigorously, spiritedly, he’s glad his brother’s back, nobody can hear him but if he said that aloud and someone could hear him he’d want that person to know he’s happy as can be to see his brother after thirty years, happy he’s alive, looking well, intelligent, everything intact, glad he’s able to make Denise laugh, glad she’s laughing, that his kids love their uncle, glad everyone there’s happy and having such a good time, though wishes things could be switched around a bit to a lot — brother back, that unchanged, healthy, intact, etcetera, Denise laughing, smiling, animated, both animated but he seated between them holding their hidden hands and Eva on his lap and Olivia on the other side of Alex or Denise with her arm stretched behind whomever she’s sitting beside so her hand’s on his shoulder or neck, patting it, habit she got from him when he used to pick her up to comfort her before she could even walk or when he’d walk her to sleep, or just resting on or stroking it, goes to the dogwood tree in the front yard, only tree there, centered in the small lawn, doesn’t know why he went to it or what he’s going to do there, stare at it? walk past it and then where? snap a branch off and toss it over or into his hedge and then what? all the streetlights on the street and the cross one go on at once though the sun’s still almost straight up and bright, never liked the tree even when it blossomed pink or gave on a hot day enough shade to sit beneath, which he never did, always preferred sitting in the rocker on the covered porch and close enough to the railing to put his feet up, little table by the chair to put down his newspaper or book and drink, its branches are sharp and have scratched his arms when he’s tried to mow close to it and the top of his head once when he bent down under the low branches to get the mower right up to the trunk, is that it with all dogwoods or just pink-blossoming ones or just his: low branches and sharpness? all or most of the house alarms in the neighborhood go off, four or five of them, loud almost simultaneous hum starts up from what seems like all the air conditioners in the neighborhood, though it can’t be fifty degrees out, fifty-five, he wasn’t serious before about her smile and what it could do concerning electricity and giving off energy and moving solar systems and stuff, it was what literary people, even people with just literary pretensions, and of course some nonliterary people who happen to know the word, like to call, well, like to call, exaggeration for want of the fancier literary word he can’t come up with now but which sounds Greek and has some part that sounds like bell or ball in it but always slips his mind when he wants to use it, bill, bull, boll, but he’ll see: usually two days at the most, three, after he can’t recall it he comes across it in a newspaper article or magazine when he hasn’t seen it in one for months, sees an ant crawling up the tree trunk and immediately drops to his knees under the branches, resights the ant and squashes it with his thumb, then thinks why’d he do that? it wasn’t in the house or heading for it and even if it were heading to it, it was just one, he probably wanted to take something out on something, let off steam, thinks of slapping his hand against the trunk for the same reason, beating it, then maybe both hands and then maybe his head, to take it in his hands, which would have to hurt by then, and slam it against the trunk till he gets too dizzy or tired to or collapses or his head splits open, but that would make no sense either unless he wanted Alex or Denise to come out to help his head, which he doesn’t think he does, and though a gash wouldn’t bother him much or the blood — his head got knocked around plenty when he was a kid, though never self-inflicted, with scars dotted along the sides and his continuing baldness revealing a few forgotten creases on top — he wouldn’t stick himself with the pain that goes with those slams, flicks the ant off his thumb, sees several more crawling up the trunk, “You you-yous,” holding his fist over them, crawls out from under the tree and goes into the house, doesn’t know why, maybe to sit between Alex and Denise, put Eva on his lap, Olivia’s hand on his shoulder or back and even patting it for her in case she doesn’t, for one thing to finally find out where he’s been for thirty years and how’d he get here, for another — well, lots of anothers but one’s just to apologize to them all for his behavior before — nobody’s there, shuts off all the appliances and lights, looks out the living room window to the lane of grass between his house and the shrubs that belong to the next, out the kitchen door to the backyard and swing set, shouts for them and then goes upstairs, shuts off Denise’s typewriter and all the appliances and lights, she could be showing Alex his studio and the guest bed in the basement, even making up the bed for him if he’s bushed, for he might have come a long way in a few days, not had much sleep — runs the two flights downstairs, front door knocks, shuts off all the appliances and lights there and the sump pump which continued pumping when there was no water left to dump, upstairs, front door ding-dongs and knocks though doesn’t remember shutting it, looks through the small door window to see if it’s Alex or Denise — window’s too high to see if it’s the kids if they’re standing close to the door — a woman, shuts the porch light, opens the door, strangely familiar, not strangely but queerly, familiarly, family, it’s — she’s — he’s sure what his sister would look like if she’d lived another twenty-four — five — four years, “Hello,” she says, “How do you do, but I’m sorry, if this is for my wife, for she doesn’t seem to be here though she was a few minutes ago,” “No, I’m not here for her but would love meeting her and the children eventually,” “Then if it’s for anything like some organization or charity — a donation, something to sign, a petition, and then a donation for the costs of printing and distributing the petition and keeping the organization going — we don’t do that here — it’s my, not my wife’s, repudiation or reaction against or whatever you want to call it of all door-to-door solicitations and canvassings, no matter how — not ‘important,’ not ‘good’ in the sense of the right thing, moral, virtuous, not ‘upright,’ not ‘upstanding,’ but a certain word I’m looking for—,” “‘Well-intentioned, well-meaning, high-principled’?” “That’s right — any of those, but we don’t, much as we might approve of what you’re pushing — supporting — canvassing for and want us to join, give to, support or sign, anyway, along those lines, and you should see me — hear me — when I get them over the phone — I’m rapidly — rabidly — against the private home phone being used for solicitations and ads of any kind and the recorded ones — you know, or maybe you don’t, but the ‘Hi, I’m Chuck Computer and are you sure you have enough cemetery plots?’—the worst, though I wouldn’t go so far as to start or give to or canvass for a campaign against them,” same long straight dark hair combed the same way though now streaked a bit gray, hollow cheeks like hers the last few years but more like a model’s high cheekbones so less out of illness—“Vera? — I mean, it can’t be but who else could it but it can’t, so excuse me,” “Howard,” she says, “even if I knew this was your home, for a while I was undecided it was you,” “But it’s impossible, I take back what I said, or if