But Kitty just closed her eyes and in the next moment covered her face with her hands and started to cry.
"Hey," Sabine said. She put her arm around Kitty and felt slightly warmer. "Stop that."
"I'm sorry," Kitty said.
"Why in the world are you telling me that you're sorry?" As close as she was, Sabine had to raise her voice slightly, as the wind seemed to carry the words directly from her throat and down the block.
"Sometimes I feel like you're Guy," Kitty said from deep inside her gloves. "All these years all I've wanted is for him to come back, to talk to me, and now that you're here everything is going to hell. You're going to go and that's going to be it. You're going to think, Thank God I got out of there. I won't see you anymore." The tears on Kitty's face froze onto her gloves and left glittering paths on her cheeks. A thin sheet of ice formed in the dip of her upper Up.
Every time Kitty had come into the room, Sabine had thought of Parsifal, the way he walked, his lovely face. "Of course you'll see me," Sabine said. "You have to forget about that. There are too many other things to worry about here."
"Don't worry about Howard," Kitty said, and sniffed. "I know he went to work."
The thought that Howard Plate might be inside had never even occurred to Sabine. She was talking about worry in a larger sense, worry down the line as opposed to the more immediate worry of an angry husband hiding in a closet. "Then open the door before we freeze to death."
Kitty looked up as if to notice the weather, tilted the broad planes of her face into the wind so that her hair wrapped around her neck and slapped into her eyes. She turned the key in the lock.
There was nothing so terrible inside the house. It was a private life left lying around, because no one had thought that Sabine was coming by to see it. Breakfast dishes from exactly one breakfast sat unwashed in the sink, a handful of plates were broken onto an otherwise very clean linoleum floor. In the living room there was one pillow, one peach-colored blanket, and one very faded comforter with the shadowy image of Superman making an upward departure, crumpled onto the sofa. The cushions from the back of the sofa were scattered on the floor. Everywhere they went there were clear signs of boys, tennis shoes, hockey sticks, assorted textbooks that one could easily imagine should have been taken to school.
Sabine pressed her hands against her ears, hoping that the blood would return. "It looks like a house," she said. "Like anybody's house. I promise I won't break off all contact because of it."
Kitty rubbed her cheeks, knocking the ice away. "What I mean is, I don't want you to think of me like this. I'm not always like this." Kitty collected two startlingly large tennis shoes from opposite sides of the kitchen and set them next to one another by the back door. She crouched down beside them and for no reason evened up the laces. "Or I am always like this and I don't want to be. Or I'd like you to think I'm not always like this. Hell."
"You have it all wrong," Sabine said. "I'm the one who worries. 'Who is this crazy women who married my gay brother before he died? How did she wind up in Nebraska when we'd never even heard of her?' If anybody's suspect here it has to be me. I'm not always like this, either, you know. I used to be a lot happier than this." She started to pick up the pieces of plate on the floor.
"Leave those," Kitty said. "Howard threw those."
Sabine looked in her cupped hands, heavy everyday china broken into chunks, the chunks covered with flowers and raspberries. She set them back down on the floor in a neat pile.
"So what were you like when you were happier?" Kitty said.
Sabine thought about the days before Phan was sick or before they even knew Phan. "I don't know how to say it. It had something to do with being younger."
Kitty apologized at the doorway of every room they went into-unmade beds, socks and underwear thrown on top of the clothes hamper, towels rolled into damp balls next to pillows. "Dear God," Kitty said, picking up handfuls of clothes off the floor of Guy's room. "Couldn't you just wait in the kitchen for an hour or so?"
"I've seen it now. I've been initiated."
Kitty shook her head, left the room, and returned with a box of lawn-and-leaf bags. "I'm just going to make a pile and you shovel it in. We can wash it when we get back to my mother's house." Kitty started throwing things in the direction of the single bed. Above the bed was a large black poster of the word PHISH, whose green letters formed into the shape of a fish. Sabine thought it must be some kind of inside joke she could not possibly understand.
Kitty bent over and started digging around on the floor. "When you're young and you want to have a baby because babies are so cute and everybody else has one, nobody ever takes you aside and explains to you what happens when they grow up. Maybe they all think it's obvious. I mean, if you know enough about biology to know where babies come from, then you should know that sooner or later they turn into teenagers, but somehow you just don't ever think about it, then one day, bang, you've got these total strangers living with you, these children in adult bodies, and you don't know who they are. It's like they somehow ate up those children you had and you loved, and you keep loving these people because you know they've got your child locked up in there somewhere." She stopped with two pairs of jeans in one hand and a windbreaker in the other and looked at the wreckage that she couldn't seem to make a dent in. "You love them so much and yet you keep wondering when they're going to leave."
Poor Dot, Sabine thought. She'd had five whole days to herself after forty-six years and even then she had a house guest. Sabine nosed the butt-end of a joint safely under Guy's bed with the toe of her boot. "I like your boys. But I'm glad they're your boys, if you know what I mean."
"Of course I know what you mean. I like them, too, but I wish they were yours."
Sabine looked into the tumble of clothes in dark green plastic. "There are no socks in this bag."
"Socks," Kitty said. "Right."
The point was never to take everything, just a cross section of the essentials, just enough to keep them from coming back to the house for a few days while everyone calmed down. This trip was for clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, things to meet immediate needs. Photographs, letters, the pretty blue glass vase shaped like an ostrich egg that had been her grandmother's, stayed exactly where they were. Kitty and Sabine each tugged a lawn-and-leaf bag out to the car and slung it into the backseat. As soon as the weight was out of their hands, they felt better, freer. For a moment it was as if they were loading up the car to go on a vacation. They would find a map in the glove compartment and head due south, not stopping until they got to Mexico. In Mexico there was no family. Sons, husbands, mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers were the sole property of the United States. In Mexico there was only warm weather, only beaches, tequila, Kitty and Sabine.
When they got back to Dot's house, Sabine made lunch out of what was left of last night's chicken while Kitty sorted the laundry by color and type of fabric into huge piles on the kitchen floor.
"Every time I stick my hand in a pocket I hold my breath," Kitty said, and slid her hand into a pair of jeans. She pulled out a folded paper napkin covered in phone numbers, held it for a moment up to the light, and then tossed it onto the counter. "Piece of cake."
"Are the boys going to be very upset about this?"
"It's a break for them, too, a couple days of peace. They don't like to move around, have their routine upset, but the fighting wears them out. They'll worry about their dad, Guy especially. He's afraid of him, but he thinks Howard is basically misunderstood. Maybe he's right."