Together Dot and Sabine cleaned up the kitchen, washed and dried the dishes and wiped the bacon grease off the stove, wiped up every amber bead of syrup that had been dripped off plates. When the hot-water heater had warmed itself up again, Dot went to take her bath while Sabine brought her work back to the now clean kitchen table and began to cut out the supporting beams for Phan's house. She found the task immensely soothing, the order she had to follow, the lining up of glue and razor blades and straight edge. In the monotonous details of the task she was able for a moment not to think about anything. She did not think about missing Parsifal, nor did she wonder about Kitty. She did not think about what it would be like to leave or stay. She cut and measured. She wrote long lists of numbers on the back of an old envelope and worked the math out in her head. Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.
"You look like you're set for the day," Dot said.
Sabine looked up from her work. "Are you leaving already?"
"I've got to pick up some things for Bertie. I feel like with all the other stuff that's been going on the wedding is getting short shrift. They should have gotten married six years ago. It feels a little anticlimactic now. I keep forgetting it's on Saturday."
"It took me twenty-two years to get down the aisle, and Haas likes girls, so don't complain. By the way, why did Bertie wait all this time just to get married in the dead of winter?"
"She's turning thirty. They were going to get married next summer, and then all of a sudden she decided she wanted to get married before she turned thirty."
"Good a reason as any." Sabine arranged a line of toothpicks.
"Are you going to be sitting right there when I come home?"
"Probably."
"Well, at least put some slippers on." She waved to Sabine and blew her a kiss.
As soon as she had closed the door Sabine understood what Dot wanted, just to have the house be quiet for a while, to have a couple of hours alone. She understood because the quiet was wonderful.
Sabine did not get up. She did not take a shower. She stayed in Phan's pajamas, in Parsifal's robe, and worked through the morning and afternoon in a state of transcendent concentration. Her hands pursued their delicate, complicated mission. She went over every detail of the house in her mind: the shape of the planters on either side of the front door, the curve of the driveway, the size of the swimming pool in relation to the house (Sabine made beautiful swimming pools, cut them to their proper depth on a plywood base, painted the inside blue, and covered the top in a rippling cellophane. Maybe she would make a yellow raft.) Every time Kitty's face floated towards her she shook her head and refocused her attention on a task. She liked to skip around in the way they had told her never to do in architecture school. She would connect two outer walls, stop to sand the base, gesso some cardboard, work on the garden. She cut out pansies the size of baby aspirin from a sheet of white notebook paper, cut slits in two matching shapes, and then slid them together using tweezers. Then she ran a violet streak across their faces with a toothpick. She had made an entire saucer full of pansies when she heard the high whining brakes of the mail truck. She put down the tweezers and flexed her fingers open and closed. Getting the mail was one of the tasks that Sabine had come to think of as hers, like shoveling snow and washing dishes. She hurried to get dressed, suddenly anxious to be outside for the sixty-second round-trip that mail retrieval required. She stepped into a pair of boots by the door (there seemed to be no sense of ownership about boots when it came to short trips) and went out the back door rather than the front, just to make her walk a few feet longer. Sabine barely noticed the freezing cold, the blue sky, or the howling wind. She was getting used to them.
She was thinking about the placement of the windows in the front hallway of the house on Oriole, trying to remember the number of panes in each window. She had walked all the way down the driveway and reached into the mailbox before she noticed the man across the street leaning on the front bumper of a parked Chevy Cavalier. The sun directly above their heads made Sabine squint. No one simply stood outside in Nebraska in February.
"Howard?" Sabine shaded her eyes with her hand.
He gave a curt nod of agreement but didn't say anything, as if he were waiting for someone else and didn't want to be disturbed.
"Are you all right?" Sabine said from across the street.
"Oh, hell, I'm fine. My wife left me and took my kids. How are you?"
"Do you want to come inside, have some coffee?" Sabine said, turning slightly towards Dot's house to show which way she meant to go. "It's awfully cold out here."
"I don't mind the cold."
"Well, that makes one of us." Sabine stuck the mail under her arm to put her hands in her pockets. "What are you doing out here?"
"Waiting for you."
"Waiting for me?" Sabine said. "Why didn't you come to the door?"
"You all made it real clear about how you felt about me coming around. You don't want me anywhere near you."
"I never said-"
"I'll talk to you where I want to." He stayed on the other side of the street, his long, thin legs angled down like a loading ramp.
"Okay," Sabine said. "Talk to me."
But her asking only seemed to make him wait. He looked down the street, his eyes fixed so hard on something that Sabine looked in that direction to try and see what it was. There was nothing down there. It was only more of the same. "She sure does talk a lot about you," Howard Plate said, looking off. "Used to be she talked about that brother of hers all the time, but once you came into town she fixed on you."
Sabine shivered. She hadn't planned to spend this much time outside. She had only dressed to survive the cold for a minute. She had left her hat and gloves inside. She had left her coat. "It's a big surprise, finding family you didn't know you had. It's been a surprise for me."
"You think we're family?"
"Dot was my husband's mother. Kitty and Bertie were his sisters. I think that makes us family of a sort. I certainly care for them a great deal."
"That explains why you came to see them so often."
Sabine took her hands from her pockets and rubbed them quickly along the outsides of her arms. It didn't take long for your skin to turn brittle, to feel the hard bite of the wind. "Howard, I'm freezing. I'm going inside." Where were all the neighbors? Where were the cars driving by in the middle of the day? Why was everything so quiet?
"I still haven't told you why I came to see you."
"Okay." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying not to hop. "Why?"
"I want you to stay away from my wife and I want you to stay away from my sons. Things were fine when you were out in California." He said the word with particular hatred. "I want things to be fine again."
"Listen, this is Alliance," she said quickly, hoping to wrap this encounter up. "I don't know where I'm supposed to go to avoid seeing Kitty and the boys, especially now that they're staying here. Besides, I hardly think you can blame this breakup on me. Things were going great before I came to town and now they've all gone to hell?" I kissed your wife, she wanted to say to him. The words came up in her throat with a powerful urgency, and it was all she could do to push them down. I kissed your wife.
"Things might not have been great, but we were all living in the same house."
"Sometimes," Sabine said.
"Most of the time. Don't you tell me what goes on in my family. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about."
"For what it's worth, I'm not the problem."
"It's worth nothing," Howard Plate said. He detached himself from the car and stood up. The street seemed remarkably small. With all the snow banked along the edges it would have been difficult for two cars to pass one another.