“And Anita?” Kitty said. “What was that?”
“A mistake. I made some mistakes. Can’t a man make a mistake now and then?”
“I heard you’re working at a box factory. Another mistake?”
“It’s just temporary. It’s what the employment agency had. It’s just until I get back on my feet and we get all of this straightened out.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Kitty said, whacking silverware into a box. “We—we aren’t straightening anything out. We aren’t a we anymore. I’m moving Wednesday, and once I get out of this place and the lawyers finish up, we aren’t going to see each other again. Not if I can help it.”
Henry backed away from her, wondering when she’d gotten so mean. “I’ll just go get what I need,” he said.
“You do that.” Kitty tore open another cabinet and began stacking dishes furiously. Henry tried to imagine her in one of the apartments at Twin Oaks: shoddy construction, low ceilings, flimsy stairs and walls. The closets were shallow and all the windows jammed. He knew the man who had built that complex: Dominic, who had skimped on every phase of the construction. Kitty’s belongings—our belongings, he thought with a pang of loss — would be hopelessly out of place.
In the living room Lise was listening absently to Brendan. “I’m fine,” Brendan told her. “Fine, never been better.” Lise glared at Henry as he passed her and fled up the stairs. More boxes, more disarray. His shirt felt heavy on his shoulders and he started to sweat. Without thinking, hardly seeing, he pawed through the closet he had once shared with Kitty. Blankets — fine, he thought. Two. A short-sleeved shirt and his long-billed Red Wings cap. Sneakers — I thought I had those. I thought they were at the apartment. The briefcase Da had given him when he’d left Coreopsis, with the sheaf of yellowed newspaper clippings and papers inside; the framed picture of his parents at the Farewell Ball, where, his mother swore, he had been conceived — don’t look at that; a stack of ties the girls had given him, which he had never worn but always saved. He crammed these things into an empty box he found lying near the bed. He hadn’t taken much when Kitty had thrown him out — it hadn’t seemed necessary, he’d thought he had plenty of time. But now he was seized by the fear that Kitty might get rid of everything.
When he came downstairs, Brendan said, “Things you need?” Kitty came into the living room and said, “Good. Get that junk out of here.”
“We ought to go,” Henry said to his uncle, who nodded. Lise wheeled Brendan out the door and then stood by him near the van, saying something that Henry couldn’t hear from the living room. He touched Kitty’s elbow, the elbow of this woman who had once been his wife.
“I’ll call you Monday,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“Don’t bother. We don’t.”
Henry cleared his throat. “Listen. I know this is a little strange — but do you have any cash you could spare?” He had to ask, although it tore at his stomach; he and Brendan had fifty bucks between them. “I get paid next week, I’ll pay you right back ….”
Kitty laughed at him. She called Lise to her and eased Henry out the door; as he passed Lise, she looked over his shoulder as if he were nothing to her. He thought of the time he’d lost her at Midtown Plaza, when she’d been three or four and small enough to blend into the forest of knees and thighs. He still didn’t know how it had happened. He had taken his eyes from her for just a minute, just long enough to examine the posters filling the travel agent’s window with palm trees and blue water and stretches of white sand, and when he looked back for her she was gone. The plaza was packed that week before Christmas, a sea of dark coats and scarves and jumbled legs and lines of children waiting to sit in Santa’s lap and ride the mechanical reindeer. Lise hadn’t made her way to the other children or the tree hung with gifts or the tired men costumed as elves. She wasn’t at the candy counter or the ice cream stand. He had climbed up on the concrete planter ringing one of the potted trees and looked down on the crowd, but still he hadn’t been able to see her. For the next half hour he’d run around in a fog of panic and guilt.
She turned up in the arms of a security guard at the information desk, and when she caught sight of him she burst into angry tears. “You left!” she shrieked. And while he knew he hadn’t, that he had stood unmoving in front of the window while she trotted away, her accusation had stung him. He’d forgotten her for a minute and it came to the same thing.
Kitty closed the door behind Lise, shutting out Henry and Brendan and also Bongo, who had slipped out behind Brendan’s wheelchair and was chasing a squirrel around the yard. Henry walked slowly toward the van, carrying his box of useless objects. When he opened the van door, Bongo leapt inside before Henry could finish raising Brendan’s chair. Henry looked at his dog, flop-legged and pink-tongued and uncomplaining and eager, and he said, “Fine. You want to come, you come.”
“Henry,” Brendan said from his perch behind the driver’s seat. “This maybe isn’t a great idea.”
Henry closed his door and started the engine. “He’s my dog,” he said, and the three of them drove off.
9
ANYTHING WE CAN CONCEIVE OF DOING, WE CAN DO, WILOMA READ. In our dreams we can do anything, and the same is true of our waking lives.
Wiloma was sitting at her kitchen table eating cottage cheese, although she would have preferred a tuna sandwich. She’d eaten tuna for several years after she stopped eating meat, but then she’d read about the dolphins; now she ate bland white curds doused with tamari and sprinkled with sunflower seeds. In between bites she tested her new filling with her tongue and felt guilty about her visit to her dentist.
Her tooth felt smooth and whole again. She knew that if she’d been able to visualize it strong and healthy it would have healed itself, but each time she’d closed her eyes and called up a picture of it she’d seen it cratered and crumbling, the dark interior leading to a ribbon of pain. She had failed; she could admit that. She found it harder to admit that she had looked forward to seeing her dentist and enjoyed her visit to him.
Her dentist had a warm, burred voice and a lovely neck. The chair in which she lay tilted so far back that her head was under his chin, and when she looked up, she saw the beard beneath his white mask and his shaved neck and the soft skin behind his ears. His hands were gentle and strong, and the way he cradled her head with them made her wonder how he’d hold the rest of her. While she lay there, her mouth stretched open and filled with a rubber dam and a drain and thin metal bands, she took her mind off the pain by staring at his eyes and his skin. She told herself that the fantasies she wove in that chair were not so terrible — she hadn’t made love to anyone since Waldo had left her, and it was natural, normal, that she should be attracted to this man. What was not so normal — what went, really, against the grain of everything she believed — was that her teeth acted up more these days than they ever had before, and that she couldn’t put the energy into healing them that she knew she should. And that was, she suspected, because she didn’t really want them healed; healing them would mean missing those gentle hands.