“Just one of my favorites would have done.”
“Well, I have to eat, too, don’t I?”
Without waiting for him to choose, Aunt Ethel bent forward, drew half an onion bagel from the stack, and began slathering it with cream cheese and onion bits. Daniel gestured at the wall.
“Aunt Ethel, we really have to talk about you letting the buffalo herd play with the photographs.”
She lifted an old, open hardback off the table out of the way of the food and held it to her chest. The phone rang.
“Ugh,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking.”
Daniel grinned. “Okay, I’ll leave.”
She tsked and smacked his leg with the book, then studied him a while.
“Too thin,” she said.
She reoffered the bagel, and Daniel took it, though he wasn’t hungry. Almost casually, he glanced at his aunt’s hands, looking for signs of shaking. There were none.
“Seriously,” he said. “What happened to the boys?” He nodded toward the wall, most of which was blanketed with the same collage of framed snapshots of children and stepchildren and grandchildren Daniel had practically memorized during all those childhood visits, or more likely during the shivas, when there was so little to do but eat and stare at faces. But sometime in the past year, Aunt Ethel had apparently replaced the photos of herself and Aunt Zippo and the six husbands they’d buried between them.’
“They’re right there.” She began pointing down the row of new photos, each of a different shaggy, horned, decrepit-looking buffalo standing atop a grassless little hill in front of a cyclone fence. Unless it was the same buffalo.
Laughing through a mouthful of bagel, Daniel said, “I meant your boys. Joe, Mack, Har—”
“There’s Harry.” Aunt Ethel directed his gaze toward the farthest-right buffalo. “Sleepy-eyed and slow as ever. Here’s Joe. And see Mitchell, could he be any more of a cliché, do you think?”
Baffled, Daniel followed his Aunt’s finger. This buffalo had one of its legs off the ground and its head lifted, gazing not at the grassless ground but through the fence.
“Look at him,” Aunt Ethel said. “Still busy. Somewhere in that yard, some overwhelmed, mesmerized sheep dog just agreed to purchase the complete long-term care plus annuities package.”
Daniel started to laugh again, but the expression on his aunt’s face stopped him. She wore the same loving smile she’d always leveled at him. But she was looking at the photographs.
“Aunt Ethel. You’re naming your buffalo pictures?”
“The buffalo, not the pictures.” Folding the book against her chest, Aunt Ethel gave a satisfied sigh. “And we didn’t name them, what are you talking about? Did you name Lisa?”
“What?”
“How is she, by the way? Oy vay, she’s been through so much. You both have. So young.”
Laying the book on the couch and pinching his cheek, Aunt Ethel toddled out of the room with the empty orange juice jug. Daniel stared after her. It should have been funny. Just the latest of the thousand ways his aunt had found to flood her days with happier thoughts than her days seemed to merit. He wondered if she’d told Zippo. Somehow, he didn’t think Zippo would be amused.
Daniel looked down at the hardback on the couch, and bent to pick it up. It had no cover. But a number of its pages had been dog-eared, and when Daniel flipped to the first, he found a passage highlighted in bright pink marker. “The Holy Spark that fell when God built and destroyed the worlds, man shall raise and purify, from stone to plant, from plant to animal.. purify and raise the Holy Sparks that are imprisoned in the world of shells.” Next to the word “shells,” in the mock-parchment margins of the page, his aunt had drawn a smiley face.
Not Dick Francis, then. He flipped the book on its spine and raised an eyebrow. He’d never known his Aunt to crack a Sidur in synagogue, let alone the Kabbalah in her home.
“You’re going to have to come to the graves, okay?” Aunt Ethel said from the other room, and Daniel started.
“I’m sorry?”
“Thursday’s cemetery day, remember? I’d be okay skipping, I mean, they’re notthere anymore, but you know your other aunt. ‘A grave needs stones.’ So come with us, and afterwards we’ll go get coddies.”
“Ugh,” Daniel murmured. “Is that even real fish in those things?”
“What do you think the mustard’s for?”
Daniel started to smile, but stopped halfway. He was looking at the buffalo. Remembering Mitchell coming home from work, which is pretty much all anyone remembered of Mitchell. Harry with the trains. Most of all, Mack, spooling jokes through endless dinners, teaching his Aunt to rumba on two replaced hips.
For the first time in his life, he wondered if it had been a good idea coming here. He leaned forward to lay the book back on the couch, came face to face with the photograph of the buffalo with its leg in the air — Mitchell— and saw the cheetah for the first time.
Had that been there a second ago? Had he really not noticed that?
There it was, anyway, its nose to the gate of the fence in the background, one paw through the chicken wire. The blotchy, irregular spots on its fur looked more like mange than coloration, and there was an ugly pink patch above its back right haunch and another at the base of its neck.
“Aunt Ethel?” he called. “About this cheetah…”
“Mack?”
“Mack?”
The front door burst open, and Daniel swiveled toward it. From the tiny entranceway, he heard the scuffle of heavy boot heels, started to call a hello, but stopped when he heard the tremor in Zippo’s voice.
“They’re out. Ethel, my God, they’re loose. All of them.”
Daniel arrived just in time to see Aunt Ethel stumbling for the front closet, grabbing at the long, yellow overcoat she’d worn all of his life, and starting out the front door before Aunt Zip put a crooked, age-stained hand on her wrist.
“Honey, you’re going to freeze.”
With an annoyed glance at her shorts and t-shirt, Ethel hurried off down the back hallway toward her bedroom. That hallway, too, had always been lined floor to ceiling with family photographs, including a random series of Daniel at various ages, some of them with his parents. From where he was standing, Daniel could only see that there were still pictures. Had the one of his father been replaced, also? With orangutans, maybe?
Was there even one of Lisa? Had he ever given Aunt Ethel one?
Then Zippo’s hand was on his cheek, pulling his gaze around. Where Ethel was essentially a fire hydrant with hammer toes, Zippo loomed like a tall, bent oak. Whatever dye she used either never took or she kept washing it out, because her gauzy hair was mostly white tinged with blue.
“Hello, Aunt Zip.” He leaned in to kiss her, but halted midway. “Aunt Zip? What is it?”
Both of his aunts could produce tissues from mid-air the way magicians did coins. Almost always, the tissues were for others, but now Zippo dabbed at her own eyes. The orange eye-shadow on her lids looked caked and layered and permanent, like veins in sedimentary rock.
“Nothing, sweetie,” she said. “It’s your silly old aunts. You look thin.”
Even more unsettled, Daniel kissed her anyway. “It’s great to see you.”
“Oh, Daniel. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with all this again. So soon after your dad, I mean. It’s not fair.”
“It’s never fair,” Daniel said quietly. “Isn’t that what you taught my mom?”
“Yes.” Aunt Zippo’s face had long since begun to cave in, the nose sinking into its cavity and the mouth losing shape, and there were red, spidery blotches everywhere. She looked like a cherry pie. With whip cream hair. She dabbed once more with the tissue. The tissue vanished. “But I meant for me.” With that singular smile that always looked half-melted, almost all mouth-turned-down, Zippo touched his cheek. Daniel felt simultaneously near tears and buoyed.