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“Did Alex, I mean, she agreed with you?”

Mrs. Heppendale raised an eyebrow. “She’s not a total fool when something is made clear,” she said.

“What do you see when you look at me?” I said.

What I saw, with my inner eye, was a young woman too often stunned, even by the most usual things: two chairs left behind at a borrowed house, in an odd position. A note in backward-sloping handwriting, another note more or less block-printed, all in capital letters, lying on a table where a fruit bowl might be.

Mrs. Heppendale said nothing, though she must have said good-bye, because our eyes locked for a few seconds before she stepped onto the bus. Then suddenly Stella, the Luckiest Girl in the World (self-appointed), exited through the rear door and flew into my arms. What if Mrs. Heppendale saw that? Stella’s hair smelled of peaches. The diamond ring sparkled as if the day weren’t cloudy. I looked over Stella’s shoulder. I couldn’t see through the bus windows, though I’d ridden that bus and knew Mrs. Heppendale could see out. Was she wondering what my next expression would be, how soon I’d drop my polite but nervous smile?

Bea had had a flirtation with Alex? It had gone right by me. What would something like that mean, anyway? Nothing. It’s not like they ended up together. (By September, even Stella’s engagement was broken; instead of returning the ring, she’d sold it to an estate jeweler in Boston and sent the money to him — which, of course, was nowhere near as much as he’d paid for the ring.)

In a supermarket recently, I stopped to look at the orchids and thought about telling the guy who worked in the floral section about the underground orchid, though I realized he’d probably think I was either crazy or flirting. I wasn’t the sort of person who struck up conversations with strangers. Bea had been the one who was outgoing, always curious, asking whether I believed in God; what I expected out of life; how high I thought a heel could be before it just looked silly. “You take it on faith that there’s a God?” she’d echoed one time, wide-eyed. Well, sure. The same way we take it on faith that people in the Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist’s dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?

I thought about Bea a lot, but she never answered my e-mails, and her cell phone had been disconnected. One time when my thoughts were wandering, it suddenly came to me what Bea’s parents had done. When they left the house, they’d turned the Adirondack chairs over (shocking pink was that summer’s color) to show that they disliked them. They’d given the finger to the very symbol of summer, and they’d been right to do it. Those things ruined women’s stockings and made you spill your drink; you had to sit in them awkwardly, pretending that your casual moment was also comfortable. That you’d adapted easily to their too-deep seats and were having fun.

I certainly wouldn’t know how to write the story of that summer. Tracy and Bea and Alex and I were at those points in our lives when everything made sense in not making sense, you know? You do know. Who hasn’t been twenty-one? Who hasn’t sat outdoors on a summer night and known — known without questioning it — that through the impenetrable black sky, someone or something is looking down at you? The stars just glitter to draw your attention.

YANCEY

Yancey swishes down the dirt road, feet aflutter. The dog has always half hopped, and now that she wears little rubber booties, after two nasty bouts of bacterial infection in her paw pads, her dance-like movements are even more noticeable. This morning she set off on the trail of the wild turkey, who made a hasty exit into the bushes at the sound of the front door opening. I’ve lived here for twenty-four years. Yancey has been with me for the last thirteen. Two years ago she had Lyme disease, but she got good treatment and bounced back. Still, from the way she gets up in the morning, I know her days are numbered. No doubt she’s inspired to rise by the thought of the field that contains more possibilities than any doggy dream. In the field can be found voles, snakes, skunks, possums, raccoons. Just to say their names makes one hiss automatically. Onomatopoeia of the field!

My daughter Ginger and her wife, Stephanie, who goes by the name Étienne, want to take the dog away from me. It’s because I’ve tripped or fallen a couple of times, and once had to wear a soft cast. And because I spend so much time and money having her cared for. They’re distressed that if I can’t get a tick off her on the first pull, I drive her to the vet. I’ve explained that the vet does not charge me for this, but that seems to be the least of the problem. It’s that I’m in the car too often and that my life is “centered around the dog.” God help me if they ever find out Yancey and I sometimes split a microwaved chicken burrito for dinner. I wash it down with a glass of white wine, Yancey with a small bowl of milk.

Don’t worry: I do have a topic of conversation other than the dog.

I’m going to tell you something funny — if anyone thinks anything about the IRS might be even remotely funny. It’s that they sent someone to the house to look at the room I use for writing poetry. They did not believe, from the photographs my accountant sent, that the door was really on hinges, and that the room had no other use. We weren’t lying. The room — which used to be the little sewing room of the lady we bought the house from, which I used for storage before I decided I didn’t need anything that was stored there and gave it all away — contains my desk, with a typewriter and the usual things that one has on one’s desk, such as a bowl of paper clips and a jar of pens. There’s a kilim with excessive knotted fringe that’s faded horribly in the sunlight. There are bookshelves filled with poetry books, essays, criticism, et cetera. The broken fax machine sits on a little stool that also holds the orchid from what used to be the big greenhouse in town, until the owner’s wife left him and he moved away to Tampa. Ginger maintains that I overwater it. The low light and the cold will kill it. And it isn’t helped by Yancey pouncing on it, mistaking it, with her blurred vision, for her favorite toy, which is a squeaking Ed Grimley doll.

The man from the IRS was nice. He helped me push up a storm window and lower the screen, and he stood by while I vacuumed up dead flies. From his posture, I suspected he’d been to military school, or at least in the service, and I turned out to be right. He’d gone to VMI, he told me. We talked a little about Lexington, a southern town we both liked. He was probably used to people trying to get on his good side, but when you have anything as real as a small southern town between you, a few words of reminiscence aren’t likely to be mistaken for buttering up.

He admired the framed Audubon prints on the wall going up the stairs. I pointed to the black half circle below them, which he’d been kind enough not to mention. It got there because my husband, who drank, took a fall one night and went over backward, the rubber sole of his shoe scraping a near-perfect arc underneath the prints. The fall didn’t kill him, though driving into a tree did. Anyway, I told my visitor about the mark on the wall before we got to the landing. I had him precede me because I don’t bound up the stairs anymore. “But you do use your room regularly,” he said. I thought he was perhaps speaking sympathetically, cuing me. I used it every day, so agreeing was only telling the truth.

He saw that the door was on the hinges. That even the small closet held typing paper and a file drawer filled with rough drafts, not clothes. He admired the rug, which pleased me. He seemed like a genuine person, if you know what I mean. Yancey clicked along beside us, with her long toenails that the vet kept urging me to let her cut, though I know Yancey hates it so much, I’ve demurred. The IRS man said that his wife had a poodle that had been run over by a truck. Whether it was a standard poodle or one of those little things, he didn’t say. I told him I was sorry and waited for a signal we might leave the room. He took a few steps forward and looked out the window. Below, the white lilacs were blooming. He said, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d!” It crossed my mind that he might be testing. Of course I knew who wrote the poem. I wasn’t, for example, pretending that my husband’s office was mine, to continue to take the deduction after his death. So I said the poet’s name. Then we stood there a bit longer.