Our village is beautiful, boring, with many American flags. They hang over lawns, porches and cars, from pieces of wood. The whole township has at most seven or eight roads, so people tend to notice outsiders, and other strange occurrences.
Just the other day, hours before the winter storm warning was supposed to take effect, during my afternoon walk, I passed an elderly man in suspenders and a dress shirt three sizes too large. He crossed his lawn, approached a flag dangling from his porch, and pulled it down.
I lowered my headphones and waved. He looked at me as though I were a ghost.
Over dinner, I told Andy. This time, I didn’t mean to judge anyone. If my observations were vitriolic, I thought the quality, at least, was veiled. My husband had urban affectations and rural aspirations, the mark of living in the city for decades, until he retired last June, finding it difficult to transition to Zoom. Andy wasn’t rich, or comfortable in the late Capitalist sense: he was comfortable because he knew how to treat himself and others well.
At sixty-four, he wanted to plant herbs, tend the perennials, cook diverse meals in a kitchen twice as large as our apartment’s back in the city, and be close to his mother, a good-hearted, annoying, ancient woman who lived just down the highway. He swirled around his beef tibs in a plate of berbere, said, “You’re sure he wasn’t lowering the flag to half-mast?”
“Who died? Donald Trump?”
“No one died, Simcha,” he said. “That’s what veterans do. They lower the flag every evening and raise it again at sunrise.”
“Really?”
“Yes. This is who real people are.”
“Vets?”
“Some of them.”
“And the rest of us?”
“What?”
“Are we unreal?”
Andy raised his thick gray brow, laughed. I crossed my arms, gave the wall side-eye. We would fight eventually. No reason it had to be then.
After I finished marking up a few more manuscripts, we had a sex date. I shuttered the windows, locked the doors, and shut the lights. Andy took off his clothes and lay on his stomach. I edged a strap-on into my vagina and rubbed the other end down with K-Y Jelly. His pale ass stood out like a discoloration in his body. At first, we fucked slowly. Each time a car passed, our bedroom became bright with the shadows of branches, lingering for a brief time, like veins popped from the skin in sweltering heat.
***
I woke to the sound of his shovel scraping the walk. A row of bushes, bearded in white, shielded the covered pathway from our front door to the driveway, and the glazed runoff from the gutters made Andy slip and slide. Of course I worried he might fall, break a hip, gash his head, shatter his ribcage, call for me from the ground while I slept, his voice soft with injury. He was so much older than I was, forty years my senior. “Hi Sleepy,” he said.
“Remember when we used to call these blizzards, not winter storms?” I reached for the shovel. “The word sounded so innocent, like something you could buy.”
“As usual,” he smiled, “You’re already too late.”
He planted the shovel like a pole with no flag and nodded toward the freshly cleared driveway. Under the wiper of our Subaru was a note:
I was doing mine and saw yours looked like a mess. Hope this helps!
-F.
Freddy was the town snow-plower, leaf-blower, and car-tower. He was also a neighbor, in his mid-fifties and prone to grinning, who always greeted us from his pickup truck with the stars and stripes waving on its back. He reminded me of a golden retriever. Not to patronize. His wife was a local librarian. Our first couple of years here, I thought she was nasty as a Proud Boy. But when people began to get ill last spring and the world shut down and the local government retreated from their posts, she continued to send helpful emails to people on the library’s subscriber list: the mayor’s office was open by appointment only; wi-fi had been extended to the library’s parking lot; the Baptist church had free lunch every Tuesday and Thursday. “I hope everyone is staying safe during these trying times—Lucy” she concluded.
We had no idea about Lucy’s politics. All we knew was she acted like a determined captain when the rest of the planet hopped in lifeboats, if they had them, and began to paddle away.
Freddy had been doing Andy favors since before I met him, before Andy divorced his second wife, before we moved here full-time. Once, when our car’s battery was drained, Freddy gave us a jump. Another time, he took in our mail when we were out of town. Andy always made food in return. He insisted that being appreciative was inherently righteous. Plus, Freddy had not always been persona non grata. Before he flew a Blue Lives Matter flag from his house, only to replace it with the Don’t-Tread-On-Me flag a couple years after, a later trend in fascist apparel, at least in our village, Freddy had been a real person. He was different from our neighbor down Crescent Lane, who drove a Porsche wagon with a “Register Commies, Not Guns” bumper decal, and the widow by the water who decorated her lawn with a dark-skinned butler statue. Freddy was not rich. He was an “uneducated victim,” Andy claimed, which meant he was to be condescended to, not despised: “Remember when he salted the black ice? When he offered to load our glass bottles into the pick-up and drive them to the dump?”
But I thought it was fairer to hate someone than to look down upon them.
Anyway, Andy soaked borlotti beans in minced onions, oil, and tomato, a pasta e fagioli. He poured the soup in a takeout box he put in a paper bag stamped with the imprimatur of Imbroglio, the county’s expensive and only Puglian restaurant, and then carefully, because he did everything involving food with care, shaved parmigiano reggiano into a small plastic container. After, he taped the plastic cheese container to the top of the box, an extra effort to prevent spillage.
We walked queasily in Freddy and Lucy’s own footsteps across their snow-covered lawn. I hated knocking on doors uninvited, but the custom was not even to offer that much courtesy. “Andy! Simcha!” townsfolk we hadn’t invited over yelled, “We have some leftover ramps and broccoli rabe from the farm stand!” “I was just in the neighborhood!” “We made braised vegetables and meatloaf and wanted to give you half!” The two little boys next door, Mike and Lisa who were professors in the city, the exterminator, the plumber, Freddy and Lucy, a Jehovah’s Witness, a campaigning candidate for Town Board Chair, and my mother-in-law all strolled in unannounced. “It’s just who people are,” Andy said. He didn’t mean people who did things such as have sex or be naked. He meant the people who walked in on them.
But I insisted on not being a hypocrite, so we rapped on Freddy and Lucy’s door. The television flashed through the window. No answer came.
“We’ll leave it here and go,” I said.
A big drift of snow blew from a tree branch and plopped on a car. Their property had an aura that scared me, with its woodshed and nativity scene, the Christmas manger scene that sometimes housed the neighborhood cat. A lawnmower rested ominously by the cellar steps. Their address numbers were frilly, grimey.
“They have an awning,” I pointed out.
“Tons of animals would lap my soup right up.”
“We’re on the East Coast.”
“Meaning wildlife is already extinct here?”
I shook my head. “Just unlikely.”
Andy offered not even a chuckle of acknowledgement. The world had that hermetic feel, the overcast skies a ceiling. I’d rather read The New York Times’ Most Depressing Headlines 2016-????: An Anthology than actually have a conversation with Freddy, but I kept imagining Andy falling on the ice, red soup in front of him while he lay on the blacktop because of a broken hip, unable to stand because of the pain and the ice itself and—suffice it to say, I offered to bring the food back later.
“You despise these people.”
“Keep your voice down. God forbid they know what I think about them.”
“There’s no reason I can’t do it,” Andy whispered at scream volume.
“It’s slippery out.”
“Why tell me that, Simcha? I’m ready and able. I spent two winters out here, alone, after Moira died.”
The mere mention of her name made my heart drop through my uterus and birth canal.
“Sorry,” he added.
I turned back to the door with a fresh sense of hurt, peering through the glass panels set in the wood, past the glare and into the dim living room. I covered my eyes with my hand. On the couch, our neighbors lay clothed, embracing and likely asleep, in a swath of celluloid glow. Eyes closed, Freddy cradled Lucy’s head with his armpit. They were entombed in love like those corpses archeologists discovered at Pompeii, and this bothered me.
They had permanence, the sort we all believed was promised by a long life, and meanwhile I was twenty-four, and found old men attractive.
“What are you doing?” Andy asked. “You’re being inappropriate and spying on people.”
I backed away. “Let’s go.”
***
On our refrigerator were photographs. During the first year of our relationship, Andy had taken twenty or thirty snapshots of us together on a Kodak disposable camera, in order to replace his pictures of Deirde, who had insisted that Andy take down his many, many pictures of Moira. One photograph of Andy’s first wife remained today, respecting the hard-fought agreement that Andy had made with his second wife: One picture of Moira, many of Deirdre.
We had exhaustively negotiated plans, for that afternoon, to clean out the guest room closet. Andy had been using it for storage since the late ‘80s, and after some pushing on my part, he had finally agreed to move the contents to the basement of his mother’s house, where he had all the space he might want—for the time being, that is, until the ninety-four-year-old herself croaked. Inside the closet, we found a tattered plastic chess set, two glued-together badminton rackets, several dozen plastic bags left over from department stores in the city, fourteen lightbulbs, many typewritten manuscript pages in stacks, seven vintage men’s sport coats, a Lazy Susan, four rolodexes, and several items that Andy grabbed from my hands, exclaiming, “I know what that is, let me handle it,” as only a man crushed by abundant secrecy does. “You’re making me nervous.” Separating me from a wool blanket, his foot caught in a garbage bag on the floor and he tumbled, slid to a stop on the ground.
“Oh my God! Stand slowly. Are you OK?”
He gave himself practiced instructions to do just what I said. On his feet, he banished me from the guest room—“What’s the matter with you? Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Go do your copy editing, this is my responsibility”—leaving me to work and think about how it was only a matter of time. Small spills would ultimately become big ones. He would die, and when he did, I would probably remain alive. Who knows.
Still, the next hour or so passed smoothly, the way time can when two people who share a household devote themselves to different tasks. I’d just gotten into a groove with my copy editing when he emerged from the guest room carrying a baby blue cashmere sweater.
“Do you like it?” He handed it to me, offering a gift. “I hope it fits.”
It belonged, I knew, to either Deirdre or Moira, but I tried the sweater on anyway—as a favor to my husband, I told myself. The material was soft, tantalizingly so. I observed myself in the mirror of the bathroom while Andy stood over my shoulder. I looked good, like a member of the British aristocracy at rest in a country manor. I looked as comfy as the article of clothing felt.
“Whose was this?”
“Frankly,” he put a finger to his chin. “I can’t remember.”
“It isn’t yours.”
“I suppose it’s Moira’s,” he said, gaze welling. “What am I supposed to do? You can’t ask me to deny my own past. I don’t have any special connection to this sweater. It isn’t something I feel like I have to get rid of, in order to handle my grief. I thought you might want it, since it’s nice. I thought I should offer it to you before I drive it over to the church thrift store and leave it in the donation shed.”
“Heterosexual relationships are hell,” I said. We made eye contact in the mirror. Clearly, he had no idea what I meant.
***
I liked to work in Andy’s office, which of course used to be his province, with diplomas and books on mid-century modern architecture on the walls and the drafts of his scholarship in filing cabinets behind the desk. He had let me work here for the past year or so, because I had trouble concentrating since the pandemic began. In his own space, with his own musk, for whatever reason, I could focus. Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, he lay in bed, reading his Kindle.
The sun had dropped low in the sky. I poured myself a few fingers of rye. Then, more. When I got bored, I played with the binder clips Andy had left on his desk, the color-coded post-it notes, all of which were in their place as though he’d been working here yesterday, last week or last month, not as though he retired at the end of last school year. A screen door moaned closed the moment I switched on his lamp. The sound came from across the street. I stood from my computer, peered through the blinds.
Pouring salt on the road, Lucy’s hennaed hair hung like a fur over her puffy coat. She listened to music on tiny airpods, but I had no idea, because the little cordless earphones were so minuscule, and because I never expect people who are over forty to wear headphones in public, even though they all do, these days, and of course people I now consider old were listening to music on their portable devices well before I was born. When I handed her the Imbroglio bag, she jumped, put her hand on her heart, and after a moment, said,
“How nice. What a treat.”
I smiled. “I really didn’t mean to interrupt your jams or whatever.”
“It’s an audiobook.”
“Even worse.”
My meager past with Lucy cast a pall: when I moved in, she stared at me from her lawn, mouth agape, while I helped Andy carry his bags into the house. We told her we were eloping, selling our place in the city, moving to the town full-time, and she spoke only to him, hardly acknowledging me. At the library, she hid behind her bangs—substantial, timeless, straighter than my own hair. When I brought books up to check out, she greeted me like I was just another patron, hardly acknowledging me with her eyes. And then of course the flags her husband flew stood between us like an electrified fence.
“Don’t wear yourself out with apologies, it was boring. War And Peace. I always told myself I’d read it. But I never had the time.”
She set the soup on the ground and dropped the salt bag beside it, rubbed her forearms. A bird arrowed past a power line.
“I was inspired after my book club read Anna Karenina a few months back.” She scraped her work boots.
“I’ve only seen the Keira Knightley movie.”
“Oh, the girl who needs to eat more?”
I sighed. “I’m going to go inside.”
“You know, I didn’t know you were Andy’s partner at first,” she blurted. “For a while I thought you were his daughter. But I was puzzled, because I never knew he had one. I thought you were a stepchild from the Moira era, but I figured I would have heard of your existence, if you had been Andy’s girl. I knew he and Deirde didn’t have any children, of course. We were very close.”
“So they tell me.”
“Some things are not built to last.” She spoke like an advertisement for a hearty pick-up with tons of horsepower. “During the break up, Deirdre cried all the time. You’d imagine she would.”
“I really, really try not to imagine anything.”
“Then, when you came into the library,” she went on, “I mistook you for just another young person, home for the summer. But you kept coming in, during the fall and the winter. So then I thought you went to the university in Mainville just over there, and later I speculated, ‘Maybe she came home to live with her parents until COVID blew over,’ like a lot of twenty-somethings. We wanted our sons to come back and live with us. I’m babbling. There aren’t a lot of young people here.”
“The village’s median age is fifty-five, I heard,” I said.
“I can believe it. My husband was the one who said ‘She’s Mr. Ehrenstein’s wife.’ And of course we’re so happy our handsome neighbor found love at his advanced age. Deirdre aside, I have affection for Andy. Needless to say I understand you and he are both to the left of center, and you should know, for Freddy the whole Trump thing is mostly a way to be close to his friends and our sons. He always struggled with male friendship. Our sons, too. They’re around your age, and tell me, don’t your friends all struggle? Billy bought his dad the ‘Don’t-Tread-On-Me’ flag for Christmas last year, and Freddy said he would fly it because he likes the graphic of the rattlesnake. ‘It’s poetic,’ he said. I told him, ‘You don’t know anything about poetry. Name one poet.’ He couldn’t. Obviously not. Humanity’s full of obstacles these days. Ever read Tolstoy? Do you want my copy of Anna Karenina? I’m happy to lend it to you. I want to be rid of it, honestly. It stares at you like a hole in the roof.” She whooped in excitement with her own cleverness, and then looked conspiratorial. “C’mon.”
Andy knew how to say “No” politely. My thoughts, on the other hand, tended to be ruder than my behavior. Plus, as I had grown slowly to suspect, Lucy wasn’t half as standoffish as I thought she might be. She was just awkward and private, until she recognized me.
So I followed her through the door of a house of which I had not even imagined the inside when I played peeping Tom earlier in the afternoon. There was a Goya reproduction on the wall, an antique cupboard with a picture of their grown children, salt-shakers shaped like the busts of leprechauns, a bowl of grapes that I guessed were fake—but turned out be real—and the curving, flat-screen television, which was now playing American Ninja Warrior. Lucy led me upstairs, to Billy’s room with a twin bed she’d jammed into the corner to make way for her desk and a mixture of hardcover political thrillers and peeling paperbacks, many of them Barnes & Noble Classics, out of which she pulled the promised tome. An Iron Maiden poster draped the wall. She didn’t have the heart to take it down, she said. She called her son’s old room “my lair.”
“Freddy! Simcha from across the street is here, so make sure you’re in some state of decency. She brought us over your favorite, Pasta Fazool!”
“My favorite’s lasagna,” called Freddy.
“He’s kidding,” Lucy winked.
Freddy brandished his cigar-sized fingers in the threshold, remarked on how good the soup looked. Lucy nudged us toward the kitchen. I sounded simultaneously polite and defiant, as ever.
“Andy made it. I don’t even know how to cook.”
“Would you like a cocktail? Tea?” she asked.
“Whatever you’re having.”
“You should have exactly what you want. Freddy and I had martinis with lunch, to celebrate the snow day. I doubt we can do it like Andy does. But you won’t judge.”
She poured a bit of gin in a glass with too much white vermouth, seltzer, and a whole wedge of lemon. Freddy cracked a Schlitz.
“Salut,” he raised his glass. “To neighbors.”
We cheersed.
“Share a drink and put differences away. Help each other out, eh?”
Lucy looked at me. “That’s right. Setting disagreements aside is how we’ve stayed married for more than thirty years.”
“Yes ma’am,” Freddy sipped.
“Deirdre told me that she and Andy used to shadowbox. Like two little kids. They pretended to hit each other, laughed hysterically. It usually involved drinking.”
“Seriously, I’d appreciate if we don’t talk about any of Andy’s ex-wives.”
“OK, then,” Lucy shrugged, guffawed, and then looked offended, or at least surprised. There was a silence that some would describe as pregnant. For a couple minutes, we stood in reverence of American Ninja Warrior. A man tried to crab up a squishy structure before one of the many cushioned appendages protruding from its body batted him into water below. We talked about football. Their kids needed to come home for the holidays, Freddy and Lucy said, and had no choice in the matter. I set my dead soldier on the counter.
“Make you another, kiddo?”
I shrugged, passing over my glass. “I always choose fun over happiness. It’s just what I do.”
“You’re young. You’re my son Billy’s age. You have nothing to worry about. Billy chooses misery over fun and happiness.”
“He batted .654 his sophomore year of high school. You would have thought he had some kind of future,” Freddy explained.
“Both Billy and Simcha have futures.” Lucy sounded as though she was being fair to each of her children and looked up from the cutting board on which she prepared the drinks.
“I can’t hardly believe it,” Freddy pointed at the screen. “He just got creamed.” The crowd stood, jeered as a young man surfaced from the pool. “Don’t get up. He ain’t getting up.”
“You speak so much about Billy, but how about your other son?”
“You mean Thomas?”
I nodded.
“He has friends from the Internet,” Lucy handed me another seltzered-down martini. “They get together at a bar up in Algonquin and other times go fishing. One lent him a truck Thomas parked here for a while. Strange guys.”
“Truly. Weird.”
“The truck had bumper stickers. ‘Shove your mask up your ass,’ and ‘My mistress is my M-16,’” I said.
“You notice details.”
“They like to shoot,” Freddy said defensively. “My father did, too. It runs in the family.”
“Shoot heroin?” I took a long slug of my drink. When I looked up, both Lucy and husband were staring at me.
“What did you say?”
Freddy was frozen, beer mid-sip.
“I was just word associating. It was a joke. How I often, you know.”
“What?”
“Make conversation. It’s what I have to offer. You know, in terms of, uh, relating to people like neighbors.”
Back in the city, I waited to leave the apartment if I heard anybody in the hallway of my building, or if I was running late, I put on my headphones, walked as quickly as I could, and grimaced my way through a little “hi” while I passed. I used to cross the street in high school when I saw the people who lived next door down the block, walking their dogs or speaking with the mailwoman. The girls on the field hockey team, Ms. Knudsen in the 10th grade and my mother were all as shocked as Freddy: You’re so shy people think you hate their guts.
“She didn’t mean any offense, Freddy. She just feels comfortable with us, don’t you see. It has nothing to do with Billy.”
“I don’t know how she could ever have come up with that.”
“Or how anyone could come up with anything,” Lucy sighed. “Do you know, Fred? You don’t get anything, actually?”
“Why are you saying stuff about our family, Simcha? What does Andy know about our family?”
“Andy knows nothing. Literally.”
Freddy stared at me blankly. He had little fight in his body. But this made him no less of a Nazi.
“It was a random coincidence that something stupid I unfortunately said struck a nerve with you both, Freddy. I think we can all agree that we’ve had a lot to drink and maybe we became familiar with each other more quickly than we should have.”
I went up to Billy’s room again and grabbed my coat, hesitating for hardly a moment before I placed Anna Karenina back on the shelf beside a fat thriller. Descending the stairs, I wanted to tell them the ways in which I despised them, which didn’t mean I didn’t like them in other ways, I would say. They were kind. But aspects of their life were so ignorant, they were evil. I wanted to communicate this, without saying it directly, without being inflammatory. I wanted to show them that there was a truth and a lie, and that anyone apologizing for the lie was just another liar, that now was not a time for working to save a marriage, because saving a marriage just meant having a wedding with the devil. But I didn’t feel right lecturing them, so instead I said, “Your beliefs about America make me puke and you should shove your flagpole up your bled-white asses, you motherfuckers,” and I let the screen squeak to a slam behind me.
***
Moira had been a writer of stories, novels and essays before her untimely death at forty-six. She had cancer of the tongue, which meant for her last months she couldn’t speak or swallow, and if she had survived, she would not have been able to taste food for the rest of her life. She published three books and countless articles, and frequently, I ventured into Andy’s office, grabbed some material from the filing cabinets, sat cross-legged on the floor, and read. At this point, I had been through much of what she published, including her novel, Permanent Home On The Prairie, about a group of children in a small town who find fortune buried in a cemetery where a slave burial ground, thanks to time and redrawing of property lines, butted against the fading gravestones of the white elite. I found Moira’s presence comforting, though I sometimes felt scared that she and I occupied the same house, sat in the same chairs, loved the same person, and might even have enjoyed the company of one another. I felt least enthusiastic about this last fact, that had our timeline worked out better, we might have wanted to be friends. But what does companionship mean, between generations? Time hits like a skinny celebrity, a great novel, dividing us and drawing us closer, at once.
Andy took half a Viagra while I was gone and asked if I was feeling bottomish. In the bedroom, I rode him, and after his erection weakened like a melted knife, I let him eat me out until I came three times.
While he slept, I poured myself a drink in the living room, dressed and paced around the house, jittery and scared of shadows. I got in bed beside him and put my arms around his stomach hard enough to wake him. He stirred noncommittally.
“Andy,” I shook.
He rose suddenly and looked around the room. “Oh God, Simcha, where am I?”
“I feel like a ghost in this town, Andy. I feel like I hardly exist.”
“You’re sure not Casper the friendly ghost,” his voice faded, and he began to breathe deeply again. I laughed and lay on my back, the world spinning around my head. Then I cozied up closer to him and spoke in his ear.
“Please don’t die. Don’t die and leave me in this world. I love you. I don’t want to walk around this dumb planet every day without you.”
I fell asleep for a couple of hours in my clothes, stumbled into the bathroom. My body tingled with the weight of sleep. The vanity lights flickered, as they always did. I felt a presence, and so I spoke its name.
“Moira?”
The ceiling cracked. The house—you know—settled. Maybe I was only feeling myself, or the softness of her cashmere sweater, which was draped over a chair in the kitchen, several feet away. The residue of the soft.
Sometimes, I drew on my knowledge of Moira for strength, as if she were my mother and Andy my father, or she were my father and Andy my mother, as if we were a family of ghosts, neither friendly nor evil, impotent to either bless or curse one another.
***
I went on a walk the next afternoon, through the cemetery and up to Main Street, past the library and the post office, the ice cream parlor that would be shuttered until summer, the art gallery and the real estate office. I passed a few stores peddling sleek kitsch and the enormous fire station with the LED screen flashing GOD BLESS YOUR HEALTH AND STAY SAFE THIS SEASON, the Chinese restaurant and the slice place where the obese people from the surrounding towns carried whole pies to their car. I passed the old gas station, the dentist, and the even older gas station, which had sagged into an abandoned lot with weeds and cracks. I passed the bar that never observed COVID rules, the one that did marginally better. I passed the yoga studio and the antique store, the automotive shop and the seasonal theater, the dock and the stretch of seaweed sand that curved around the bay.
I walked up the residential roads to the long thoroughfare that led past the train station and the currency exchange, the smoke shop and the waffle restaurant slated to open for more than a year now. It was sub-freezing and the streets were subtly glazed. On the other side of the four-lane highway was a little bridge over a creek, and from blocks away, I could see the lights. “What is this,” I muttered to myself. “Cops queued up, sirens on, to run a long red?” When I got close, though, I understood that the number of the lights and the intensity of the horns in the background were not as silly as they had seemed at a distance.
I passed backed-up traffic, men screaming into cell phones and heads stuck through windows to peer around the other cars. A couple of people from the little Baptist church had stepped into the parking lot. An old minister held his hand to his mouth. Young parishioners cried, one into an iPad covered in stickers.
“What’s going on?” a guy asked her, his posture someone’s trying to get laid.
A truck had its wheels to the sky, pole cracked and flag fluttering flaccidly against the breeze. The hood was crumpled on the barrier. I began to run. Cops behind the barricade waved their arms, told the people in the front where to turn off. The flipped Silverado looked like Freddy’s truck. It looked so similar that I continued to move in its direction, just to be sure. “Who died?” I asked a thin patrolman with a big belly, and though I didn’t know what happened, I could tell by his slow blink that I had asked the right question. I broke into a sprint again. I was an eternal parent, scared and always ready for the worst. If only I could have loved Andy when he was young. If only there was no ice or skid, no potholes or glare. And Lucy had never met Freddy. I wanted her to have a life. I would give it to her the way a mother gives opportunity to her children. If only I could run fast enough, I might reach a moment before the accident, back in a time of innocence with abundant mistakes to be made, when the future was just a big dense city with energy stored up. But in fact the wreckage stayed put, and all that happened was I got closer and closer.
