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  It was his understanding that the class was to run a full semester and he paid a damn good bit of money for Rose to take it. It isn’t about the money. He is glad to do it. Rose isn’t like a lot of wives, Joey Doherty’s for instance. Now there’s a woman who goes through money like a dose of salts. No, he has no complaints on that score with Rose. He hadn’t minded paying for this writing class; he was happy to do it if that was what she wanted. But the thing is, the class was supposed to run for four months, and if they cut it short—whatever the reason—it doesn’t seem right not to give some sort of refund.

  Afternoon classes are in session, and he has to circle the lot three times before he can find a parking spot. Between that and the headache, he’s in a sour mood by the time he reaches the registrar’s office. There’s only one person behind the desk, someone he instantly knows he doesn’t want to deal with. A student, but he doesn’t have a clue as to which sex. The crewcut hair and plaid work shirt say boy, but the fingernails—long, painted yellow—indicate girl. Yellow!

  “Can I help you?” A female voice.

  There is something in her nose—he averts his eyes discreetly—but a second glance shows him it’s a gold stud. What are her parents thinking of? No daughter of his would leave the house in a getup like that. Pierced nose. A crewcut, for Christ’s sakes. None of this is helping with the headache. He holds his hands over his eyes, presses his thumb and forefinger into his temples.

  “Yes?” the girl prompts. “Do you need help?”

  He drops his hand, doesn’t even try not to stare at her hair. Girl gets a buzz like that, she should be used to people staring. “I’m here about a refund.”

  Her voice turns flat. “Which class?”

  He gives her the information. “Of course, I don’t expect the entire amount,” he says. He wants to be quite clear about that.

  While she punches the data into her computer, he stares at her shorn scalp. He shakes his head and thinks of Tyrone. The mechanic wears his hair in a ponytail, has a pierced ear. Somewhere along the line kids today have gotten confused, gotten the roles blurred.

  The girl looks up from her screen. “That class is still on the schedule.”

  “What?”

  “It’s still on the schedule. It hasn’t been canceled.”

  “It sure has,” he informs her, thinking, God, these people don’t know what’s going on around here. How do they expect to teach anyone anything? With more patience than he feels, he repeats what Rose has told him. “My wife should know. She was taking the class.” He stresses “wife” to show this girl that she’s dealing with adults here.

  The girl frowns and taps more keys. The long yellow nails make a clicking sound. “No,” she says. “Professor Jeffrey is still teaching that course. In fact, it’s in session right now. In room 306 Dalton. Dalton Hall. The humanities building. If you parked in Lot A, you walked right by it.”

  Ned stands his ground. There is a mistake, a mix-up. Maybe this girl doesn’t know how to use a computer. Fingernails like that, she’s probably struck the wrong keys. He’ll have to ask for the person in charge.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” she asks before he can act.

  “Rose Nelson. Mrs. Rose Nelson.”

  She taps more keys on the board; they both wait while new information pops up. “Ah, here it is,” she says in her flat voice. “Rose Nelson.” She stops reading and casts a funny glance at him.

  “We have Rose Nelson entered as a voluntary withdrawal. Of course, there’s no refund after the first month of classes. If she’d withdrawn a week earlier, you’d be entitled to a partial refund. Sorry.” She returns to her work, dismissing him.

  He is pretty sure, would have bet the shop on it, that Rose has never in her life lied to him. Why would she tell him the professor had an emergency, had to leave town? If she doesn’t want to take the damn writing class, she could have told him she quit. At that moment he could kill Rose. Not about the money, the hell with the money, but for embarrassing him in front of this ridiculous creature.

  ON HIS WAY TO THE PARKING LOT, HE PASSES DALTON HALL, and it comes to him that something isn’t right about this. He can just feel it. He looks about and, seeing no one in sight, crosses the walk. He pauses a moment, inhales a time or two, gets his bearings. He still wears his work clothes: green pants stained with oil, grease, and engine fluids that mark him as a trespasser. He doesn’t have one clue what he’ll say if anyone challenges him, asks him what he’s doing here.

  Room 306 is on the third floor. Out of breath by the time he’s climbed three flights of stairs, he’s glad to find the corridor empty. He passes by closed doors, checking numbers, peering into oblong windows of near-useless glass the size of a carton of milk. The room is midway down the hall.

  All it takes is one quick look. The guy standing in front of the class is younger than he expects, and wears a shirt, no tie. And jeans, for Christ’s sake. Ned has his number immediately. A know-it-all kind of guy, the kind that talks about movies you’ve never seen, makes a pain in the ass of himself at town meetings. He’d bet a week’s profits the guy drives something foreign. Probably a Volvo.

  Immediately, looking at this guy, Ned knows what happened to Rose, realizes how she’d written something in his class and this son of a bitch had ripped it to shreds. Naturally Rose is too embarrassed to return. A spasm of fury takes Ned for what this bastard has done to his Rose, but it passes quickly. His stomach for confrontation, his capacity for sustained rage, has long ago been exhausted.

  THE HOUSE HAS AN EMPTY FEEL.

  “Rose?” he yells as he enters. “Rosie?”

  He checks the kitchen and then upstairs. She isn’t in their bedroom. Todd’s door is closed, and as he approaches he hopes to hell she isn’t in there. He hasn’t found her in there in months, and he clings to this as a sign she is getting better. He opens the door, smells stale air. Years ago the last traces of Todd’s sweat and shaving lotion evaporated, but everything else is the same. Over on the bureau, Rose has set up a little arrangement of some of his things, junk for the most part: A ceramic tiger he made in day camp, broken and repaired at least twice—even from the door Ned can see a thin line of glue at the tail. Two framed snapshots, one of him at six and one at fifteen. His watch, a cheap blood-encrusted Timex they stripped from his wrist in the emergency room. (Rose kept it set to the correct time for months until the battery ran down.). A scrap of wrinkled paper on which is scribbled a note telling them he will be late for dinner. A couple of years ago, Rose added a votive candle. It looks like some kind of shrine, for Christ’s sake. Sick.

  If Ned has his way, they would turn the room into a den, should have done it a long time ago. A place where he can do paperwork for the station instead of the cramped space he now uses where he can never find anything. Tax time is a nightmare. Naturally, Rose won’t hear of it. Where is she anyway? “Rose?” he calls again.

  He’s nervous when he doesn’t know where she is. He’s already lost sight of too much of her. It’s as if Rose is a balloon lost in clouds overhead, and if he doesn’t keep her tethered, she’ll float completely off, be gone. He believes if he can just keep hold of the string, the other part will come back.

  He goes out to the hall. From the upstairs window, he takes in the reassuring sight of laundry blowing on the line. Over in the yard at the Montgomery place, he sees two figures, hears, then through the window, the thump of rock music. Bad enough he’s got to put up with Ty’s stuff at the station. Now it looks like he won’t get peace in his own backyard.

  The Gates girl moved in last month. No husband on the scene, just her and the kid, although in Ned’s eyes, she isn’t much more than a kid herself. Personally he thinks she’s a fruitcake: not evil, just no good sense. She’s as thin as oil slick—looks like one stiff breeze would knock her over—and she runs around in bare feet and flashy skirts that either swing around her ankles or cut high across her thighs. No middle ground with that one.

  A couple of weeks ago
she stopped by the station to use the pay phone and fuel that old Buick she drives, and it wasn’t two minutes before she had Tyrone’s tongue hanging near his knees. The mechanic wasn’t much good for the next half hour. It makes Ned nervous her being next door, so close to Rose.

  Before the Gates kid moved over there, Ned had high hopes for the Montgomery place. He fantasized that a couple about his and Rose’s age would move in. A nice childless couple. The woman who would come over and get Rose talking about curtains and slipcovers and what was on sale at the grocery store. And maybe the two of them would start sewing, the way Rose used to. Ned can’t remember the last time he’s come home to the whirring of Rose’s sewing machine. The noise used to annoy the hell out of him, but now he would welcome any indication that Rose is returning to her normal self.

  Instead of this neighbor he envisioned, a woman who would show Rose the road back to herself, this crazy kid moved in, this wisp of a girl with a mouth on her that would put Ty to shame.

  Again he remembers the day when she stopped by the station to use the pay phone. Her line was supposed to have been connected the day before, and she wanted to blast the phone company. “The fucking phone company,” was what she said. Right then, as soon as those words flew out of her mouth—“the fucking phone company”—Ned saw his hopes for Rose fly right out the window.

  The boy seems nice enough, though. No bouts of temper as far as Ned can see. He says “sorry” when his ball rolls over to their yard. Not his fault his mother has a mouth on her. When Ned was out mowing the lawn the previous night, he saw the kid playing all alone, tossing an old whiffle ball up in the air, awkward hands missing it on its arc down, tossing and missing, tossing and missing, over and over until it made him dizzy to watch. It reminded him of all the nights he’d spent with Todd, teaching him to catch—a boy needs a patient man for that—and then he remembered all the baseballs he’d bought for his son over the years.

  There is a whole carton of that stuff in the garage. The balls and gloves and Frisbees in that cardboard box would be doing a lot more good if that boy had them. As it is, every time Ned goes out to get the mower, his eyes fall on the carton, a concrete reminder of the worst kind of pain a man could ever expect to have. He had wanted to give the lot of them to his sister Ethel for her boys. But Rose wouldn’t hear of it, although he couldn’t imagine what she had been saving them for. It hadn’t made any sense. Still doesn’t. As far as he can see, all this holding on to Todd’s stuff doesn’t help anything. If he had his way, he’d just get rid of it all. But there was hell to pay the one time he gave some of Todd’s clothes to Ethel. Clothes, for Christ’s sake.

  He had wanted more than the one child, but it hadn’t worked out that way. They just had the one. Rose was thirty-three when Todd was born and had almost lost hope. If you have more than one kid, at least there are others if something happens to one. Not that he’s blaming Rose.

  Sometimes, when he allows himself to think about Todd, he is hit with an actual pain, a physical ache he can feel in his muscles and sinew and organs.

  He notices the bathroom door is closed. “Rose,” he says. “Rosie, you in there?”

  “Go away.”

  He tries the knob, finds it locked. He sighs, caught between anger and resignation. “Rosie,” he says to the door. “Open up. I need a couple of aspirin. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

  After a moment or two the door opens enough for her to extend an arm, hand him a bottle of Excedrin. He should push it open, take her by surprise, grab her and shake her and put an end to this nonsense. He takes the bottle and waits—helplessly—while she withdraws her hand. He listens to the thick chink of the lock being turned.

  Downstairs, he stands at the kitchen sink, turns on the faucet, runs the cold tap until it’s icy, then cups his hands and ducks his face. Again and again he bathes his face, but this does not relieve the tightness across his temples, the pounding behind his eyes. He takes the Excedrin, then walks down the hall and opens the front door, stares across his driveway to the lot next door. The boy has gone inside.

  The lawn over there needs mowing, and the old growth on the foundation shrubs hasn’t been trimmed. A street like this, once you let one place get run down, the whole neighborhood goes to hell. He wonders which realtor handled the rental, who he should complain to. Looking over at the house where he now has for a neighbor a perfect nutcase, Ned again feels a heavy, familiar helplessness.

  He would like to ask someone what do to about Rose. Doc Blessing hasn’t been able to help. Oh, he gave her pills, but after a week, she refused to take them. Reverend Wills has talked to them both, but that hasn’t changed a thing. It’s as if Ned married one woman—a woman who was a kind and good wife, a good mother, too, who took an interest in things—and then one day, an accident, a stupid goddamned accident, and nothing was the same.

  Rose closed. Just plain shut up. The first thing was she refused to drive. Just downright refused to drive. Initially, he supposed it was because she was afraid of something like getting in an accident herself. Patiently he pointed out how foolish this was, how lightning didn’t strike twice, how after the Covington kid drowned in the lake, the rest of the family hadn’t stopped swimming, for Christ’s sake. “Sell the car,” she told him. Sell the car? The Pontiac he bought her just the month before? The first new car they ever had? The car she was so crazy about she washed it nearly every day, like a teenager? He put it off, offering excuses, sure that she’d come around, until the day she told him if he didn’t sell it, she would. He knew by the expression on her face that she meant it.

  He keeps waiting for her to get over her grief. He tries to recall what it was like before. Nights, he sits in his recliner, staring at reruns of “M*A*S*H” and tries to remember Rose. His Rose. Before. He goes back to the beginning, when he and Rose were young, long before Todd. One night his brain slipped right back to a time before they were married, the picture so clear it could have been playing on the screen in front of him. A hot summer night. He and Rose in the car. A Chevy, the blue-and-cream ’63. They were heading over to the lake, to the old pavilion where they used to hold Saturday night dances, the one the town still rents out to the Polish for their polka parties. Lying there next to Rosie on the army blanket he took from the Chevy trunk, lying so still he scarcely dared to breathe, resting his hand on the fullness of her breast, feeling her heart rise and fall under his palm, feeling the life there, feeling all the promise Rose held in that sweet and perfect breast . . . Lying there he felt his hand begin to tremble, shake beyond his control. Then she put her hand over his, steadying them both. He was so in love with her then, he would have given her anything, given her the sun had she asked, so in love with her it scared him.

  Remembering never helps. It only makes the ache worse. In addition to losing a son, he’s lost his wife, too.

  Why can’t she come back to him? Doesn’t she think he misses Todd? Doesn’t she know something breaks inside a man when he buries his son? Doesn’t she know that when he put Todd in the ground, a lot of his dreams were buried there, too?

  God knows, he loved his son. And he loves Rose; he really does. He loves Rose, but she is trying that love. Things happen to people: Accidents. Illness. But people get on with their lives. Christ, it isn’t right, not normal to act like the funeral was yesterday, instead of five years ago.

  Rose’s grief, Ned thinks. Rose’s grief will kill me, too.

  CHAPTER 6

  ROSE

  “ROSE? ” She hears Ned calling her from the hall. “Rosie? You in there?” The bathroom is the only room in the house with a lock, but even this can’t prevent his questions from sliding through wood panels. “Rosie?” His voice holds a mixture of concern and aggrievement. It seeps through the door like smoke.

  She can’t make herself answer. She sits on the toilet and rocks back and forth, her arms wrapped around her midsection. She hasn’t had a spell like this for a while. Weeks. Months.

  After a while, the so
und of laughter pulls her to the window, and she looks down on the neighbor’s yard. That boy is still outside. Now he is kicking a ball around the grass. She yanks the shade to the sill, as if it were possible to shut out the unfairness of it. How is it possible that Opal Gates be given a child, blessed with a child when she is little more than a child herself, when she doesn’t know enough—or care enough—to put shoes on her boy’s feet?

  She moans, and the sound curls inside her chest like smoke, too deep to escape.

  Ned knocks again.

  “Rose, let me in. I need some aspirin. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

  There’s aspirin in the kitchen, on the shelf by the sink, but she goes to the medicine cabinet, takes out the Excedrin, unlocks the bathroom door.

  She catches a quick glimpse of him, his face pale, slack with pain, and feels a spasm of guilt. Recently he’s been getting these headaches. She is truly sorry that she can’t help him, can’t come out of the bathroom. She can almost picture what she should do, what in fact she has done in the distant past, what he wants now. She should lead him to the living room, to his green recliner. You just relax, she should say. Just sit here and rest while I go heat some milk. He’d close his eyes, and she’d run a hand over the furrow between his brows, her fingers cool on his skin. When she came back with the cup of warm milk, she’d bring a washcloth, one she’d wrung in ice water. Rosie, he’d say, you’re an angel. What would I do without you? He’d reach an arm out, his eyes still closed, and his hand would rest on the curve of her hip, the touch comforting to them both, more soothing than words. She allows herself to hold this picture for a moment, but the woman offering the cup of warm milk, the woman who would welcome the weight of a heavy hand on her hip, this woman is someone else—not her. She lets this scene slip from her grasp, from possibility. She hands the bottle to him, relocks the door, shuts out the sight of his tired face. There is room in her heart for only so much pain.