Perfect Reader Part 4

"Doesn't everyone's mother have an a.n.a.lyst?" Flora asked Georgia.

Georgia, who loved to be consulted on all matters of human behavior, paused to consider before answering. "Many do, but not all" was her a.s.sessment.

Abandoned, Flora and her father developed a Tuesday-night routine of their own. Dinner at Ponzu, a j.a.panese restaurant on an ugly commercial strip just out of town, with huge grills on the tables where the chefs cooked in front of you and did tricks like flipping a shrimp in the air and catching it in their pockets. They were beloved guests because they came every week and because her father tipped exorbitantly. The hostess insisted on bringing them, on the house, a soda for Flora, and for her father, plum wine, which he found cloyingly sweet but drank out of politeness. He was a man who cleaned his plate, even if he didn't like something, and this annoyed Flora's mother, who felt his manners missed the point. "I'd rather have you leave some food and listen to me when I talk to you instead," she'd say, as if one had a choice about that kind of thing.

Sometimes Georgia came with them to dinner. Flora's father called Georgia "the Wizard," for Georgia's love of science and magic, and because the tops of her ears came to the gentlest of points. "It's the Wild Wizard!" he'd say to her in greeting, and they would both look delighted.

"Like sisters," the staff at Ponzu said.

Over dinner, there were compet.i.tions. "Let the compet.i.tions commence" was her father's rallying cry. "Who can make the best cow sound?" And the three of them mooed, one at a time, her father announcing, "I won that one," and they would shriek with laughter at the corruption of the judging system. "I'm sorr-ry," he'd say, exaggerating the word to show he wasn't a bit sorry. "Even the Lithuanian judge gave mine a nine-point-eight. You two squeaked by with an eight-point-two."

Back at the house, her father made Flora sweet, milky tea, and then he would read to her, picking up wherever her mother had left off the night before. Flora would offer a synopsis of what he'd missed, but he never seemed to mind that these weekly sessions meant he only ever heard one-seventh of a story. One month he started to read to her from a different book, a book of his choosing, one he had loved growing up and bought for her in town at Finch's Books: Swallows and Amazons Swallows and Amazons. But Flora had found it boring and they'd quit halfway through. It was years later, remembering her father's hopefulness upon presenting her with the hardbound volume with a simple line drawing of a canoe or some other member of the boat family across its cover, that it occurred to her that in rejecting the story, she might have hurt his feelings-learning she had the power to wound her parents a long, slow lesson for her.

Just before nine o'clock, her father always found a stopping place and closed the book, and the two of them went upstairs and turned on the television. Together, they watched a show her mother would never have watched, where things blew up and people jumped out of planes and punched one another. It was terrible, a fact both Flora and her father freely acknowledged, but they loved it. The show was funny, both intentionally and unintentionally, and they shouted at the television as they watched.

"Not everyone can appreciate the subtle genius of this show," he told her. "But you and I, we've grasped the secret of its stealthy power, haven't we?"

And Flora loved the exclusivity of it all-of the show and Ponzu, that they were hers and her father's and only sometimes Georgia's. There was no need to share with others. Tuesdays were theirs, and no one else's.

Before bed, Flora's mother called to check in. Her voice from the city sounded different, lighter. It was her old voice, temporarily restored, though often she sounded tired from her drive, or all the a.n.a.lyzing, and Flora, wide-awake, tried to make her voice sound tired, too. But Flora wasn't much for talking on the phone, and after a few minutes she would pa.s.s it off to her father and brush her teeth and get ready for bed while her parents talked. When her father hung up, she could see the pull of work and other matters on his face-he, who had been hers all night, no longer hers. He tucked her in quickly, rus.h.i.+ng a little, pulling the blankets up around her ears and telling her she was "the best of all possible Flos," and then he turned out the light and went next door, into his study, and she listened for the sounds of his worries-papers whispering against one another, books slipping away from the shelf, the sigh of leather as he adjusted himself in his chair.

It was then, staring at the light from his study as it sneaked beneath her door, that Flora began to miss her mother, her stomach suddenly a little queasy. She lay on her side, and the sound of her own heartbeat in her ear worried her, and she played the game she played when she couldn't sleep, trying to scare herself to sleep. There was a witch walking up the long, formal staircase, moving slowly, step by step, each heartbeat another step. Now she was at the last step Flora and Georgia could jump off of; now she was on the landing; now she was admiring the chandelier. Flora had to be asleep by the time the witch got to the doorway of her room, or else. On other nights, her parents inhabited their separate spheres throughout the house, but they were both there. Flora could find them if she needed to; she knew where they were, the world less precarious, quieter.

Still other nights, they both were gone. Her father traveled for work-he was out wooing fat cats, a funny image-and would bring her T-s.h.i.+rts from the cities he visited: CLEVELAND CLEVELAND-YOU'VE GOTTA BE TOUGH; ITHACA IS GORGES ITHACA IS GORGES. Flora treasured them, as if they were thoughtful gifts. Sometimes her mother went along. Once, they were invited to the president's house in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. They both had voted against the president, but it was only Joan who wondered if she could bear to sit in the same room with him. She bought a floor-length s.h.i.+mmering blue dress that made her blue-gray eyes s.h.i.+ne like icy water. She had never looked more beautiful, though she complained it had been a mistake, it wasn't her, she felt like an imposter.

"Maybe it's okay if it's not you," Flora said. "That way you can pretend you're someone else when you have to meet the president. Someone who likes him more."

"I'm getting tired of being someone else," her mother said.

Mrs. J. came and stayed with Flora and made her beef stew and they played gin rummy on the red Formica of the kitchen counter and drank soda, and Flora didn't miss her parents at all. Mrs. J. told her stories. The previous president of Darwin had killed himself. Not in the house, but after. He'd been a good man, Mrs. J. said, but he'd had a hard time of it.

"Some people are too good for this world," she said-a chastening dictum that seemed to rewrite the universe, and Flora's place in it.

Her parents had probably not told Flora this on purpose. It would be a story she would cling to, or one that clung to her. A story she knew without them knowing, that she knew in spite of them. Some people were too good for this world, and some people weren't.

A few weeks after the trip, a photograph arrived in the mail. It was of Joan Dempsey shaking hands with the president in the receiving line, signed to her across the bottom, "With kind regards," from him.

"What am I supposed to do with this? Frame it and hang it on my wall?"

"I'll keep it," Flora said.

But instead, her mother signed it, too, across the top, "With kind regards, Joan Dempsey," and she mailed it right back to the White House.

It was embarra.s.sing, like when her mother made a scene in a restaurant about the food not being warm or the plates arriving at different times. But it was also exciting. It was exciting when people misbehaved. Flora's father, though, wasn't excited.

"What an infantile thing to do," he accused. "Was it really necessary?"

"When did you become such a coward?" her mother said, her voice as icy as her eyes.

5.

Rearrangements.

THE LIVING ROOM FURNITURE in her father's house was all wrong. When you entered the room, you were met with the back of the couch, rudely blocking your path. The best spot for reading-the faded gold armchair with its supplicant ottoman-was lampless. And the round wooden coffee table was simply too big for the s.p.a.ce, an oversize hamburger bun in the center of the room. Flora pushed the couch out of the way and dragged the bun out of the room and into the kitchen. It was heavy, like dragging a fat corpse by the arms. She tried not to scuff the floors as she dragged, the attempt more theoretical than practical-moving furniture alone, there was no way not to scuff. in her father's house was all wrong. When you entered the room, you were met with the back of the couch, rudely blocking your path. The best spot for reading-the faded gold armchair with its supplicant ottoman-was lampless. And the round wooden coffee table was simply too big for the s.p.a.ce, an oversize hamburger bun in the center of the room. Flora pushed the couch out of the way and dragged the bun out of the room and into the kitchen. It was heavy, like dragging a fat corpse by the arms. She tried not to scuff the floors as she dragged, the attempt more theoretical than practical-moving furniture alone, there was no way not to scuff.

Now, if she moved the couch ninety degrees to the right, it would block the windows and the old door to the street. Ninety degrees to the left and it would block the fireplace. The only choice was to move the couch to its exact opposite position in the room, so it could look at where it once stood and face the world that had existed only behind it. Was it loneliness that created this compulsion to animate? Post-divorce, her mother had taken to furniture rearrangement as if it were a useful hobby, as she'd picked up other hobbies over the years, like hair dying, or clipping newspaper articles. On many days, returning from school to the small house they shared, Flora found that the living room and the dining room had switched places. A week later, they might have switched again. After months of this, she'd pretended not to notice; though carrying her dinner plate out from the kitchen, she would often find herself in the wrong room.

But she'd inherited the trait, the furniture-rearranging gene pa.s.sed down from mother to daughter, along with the crooked row of bottom teeth, the circ.u.mflex eyebrows, the narrow feet. Flora loved rearranging her tiny one-bedroom apartment in the city, and in hotel rooms, or the homes of friends, or her boss's office, she had to stop herself from moving things around. She could enter a room and see why it was wrong, and how to make it right, and this was one of the reasons she'd been good at her job. If only, she'd said in response to compliments, such problem-solving skills extended to other parts of life. But it had gotten her into trouble, too. Some people didn't warm to the implication that what they had could be improved upon.

Back in that previous life that now seemed another person's, weeks ago when she had a life that more nearly resembled the lives of her friends, Flora worked at a magazine for the domestically obsessive and organically minded, editing stories on other people's houses. She wrote copy on subjects such as organizing your pantry, the best nontoxic paints, and biodynamic gardening. She'd liked gardening best: Having never actually done it herself, she found it closest to fiction. She liked dreaming up the exact adjective a green thumb might use for soil or trowels (lush, loamy; ergonomic, essential) (lush, loamy; ergonomic, essential). Orchids-the gardener of her mind was rugged and practical, moved by beautiful things but alarmed by fussiness-where would he stand on orchids? Where would he stand on Flora? He'd approve of the rearranging-it was, after all, a version of thrift, a chance to make changes without paying for them.

As soon as the couch reversed its position in the room, the gold chair could take its place. The gold chair: where her father had read in the evenings, and on weekends, the upholstery worn thin by the sedentary pleasures he took in life. She moved the chair so it was closest to the fireplace. She would make a fire, and sit in the chair, and finally read her father's ma.n.u.script. The wood was out behind the garage. She made four trips-who knew how long this reading would take. She loved tending fires, prodding them into fuller life, but she'd never been good at starting them. Her father's trick had been to incinerate an entire newspaper and begin with a great blaze that wore itself away in moments. He'd had wasteful habits, and this had seemed to her one of them. She used three sheets of newspaper, balled tightly, and built a pyramid of small logs and kindling around them. To her surprise, it caught on the first match. Smoke seeped into the house. It took her a moment to realize this was wrong and why. In the President's House, the flue was perpetually open, her father having forgotten to close it, and bats had used it as a private entrance. She could see her parents standing in the industrial kitchen in their bathrobes, clutching badminton rackets, swatting at one terrified creature turned demonic, furry shuttlec.o.c.k. It was tiny at rest, and large and looming in flight. When Flora had started to cry, her mother promised they would not hurt the bat.

"If we happen to hurt the little f.u.c.ker, so be it," her father had said. He was enjoying himself, into the sport of it. Afterward, once the winged rodent had been released unscathed, Flora had made him swear that he hadn't been serious, that he'd meant the animal no harm. He had been unable to say so without grinning.

The flames were just low enough that she could reach in and lift the flue out of the way, but the room was invaded. She opened the old door to let the air change places. She retrieved the ma.n.u.script from where it lay buried in the body bag. She made a pot of tea. The living room was then cold, the fire dismal. She closed the door and placed two small logs on, easing them into perfect position with the tongs, which left the smell of metal on her hands. She poured the tea. She collected the papers and her mug and sat down in the gold chair. With the new configuration, there was nowhere to put her tea except the floor, and Larks came and lapped out of the cup before she could push him away.

"Okay, Larks," Flora said. "You have that one." Her father had made the dog tea-sweet, milky tea, as he'd made it for Flora when she was small-every afternoon.

She went back into the kitchen and poured herself another cup. She sat cross-legged in the gold chair, the ma.n.u.script on her lap. "I'm not performing for anyone anymore, just writing for myself," her father had told her on his last visit. "Appallingly rough," he'd said, resting the palm of his hand gently on the folder of poems. "Some good bits though, I think."

The fire was suddenly impressive. She felt a childish pride looking at it. I did that, she thought, all by myself. But she could not make herself turn past the t.i.tle page. Her father's handwriting, neat and illegible: In Darwin's Gardens.

POEMS.

By Lewis Dempsey.

The ink on the page was jet-black, the paper ivory and unlined. The stack of papers was the apotheosis of ma.n.u.script-so ma.n.u.scriptlike, it looked a caricature, a prop designed by an expert. Manu-script Manu-script. Funny the feminists hadn't had their way with that one yet. So intimate-the handwritten word. The letters breathed on the page; the ma.n.u.script seemed to her alive. She didn't like to be alone with it. It was as if writing were something one died of, like cancer or cholesterol. She imagined the words whispered in the pretend hush of gossip: "It wasn't until he died that they found out-he had poems." poems."

The words might have been written in another language, the shape of the letters exotic, except for the word POEMS POEMS, which her father had written all in capitals. She imagined him making each stroke slowly, smiling slightly in satisfaction. How one knew and recognized handwriting, as one knew and recognized a voice in the distance, or on the other end of a phone. These details of person-hood we learned and memorized, as if access to that information meant we knew and understood one another. We felt a sense of owners.h.i.+p knowing such things. But the voice died with the person, absent a recording-and she'd thrown away the answering machine. The handwriting survived, though, particularly if writing had been something one did. Journals and ma.n.u.scripts, but in subtler manifestations, too-notes in margins, and "LD," his initials, written into each of his books, alongside the date at which it had been read, and often numerous dates, numerous rereadings: "April '64," "June '73," "December '89." His full initials were really LSD, which Flora in middle school had teased him about, serenading him with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," though he had certainly never tried the drug or any drug stronger than aspirin. He'd been a bit of a square; intellectually daring, but in many ways a square.

He had wanted to be the poet, and not the poet's ideal reader, but had taken the safer route. And had been dissatisfied all those years on the wrong side of the words. Not surprising, that; she knew well his disappointments. She'd just never thought he'd do anything to quell them. He understood his poets-"the Hardy Boys," he called them, and Hardy most of all-knew them better, maybe, than they'd known themselves (or than he'd known himself), and though that hadn't been enough, the scantness was more acceptable than the thought of failure. The whole thing very Chariots of Fire-I won't run if I can't win Chariots of Fire-I won't run if I can't win, and all that. Until the end. Had he guessed it was the end? In his final months, he'd reversed and risked himself, trading interpretation for invention, and started writing, and, from the look of the stack of poems, written a lot. And then he had given them to her, and left her alone with them, leaving her in the very position he had resented in his own life, the academic position, and now she had to be his perfect reader, the perfect understander, living not in her own imagination, but in his.

No one knew the poems existed. Her father had given them only to her. They could easily disappear. Ma.n.u.scripts had disappeared before. Ma.n.u.script and fire-as linked in the literary imagination as tuberculosis and undiscovered genius. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, had famously not burned his friend's papers, and all the literati considered him a hero for it. Having never read Kafka, Flora could imagine a world without him; her world was was without him. She had read about the posthumous act of defiance at the Cross Library while doing her executioner research. Defiant, and dishonest, wasn't it? Brod had what she wanted: instructions in a will. And ignored them. without him. She had read about the posthumous act of defiance at the Cross Library while doing her executioner research. Defiant, and dishonest, wasn't it? Brod had what she wanted: instructions in a will. And ignored them.

A violent act: throwing a book on a fire. Irreversible, like death. And a bit Victorian-ma.n.u.scripts weren't burned anymore; they were lost in the wilds of hard drives, they crashed, or were mis takenly trashed. Something romantic and old-fas.h.i.+oned, then, in throwing papers on a fire. Also anti-intellectual, repressive, and selfish. What Republicans did, or geniuses overcome by madness. Her father had told her the story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti burying his ma.n.u.script with his muse, only to regret the move years later and have the body and papers disinterred. There were many acts more brutal than incineration.

What would it look like to incinerate a ma.n.u.script? How long to turn to ash and ember? Most of her father's work Flora regarded with equal parts tedium and fascination. But the poems were a special case. It was flattering to be the only one he had trusted with them, as though he had left her, in addition to the house and the money, a piece of his mind, his most private self. Still, she did not want to read them. Reader's block-a mutation of the old, familiar literary neurosis. She'd read poetry, but never seriously, and mostly at her father's suggestion. "Pay particular attention to the third stanza," he'd instruct. "That's where he begins to make the language work for him." "Don't bother with Stevens yet," he'd told her once when she picked a volume off his shelves in high school. "If you read him now, you won't love him. Don't deny yourself that falling in love." But had she ever fallen in love with a poet, or a poem? When she was little, she asked her father in tears, "What if I don't like poetry when I grow up?" fearing this would be the end for them. "Of course you'll like poetry," he told her, and she'd believed him. And she did like poetry. But she felt she didn't love poetry as she ought to. What if she couldn't love his poems?

Looking at the fire, and the possibilities it presented, she became aware of her pulse. The thrill of a bad idea. One's body telling one to act. Fight or flight. But how to know which action it was recommending? Childhood had been so ripe with opportunities for disobedience. What opportunities had the past seven years of her life-her trial adulthood-presented? A gradual diminution in photo copying responsibilities, an ever-fluctuating stream of anxiety and anxiety medication, a haze of cigarette hangovers and haircuts she couldn't afford, afternoons spent in Laundromats reading Susan Sontag at the recommendation of some boy with only minimal comprehension, s.e.x without foreplay and urinary-tract infections, air-shaft apartments with bathroom doors painted over so many times they wouldn't shut. Was this, the loss of her father, the means of escape she'd been wis.h.i.+ng for, a new opportunity to disobey, her own act of defiance in the making? She'd packed her party dress, for Christ's sake. Her twenties, now, had something of a narrative arc: My father died, and everything changed.

She'd had violent fantasies before-tripping, shoving, plate shattering-but they'd remained fantasies. Having no siblings, Flora had never hit or been hit. She pulled back the screen. She could throw one page, one poem, on the fire and see how it felt. Once she'd pinched Georgia hard on the arm, and her fingertips had left a dark purple welt that so appalled her, she didn't speak to Georgia for a full day, as if she had been the one responsible. Just the t.i.tle page, perhaps. Nothing of substance would be lost.

"Some good bits, though," her father had said, handing her his poems over breakfast, asking for her opinion. The last time she saw him. "But be kind to your old dad. Don't give me the full editorial treatment. Big picture. Favorite and least favorite lines. Triumphs and disasters. That sort of thing. But I hope you like them, Flora-Girl, I really do."

She threw her tea on the fire. It released an unsatisfying hiss, then a sputter, then nothing. There would be no incinerating, no disinterring. She was not a deranged genius; she was no book burner; there were limits, even, to her selfishness. She turned the page and faced the first poem.

It was a Tuesday evening, after dinner at Ponzu, that her father told Flora without her mother, breaking with the standard practice, the recommended protocol of both parents presenting a united front, a last hurrah of togetherness, an encore. He said afterward, when it had become another thing for them to fight over, that he'd felt he had to; something Flora said had made him think she knew. Flora didn't know what that was, what it could have been. She knew nothing. How could she have known? Her father took the tea and English m.u.f.fin up to her mother in bed every morning-he always did this, up until the very end. Then he and Flora ate their breakfasts together in the big kitchen, on the tall white stools, resting their elbows on the red Formica countertop, and then he'd make her lunch and take her to school. Every day, like that, just the same.

When he told her, he said, "Your mother and I have reached an end," as though there were many possible ends and they had arrived at one by chance, as though it were a board game, or a choose-your-own-adventure story, and she said, "I don't know what you mean," though she was crying. She was sitting on the ground on the rough gray industrial carpet on the third floor, once the maids' quarters, now the family area, and she was crying and sweating a little, and she said, "I don't know what you mean," and he said, "We're filing for divorce." And she cried, sitting on the floor, with her father in a chair above her, and she didn't want him to come near her, to comfort her, and he didn't try to, as if he knew, or didn't care. She wanted to run away and throw herself down the stairs, down all the stairs in one great leap, to smash her body into the floor below.

Once she knew what they had known for a few months, there was no need for pretense, no need for civility. She wanted to not know, to unknow. Before, they had spoken in French so she wouldn't understand, laughing exotic secrets to each other. Now they fought in French when they remembered or cared that she could hear them. Her mother cried and ate Reese's peanut b.u.t.ter cups. "Your father is such a p.r.i.c.k," she told Flora as she braided her hair tightly for school. Her father moved into the guest room and had a private phone line installed. "Your mother is a sick woman," he said, b.u.t.tering Flora's English m.u.f.fin.

The house, in its inst.i.tutional grandeur, was impervious to them, untroubled by their misery. It easily accommodated her father's move, and the new private phone line. He disappeared into the gold room. Flora rarely saw him, except at breakfast, which was weirdly normal, their routines impervious to them as well. When she saw him in the evenings, he was on his phone, already tethered to another person, another life. He hired Jimmy Mills, a local sleazebag, as his divorce lawyer. "Dark Satanic Mills," her mother called him. Flora didn't get the joke. The only one who got the joke was her father, and he pretended it wasn't funny. They'd reached a stalemate in the financial agreement. They would all live together-the three of them in the President's House, all in separate bedrooms, as if it were a dormitory-until the divorce was final, the contract signed.

"It's my only leverage," her mother said. "He wants us out of here so badly."

"Mom says you're trying to evict us," Flora told him one morning as he drove her to school.

"No, sweetheart," her father a.s.sured her. "Not you, never you."

But they all knew, without discussing it, that she would live with her mother, that when she went, Flora would go, too.

6.

Revolts.

DAWN, AND A DAMP SPOT nestled beside Flora in the twin bed, spooning her. Above the canopy frame a brown ring, the paint bubbling sinisterly. The house was in revolt against her: She hadn't read the poems. nestled beside Flora in the twin bed, spooning her. Above the canopy frame a brown ring, the paint bubbling sinisterly. The house was in revolt against her: She hadn't read the poems.

"f.u.c.k," she said, realizing what had happened. "f.u.c.k this stupid f.u.c.king house."

The roof had given way, with G.o.d-like precision, to the ark-worthy rains overnight. Cynthia had warned of-or perhaps willed into being-such an event. Who did one call when it started raining indoors? There was no super, or father to call; Flora was in charge. She needed to know about things like poetry and leaking roofs. But she couldn't face the morning, or the mess. She found a plastic basin under the sink in the bathroom and placed it on the sheet below the leak, then slinked down the hall to her father's room. The thought of someone seeing, or explaining the move to her mother, embarra.s.sed her. It looked bad. d.a.m.n Freud! Couldn't a grown woman sleep in her father's bed in peace?

Larks watched, the black caterpillars of fur above his eyes lifting, ears poised.

"Lie down, Larks," she said, and he settled into his spot at the foot of the bed with a sigh.

Larks was still in mourning, or, more accurately, in patient wait. Maybe that was what mourning was-waiting. Larks was a sweet, affectionate dog who liked everyone well enough, but he'd regarded Flora's father with an undignified level of devotion, and his days were now devoted to the kitchen window, where he could gaze at the slate steps for hours. His antic.i.p.ation constant, his optimism irritating.

"He's not coming back, Larks," she'd told him in a hard voice, and then felt hard. She'd scratched around his soft ears. "You know he never would have left you by choice. His plan was to outlive you," she'd said, the way her father had spoken to the dog-in complete sentences, as though talking to a person.

Being in a proper bed, a bed big enough for two, was a thrill. She could sprawl; she could stretch; she could span. At a certain age, twin beds became ridiculous, demeaning even, sad, and she had reached that age. His mattress was extremely comfortable, the sheets silken and expensive to the touch. New? Flora liked interiors. Hence the job. Hence the rearranging. She liked making a s.p.a.ce her own. She liked being in a s.p.a.ce she had made. But did she like her father's interior? The whole house was very comfortable, if imperfectly arranged, well stuffed and clean. Her father liked good wood-cherry above all-and simple Shaker lines. He liked paintings of barns or broken wooden fences, leather boxes with motley mementos stuffed inside-a postcard she'd sent from Mexico, an arrowhead, a hand-carved spoon, a photograph of Larks as a puppy. It was all tasteful, easy, with ample storage s.p.a.ce. A strange setting for a lone twenty-something girl. What would become of her living in the midst of this throw-pillowed, subzeroed existence? Would she skip her thirties and suddenly emerge middle-aged?

This room was much nicer than hers, with an extra window, better light. There was even a working fireplace and a larger closet. There was no need to preserve the room as some kind of shrine, was there, or to leave it lying fallow? The door to the closet hung open, offering a glimpse inside, as though her father's s.h.i.+rts and pants, his shoes and his ties were stunned by, and monitoring closely, this new move. He was a man who even in his presidential years owned only two suits, which he referred to as "the suit" and "the other suit." But for someone who cared so little about clothes, he'd worn them well, relaxed and elegant, if a little rumpled. Like a colonial Raj-at home in the world, his world, confident and at ease.

He was never going to wear any of those s.h.i.+rts again. He would not come home, annoyed to find himself displaced, a refugee in his own home. He would not take back his house, his ma.n.u.script. He could not revoke her literary executors.h.i.+p, her control of the estate. He would never know her secrets from him, or what she had learned of his from her. Such revelations kept striking, mallet-like-he will not be there to throw tennis b.a.l.l.s for Larks tomorrow; if I answer the telephone, he will not be on the other end-each a fresh, wounding surprise. The permanence of death a continual surprise. Like Larks, she waited. She listened for his footsteps on the slate.

The yawning maw of the closet accused her. She got up and closed the door. If she slept in her father's room, she would do so clothed. There was no need to be naked in there. The whole house was hers. She'd use her old bedroom as a dressing room, keep her things in there for now. But G.o.d, if she stayed in his house, would she never have s.e.x again?

She sank into sleep but was awakened by the phone-who on earth? It was still "sparrow fart," as her father called the early morning. She didn't answer. It would not be him on the other end. She was not a call screener, as that implied there were people whose calls she would receive. She just didn't answer. She listened to the rain, an aural cliche of relaxation and coziness, but in this case a reminder of the hole in the roof, the burgeoning decay above. Again, the phone. Either an emergency or an a.s.shole. She answered.

It was Cynthia Reynolds, her father's friend.

"Yes, Cynthia, of course I remember," Flora said, sitting up. As if she would have forgotten. In her father's bed, her father's lover in her ear, she felt newly self-conscious, as though Cynthia could see her there; as if Cynthia had a greater claim to that bed than she did and knew it.

"Am I calling too early?" Cynthia said. "I see it's just gone eight o'clock. I never know when it becomes acceptable to phone. You see, I'm a terrifically early riser-like your father. I guess I'm used to dialing his number at odd hours."

"No, it's fine. I'm up."

"I called a few minutes ago, but there was no machine, so I was worried I'd dialed wrong. But now it occurs to me you told me the machine had broken.... How are you?"

Flora debated mentioning the leak. Cynthia might know a roofer, know a number to call. "I'm fine," she said instead. This had been her default reply to such inquiries since childhood, regardless of circ.u.mstance, misery and joy reduced to the same monosyllable. Though in Flora's case, she stretched the word out over two syllables, raising her pitch slightly at the end: Fi-ine Fi-ine. "How are you?"

"I'm sure you have plans for Thanksgiving," Cynthia said. "But I'm having a few people over and we're going to eat late. I was hoping you might be able to stop by for dessert and coffee in the evening."

"Sure." The curt word out before Flora thought to say no.

Thanksgiving: the great feast of familial grat.i.tude; the onslaught of the season of good cheer. It was a week-or was it days?-away. Flora already had two Thanksgivings planned. The first a brief visit with Georgia's parents-Madeleine had called to invite her after their reunion at the library, perhaps out of pity, because that was what one did when someone's father died. The second was dinner with her mother, who was coming to Darwin to check on her, a preemptive intervention, though she would stay not with Flora, but with friends in town. "It would be too weird to sleep in that house, your father's house," she'd insisted.

"Oh, that's wonderful." Cynthia spoke too enthusiastically, with exaggerated warmth. "About nine, then?"

"Yes." Flora wrote down the address, which was nearby, as everything was in Darwin-inescapably convenient.

"Oh, I'm so pleased you can make it."

"Can I bring anything?"

"Oh, no, just yourself."

Did the woman start every sentence with the word Oh? Oh? And what other, truer words did it leave unsaid? And what other, truer words did it leave unsaid?

"Thanks for the invitation," Flora said. "See you then."

And Cynthia hung up without saying good-bye.

Mrs. J. had described her as "after something." Was she now after Flora Flora? Was she wooing the daughter, as she'd wooed the father? Or was Mrs. J. right that it was the house she wanted? Flora's father's bedroom had been sprinkled with some unmistakably feminine touches-a gratuitous gla.s.s bottle on the dresser, what looked like a vintage silk scarf, red and floral, laid like a runner across the mantel. Cynthia had certainly spent more time there than Flora over the last year. It had probably come to feel like her house as she gradually, month by month, began to make herself more at home in it, as one does at a boyfriend's place, slowly colonizing the maleness-a new bath mat here, a ceramic coaster there-seeping in, claiming, detail by detail.

"But, technically, it's my house now, not his," Flora had reasoned against her mother's objection to sleeping over. "What if I decide to live here for the rest of my life? Will you never come visit me?"

"G.o.d, Flo," her mother had said. "You're not seriously considering that, are you?"

Her mother had fled from Darwin as soon as Flora graduated from high school, and talked about the town as if it were below Chern.o.byl on the list of places one might want to live. She had no use at all for nature-city parks presented too much greenery for her taste-and so Darwin's bucolic charms, such as they were, were another strike against, rather than for. She still talked about the move to Darwin as though Flora's father had brought her to the most backward of backwaters against her will.

Back in Darwin, Flora felt a sharp longing, like the quick thrill of a bitten tongue, to go back in time, to protect her younger self from what was to come. But then, she was going back, wasn't she? The word move move suggested action, suggested progress. But the move to Darwin, if that's what it was, the move into her father's house, and now his bedroom. What was she doing? She heard her mother's voice, her disapproval: suggested action, suggested progress. But the move to Darwin, if that's what it was, the move into her father's house, and now his bedroom. What was she doing? She heard her mother's voice, her disapproval: Flora, what exactly is going on with you? Flora, what exactly is going on with you?

Divorce-it was a glamorous word, a fancy word. Flora liked to say it like two separate words, stretching out the syllables: Deee-voa.r.s.e Deee-voa.r.s.e.