He went on sketching the apple tree in the yard, just beyond his bedroom window until he couldn’t bear the aching nothingness of the afternoon and went down the stairs to stand in front of the open refrigerator.

“If you’re hungry, Timmy, decide what you’d like to eat before opening the fridge door. You’re letting all the cold out,” his mother said.

Timmy swiped a yogurt from the second shelf though it wasn’t what he wanted. He let the door slam and watched his mother jump. He left the utensil drawer open after removing a spoon and sat down at the weathered farm table to eat his banana strawberry yogurt from the carton. He didn’t realize that his mother was comparing him to his father. He didn’t know that his mother was busy considering whether or not standing in an open fridge or leaving utensil drawers open were learned or inherited habits. He hadn’t sensed that, just last month, she had considered leaving.

“You’d better get your cleats, Timmy,” his father called from the home office. “Ten minutes to game time.”

Timmy looked to his mother who shrugged. He had hoped that they could all forget about baseball. His mother seemed willing, eager even, to overlook the entire sport but his father came into the kitchen punching the inside of his well worn glove, the one he’d had since high school. It smelled of twenty year old sneakers and slightly of piss.

“Today’s the day, Timmy. Maybe they’ll let you pitch an inning or two. I’m guessing you’re going to hit today. I’m thinking a double or a home run,” his father said confidently. Unable to strike the right tone, his father’s over-the-top optimism only underscored the true insecurity he felt as a man who had fathered a son who had, so far, managed to strike out and miss pop flies to right field each and every weekend afternoon for the past three months.

“Don’t forget to wear your cup. I’m thinking you might get to play catcher for a bit,” his father said.

“I don’t want to play catcher, Dad,” Timmy said. Just thinking about the other team stealing bases while he bobbled the ball behind home plate made him feel nauseas.

“Don’t be silly, Timmy. You’ll be a great catcher,” his mother said sweetly though she wouldn’t come to watch the game. She had learned to leave her husband to the task of coach and spectator as he was possessive of the role, embarrassing in his urgency.

Timmy filled his mouth with another spoonful of yogurt and left the half empty carton on the table for his mother to dispose of while he climbed the stairs to find his cap and glove.

“Nonsense. Your mother’s right. You were born to catch,” his father said as he walked out the back door to start the car and wait for Timmy in the driveway, the engine running.

“Hurry,” his mother urged from the foot of the stairs. “You know how your father likes to warm you up a little before a game.”

Timmy sat on the floor of is bedroom and wriggled into the tight polyester stretch of his baseball pants. He paused to remember the last game he’d pitched. It was unfortunate that his debut on the mound had coincided with his father’s first time volunteering as umpire. Being earnest and eager to show he would play no favorites, his father had been ruthless with the calls. Timmy walked six batters and was taken out in the bottom of the third. His next at bat was a three swing strike out. Standing behind him wearing the official face mask and chest plate, his father had kicked the dirt in frustration and later cried in the shower wishing his son, Timmy, had turned out at least the athlete he had been.

Lara Shepherd bounced the ball four times on the service line before drawing the racket back behind her head and releasing the ball into the air. It rose, spinning and arching just slightly away from her. It was an imperfect toss and anyone watching, as Richard was, could see that her serve would fall short of the net. But with her service action already underway, there was nothing for Lara to do but chase the ball.

And in the momentary pause between imperfect release and rattling uncentered connection, she was busy deciding that love was too strong a word, and entirely the wrong thing to say when announcing she had nothing. Still, she said, “Love-Fifteen,” loud enough to be heard by her opponents before rocking back on her heel and hitting the ball into the net for the second time. The doubles team positioned to receive her serve, standing purposefully, one up-one back in their matching tennis ensembles on the far side of the net, was not particularly fearsome or accomplished. The duo did nothing to sway her timing or alter her resolve. It was her own preoccupation with the definition of the word Love, so flippantly tossed around here on the tennis court, day after day, that distorted her focus.

“Sorry,” she said to her partner who smiled wanly, trying to be forgiving and replied, “Take your time. Breathe deeply.” Lara quit apologizing and concentrated on being less restless and divided.

“Love –Thirty,” Lara called after the double fault, now serving from the deuce-side of the court. She still had nothing and she was still forced to call it love.

Lara adjusted her short white skirt, dragging it down around her hips and tapped her racket on the ground once before beginning the whole syncopated motion of the serve all over again. She thought, even if this love thing has grown thread bare and tattered, shouldn’t it be enough that we still have an affection for the things we share; attractive children once called cherubic but now too old at twelve and nine to be compared to angels, matching Volvo SUV’s, a new house with arched dormer windows situated in a neighborhood full of cul-de-sacs and startlingly similar colonials all lacking character but tastefully appointed, settled onto one acre tracts, surrounded by lush lawns bordered with lilacs and viburnum and rhododendron bushes.

She knew these shared affections were certainly more than nothing. But she couldn’t help but think that the effort she expended improving her athletic capability, adjusting her backhand, perfecting a top-spin lob, must underscore her certain unhappiness with the whole of things. She looked forward to her time within the cavernous hangar of the indoor tennis club, immersed in the sounds of balls leaving rackets and the emphatic shouts of out-loud scoring and the hoarse and incessant voice of coaching and encouragement because it was here that she found herself capable of broad focus, here she approached something close to suspended thought, giving in completely to the sensations of executing a proper forehand.

In this space, she had learned to quiet her mind, to suppress the dull but persistent whine of unhappiness that instantly returned once she had zipped her racket back into its black nylon cover and walked out the door into the parking lot, shoulders hunched against the wind. Usually she was just thankful for having occupied a present space, if only for an hour or two, before slipping back into a state of pressing anxiety about past and future.

Richard, sitting on the balcony, feet up on the railing, fished a turkey sandwich from a plastic baggy, the same sandwich on wheat bread that comprised the lunchtime meal he ate day after day in stolen moments between lessons. He immediately noticed Lara’s faltering concentration. The sweet way her right foot kicked out behind her when she reached toward a bad ball toss. In fact, if he was being honest with himself, he noticed everything about Lara Shepherd and he was beginning to feel slightly anxious about this preoccupation. There were other women, attractive women, with whom he flirted. It was just part of the job description, the distinct advantage of working with sweaty, scantily clad females. The constant proximity to the opposite gender made the sameness of the daily drills and stroke corrections entirely bearable. But there was something about this one woman that made him compulsive and wanton.

Startled by the obvious strength of his affection, Richard removed his feet from the balcony railing and crossed his legs to hide the swell of his excitement. He turned away from her court to collect his thoughts. He was, for the first time, thankful that his sexual arousal was no longer that of youth; his erection now a rush of blood and a stiffening but not an outward thrusting bulge that would have been obvious through his Adidas track pants.

He focused on the appointment with his accountant he had scheduled for the afternoon. He pictured his wife of thirty years in her bathrobe asleep on the couch in front of last night’s episode of Survivor, her mouth slightly open and a dribble of saliva dripping off her chin. He began the ritual of silent self-chastisement, recognizing the obvious weakness, the compulsion that drove him to position himself by the front door at just the time Lara would be leaving so he could watch her departure. He knew that it would leave him empty and wanting, but it was an exit he felt helplessly compelled to witness. He stood beside the door and kicked it open for her as she crossed the threshold.

“See you tomorrow, Richard” she called as she hurried down the steps, checking her phone for messages, searching her purse for the car keys.

“Tomorrow. See you then,” he said holding the door open with his foot a little longer than necessary just long enough to watch her turn the corner, remarking to himself just how much he loved the way she said his name.

Matt Clemens, hurrying through the lobby, heading out to Court Three to give a one o’clock lesson, spun his racket in his hand and made a chucking sound of disapproval. “Richard, Richard, Richard,” he scolded. And Richard turned on his heel quickly to hide the fact that he was blushing. He hated Matt Clemens, the timbre of his voice, high pitched and whining with disapproval. He loathed Matt Clemens in this moment for making him feel somehow obscene and predatory…

My Mother’s Day was quiet and nice in the way that a Spring day that remains mostly sunny, hosts the fragrance of lilacs and viburnum and begins with good coffee can be. The kids planned a scavenger hunt complete with hand written clues on white pieces of paper, the edges of which G had treated with the special care of pinking shears. The sweet and loopy scrawl of her six year old hand led me from one plastic bag of gummy frogs found behind a framed photograph of her one year old self enjoying her first lollipop to another plastic bag of chocolate covered gummy bears discovered on the window sill amongst O’s owl figurine collection and back to a last bag of gummy letters tucked beneath the Cabernet colored throw blanket that was tossed carelessly along the back of the couch.

Long before six a.m., I could hear her, busy in her room, cutting and whispering and fluttering with purpose and the pride of being old enough to participate and contribute. She hurried to MBH’s side of the bed just past 6:30 to rouse him and remind him of the importance of the day. I groaned and turned over, trying to be cooperative by feigning sleep for an hour longer so that the three of them could plan and execute their gummy hunt and travel to Starbucks and back to regale me with a giant hot latte and a early a.m. rice crispie treat.

I’d like to say that I spent the rest of day reading and dozing and doing crossword puzzles but it was really just a regular day that involved jogging and laundry and yard work. It wasn’t until this afternoon, during the kids’ piano lessons that I opened The Short Stories of John Cheever for the first time and now believe I may never put it down. It was the perfect spot to find my new favorite writer, the vast and artful space of an old and flaking Victorian, the room with a piano at the back, flanked on one side by a floor to ceiling book case of poetry compilations and volumes on art history, a teasing, wanton sun peeking in and out and momentarily lingering on the east wall hung with portraits and weavings and pen-and-ink nudes – an art teacher’s collection of her favorite students’ work. Each corner, every inch of wall space the host to something visual and arresting. There I ran my hands along the aging spines and rested on the thick orange hard cover of Cheever’s life work. After reading two stories, The Seaside Houses and The Angel of the Bridge, absorbing every bit of brilliance despite the halting pluck of children striking off keys and errant chords, I am lost to his words, so taken with his descriptive aptitude that I worry I may never write again. Who needs my contribution when we’ve already got passages like the following to adore and admire:

“God knows where they all come from or where they go, this host of prosperous and well-dressed hangers-on who, in spite of the atmosphere of fraternity they generate, would not think of speaking to one another. They all have a bottle hidden behind the Literary Guild selections and another in the piano bench. I thought of introducing myself to Greenwood, and then thought better or it. I had taken his beloved house away from him and he was bound to be unfriendly. I couldn’t guess the incidents in his autobiography, but I could guess its atmosphere and drift. Daddy would have died or absconded when he was young. The absence of a male parent is not so hard to discern among the marks life leaves on our faces. He would have been raised by his mother and his aunt, have gone to the state university an have majored (my guess) in general merchandising. He would have been in charge of PX supplies during the war. Nothing had worked out after the war. He had lost his daughter, his house, the love of his wife, and his interest in business, but none of these losses would account for his pain and bewilderment. The real cause would remain concealed from him, concealed from me, concealed from us all…”

I’ll leave you with this, now excuse me while I go and worship this compilation just a little longer,

“…as she grew older her way was strewn with invisible rocks and lions and the eccentric paths she took, as the world seemed to change its boundaries and become less and less comprehensible.”

Breasts bared in a cool dark room,
Nipples stand and swell in the glow of iniquity,
This is how he’ll remember it-
Just an outline, a vague light creeping
From beneath silken drapes, closed for privacy.
Tilted hips on a soft white bed.
The fragile trill of her laughter beneath the palm of his hand
Resting in her stomach’s soft hollow.
Where he traces the words
That threaten to escape him. The timid silence of need
Rendering him speechless.
Longing and holding in the late afternoon
Laced with impending heartbreak.

She talks to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her lips damp with rum, her cheeks glowing with drink. He is only sharing the truth with someone, anyone. There is no harm in this. She manipulates her shirt back into the waistline of her denim skirt, she smoothes her hair and purses her lips. She stares at herself long enough to discern the slight difference between her two eyes, one just a hair smaller than the other. And she returns to the kitchen where Ted offers her another full drink that he has busied himself with in her absence.

He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequately attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.

And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the counter top to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that they have been working towards for months.

It begins almost perfunctorily. Efficient is the word that occurs to her, and she finds herself oddly and inexplicably pleased by this. The way he accomplishes seduction like it is just another task on his long to-do list.

His hand traces the swell of her breast from the rise of collar bone to the stiffening nipple. He draws at her shirt, dragging it up and over her head. He takes a nipple tenderly in his mouth. She weaves her fingers through his hair, her thoughts drifting. She wonders whether every mouth on every nipple the whole world over feels exactly the same sense of ownership, so powerful an exchange established between one small nibble of flesh and the rub of a tongue.

He surprises her by withdrawing from her breast and kissing her strongly on the mouth, pressing in hard against her, an act she finds more invasive than intimate. He kisses her in a way that is surprisingly different from the kisses she has exchanged with her husband of ten years. There is a deeper yearning, the earnestness of need.

And for a moment he has taken her breath – quite literally. He is not kissing her so much as inhaling her, an act that leaves her dizzy and resistant.

She is so busy maintaining her balance, so intent on restoring breath that she misses the exact moment he removes her panties, bunches up her skirt and enters her. Quickly, without warning, he explodes within her. And just like that he has transformed a kiss into possession, as simply as if he has swallowed something she once held on the tip of her tongue.

She leans forward, uncertain about whether she is pursuing the open kiss or the thing that he has taken from her. But he has withdrawn, panting with the effort expended having staked his claim. He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper profound thoughts that elicit torrents of great relief.

She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.

As he stands and stretches, she is exposed, her face like a diary accidentally left open to a particularly awkward passage. He turns to fasten his pants, to re-button his shirt and she feels just the slightest surge of gratitude because he has not noticed her disappointment.

She quickly straightens the hem of her skirt and tucks in her own shirt. She lets her hand rest on his shoulder briefly before she lets herself out. He is back sipping at his drink, now mostly dilute, all melted ice and mint leaves.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other.

For a short time, she wears the effects of it like a school girl with a secret. She is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth. But the secret fades and each day becomes more ordinary as she slowly lets go of the hope she long held for the thing between them. As she suspected it might, her life goes on much as it did before, without the romance, without the new fluster and flush all bundled up in her wish for love.

She returns to her husband, to her young family because she knows her children think their father hung the moon. She assumes her role as their mother, bolstering this quaint notion for at least a little while longer. And, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul forgives her the trespass.

Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court only one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.

I quaked with recognition, so much so that I let rip a great big guffaw of familiarity, when reading the line, “If you are a person who loves Alice Munro and your going out with someone whose favorite book is The Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

I can’t help but think that My Better Half directed my attention to this article to highlight the fact that we are, literarily at least, compatible. It’s his way of reminding me that we chose each other for our intellectual curiosities. His subtle way of highlighting the fact that he thinks my high school boyfriend is a dumbass, while he, My Better Half, the father of my children, has read Dickens and Moby Dick and Hemingway and Faulkner and not just for college English but for fun, for recreation, for love of the written word.

This is not to say we read the same things, he and I. His bookish preferences run to the decidedly male end of the spectrum. He claims that every literary novel written by a woman contains the requisite rape scene and he just can’t stand the predictable subject of violation. While I know this to be untrue, I can settle into the fact that he’s not going to take as much as I do from the stories by Grace Paley or Lorrie Moore or Sue Miller or Virginia Woolf. There are distinct gender differences in this reading thing.

He prefers non-fiction to fiction. I am a short story, fiction-only-please, kind of gal. If he deigns to indulge in a little pulp, it is always of the murder/mystery variety and not Dean Koontz or whatever schlock is out there but, rather, Chandler or Philip K. Dick and the occasional Ross Thomas.

If I’m feeling flighty and distracted, I am more apt to grab something sweepingly popular off the best seller list. I can still enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love even though I know it’s been read by Oprah and every book group in America. I am, admittedly, fascinated by popular fiction, at least in part because I envy the mediocre writer their astonishing and surprising success and am always trying to figure out what exactly has propelled a particular book of questionable value to the apex of popularity. I find literary success of any kind hopeful and reassuring.

To My Better Half, the rise of popular fiction only bolsters his opinion that the entire country is comprised of semi-literate morons. The more fuss there is surrounding a book, the less credibility he thinks it deserves. I can’t remember the last time he’s read a best seller of the fictional variety. Currently he has Dashiell Hammett’s Crime Stories and Proust’s Swann’s Way on his night stand while I have Grisham’s Innocent Man on mine. (Disclaimer: It’s my first Grisham and it’s actually non-fiction and I’m only reading it because it contains a lot of the legalese I’m desperate to master in preceding to finish the true-crime novel I’m working on, but still, it’s Grisham, and it’s there beside the bed. I’m quite sure My Better Half is shocked and horrified by its presence in our shared chambers.)

Admittedly, I have loved My Better Half’s unapologetic superior intellectual shtick. I have, at times, found it kind of hot. But right now, I just see it as reason to be annoyed that he won’t sit on the couch with me on Tuesday night and enjoy American Idol like everyone else in the free fucking world. If we’re not watching Masterpiece Theater, The Wire or a Sundance film, he retires to the office to surf the internet and listen to political speeches and catch up on programming blogs. I’m totally alone on the couch trying to groove to the sounds of David Cook doing Billie Jean. I wish he could ditch the pretense for just a little while and take some pleasure in the decidedly fun aspects of popular culture, after all there is some inherent value in Justin’s SexyBack and Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and the occasional Wally Lamb novel if only because these shamelessly popular examples of pure fun, of entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I tire of having to be learning something from someone at all times. Just sitting and receiving and doing little work in the process of being distracted has its own charms and advantages, ones I have come to appreciate more as I age.

Still, as said in the NYT piece, there has to be some substance that counteracts the fluff…”Most of my friends and men in my life are non-readers…but now that you mention it, if I went over to man’s house and there were books about life lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequate and attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.

And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the countertop to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that she has been working towards for months.

He is an efficient lover and it is a brief but satisfying coupling, free of promises or possessions, that allows her plenty of time to collect herself on the ride to parent pick up.

He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper anything profound that elicits a torrent of great relief. She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.

Despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other. She feels ordinary and slightly defeated. She begins to sleep again. She can feel herself returning to the present.

It is over as quickly as it began. And for a time, she is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth, like a schoolgirl with a secret. She suspects that, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul had already forgiven her this trespass.

Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the Gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.

She is just about to shower when Paul begins to rattle the knob and pound at the door. He knows how she hates to be disturbed while mired in the morning routine. Still he feels entitled to disturb his wife, unclothed, just stepping into the steaming start of her day. He is risking a full day’s wrath. Kate is given to enduring grudges, punishing his trespasses with protracted silences and the occasional nasty barb.

She has already wiped the countertop free of toothpaste and suspicious hairs. She has scrubbed the toilet seat with Tilex. She has used a damp paper towel to collect the lint and dirt and pet hair that had drifted into corners.

Paul is banging so hard that he can barely hear her call out, “Is it too much to ask? Just one shower? Undisturbed?” She wishes she has turned the lock. She has given up entirely on the notion that he might try to understand her need for quiet, the occasional moment to herself, and has taken to hiding out behind barred doors in the house they share with their two children on a quiet street in an expensive suburban town with planned parks and greenways and a dozen private elementary schools where she and her family are supposed to live out their lives, together and happy.

“I’ve got a question,” he says through the bathroom door. “Do you think there will ever be a morning when you don’t wake up a bitch?”

She is stretched thin and flinty from another bad night’s sleep. The long hours spent laying face up in the darkness of their room, watching the rapid revolutions of the ceiling fan, listening to Paul snore softly and mumble incoherent nothings in his sleep, have made her mad with wanting. She is deeply, deeply afraid that she may never sleep again. Each night a little worse than the last. A self perpetuating cycle of insomnia fueled by persistent thoughts of another man, not the one who moans softly and snuffles on the pillow beside her, but the one that lives across town, the one that has, subtly and sideways, invaded her day life, her night life, become the one true thing her hectic mind can rest on.

Because she hardly sleeps, she hardly dreams. She lies still and imagines. And it doesn’t feel that wrong or wanton, being there beside her husband and thinking of another. Because as hard as she tries to conjure this other man’s hands on her stomach at the small of her back, brushing softly her inner thighs, she can only imagine her head resting on his chest while his arms are wrapped tightly around her.

She is incapable of sexual thoughts of carnal lust and physical satisfactions. But she can almost feel him kiss the top of her head and her stomach aches with the sensation of something long wanted, finally fulfilled.

She is overwhelmed by a certain peace, by the notion that she would gladly die in this man’s arms. She drifts off momentarily and wakes to find herself very much alive and sick with wanting to slip back into the fleeting dream. She can’t quite recall the exact words he has spoken to her as he held her in this imagined and important embrace. But it has inspired flooding relief. It must have been something simple and pure like, I am here now.

Before laying down each night, she is never wholly aware of feeling dissatisfied or fragile, but now, at first light, it is all so completely wrong without him. She practically writhes with the indignity of it -this desire for completion – so un-progressive, so solidly antiquated an idea.

She climbs from the bed just before dawn to make her ritual tear around two miles of golf course and back to the smallish Southern Colonial that has been recently painted a deep coral color with crisp white shutters.

She hurries, pounding, panting sprinting through the quiet, forgetting to admire the day in its rose toned beginnings, consumed by this girlish crush, sick with the anticipation of getting there, ridiculously eager to begin shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation, anxious to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Kate hasn’t taken the time to detect the subtle shift of seasons, the increasing moisture in the air at daybreak, the languid whooping of the Myna birds as they prepare to fly south before the terrible summer and its lashing rains and bugs and horrific storms.

She is used to a more obvious heralding of spring; the dramatic resurrection of the daffodils, the collective scent of manure and early apple blossoms, the first bloom of forsythia and the return of the gold finches and robins. She is not equipped to notice the quiet shift that is winter to spring in the Tropics, her faculties of perception dulled and depleted by the energy expended thinking urgently about a man nearly twenty years her senior.

As Paul explodes into the bathroom, she stands poised on the edge of the tub, running clothes piled into the hamper, the bathroom full of the strong and reassuring smell of cleaning products.

“I’ve got an 8:30 conference call. Just need to grab something,” he says, removing a prescription bottle from the medicine cabinet, filling his dress pant pocket with a handful of Prilosec.

“What’s your day look like,” he asks, a stab at atonement for the previously nasty exchange, an attempt to reach her in the place she has gone recently, a location decidedly distant and distracted.

“Just more of the same. Astrid. Zaida. Jose…About ten other clients that promise to drive me mad,” she says. Omitting the name Ted O’Malley from the list feels like a tiny deception but one she is willing to live with.

“You need a new job or a new attitude. Either one. You choose,” Paul says.

“Since you’re feeling like my life-coach this morning, you could drop the kids at school for me,” she calls to him as he leaves the house. He simply waves as he walks out the front door. Either he hasn’t heard her request or has decided to ignore her. He is already checking his blackberry for phone messages and e-mails, busy launching a day that does not concern her.

Paul’s refusal to do carpool might make her late this morning and she hates the way she’s tried to dodge a duty she usually performs with some measure of satisfaction.

She has always liked to start the day by shaking each teacher’s hand before relinquishing control of her children. She has considered the morning meet and greet less an attempt to curry favor than an opportunity to give each instructor a look in the eye, to remind them of their precious charge, that they and they alone have been trusted to guide and advise her grade-schoolers in all things that happen between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. She has thought it advantageous that they have a healthy respect for her piercing gaze and her vise-like grip.

But in the last few weeks she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understood the basis for that kind of attraction until now. A mother to two children, a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age have little to do with it. There is an impossible and intoxicating allure in the flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She is caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only five weeks since she began working for Ted and his wife, landscaping their property on Alfonso Court. And just that quickly it has come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him, just briefly, in the morning before the sun is full in the sky, before the plodding and ordinary tasks of the day, has taken on the urgent tone of infatuation.

Initially, she was reluctant to help them revive the garden. When she first walked the property, she had thought the house hopelessly unattractive with its trite palm tree plaque above the front door, a leaky pool decaying in the back yard, the pink marble floor tile throughout the first floor. Among the tear downs on Alfonso Court, she considered it a questionable keeper. There was nothing but the low and grumbling sound of destruction on the block; one more pile of concrete rubble to haul away to God Knows Where.

But Ted’s young wife, Astrid, has insisted on the restoration. She has brought a sort of intensity to the task that underscores the fact that she feels the house possesses something like a soul. Kate thinks that Astrid has, perhaps, confused the concepts of rejuvenation and salvation, intent on restoring the building to its previous grandeur but with a modern injection of Feng Shui principles and some silly notions of death and rebirth that she’d picked up at an Ashram in India.

Kate has been simultaneously amused and irritated by Astrid’s tendency to suffer so acutely about things like the proper placement of the water feature. She has had to suppress giggles of disdain on several occasions, like when Astrid confessed that a Feng Shui expert counseled her to abandon the new house. The guru of questionable qualification had pronounced the whole layout inauspicious. Astrid had whispered this revelation as if saying it aloud would somehow activate the Dalai Lama to unleash unhappiness, cancer or, at the very least, ingrown toenails.

And at first, Kate had wondered about their peculiar arrangement. Ted and Astrid. She struggled to identify that which sustained their attraction, something beyond the obvious and the carnal. She imagined the temporary exuberance of their initial romance, long limbs tangled in late morning romps; the spontaneity a surprise to Ted, past mid-life. But now, she can see that their tolerance for one another has grown thread bare and strained. She enjoys watching Ted barely manage a tight lipped patience for Astrid’s decadence and the financial ramifications of her whimsy. She is acutely aware that Ted can hardly endure Astrid’s whimsical musings on paint color and leaf texture.

Kate can admit to herself, within the mental transgressions of her day, that Ted is not conventionally handsome. She can see his obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has gradually come to admire his more subtle attributes. She has noticed the effort he expends staying fit, the muscular definition of his chest and arms distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth. She has grown fond of his quick but shy smile and the strength of his hands.

It has become ritual for Kate and Ted to walk the perimeter of the property each morning. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules, allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. He seems to enjoy the effect he has on her, the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I don’t know the difference between a jasmine and a plumbago and still I rush home each night to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion,” he says. “It’s like you’re creating the Garden of Eden just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the bed of newly planted Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day?” She has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning in March and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone she hopes might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness. Later, remembering the remark, the gesture of his hand, she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She has begun to flirt and dabble, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his daily calls to go to voice mail. She saves his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, clever suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about perfectly ordinary topics like sod selection and installation schedules.

She allows herself to think of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self when replaying these voice mail messages in the quiet moments of her day.

She warms with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do to let him go each morning. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her away from her day destined to be increasingly dull and disappointing in the wake of their early morning encounter. Instead she is stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Occasionally Astrid walks out with Ted in the morning and he is careful to maintain a polite distance. He allows Astrid to do all the talking, excusing himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end.

“Sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she stings and hollows with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his apology for the forced distance. When it comes, that call is like the return of something elemental and sustaining. Her lungs and diaphragm expand into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

Finishing the last of her bad coffee, too strong, a murky cold blackness, Kate pulls up onto the newly installed lawn at a quarter to nine. (It has taken ten years to adapt to this ritual peculiar to South Florida. A native New Englander does not, at first, casually drive on lawns.) She is only fifteen minutes late and the driveway is already packed with a full fleet of vans and pick-ups that belonged to the electricians, painters, and various subcontractors madly revamping the house.

Kate has missed Ted’s departure by only minutes and she wilts with disappointment, seeing Astrid on the front steps, smoking, still in her morning robe.

As she makes her way to the front door, she steals furtive glances at the garden. There is something almost pornographic about the unrestrained fertility of the earth and the visible density of the air, heavy with pollen and the smell of ripening mangoes. The plants are a damp and startling green in the weak morning light. She congratulates herself as the garden appears to be blooming and expanding, struggling only slightly as the South Florida Spring, its ruthless sun and brewing heat, has just begun in earnest.
Astrid rises to meet her with a measured nonchalance as if she has not been waiting for Kate at all but been doing something far more important and has been interrupted at that essential task.

With shoulders hunched and feet shuffling, Kate braces for the cheek to cheek. Where she comes from, true warmth is a brisk handshake or a casual wave with an observation about the weather.

“I’m beginning to worry about the garden. We’ve spent $20,000 dollars so far and…” her voice trails off, and, as if for emphasis or maybe as an insult, Astrid tosses her cigarette into the planted bed beside the door.

Kate’s begins to sweat. Dampness develops in the creases of her baby-tee. She maintains a sense of calm by reminding herself that Astrid knows nothing of her affection for Ted.

Astrid sets off along the cedar mulch path, wending her way through the densely planted anthuriums, white throated spathiphyllum and fragile begonias, occasionally crushing a newly installed plant or tripping over a hose extension.

“What do you think about these plants here in the front of this bed? The one with all the dead flowers,” Astrid says.

From the beginning Astrid has insisted on Gardenias by the front door, caught up in the idea of them, their heavy fragrance evoking the pure essence of the South, their glossy leaves conjuring up gracious porches where sweet tea is served.

“Don’t you think the smell will be heavenly when we come and go?” Astrid had said in her way of making hyperbolic statements in the form of questions.

Kate had tried to talk her off the Gardenias. She always thought them a messy, imperfect shrub, never meant for close up scrutiny as all the deliciously fragrant blooms hanging bent and brown and dying, before they drop like crumbs. She has always thought it disappointing to get too close to a Gardenia.

“The Gardenias were your idea,” she says hoping Astrid will recognize the impatience in her tone.

Astrid sighs audibly and reached into her robe pocket for her cigarettes. As she cups the lighter and bends to the flame, her eyes grow bright with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She dabs at her eyes with the sash of her pink and silky robe that reveals tanned cleavage while catching suggestively around her legs. “It must be all the hormones and the pressure of this construction that just seems to go on and on and on.”

Kate begins to sink into a state of panic, thinking that, perhaps, she will have to speak of menstrual cycles here on the lawn, in the light of day.

“Ted and I are expecting. I’m a little off. Overcome at the strangest times,” Astrid manages between exhaling and crying and wiping her nose.

“Expecting what?” Kate asks.

“I’m three month’s along,” Astrid says glancing down her nose at the cigarette. “I know I’m going to have to quit, but the garden, the painting, the kitchen remodel, it’s all so discombobulating.”

Kate is too stunned for comment and they stand silently, side by side, watching the clogged fountain in the northeast corner of the garden struggle to produce a dribble up through the fountain head.

“Is this a surprise?” Kate finally blurts out before self edit.

“Ted’s not happy,” Astrid says. “He says he’s done the family thing.”

Kate senses that Astrid wants more than a discussion about Gardenias. She wants a friend, a fellowship. She craves shared secrets about deliveries and hemorrhoids and chapped nipples.

But Kate can manage only paltry attempts at consolation as she is suppresses her urge to vomit.

“Be patient with the plants, Astrid. We’re just entering the growing season now. All of this will soon explode with growth,” she says. “I’ll give Ted a call and let him know that we’ve decided to let things settle in,” she shouts over her shoulder, blundering to the car and ducking inside before she is asked to recommend pregnancy books or pre-natal classes, or even worse, before Astrid begins her regular musings on Ch’i and the proper direction of the universal energies.

Kate is foolish with tears as she grabs her cell phone and listens to the last four messages she has saved. She listens for even the slightest indication of his waning affections. Something she might have missed, some hardness, some measured distance in his voice. She finds nothing to suggest his disaffection and she feels the betrayal acutely though she knows she has no right to it.

She imagines Ted already at the office this morning, working up real estate deals, generating the kind of money required to resurrect 61 Alfonso Court in the manner compliant with eastern philosophy. And she rehearses the conversation she will have with him about Astrid’s concerns, carefully planning her comments in order to mask her outrage.

She dials twice but can’t force herself to press Send. She is afraid this is the end of it – the thing between them that never really began. Though she knows that this is as good a place as any to cut it off and resume her regular life, she is powerless to make the call.

Instead she cancels the rest of the day’s appointments and drives home to sulk and weep in the quiet of her empty house. She phones her best friend, Amy, who will surely talk her off the tottering ledge, will right her wobbling emotional stability.

She tells Amy everything including her inability to properly fantasize a sex scene with this man, that she can only conjure their holding each other in some sort of profound embrace.

Amy, nothing if not matter of fact and efficient says, “Oh honey, you’re way gone. I can tell because he’s become something like your very own version of God. You’ll be okay. Let yourself miss him. We all do, honey, we all do. Miss God, I mean.”

And Kate weeps softly with disappointment while she drafts a fraught letter, hand written and blurry at the edges, a note she will later crumple and tear and tuck safely beneath the cereal remnants in the garbage pail, a hand drafted good bye to man she hardly knows beyond the space he occupies in her brain.

In the days to follow, Kate finds herself driving by the house, feeling a little flare of happiness when she notices that Ted’s car sits alone in the driveway. She secretly celebrates Astrid’s absence, imagining her sporty Nissan gone to the grocery or to meditation class.

The grass at Alfonso Court begins to grow long. Leaves accumulate on the driveway that is still sullied with mud and the trappings of construction. She is remarkably satisfied by the way things are slipping into wild, lush abandon without her careful pruning and expert attention.

Her cell phone rings incessantly, all day – clients, contractors, Paul calling to say he’ll be late coming home. Again. Despite the phone’s cheerful chirp and chatter, Ted’s silence is deafening and distracting, enticing her to elicit the attention she needs above all else, beyond water or food or breath.

Kate conjures multiple excuses for stopping by Alfonso Court, deciding on the best, most believable one before committing to the task. She decides it is her duty to return there under the pretense of Gardenia surveillance. “I am merely keeping my word,” she repeats to herself as she approaches the front door. She declares, firmly to herself, I won’t stay long. The kids will need to be picked up, the dog walked before dinner preparations.

The sound of the bell is an echo in what appears to be a nearly empty foyer. She can see that the paintings and furniture, carefully selected and arranged according to Feng Shui principles, have been removed. There is scant evidence of inhabitance save for a pair of men’s driving shoes and a pile of mail on the hallway floor, just inside the door. Kate avoids looking at the plants, clearly suffering neglect. She pauses there, preparing, working herself up to the task of goodbye while Ted comes thundering to the door, uncharacteristically expansive and spectacularly drunk.

“Kate Adams? Well, come in. Join me. I’m set up for Mojitos.”

“That’s okay. I’m just following up on the garden. When I last saw Astrid I told her I’d come by and check things out in few weeks.”

“I appreciate that,” Ted steps aside and makes a sweeping gesture, ushering her inside though she has vowed to stay well outside that front door, poking around in the garden, making lists of maintenance requirements.

“Update,” Ted says. “Astrid’s long gone and I’m selling the place before sinking another dime. You don’t have to worry about fulfilling any promises you’ve made. You’re off the hook.” He leads her back to the kitchen overlooking the pool gone filthy green with neglect.

“Jesus, Ted, it’s a mess out there. You can’t put the house on the market with a yard looking like that. Let the guys come by and finish the driveway. Make it look appealing from the street.”

“It’s just an investment for me Kate. The whole idea was to flip it. To improve it only slightly and turn around and sell.” He is crushing mint leaves with the back of a spoon as he speaks, efficient and intent on his host’s task despite the fact that he is several drinks deep and his usual tailored appearance had been replaced by a more disorderly version of his former self, untucked, unpressed, like he’d been sleeping in that particular dress shirt and pair of pants for days.

“The whole project took on a life of its own. Astrid really began looking at this as a home not a return investment,” Ted says as he fixes her a drink in a suspiciously cloudy glass. She sips at it, sloshing it around, making polite and companionable sounds with her ice cubes. After all, she thinks, it’s not even four o’clock.

“Sounds to me like you’ll be needing something like a real home in another few months,” she says.

He glances up quickly, something wildly apologetic and shameful in the way he meets her gaze. “So you think I’m an asshole for not being enthusiastic?”

“No. I think you have every right to be wary of it, at your age. God, I’m tired of the parent thing and I’m only thirty-six.”

“Kate, she took everything. She’s staying with a friend in Pompano for awhile.”

“It’s just an argument. It’ll blow over,” Kate says, between gulps of her Mojito that she now drinks with vigor, needing something to do with her hands while sustaining uncomfortable conversation, the alcoholic equivalent of chewing her nails.

“Jesus, it’s more than an argument. It’s an existential divide,” he says.

Kate wonders at the powers of alcohol. How loose Ted seems with these private details like there is penance in having this conversation, here , with her, in the afternoon at an empty house, save for the clear rum and the tumblers and the sound of a broken pool pump.

Kate, sitting at the bar stool across from where Ted stands, feels her presence there inevitable, scripted, like she is the recipient of his shame.

He covers her hand with his own. She registers the weight of it as comfort and companionship. Their two hands like a pre-game cheer, resting there beside the glass she had drained of the sweet, severe taste of alcohol.

“Astrid’s beautiful, right? And, it was easy for me. Relationship-lite,” he says, fairly whispering this admission. “Promise you won’t get all righteous on me before hearing me out,” he says while moving around the granite island to sit on the stool right next to hers.

“I needed that light thing for awhile after what was long and serious and dramatic. Truth is, I was married to another woman for thirty-six years and she’s dying right now in Winston-Salem where she lives with her mother and sister while doctors pump her full of chemo and radiation and all the other shit that buys a person a few agonizing, painful years.”

He runs that very same hand, that was only minutes ago resting atop her own, through his hair with a restlessness and agitation that he’s been drinking at for some time.

“Marilyn’s leaving me is a long story that reflects poorly on me. But it was two years ago. You almost get over a thing before another one bites you in the ass.”

Kate fumbles with the spoon that has little specks of chopped mint pressed to its back. She suppresses a powerful urge to leave. She feels he deserves to tell this story, and she is perversely relieved that she had been wrong in her previous assessment. She had always assumed that he had deserted his former wife for the younger Astrid. The fact that he is the one that has been abandoned surfaces like hope. Now she won’t need to hold him accountable for such a severe disloyalty.

“I guess a person can kind of derail when faced with death,” Kate offers now, as consolation.

”No, it wasn’t sudden like that. Thirty five years after you’ve met someone, there’s not much left of the old charge. You keep at it because it’s the right thing to do, because you’re Catholic and watching the thing die on the vine is expected. When she learned she was sick again, she decided to leave. She didn’t have the energy to keep pretending. After the initial shock of it, I found a distraction…”

“How do you know what’s happened to her, to Marilyn, I mean?” Kate asks.

“I get information from our three sons. I wait for phone calls, updates about end of life care.”

Kate stands abruptly, urgently needing to use the bathroom if just to gather remove from Ted, to ponder the suggestion of that hand.

She talks to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her lips damp with rum, her cheeks glowing with drink. He is only sharing the truth with someone, anyone. There is no harm in this. She manipulates her shirt back into the waistline of her jeans, she smoothes her hair and purses her lips. She stares at herself long enough to discern the slight difference between her two eyes, one just a hair smaller than the other. And she returns to the kitchen where Ted offers her another full drink that he has busied himself with in her absence.

He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequate and attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.

And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the countertop to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that she has been working towards for months.

He is an efficient lover and it is a brief but satisfying coupling, free of promises or possessions, that allows her plenty of time to collect herself on the ride to parent pick up.

He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper anything profound that elicits a torrent of great relief. She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.

Despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other. She feels ordinary and slightly defeated. She begins to sleep again. She can feel herself returning to the present.

It is over as quickly as it began. And for a time, she is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth, like a schoolgirl with a secret. She suspects that, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul had already forgiven her this trespass.

Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the Gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.

But in the last few days she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understand the basis for that kind of attraction until now. With her own children and a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age had little to do with it. The flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She has spent the past few weeks caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only three weeks since she’s begun working for him and just that quickly it had come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him has taken on the urgent and ominous tone of obsession.

When she had first been hired to revive his garden, she had not considered him conventionally handsome. There were some obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has grown to admire the effort he expends staying fit. His muscular distinction distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth.

And despite the initial lack of physical attraction, gradually she finds herself arriving at the property early, shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation in order to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Together they walk the perimeter of the property. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. Smiling and nodding, he enjoys the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I’m enjoying this so much,” he says. “I can’ wait to get home each evening to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion. It’s like the Garden of Paradise is beginning to grow just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the planted bed of Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day,” she has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone who might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness as she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She begins to play at being coquettish, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his calls to go to voice mail, saving his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, possible suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about sod selection and installation schedules. She allows his recorded voice to remind her of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self. She smiles with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or just to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do each morning to let him go. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her with him, where ever he is going; her day destined to go down hill after their early morning encounter, stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Some mornings his wife walks out with him onto the driveway and he is careful to let her do all the talking. He excuses himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end. “Excellent, excellent. All sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she will sting and hollow with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his call, needing his apology for the forced distance. It comes four or five hours after she has first begun to check for it. And it is like the return of something as elemental and sustaining as air, her lungs and diaphragm expanding into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

It isn’t more than this until it is…

Mizmell has tagged me and I am supposed to grab the book nearest to my left elbow and open to page 123. I am to find the fifth sentence on the page and copy the next three sentences after the fifth here in this blog. And while three sentences in the middle of a book aren’t usually all that telling or descriptive of a novel or a writer’s talent as a whole, when I selected the book nearest me and opened to the designated page, I liked what I found. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Amy Hempel is a wizard with words and even the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences of the 123rd page do her justice. I keep her compilation of short stories on my desk beside the laptop. I begin my day with her. Opening the book at random and finding inspiration in the way she strings a sentence together.

This is how it looked: a car in the driveway, a light on upstairs. But nobody answers the door. I know what I would have done as a child if there was somebody home on Halloween night who did not bother to answer the door. I would have come back with shaving cream and eggs, with toilet paper and friends.
~Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

She’s nailed it. It’s a simple thing but she has conjured memory: me and Megan Cisneros tormenting the neighbors who failed to produce adequate loot on Halloween night with mailbox pranks and doorbell ditching and all manner of obnoxiousness well into November. Now, twenty year’s later, I can only think that the citizens of Fredrickson Road can thank their lucky stars that paint ball had not been invented in 1983.

But there are other books here in the stack beside my laptop and I can’t resist the urge to see if these authors, the ones I begin my day with, like stretching my calve muscles or exhaling deep breathes, the ones who help me prepare to write, will they manage the same brilliance on a random page, mid-story?

Next in the stack is Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.

“Bill, divorced only once, is here tonight with Debbie, a woman who is too young for him: at least that is what he knows is said, thought the next time it is said to his face, Bill will shout, “I beg your pardon!” Maybe not shout. Maybe squeak. Squeak with a dash of begging.”

Okay, I allowed for four sentences but they were short and the fourth really just modified the third and seemed too brilliant and utterly necessary to Bill’s character and predicament to have left it out.

I could go on like this forever. The stack of books beside me is rather monumental. I could open each at random and see what wordy treasure lies within. It’s an enticing way to spend a weekend, but, in the interest of time and because memes are supposed to be short, slap dash, even whimsical, I’ll just do one more. It’s here and it’s handy: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

“I have donated to the couple from the women’s shelter, and to the little boy from the youth group, to the woman from the Green Party, the kids from the Boy’s Club, the pair of solemn teenagers from SANE/FREEZE. The Berkeley-ness of Berkeley, so charming at first, is getting old. The bell rings.”

The bell rings. Did you read that? Of course the bell rings and Eggers has me reading on to see who will answer the bell, to find out which needy pan handler is on the doorstep. This is the beauty of Eggers, I think I’ll read three sentences and a half hour elapses and I’m well into page 150 when I remember that I’ve got a post to finish.

And just for kicks, I want to see how I stand up to the professionals. So I randomly select a page from my own story, Habeas. Since I have not written 123 pages, I settle for page 43, five sentences in:

“The interior of my mother’s car her true reflection, a jumble of paper coffee cups, packages of wasabi peas and soy nuts, a full ashtray, discarded tank tops and blousy skirts, windows clouded with road salt and the dingy filth of cigarette smoke, the windshield hazy and opaque with neglect. She bends forward over the steering wheel and her arm shoots out in front of me at every stop as if to stall my possible trajectory through the front windshield. I am forever ten year’s old in her mind.”

There’s my shameless pitch for my own writing and for that of Hempel and Moore and Eggers and of course for Amazon book sellers and all things reading related. Go forth and be literate. (I’m supposed to tag some others, so Jennifer, Slouchy, Xsd and Ron, if you’re having a slow week and feel like sharing a passage from the book beside your left elbow, please play along.