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  “I have to go. I’ll be late for class.”

  “Deposit’s due next Tuesday!” he called after her, as she started down the hall.

  Charlotte was the team’s top golfer. At her father’s funeral, her teammates had stared at the bleak mortuary carpet or the blown-up photo of her father that rested on an easel. Anywhere but at Charlotte’s face. They wished her “condolences,” said her father “was in a better place” and that she’d “be reunited with him in heaven,” words adults had poured into their mouths. After the funeral, she didn’t hear from them. Not one.

  “They feel uncomfortable. Give them time,” her mother said.

  “They’re uncomfortable?” Charlotte stripped the team photo from her bedroom wall.

  * * *

  Charlotte rode the bus to the doctor’s office after school. Nothing had changed in the waiting room. When she sat in a leather and chrome chair, her feet dangled above the floor. Hanging on the walls were photographs of roadrunners. At least the place had air-conditioning. She was early.

  Among the magazines on an end table was a Golf Digest special issue on the Masters Tournament. From the date, she could tell her father had been alive when it came out. She looked through it, so absorbed she didn’t hear the door to the office open. A client wearing tennis shoes and a visor shuffled out.

  “You can have it,” the doctor said to Charlotte as he motioned for her to come in. She stuffed the magazine into her backpack under a notebook and a bruised apple.

  The doctor held a white pad and a plastic ballpoint pen, the kind that came a dozen to a box and dried out if you left the cap off. Black socks bunched at his pale ankles. He settled into his armchair. “Your mother told me there was a problem with a parakeet.”

  Charlotte sat opposite him on the edge of the couch. “It was hot. She didn’t fix the air-conditioning. The bird died of the heat.”

  The doctor made a note. He scratched his ankle with the back of his pen. “That must have made you feel terrible.”

  She tried without success to read what the doctor had written. Sawing the seam of her jeans with her nail, she opened a small hole. She didn’t know how she felt about the bird. She hadn’t thought she cared, but the night before, she had dreamed about parakeets, dozens of pastel birds encased in miniature coffins. And that morning, over breakfast, the house had been terribly quiet, her mother speaking in hushed tones when she spoke at all. Charlotte poked her finger into the seam and widened the hole.

  The doctor’s ballpoint had begun to leak, staining his fingers.

  “Why don’t you get a better pen?”

  As he rummaged in his desk drawer, Charlotte found herself hoping he would bring out a silver pen that was cold and smooth, a pen with character, knowing at the same time he wouldn’t.

  He retrieved another crummy ballpoint and threw the other away. “How’s that?”

  The loss came back to her—her mother pulling her out of class a week after the accident to say her father had died. Charlotte had been to see him only once. His eyes stayed closed the entire visit. As she laid her hand over his, a machine sucked thick breaths for him, another beeped the rhythm of his heart.

  Outside the school, she and her mother sat in the car. A radio DJ talked about a new pizza chain. Loudspeaker announcements and class bells floated in through the open windows, while her old life, with her father at its center, floated out. Even if Charlotte wanted to tell the doctor how that was, she couldn’t. The muscles in her face had gone slack. She bent down and pretended to look for something in her backpack, hoping the doctor wouldn’t notice her hands shaking.

  When she got home, Charlotte changed from the ripped jeans into shorts.

  Sitting at the desk in her bedroom later that day, she told her mother, “I’m not going back to the doctor.”

  “Yes, you are.” Her mother plucked the torn jeans from the floor.

  The magazine Charlotte had taken from the doctor’s office was spread out before her, along with dozens of other golf magazines her father had kept. She had gone through them and cut out her father’s image and now she had piles of him, driving, putting, riding in a cart. “Seeing the doctor won’t help. He doesn’t know anything about me.”

  Her mother sat on the unmade bed. “Then you’ll have to fill him in. You can start by telling him what happened to Mellie.”

  “You don’t see a shrink.”

  Examining the ripped jeans, her mother said, “Maybe I should.”

  Charlotte stared at her. “What would you talk to him about?”

  Her mother shrugged.

  “I think you cared more about the bird than about Dad.”

  “I can care about more than one thing.”

  * * *

  Charlotte and her mother ate dinner at the mall to escape the heat. The air-conditioning at the house was still broken. After the meal, they strolled past an ice-cream shop. Names of a dozen flavors were painted in pastel colors on the window, and the smell of a freshly pressed waffle cone drifted out the door. Charlotte remembered the kid behind the counter growing exasperated when her father wanted to sample every flavor. “How else will I know which is best?” her father had asked, tiny plastic spoons accumulating in his large hand, while Charlotte hid behind her mother, pretending not to know him. Now she wished she’d tried all those flavors with him.

  Three women in shorts and sneakers powered by, step counters on their wrists and plastic water bottles in their hands. Regret lodged in Charlotte’s chest. What a small thing it would have been to give the bird water.

  A man wheeled a toddler in a stroller. Outside a toy-shop window, the boy pointed and said, “Truck,” and the man repeated it.

  “Ollipop,” said the boy, as they passed a candy store.

  “Lollipop,” the man corrected, bending to dust bangs from the boy’s eyes and kiss him on the forehead.

  Charlotte watched, unable to turn away, until the pair disappeared into a restaurant. She wondered how long the boy would have his father and how he would lose him. When her mother took her hand, she didn’t object.

  In a pet-shop window, a parakeet cocked its head. “Is this where you got him?”

  “He was supposed to cheer you up.”

  “It was like you were gone, too,” Charlotte said to her mother’s reflection.

  “I know.”

  Charlotte leaned forward, her fingers smudging the glass. The bird had a blush of red feathers on its face and green markings on its wings. Charlotte saw other birds, too, but none of them was Mellie, who was buried, wings ruffled and dirty, under chicken bones and mashed potatoes. Parakeets, cockatiels, and African grays, seeds and pellets, screeches and chirps, filled the store. Charlotte turned away, dragging her mother along, birds continuing to flutter before her eyes. When they came to an exit, she pulled Elisha through, welcoming the ferocious blast of heat that made it impossible to think or remember.

  * * *

  When Charlotte got home from school the next day, she saw her mother’s Lexus parked in the garage, though Elisha should have been at work. Charlotte called out to her in the house and then went outside and discovered her mother sifting through a bag of trash. It had been three days since Charlotte had disposed of Mellie, and the garbage truck was due any minute.

  From the tops of fences, crows cawed to one another over the whirr of a compressor. The air-conditioning had been fixed.

  Her mother had rested the garbage bag on the ground. Next to it lay a trowel. “Try the other one,” she said to Charlotte, looking toward a second bag that was still in the container. Charlotte set that bag next to the first. She kneeled and uncinched the tie before thrusting in her hands. She felt the parakeet before she saw him, just where she had buried him, and lifted him up. His feathers stuck out in clumps. With a crumpled napkin, she tried to wipe off jelly, coffee grounds, and potatoes, but succeeded only in working the mess deeper into his feathers. Closing her eyes, she saw his wings beating, heard him singing a nineties pop song. But of co
urse when she opened her eyes, the bird was as still as ever. It was too late for anything she once could have done. Charlotte tried to hand Mellie to her mother, but Elisha passed her the trowel instead. The bird was Charlotte’s now.

  L’Chaim

  No music accompanied Lila Orr’s entrance into the deserted hallway of her parents’ home. No one played the famous wedding march that she and Morris Hirsch had settled on after deciding they were too old to get married to the Rolling Stones.

  The musician had left hours before. From experience he could tell the difference between the jitters and a decision reached in the eleventh hour that the thing was better off not done. He had packed up his organ and congratulated himself on getting paid in advance. Lila’s parents had retired to their bedroom, her father still sniffing the cigar he’d planned to smoke during the reception.

  Silk shoe straps hooked over two fingers, Lila stepped into the yard to find the corgis humping under the chuppah and the cat cleaning its fur. She walked barefoot down the aisle on rose petals whose edges had begun to blacken. Lila waited for the dogs to finish and then picked up Molly, the female. It helped to hold something alive as she surveyed the elegant wreckage.

  Twenty rows of white wooden chairs populated the lawn. To rent a chair for twenty-four hours cost five dollars. Was it possible she had spent a year of her life on such things?

  Holding the dog under one arm, she snapped a few pictures with her phone. She wanted desperately to forget the day, but there would be times when she might want to remember it. Refusing to come out of the study was the bravest thing she had ever done. Better to have said no two years before on Coney Island when Morris presented the two-carat ring in a clamshell that still smelled like the sea. Morris’s voice was just as nasal then; he had the same habit of correcting her. Better to have broken it off then. But not as brave as breaking it off now, bringing humiliation on herself and Morris, and risking her father having a heart attack among his accounting partners and golf buddies.

  She wondered what had happened to all the food (forty-five dollars per person for plated grilled salmon and vegetables, an organic locally grown salad). Did the caterer take it down to the shelter, her instructions for the leftovers? She could have eaten a whole salmon. Three pieces of wedding cake with buttercream icing. She was that hungry.

  Relief overshadowed her embarrassment. For the first time in days—since her final fitting, she realized—her lungs expanded to fill her chest. She noticed the scent of crab-apple blossoms and the breeze caressing her neck (her hair was still pinned). It was spring and she was alive and she would not marry Morris. The Pottery Barn goblet that was to be crushed under Morris’s heel as part of the ceremony sat on a small table next to a bottle of Manischewitz. She set the dog down, broke the seal on the wine, and filled the glass. The glass would not be broken, not that afternoon, maybe never. “L’chaim,” she said to herself, “to life.”

  A Cat Called Grievous

  In the end we were a family. Not like yours, maybe, but one that suited us, and we stayed together a long time. Like most families, we began with two. Then, when Weldon and I had been married for seven years, he discovered the cat, curled inside a fleece-lined boot on our porch. We could have named her Boot.

  “Eugenia, come see her,” he called. Excitement saturated his voice, which was ordinarily tentative.

  The boot lay on its side. The cat was hidden, all but her face, a mass of black fur with a streak of blond down her nose and yellow eyes. Hiding places were plentiful on the porch—boxes half filled with newspapers to be recycled, empty planter pots—but nothing as warm as the boot.

  “She’s had a litter,” Weldon said after she crawled out, teats stretched like putty and hanging low. His lips trembled, and I thought he might cry.

  I took his hand, squeezed the rangy fingers, rubbed a thick knuckle with my thumb. Under other circumstances, we would have called her Mama.

  Her kittens were gone, eaten by coyotes, perhaps. Every day she prowled through snowdrifts that hid the withered Colorado landscape, wailing as she searched for them. She returned at night, wet fur pasted down, shivering. Ignoring the bowl of warm milk and plate of sardines we put out, she crawled into the boot.

  After a week, she stopped going out. She sat on the porch, long neck stretched toward a shark-gray sky, howling for hours. We called her Grievous.

  Another snow fell. It topped Weldon’s tractor-trailer, and the hulking machine loomed even larger. Thick flakes swirled around the house, stuck to the windows in clumps, and slid down leaving watery trails. Drifts buried the boot. Grievous crouched behind a box on the porch, taking shelter from the wind.

  “What do you think?” Weldon asked. “Should we let her in?” I nodded. He held the door open, jiggling the knob. It was his nature to feel rejected, so I knew he was concerned she would refuse us. As I backed up, clearing a path, she crept in and settled under the sofa.

  In the room we called the nursery, its pale pink walls stenciled with sheep, I slipped a mattress from the empty crib. Above, a black-and-white solar system hung cobwebby and desolate. On the opposite side of the room stood a dusty changing table and a dresser that had never been used.

  “What are you doing?” Weldon asked from the doorway, his voice wavering.

  “Grievous can sleep on it.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “What baby?”

  I tucked the mattress in a corner of our bedroom, a luxurious cat bed, but Grievous ignored it.

  A few days later, I sawed a hole in the front door and covered it with a rubber flap. Grievous came and went as she pleased, while at a nearby worktable I stitched dresses and tailored suits. I paused each time I heard the slap of the rubber, glad she had her freedom, relieved when she returned.

  We took her to the vet to be spayed. As I lugged the cat carrier, I imagined it was a bassinet. I thought a baby would coo pleasantly, but the cat moaned, protesting her abduction.

  “Too many cats already,” the vet said, smiling in a way that told me she enjoyed extracting reproductive organs and mopping up blood. She was small and energetic, with pointy ears, like a bat.

  The steel examination table shone, and I had second thoughts about interfering with nature. Grievous had lost one litter already. Afterward, I admired the neat cuts the doctor had made.

  Grievous recovered and hurtled through our neighborhood, pouncing on mice and chipmunks. Outside our dining-room window, she caught a rabbit. Her head vanished inside the creature and then reappeared, pink intestinal pasta dripping from her whiskers.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” I said.

  “You want me to take a picture?” Weldon asked.

  He was joking, but I did. If not to display, then to keep in my wallet, a reminder of nature’s ferocity, which I admired. Yet it seemed indecent. I shook my head no.

  Weldon wrapped his long arm around my shoulders, pulling me to him. I remembered the way he had comforted me early in our marriage when I failed to get pregnant, telling me that without a child we could continue in the way of newlyweds. “We won’t have to share our bed,” he said. “At least not for a little while.” He kissed my eyelids, throwing me into a welcome darkness. Unbuttoning his shirt, I grasped his springy black chest hair, pearled his nipple between my teeth. I mounted him on the couch, pleasure erasing our disappointment.

  Back then when he was on the road, hauling dry goods to Mississippi and New Jersey, he’d call me when my favorite song, Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine,” came on the radio. We’d sing it together, road noise backing up his airy voice. He enjoyed the weight of the truck beneath him and how responsive it was. Rarely did he return home without a gift, not from gas-station shops, but from boutiques he had ferreted out in unfamiliar towns—an antique perfume atomizer, rare fabrics for my work, a picture of the two of us inked on a grain of rice. In those days, I greeted his return with the delight of a young child.

  * * *

  In the spring after Grievous
came, Weldon and I took walks after dinner. We struggled to find things to say to each other, the years having exhausted our best stories. How many times could I hear that Weldon had nearly drowned in a reservoir when he was eight, discovering too late that the shore had receded and his friends had abandoned him? He already knew I had been expelled from high school for puncturing the fuel tank on an English teacher’s car after she gave me an F. We remarked on the weather and the damage winter had done to the roads.

  One evening, we passed a toddler riding a tricycle in front of our house. In a neighboring yard, a Doberman hurled itself against the chain that secured it to a tree. We had gone only a few steps when the chain snapped and the dog leaped onto the child, knocking him from his seat. The dog lunged for the boy’s soft neck, and the child screamed. Before we could reach them, Grievous appeared and vaulted onto the dog’s back, raking claws through its hide. The dog spun from boy to cat. We grabbed the toddler and ran inside, while Grievous escaped up a tree.

  The next night, the child’s mother brought Grievous a pot of catnip, setting it on our porch. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “He cracked a tooth in the fall and his palms were bloody, but thanks to you and your cat, he’s alive. He’s my only child. You can’t imagine what it’s like.”

  What did she mean by that? I pushed the plastic pot toward her with my foot. “Grievous doesn’t like catnip.”

  “We’re just glad she could help,” Weldon said and led me inside.

  * * *

  Our house was large, with three bedrooms in addition to the nursery, a playroom, and a formal dining room. It was crammed with heavy furniture, heirloom secretaries, and mahogany dining and bedroom sets. Before Grievous, it had felt empty.

  We had planned to have a large family. Weldon and I were only children, and we had inherited all our parents’ material goods and all their hopes. My father had been an astronomer, and I fantasized about girls in velvet jackets winning the science fair and curly-haired boys discovering stars they named after us. But after years of noting my temperature on a chart, of harvesting and implanting and miscarrying, I gave up. Not so with Weldon, who continued to hope for a miracle.