"Up in Ontario" Glimmer Train, Spring 1992

"South" Ploughshares, Winter 1997-98

"When My Mother Remarried" read on WBUR (Boston) 1999

"Five Tuesdays in Winter" Ploughshares, Fall 2005; reprinted in Contemporary Maine Fiction (Down East Books, 2005)

Five Tuesdays in Winter

Mitchell's daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn't hate them. He just didn't like having to chat with them, or lead them to very clearly marked sections (if they couldn't read signs, why were they buying books?) while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.

His daughter loved the customers. She sat behind the counter at the cash drawer every Saturday, writing up receipts in an illegible imitation of his own microscopic hand and chatting like an innkeeper. She was too tall and too sophisticated for a Maine preteen. She made him uneasy. She had recently learned the word "reticent" and used it on him constantly.

"Isn't he the most reticent person you've ever met?" she asked Kate, his only other employee.

"Maybe not the very most," Kate said, not looking up from her pricing.

"But he's--"

"That's enough, Paula," he said, then, feeling an unexpected pulse of blood to his cheeks, fled to the stockroom in back.

Mitchell had good ears, and just before he shut the door behind him, he heard Kate's gentle reprimand: "I think as a rule people don't like being spoken of in the third person."

He'd hired Kate three months ago. She'd recently moved to Portland from San Francisco for a man named Lincoln. They lived in a small apartment in the East End. On their machine, Lincoln sounded high-strung and full of anticipation, as if he only ever expected good news after the beep. Despite her strong résumé, Kate had unexpected gaps in her knowledge of books. She had never read The Leopard or Independent People. She had never even heard of Thomas Bernhard. Once he overheard a customer ask how many lines were in a sestina, and she didn't know. She was a reader (she borrowed and returned as many as ten books a week) but not a speller. On the dupe sheet, she wrote J. Austin and F. Dostoyevski. At the end of the day, when she stapled the credit card receipts to the ticker tape totals, she didn't always align the edges evenly. She let the pencils run out of lead. She had thin, sometimes dry lips which she picked at when she was thinking deeply and which he would have liked to kiss.

Wanting to kiss Kate was like wanting a larger savings account for Paula's college education or one of those infallible computerized postal scales for mail orders. It was a persistent, irritating, useless desire. He had been on two dates since Paula's mother left. The first one, over five years ago now, had been a set-up, a friend of a friend. They'd gone to an Italian restaurant for pasta putanesca. She'd picked out all of her capers and left them on the lip of her bowl, explaining that she was allergic to shellfish. Then she'd wanted to talk about his wife's departure. The story—his college buddy Brad coming to visit from Australia and leaving a week later with a box of live lobsters and Mitchell's wife—seemed to arouse her. He couldn't bear take her out again and lost the mutual friend as a result. Thankfully, others had left him alone.

He hadn't been devastated when his wife walked out. People vanished. It had been happening all his life. His mother died when he was six, his father nine years later. His best friend from childhood, Aaron, had found a lump on his back—Mitchell himself had spotted it first on the beach--and he was dead by Labor Day. Even his favorite customer, Mrs. White, had died within a few years of the shop's opening.

Mitchell stood at the stockroom's one window and watched three gulls flap restlessly above the harbor. Thick broken slabs of ice, the size of mattresses, had been pushed to the shore by the tide. Out farther, beyond the frozen crust, the open water shimmered a luminous summer blue. In these kinds of cold spells everything seemed confused. Even the gulls overhead seemed lost.

Later that afternoon, Paula said, "Kate speaks Spanish." Kate demurred from where she was shelving, but Paula overrode her. "She does. Did you know that, Dad?"

"Mmm-hmmm." He was going through a mildewed carton a student had just brought in. They were good books, without writing or highlighting on any page, but the bottom edge of nearly every one had a pen and ink drawing of a hairy testicle.

"That's my icon, in my frat," the student said. "It's a --"

"I know what it is." Mitchell was sharp, even for Mitchell.

Paula glowered. She was trying to train him to be more forgiving of his patrons. That was her campaign, ever since she'd grown tall, learned words like reticent, and found him flawed.

After the frat boy had gone, Paula said, "I was thinking. Kate could help with my Spanish conversation."
Kate approached the counter as if she were a customer. "I'm not a teacher. I just lived in Peru for a couple of years."

"Are you fluent?"

He could see from her face that it was a rigid question. "By the time I left I could say pretty much anything I wanted. But it's been six years now."

She would have been living in Peru when his wife left. He hoped, with an uncomfortable swell of feeling, that she had been happy there, that if his and Paula's life had been redirected, like the course of a river, she had been the recipient of those higher waters. Full of this fervent thought, he headed, for a reason he'd forgotten, to Anthropology.

Paula found him there, staring blankly at the spines on the shelf. "She said she could come on Tuesday evenings. Can she?"

"If you think it will help."

"I've told you Mr. Camargo never lets us speak."

He did not say that she'd never mentioned this before.

To the store, Kate wore faded, untucked shirts and jeans slashed at the knee. He was often tempted to tease her, tell her that just because she sold used books she didn't have to wear used clothes, but he thought she might snap back with a crack about the pittance he paid her, so he refrained. To the first Spanish lesson, however, Kate walked up the path to his door in wool pants the color of cranberries. Tuesday was her day off. Perhaps she'd had a late lunch date downtown with Lincoln. Worse, she might have had a job interview. It was an easy thing to find out. She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she'd give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.

Paula called from her room and he directed Kate down the hallway. The door clicked shut and he heard no Spanish, just peals of laughter, for the next half-hour.

He'd planned to do some paperwork before starting dinner, but when he sat down at his desk, he pulled out Kate's application instead. 2/14/68. Just as he'd remembered. She was well into her thirties, plenty old enough to be Paula's mother. So what was she doing in there, giggling like a seventh grader? Her birthday was coming up. On Valentine's Day, no less. Maybe she'd quit before then. She might expect a gift, or he might want to give her a little something and she'd take it the wrong way. Or Lincoln would.

They emerged from Paula's bedroom flushed and watery-eyed, speaking gibberish. He quickly slipped the application back in its file.

"Entonces, nos vemos el sábado, ¿no?" Kate said.

"¿Sábado? Sí."

They passed his desk without noticing him.

"Bueno. Hasta luego, Paula." She added an extra half-syllable to his daughter's name.

"Adios, Caterina."
They kissed on both cheeks, as if in Paris.

He waved from his chair, not wanting to break the flow with clunky English.

When she came to their house the next Tuesday, she wrote down on a slip of paper (a bank receipt, he saw later, that stated she had $57.37 in her account) from her coat pocket her new address and phone number. She was moving closer to the store.

"With Lincoln?" Paula asked, and Mitchell for once was grateful for her prying.

"No," Kate said, as if she might say more, then didn't.

"Why not? He has such perfect teeth."

Paula read the question on Mitchell's face and said, "She showed me pictures of him."

Long after she'd gone, he got up from his reading to start supper and realized the slip of paper was still crushed in his hand.

The second and last date Mitchell had had after his wife left was with a woman who worked in the insurance office next to his store. Sometimes she'd come in when she got off work, and even though she talked too much and only looked at the oversized books with photos in any given section, he agreed to go to the movies with her when she got up the nerve to ask him. They chose a comedy, but she kept whispering in his ear right before every joke, so that everyone in the audience was always laughing except them. He'd come out of the theater excruciatingly unsatisfied, far more unsatisfied than a movie whose jokes he'd missed should have left him. He felt abstracted and disjointed, and it occurred to him that the sensation was only a slight magnification of what he felt all the time. He couldn't wait to get back to his car in the store parking lot and drive away. But she was in an entirely different mood. She nearly twirled down the street, swayed not too subtly against him, and asked if he'd like to get a coffee. He said no, without excuse.

The next day while he was unpacking a shipment of remainders in the stock room, he heard her through the wall. She was on the phone with a friend. "No," she said, "it wasn't that bad. It was fun, actually...Yeah, he is, but I kind of like that...(huge hoot of laughter)...I do... All right, details. Let's see...The high point? Oh God. Let's see..." Mitchell left the box half full and went back to the front of the store. That day he didn't stay till closing but left at quarter of five. He did this for a week straight until one evening when his former employee, the employee before Kate, had a dentist's appointment and he'd had to stay. She didn't come in. She never came in again. He saw her crossing the street once, and another time she was behind him at Westy's, the take-out place up the block, but they didn't speak. He couldn't say when he stopped seeing her altogether, when she must have left the insurance company, over a year ago, maybe two.

He listened to Kate's new message: Hi. I'm not here. Say something funny and I'll get back to you. But her voice was not hopeful. It was the voice of someone stuck in Maine for no good reason.

The only time he ever got any information about her was on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the week, without Paula, they worked together in the uninterrupted professionalism he'd established the first week of her employment. It was as if she'd never stood in his living room or giggled in Spanish with his daughter. He often hoped that Paula would bring up Kate's name in the evenings, let something slip about her he didn't know, but she never did. She spoke instead of teachers, friends, projects, a concert she wanted to go to. In history she was studying Watergate, and she wanted to know what he knew about it. His friend Aaron had been an intern in D.C. that summer of the hearings, the summer before Mitchell saw the hard knot on his spine. He and Aaron had talked on the phone a lot, sometimes until two or three in the morning, passionate talk about the implications of impeachment and then, that hot August, the resignations. Paula waited for Mitchell's version of the events, but what he remembered most now about Watergate was the feeling of being nineteen in a one-room apartment, and the sound, though it had been silent for so many years now, of Aaron's hyena laugh. Finally, when he began to describe the break-in, Paula said she already knew all that, and when he said that it was the end of an era, the government's undeniable breach of faith with its people, she said her teacher explained that, too. So he told her about his one-room apartment and how Aaron's laugh nearly broke his eardrums, and she was inexplicably satisfied.

On the third Tuesday, as Kate was leaving, the phone rang. Paula ran to answer it. It was for her, of course, so Mitchell walked their guest to the door alone. She was dressed up again; she had put her coat on carefully so as not to wrinkle her soft ivory shirt. She had thin, straight hair that she'd probably complained about (as Paula had about hers) all her life, but which was clean and shiny and soft-looking. Again he wanted to say how nice she looked but instead said that he hoped she was keeping careful record of her tutoring hours. She nodded that she was and told him he didn't have to keep reminding her. He was embarrassed she remembered he'd said this before. It was his default line; it came out of his mouth when he wanted to say other things to her.

He watched her walk to her car which, during the lesson, had received a light coating of snow. He wondered if she'd brush off all the windows, or just the front and back. She didn't do any of them. She just got into the car, put on the wipers, and, without looking sideways to see him standing unconcealed at the window of his brightly lit living room, drove away.

"Kate has a date," Paula said, catching him in the act of watching her car disappear around the corner.

"Lincoln?" he asked hopefully, more comfortable with an old rival than a new one.

"They're over. With some guy she met at the store."

"My store?"

"She just said tienda, but I think so."

"She told you this in Spanish?"

"That's why she's here, isn't it?"

"Sí," Mitchell ventured uneasily.
The next day he told Kate she'd have to start addressing flyers for the sale he had every April.

"I don't mind at all, but you do know it's only the first of February."
He remembered her approaching birthday and the dilemma about Valentine's, and said, "There are over a thousand to send out, so we should get started on it."
He set her up in his office in the back, and waited on the thin stream of customers himself.

"Call if you need help," she'd said before he shut her in.

"I will." But he knew even if there was a line ten deep he wouldn't call.
Around two, a young man in a dark green parka came up to the counter. Mitchell knew he was going to ask for Kate, and when he did, he explained that she was busy at the moment. He was careful not to indicate in which direction she was so busy. Unperturbed, the man asked where the art section was, then slowly made his way towards it, lingering at the new arrival bin, the poetry shelves, mythology, psychology, before arriving at art. If he pulled out a book, he replaced it exactly as it had been, flush with the other spines and the edge of its shelf, just as Mitchell liked them. But he had bad posture which made the bottom of the coat hang away from his body.
He could see Kate looking at her watch as she came out of his office. He couldn't think of any way to keep her from coming forward.

She looked down all the aisles until she found him.

"Hey," Mitchell heard her say.

"How're you doing?"

"A little disoriented." She flexed her hand, the one that had been addressing flyers for the past five hours. Her friend didn't ask why, and Mitchell was pleased that he shared this information with Kate alone. "Let's go," she said. Mitchell's spirits plummeted.

She hadn't mentioned leaving early. She had to stay until six. She came around the counter to get her coat and scarf. "I'm going to grab something at Westy's. Want anything?"

He'd forgotten all about lunch. "No," he said, even though he was suddenly starving. "Only mushroom soup."
It was a very small joke they had. Once, about four years ago, Westy's had served, for one day, the most delicious mushroom soup he'd ever tasted. They'd never offered it again, but he'd never stopped looking on the specials board for it, every time he went in. Occasionally he put in a request, but the teenager at the register clearly had no say over soups.
Commercial Street was covered in a thick, lumpy layer of ice, and they crossed it slowly without touching. But they were talking a lot. Blue puffs came out of their mouths at the same time. They opened the door to Westy's and disappeared. They'd probably eat at one of the booths. He couldn't very well complain if once in the three months she'd been working there she ate her lunch there instead of bringing it back.

There was a couple in the far room whispering in fiction. He'd been pricing a stack of books he'd just bought from a composer, but now that Kate was gone he'd lost his concentration. He went down the aisle her friend had chosen, and pulled out, one by one, the books he'd looked at. Each one was a decent book in a sea, he acknowledged with familiar shame, of mediocre books. He would have liked to have an intensely intellectual selection -- no confessional poetry, no mass market psychology, no coffee table crap. But as it was, business was precarious. Most intellectuals were like the composer: selling, not buying. A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find books only in those colors. Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

"Hey, where are you?" She pulled on his sleeve. "I got it! Mushroom soup!" She held up two containers. She was smiling as wide as he'd ever seen. Her nose was red and dripping and beautiful. "It better be as good as you promised."

Hadn't she already eaten? Where was the guy in the green coat? How much did he owe her? Questions swarmed but stayed behind the tight knot in his mouth.

There was always one stool behind the counter and another that he used to prop open the door in summer, which now stood by the coat rack nobody ever used. He'd once wanted the store to be a homey place, the sort of place where you come in and hang up your coat and stay awhile, but it never had been. He'd never given any customer the impression that he wanted them to stay awhile. Kate found this other stool and dragged it around back, so that the two stools were now side by side, with a bowl of mushroom soup on the counter in front of each one.

He felt as if he would burst. He'd read about this feeling in novels but he was sure he'd never experienced it. Meeting his wife had brought him pleasure, or a sort of relief, the mystery of whom to spend his life with solved--or so he'd thought. But he'd actually been fairly content before he met her, talking on the phone with Aaron, eating tuna in his little room, reading from the stacks of books borrowed from the store he now owned.

They took a long lunch. Customers, as always, were irritating and disruptive. They were worse in this kind of weather. There was a focus that went out of people's eyes. They often forgot what they were looking for and lingered absent-mindedly in the aisles. When an elderly woman finally made it out the door, Kate grunted, imitating the way he had responded to her gratitude for finding her a book.

"It was Middlemarch," he explained.

"Which is a great book."

"I know it's a great book." He was aware of how much like Paula he sounded when he whined. "But shouldn't she have read it by now? She's only a hundred and thirty-seven years old."

"She could be reading it for the hundred and thirty-seventh time. Or she could be giving it to her granddaughter. Or great-granddaughter." She seemed amused, entirely uninterested in changing him. He knew it was like that at first, with anyone. He also knew it might mean that she didn't care about him at all.

He tried to think of what it really was that had bothered him about the old woman. For once in his life, the thought turned instantly to speech, before he could stop it. "I miss Mrs. White."

"What?"

"An old woman who used to come in here."

"What was she like?"

Mitchell hadn't thought about the actual Mrs. White in a long time. When he thought about her now it was just a feeling, not a person, just a deep longing. He hadn't known her very well. She used to sit on the hard pink chair in science, reading Stephen Jay Gould. They'd shared a laugh once, when a girl a few years older than Paula moved swiftly through the store to the picture of Thomas Pynchon which hung on the back wall, and burst into tears. It was the only picture of Pynchon available then, and not many people had ever seen even that, a reproduction of his high school yearbook photo, teeth like a donkey's. "The only person who should cry over that picture is his mother," Mrs. White had said.

Kate allowed him his silence. She didn't try to reframe the question or ask another. Mrs. White would have done the same thing. What was she like? She was like you, he realized, watching Kate bend to take a sip of her soup.

"She was like you," he said, incredulous.
The following day he couldn't bear her to be so far from him, and told her, at the risk of her finding more dates, that she didn't have to spend more than an hour a day addressing flyers. He stayed at the counter with her, but they spoke very little. He pored through the boxes of books people lugged in from their cars, she took money from the customers, and in between they priced in silence. He wanted to ask her if she was planning to move back to San Francisco, or somewhere else, but every time he rehearsed it in his head, it sounded like a boss's question and not a friend's. Just before closing a customer came up to the counter and asked if they were related. "You two have the exact same kind of eyes," he told them. He was drunk and the comment was preposterous. Kate had warm thick-lidded brown eyes, and his were a narrow, suspicious green. The man didn't have a coat and they watched him lurch away into the frozen air. They were careful not to look at each other's eyes. It was only yesterday, the day of the mushroom soup, but it was already far away.

Mitchell comforted himself with the thought of Saturday, the day after next, when Paula would be there with them. But that night she told him she had play practice in the morning--she'd been cast Uncle Max in The Sound of Music--and that her friend Holly had invited her over afterwards.

Once he recovered from that blow, he saw on his calendar that the fourteenth of February fell on a Tuesday, the fifth Tuesday of Spanish lessons.

Saturday then Tuesday came and went, eventless. On Wednesday and on Friday it snowed. He woke up in the middle of the night thinking about snow clinging to the ends of Kate's hair and the slope of her back when she sat on the stool, then scolded himself until dawn. He tried to think of how to mention, off-hand, to Paula that Kate's birthday was approaching. But, as usual, she was three steps ahead of him. "I completely forgot to tell you," she said at dinner. "I asked Kate to stay for dinner next Tuesday. It's her cumpleaños."

"Her birthday?" He feigned uncertainty.

"Have you been listening at the door, Dad?"

He wished he had the nerve.

"What should we get her?" Paula asked.

"How about a brooch?" he suggested.

"A brooch? What's that?"

"You know a sparkly," he put his fingers on his chest, "pin thing."

"Oh my god. You are not serious."

"Then make her something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. A drawing. A necklace. Or, what about doing what you used to do to the gravel?"
"Dad!"

Mitchell, remembering the hours Paula spent with her rock polisher, lamented the loss of the driveway as a primary source of entertainment and gifts. He knew he'd have to drive Paula to the mall.

They saw Kate there that Sunday in the food court. She was eating a burrito, alone. Both he and Paula had the same irrational impulse to conceal themselves for fear that she would guess their purpose, and shadow her through the shops in order to discover her preferences. After lunch, she went to the perfume counters in Filene's. A saleslady offered her some powder on a brush, but Kate shook her head and said something that made the woman laugh. Mitchell's chest contracted slightly at being denied the words. Then they watched her weave through the smaller stores and their red streamers and glittering hearts and loud reminders with the words Sweetheart and Someone Special.

"She seems sad," Paula said.

Mitchell was relieved she'd noticed. He thought it was just his own wishful thinking.

Kate didn't buy anything. They watched her leave the mall, scan the parking lot for her car, then head toward it. There was nothing outside -- not above or below or in the woods beyond the mall -- that wasn't some shade of gray. The cold had eased and everything that had been solid was now a thick, filthy sludge.

"It's an awful time of year to have a birthday."

Paula agreed. They stood at the door Kate had walked through. She unlocked her car, lifted her long coat in behind her, shut the door, and sat for at least a minute before starting the engine. She'd been born in Swanton, Ohio. She'd had her appendix removed. She didn't like green peppers or people in costumes or Henry James. She had a mole on her head, just where her part began. With only this handful of facts, he admitted to himself as Paula drew hearts in the clouds she breathed on the plate glass, he'd begun to truly care for her.

They bought her a brooch and went home.


His wife had left because she claimed he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he'd ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she'd left him about grocery shopping.

There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He'd always been the same person. He marveled how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he'd never been anything but this one self. Perhaps it was because physically there'd been little change; he'd lost no hair, gained no weight, grown no beard. He'd read a great deal in the past twenty years, but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.

Still, on the fifth Tuesday, as Mitchell made dinner during the lesson, the lasagna noodles quivered in his hands as he placed them in the pan. He was as nervous as a schoolgirl. He wondered where that expression came from, for he had never seen Paula ever behave this way.

Nervous as a forty-nine year old bookseller was how the saying should go.

Kate had arrived with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates which he'd set on a table in the living room. He'd been so startled by the gift he hadn't taken in the rest of her, and now he couldn't picture her in Paula's room, sitting at the foot of the bed where they always sat (he'd often seen the indentation after she'd gone). Every now and then, as he went about preparing dinner, Mitchell glanced through the open doorway at the box of chocolates.

He was just putting the lasagna in the oven when Kate flew past.

"Where're you going?" he said, unable to conceal his horror as she flung her coat over her shoulders without bothering to fit her arms in the sleeves, and reached for the door.

"I'll be right back." The door slammed shut and he heard her holler from the walkway, "She'll be fine."
He went to his daughter's room. The door was open but she wasn't in it. On her quilt on the bed was a dark red stain and a few pale streaks. Her bathroom door was shut. He stood in silence before it.

"I'm okay, Dad." She sounded like she was hanging upside down.

"You sure?" He couldn't control the wobble in his voice.

"Kate's gone to get some stuff."
He actually already had 'stuff' in his bathroom; he'd bought it for her years ago, just in case. "That's good," he said.

He felt pleased that he was not overreacting, that he knew right away what had happened and hadn't called an ambulance. And then he looked down and saw the blood up close. He was holding the quilt in his arms. He didn't remember taking it off the bed. It was a quilt his mother had made and he had slept beneath as a child. The mottled stains seemed like warnings. Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn't understand her, didn't appreciate her, didn't love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.

"How do you feel?" he ventured.

"All right. Kinda weird."

"Your mother used to get terrible cramps." He waited for the clutch that came with talking about her, like someone had grabbed him by the chest hair. "She got headaches sometimes, too. She took extra iron. We probably still have some. They're green, in a white bottle." He waited, but the clutching feeling never came. "And she had a bullet birth when you were born, you know. Thirty-five minutes, I think. We barely made it to the hospital. Not that you want to be thinking of that right now." Sweat prickled his scalp. Shut up, he told himself. "One time she was wearing these white pants and--"

"Do you miss her, Dad?"

"No." He was astonished by the truth of it.

"I don't either anymore. I feel like I should miss her. All I really remember is her walking me to school and holding my hand and giving me big hugs at the door. But I always knew the minute she turned her back I was out of her mind completely. She wasn't like you. I knew you were thinking about me always."

She was revising now, creating new memories out of what she was left with, but his eyes stung anyway.

When Kate came back from the pharmacy, he retreated to the kitchen. He could hear her coaching Paula, first in the bathroom and then through the door. At times her voice was serious and precise; other times they were both laughing. After a long while, she came in the kitchen. She caught him standing there in the middle of the room, doing nothing. She touched the quilt in his arms. "If I run cold water on it now, it won't stain."

"I'll do it." He went down the narrow back hallway to the laundry room with the big basin, and she followed. He never expected her to follow.

He turned on the faucet. "You may have to undo some stuff I told her while you were gone. I babbled on about iron and pregnancy and probably scared the lights out of her."

"You babbled? I thought you were the most reticent man in the world."

"Every forty-seven years or so I babble."

She still had her coat on. It must have started snowing again. Melted flakes glinted like stars all over her.

They had to do the quilt bit by bit, wringing out one part before starting on another. He wished, as in a fairy tale, the cloth would never end, and they could spend the rest of their lives washing and wringing.

He heard the timer buzz, then the oven door squeak open.

They hung the quilt on the fishing line he'd strung up years ago. When they were done he could do nothing but look at her. She looked carefully back. Paula called them to dinner but they made no move toward the kitchen.

"Why do you think," he asked her, "that man said we had the same eyes?"

"Maybe he saw something similar in them."

"Like what?"

"Fear." She looked away. He'd forgotten how disappointing these conversations could be.

"Desire," she added quietly.

Love, he thought. It would come out soon enough. Words and feelings were all churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn't try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest.

She brought her hand to his face. It wasn't the face other women had touched. The skin wasn't the same. His nerve endings had multiplied. He could feel each one of her fingers, their different sizes and temperatures. His stomach made a long slow twist in anticipation of all that his lips would feel.

He pulled Kate against him, but Paula came around the corner then, and they jumped back. His daughter, however, was pleased by what she found. She took them each by the arm and led them to dinner. She'd lit a candle and poured apple juice into wine glasses. She'd put the heart of chocolates by his place. Lasagna sizzled in the center of the small table and Kate was smiling and Mitchell felt, if only for this moment in his kitchen, if only for this one winter evening, that he might not need a magic quilt after all.