Part One:

Fathers and Sons

1.

        My father had a talent for sleep that was the one remarkable thing about him. He devoted himself to it twelve, thirteen, sometimes fourteen hours a night. He would come home from the store at five-thirty and putter in the garden until dinner, then as soon as he could he fled up to his bedroom and remained there among his deep and shadowy dreams until morning. It worried me at first, in those early months. I was afraid he'd sleep longer and longer until he disappeared entirely and would never find his way back to his life. But eventually I got used to it. I realized that, in many respects, given all that had happened, it wasn't such a bad response. Where someone else—myself, for instance—might have started drinking or shouting or carrying on, where another man might have gotten angry or bitter or just terribly sad, Henry Bailey slept. It became a central fact of our lives. One of those things you come to count on.

        So when I came home from work one night in early June I wasn't expecting anything. It had been one of those unexpectedly slack nights that even the seediest of bars occasionally suffers, and I'd spent most of it drinking de-caf coffee and playing pool with Tiny Alice. By eleven-thirty it seemed easier just to go home. I parked on the street and climbed out of the truck, and only then did I notice the warm and flickering glow spilling over the steps of the front porch.

        I had become so attuned to the possibility of disaster, had so accepted it as the currency of our life together, that I started forward without hesitation. I was suddenly sure I'd left the stove on or the kettle, or some lamp had fallen over, and all I could see was the image of Henry trapped in the rising flames, where even sleep wouldn't protect him. But as I hurried forward, some small, less frantic part of my mind became aware that the night breeze remained strangely clear, carrying along with the usual mixed scents of lilac and mock orange, not a single hint of smoke.

        And then I heard the music.

        I hesitated. What? I thought. What is this? Burglars? Someone breaking in and … what? Stealing the CDs? Playing the stereo? Robbing us blind to music? Because another one of those things that could be counted on about Henry was that he didn't play the stereo. I wasn't even sure he knew how. But here was the proof that someone at least had both the technical expertise and an ear for the finer things in life because, standing uncertainly in the shadow of a drooping lilac, I heard the thin, treacly line of Benny Goodman's clarinet twining through the air. And as I crept forward, peering out from the covering darkness, there was Henry, wide awake and resplendent in my favorite tuxedo.

        It was a wonderful tux, a twenty-five year old thrift shop number in unrepentant burgundy with black pocket flaps and satin lapels as wide as your hand. It had been a gift from my mother, though not to me, and I cherished it for its inestimable powers of reassurance. I tried to save it for special occasions. Though, clearly, I realized, this was nothing if not special. There was Henry, who hadn't been awake this late in six years, standing mantled in burgundy gabardine, between a bottle of champagne up to its neck in ice and the palest woman I had ever seen. She had short black hair and black lips and a ridiculously short pink dress with broad epaulettes and black bows down the front like a series of military decorations. Its vaguely martial aspect seemed at odds with the long, pale legs, as if she'd been awarded the medals during a battle in which she'd acquitted herself bravely, but had somehow lost her pants.

        She was squinting slightly in the candlelight. "You know, I can't promise anything."

        "I'm not asking for promises," said Henry.

        "It's not as easy as you make it sound."

        "I'm not trying to make it sound easy."

        "Well, it's not."

        He smiled.

        I had never thought of my father as handsome. If he had a nice smile that tended to find answering smiles in other people, that had always been more of a handicap than anything. As a boy I'd been embarrassed time and again by his indiscriminant friendliness. He tended to fall into conversation while standing in line at the post office or the bank, and as a boy I had come to feel like his keeper, tugging on a shirt or an arm to draw him away before he could embarrass us both. But now he stood there in that killer tuxedo, just a shade too snug around the middle, and leaned over the champagne, rolling the neck of the bottle between his hands with the uneasy concentration of someone who has seen it done, more or less like that, in some movie long ago. "You think it's ready?"

        "If it's not," she said, "I am."

        He lifted the bottle, glazed and dripping. Then after an uncertain moment, clamped it resolutely under one arm, and began to worry at the foil covering the cork. The ice bucket, which had looked surprisingly urbane until now, was suddenly revealed in the bottle's absence as the white plastic wastebasket from the upstairs bathroom. The woman didn't seem to notice. She stood, head cocked, nodding to the music, and her body beneath the pink dress disclosed itself in a series of odd and awkward angles: a jutting hip, a thin elbow, the long syncopation of one tapping leg. "This is nice," she said.

        "I can turn it down."

        "I said I liked it."

        Prying up one edge of the foil from around the cork, Henry tore it off in a long, ragged spiral, which he held for a second dangling like something vaguely disreputable before slipping it hurriedly into his pocket. Then he stripped off the little wire basket and, bracing himself like a lumberjack, grasped the neck in both hands with his thumbs against the cork. Just like in the movies.

        Nothing happened. He hunched forward, putting more weight behind those thumbs, straining at that cork. The woman watched, her hands twitching, a frown darkening her face. The pink dress swung impatiently. "What are you doing?" she finally demanded.

        "What do you mean?"

        "You just need to open it."

        He hesitated, shifting his grip, then gamely took the bottle in one hand, the cork in the other, and twisted. It opened with a low and anticlimactic pop. Henry turned with a sheepish smile, and from the table he handed her an empty glass, pinching it by the narrow stem as if offering a posy for her consideration. Even from a distance I recognized the glasses. A pair of crystal flutes, heavy and delicate. They'd been up in a closet in their own little box, packed in old and graying tissue for as long as I could remember.

        He started pouring. Too quickly. The wine exploded up toward the rim. "Careful!" she said. "Take it easy!"

        "I've got it," said Henry. And quick as thought he reached out and plunged one thick and stubby finger into the mounting foam, which hesitated, then subsided.

        The woman was frowning. "Here's a clue…"

        "Sorry."

        "...Just for future reference? You want to keep body parts out of the wine glasses. At least on the first date."

        Henry smiled sheepishly. "I guess I'm a little nervous."

        "Forget it," she said, more kindly now. "Just relax. You're doing fine."

        He filled his own glass more carefully and took a tiny doubtful sip. "How is it?"

        "Not bad. A little longer in the fridge wouldn't hurt."

        He nodded, digesting the information. Then after a moment, "Thanks," he said. "For coming, I mean. It means a lot to me. I wasn't sure you would."

        She shrugged and took a careful, ruminative sip, guarding her thoughts.

        Henry gestured at the bench swing, hanging from two chains at the end of the porch. "You want to sit down?"

        "Those things make me sea-sick."

        "I could bring out some chairs."

        She considered him for a moment thoughtfully, then offered up a thin, reluctant smile. "You do this sort of thing often?"

        "Are you kidding? All the time. Can't you tell?"

        "Well, it's been a while for me. I can't make any promises."

        "You said that."

        "So I'm saying it again."

        "Okay."

        "I just don't want you getting your hopes up."

        "It's too late. I was born with my hopes up." The heavy crystal glinted in his hand as he took another sip.

        As if she noticed it, too, the woman held her own glass up to the light. "These are nice. Did you buy them for the occasion?"

        "A wedding present. I don't use them very often."

        She hesitated, frowning at the news, then after a moment, "You're not going to get hurt, are you?"

        "You can let me worry about that."

        "Are you sure?"

        He turned. "I think it's time for a refill."

        She laid a thin hand over her glass. "One's my limit."

        "You can't say no to champagne."

         "No," she said. "Really."

        But Henry, teeth gleaming in the candlelight, drew the bottle out of its wastebasket and raised it teasingly over her spread fingers. "The night is still young."

        "Don't."

        "Move it or lose it."

        "Stop."

        "You're going to make me spill."

        "Cut it out, Henry!"

        But he knew not to stop. He kept tilting the bottle until she had to snatch her hand away, laughing, at the last possible second to catch the wine as it fell. "Okay," she said. "Okay. But just this one." He filled her glass, and she took a sip, smiling ruefully. She was swaying ever so slightly to the music. "Is that a saxophone?"

        "Clarinet. Benny Goodman plays a clarinet."

        "It's like the tail of a kite," she said.

        "Exactly." He was nodding happily. "It's just like that."

        I stood there, staring at the two of them. I wondered if, in the candlelight with the music playing and the wine catching the light as if it were electrically charged, this woman had any idea what kind of a man my father was. If she could tell that he'd never poured a glass of champagne in his life, that the jacket he was wearing didn't really fit, that all he knew about Benny Goodman was what instrument he played. I wondered if, under all these conditions, she could still tell what a complete flake he could actually be. But all she said, with her head tilted slightly, gazing up at him was, "How tall are you?"

        "Five-ten."

        Henry Bailey, Sr., had been five-seven at age sixteen, five-eight at twenty, and five-eight-and-a-half from twenty-one to fifty-one.

        "That's a good height," she said. "Do you want to dance?"

        "I'm not much for dancing."

        "It's easy."

        "Not for me."

        With a smile she stepped closer, raising her champagne flute and touching it to his. It gave a little timorous clink. "Just follow the glasses," she said, and slipped her left hand onto his shoulder.

        With his glass held like a bouquet in his left hand Henry laid his other lightly on her slender waist. She began to move her wine slowly through the air, as if tracing the kite tail of the music, and he moved his own to match. Their feet shuffled almost accidentally to the rhythm in something that was not quite dancing, but was closer than anything my father had ever done before.

        "Isn't that amazing," he murmured.

        The music wound on, and the two of them swayed together following the movement of the sparkling crystal. And as they moved, each occasional stutter or uncertain step produced the thin, fragile ding of the glasses colliding. 

        At last the clarinet gave a final little swoop and died. The two figures stood there, uncertainly, then stepped apart, and together they peered in through the open window at the stereo, as if uncertain what came next. After a moment Henry whispered something, and she laughed. "If you say so."

        "Trust me." He stepped inside, and then a moment later re-emerged.

        "More clarinet?" she asked.

        "I don't think so. He doesn't seem to be holding anything." He held up the empty CD case. "Wait, here it is. Saxophone."

        "Good," she purred. "Saxophone is so sexy."

        That seemed to take him aback. He hesitated as, from the living room, Stanley Turrentine's sexy saxophone insinuated itself out into the candlelight. Her face was pale beneath the black hair and dark-painted lips. She laughed again, and my father smiled uneasily as if he hadn't the slightest idea what to do next.

        I crept silently around to the back of the house and in through the kitchen and up the stairs, pursued all the while by the soft, rising thread of the music. Years ago we had divided the second floor more or less in half. To the right was what I still thought of, despite my best intentions, despite the angry, impatient lectures I gave myself at odd moments of the day, as my parents' room. To the left was the bathroom, and further still, two rooms, front and back. They weren't large, but there was plenty of space to mill around in. One was my bedroom.

        Into the other, gradually, without ever actually deciding to, we had moved all the furniture, all the books and clothing and knickknacks we couldn't bear to have in the rest of the house. All her favorite chairs, a bright pink and floral rug she'd gotten at a flea market, a few paintings she'd bought over the years, a small mahogany secretary she had picked up at an auction and refinished herself. We just piled everything into the middle of the room and closed the door. But eventually I had set about rearranging things, pushing the boxes into the corner, laying down the rug, putting up the pictures. It had been odd at first to see all those things suddenly condensed into one place, but gradually I began to spend more and more time in there. Sometimes I would read. Sometimes I'd just sit.

        I used to pretend my mother had died. I sat in her chair and made up complicated stories, full of incident and detail, turning them over in my mind and playing out a whole array of tragic deaths. I would read about disasters in the newspaper and imagine that my mother had been involved, that I had just read her name among the list of victims or seen her photograph--a smiling portrait taken during some birthday or family occasion, and supplied by her grieving husband and son--and that the shock of her death was only slowly settling into my mind. I imagined her in a car accident, running head-on into a telephone pole, or crashing into the ocean aboard a 767, or falling as the random victim of some crazy gunman in a hold-up at the Seven-Eleven.

        I didn't dwell on the details of the accident itself. What I imagined as I sat in her chair, which at some moments still carried the faint hint of her perfume like the echo of a muffled cry, as if she'd spoken into the fabric and the sound even now was rising in little whispers.... What I imagined was that she had perished on her way home and in the last instant, when she realized she would never see her beloved husband and child again, she had been struck by the most bitter sadness. That's what I thought. That's what I would pretend. But this was early on, when she'd only been gone a year, two years, three, and I was slowly having to realize she wasn't coming back, and I thought how much easier it would have been if, one way or another, she had been taken against her will.

        I never told Henry any of this. I wasn't sure he'd understand. I never really knew what his thoughts were. It wasn't anything we talked about, and my father never really came into the parlor, never sat in her chair. Though sometimes I caught sight of him frozen for a moment in mid-gesture, blank-faced and staring as if there were something he was trying to follow in the distance. It always gave me a stab of worry, and one afternoon I asked him. He was hunched, motionless in the garden with his trowel hanging limply from one hand

        "Henry?” I said. “Henry! Are you okay?"

        He shook his head, but only to clear it. "I was just thinking," he said, but with so much obvious sadness that I didn't have to ask what about. We just stood there, two people tied together by the silence, as I waited for him to move again, to straighten up and stand, just to be on the safe side, just to make sure it wasn't a stroke or a coronary or some blockage in the brain, just to make sure it was still only heartbreak.

        But now? What was I supposed to make of it now? This wasn't a coronary or a stroke, and maybe worst of all, it wasn't heartbreak. I sat upstairs in the dark and listened through the open window to the sweet and sexy sound of the saxophone. And every few minutes, if I held my breath, I could make out the thin sharp clink of champagne glasses colliding, like the sound of a tiny and very distant car crash.

2.

        Henry, in the morning, had a flight pattern as fixed and intricate as a honey bee's. He would walk into the kitchen and, winter or summer, dark or light, turn on the lamp by the stove. Then he'd switch on the back burner, pick up the kettle, and bank left toward the sink. As the kettle filled he'd select the large blue and white mug from its hook and, completing a counterclockwise pirouette, take two steps forward to set the mug down on the cutting board before opening the cupboard and taking down the economy-sized jar of Postum. Only then would he veer back to the stove to place the kettle on its, by this time glowing, element. Then a complete turn, three hundred and sixty degrees, during which he'd select a bowl from the cupboard, the yoghurt from the fridge, and a single, underripe banana, and he could begin. Three large spoonfuls of yoghurt, and the spoon would be washed and returned to the drawer. The banana would be peeled and sliced onto the yoghurt, and the knife would join the spoon. At this point, and only then, as if he'd been trying to hide it from himself all along, Henry would open the cupboard and take down a jar of wheat germ, sprinkle a large spoonful over the top, and put it away without ever setting it down. By this time the kettle would be boiling.

        My own routine was less intricate, but no less fixed. A large cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, followed by another cup of coffee, and, stunned by the early morning, I would sit at the table and watch Henry bustle through his routine, warmed by the prospect of such smooth reliability and by the companionable knowledge that in the end it was only the smallest things that could be counted on.

        This morning, though, as I came down the stairs Henry emerged from the kitchen without bowl, spoon, or Postum. He sniffed the fragrant steam rising from his mug. "Smells almost good enough to drink."

        I hesitated. "Is that my coffee?"

        "I made lots. I didn't think you'd mind."

        "That's real, you know. Caffeine and everything."

        "You're telling me." He took a sip and smacked his lips.

        "Won't it keep you up?"

        "It's morning. I'm supposed to be up."

        "But what about your blood pressure?"

        "My blood pressure's fine."

        "Did the doctor say that?"

        "I said that. And I'll tell you what else." He smiled mischievously. "I'm about to make some eggs."

        "Henry," I said, and I managed to smile back, so we could both pretend I was  only joking. "You're frightening me."

        Six years ago, the summer I turned eighteen, when Elizabeth Drew Bailey drove away and never returned, it had caught us by surprise. I mean the two of us, Henry and me. I can't say for sure about Elizabeth.

        In that last year of high school I'd been considering a number of colleges, arranging them in my mind by location and by their relative distances away: Palo Alto, Providence, New York City. Growing up I'd always thought of the mid-west as the center of the country in the same sense that the molten core of iron and magma was the center of the world: bleak, inhospitable and equidistant from anyplace that might actually support life. So when I'd thought about college I'd never considered the classes I might take or the occupation I'd prepare for. I thought only of how far away the schools were, how many miles between here and there, as if one of those movie signposts stood in the middle of my bedroom—6000 miles to Timbuktu, 5250 miles to Singapore—pointing in every direction but this one.

        But then, with all those applications spread across my desk like so many travel brochures, the aforementioned Elizabeth Drew, who had graced the Bailey household for more than twenty years, climbed into her car and drove away. And because in the larger karmic scheme of things there were only a limited number of tickets to make that big trip out of town, after she left I stayed. And because going to the local college would have, in some small way, salvaged something from the disaster, I turned my back on that as well. It was like one of those card games, where the last one left at the table gets stuck holding all the losers. I had known for years I'd been playing the game, but I hadn't realized my mother was until she left. And there I was, alone at the table with Henry, who hadn't even known such a game existed.

        In place of a note or forwarding address Elizabeth had left a pan of lasagna wrapped in foil in the fridge with instructions for cooking and additional instructions for assembling a salad from the ingredients filling the crisper. She offered no comment on events, unless you considered the fact that, in preparing the meal for a forty-five year old man with high blood pressure and the beginnings of a weight problem, she had added extra cheese and far too much salt.

        That first night we ate the dinner, believing perhaps that it was all just a misunderstanding that would clear itself up after a decent meal and a good night's sleep. But the second night it seemed more real, and neither of us was hungry. After a week I threw the rest of it away.

        At first we survived on sad little entrees with  extravagant names: lobster newburg, shrimp croquettes, Salisbury steak. They slid, frozen and stiff, from cheerful boxes and didn't so much cook as soften and heat. And when we eventually started eating real dinners it was only because I cooked them. I searched through the cupboards and found my mother's cookbooks, worn and faded and stained with food, and from these I prepared a series of familiar casseroles which we ate together, hunched around one end of the dining room, as if crowded into a corner by the pressure of the empty table.

        Together we moved through each day in a state of constant surprise, as if inhabiting that instant just after a balloon has popped and before our answering gasp. I hovered around my father, doing what I could while trying not to see the depth of sadness in his face. Once at work he was fine. He slipped into his old routine. But at home he seemed to be re-discovering with each minute the terrible news, and I waited anxiously for our hearts to break. But there was something in his unutterable grief that gave me a kind of emotional leeway, a kind of shell-shocked objectivity that carried me through. And at the end of each day, when he finally trudged up to bed, I felt as if I'd delivered him safely to harbor, leaving me only the evenings to get through on my own.

        Gradually, though, as the first sharp sadness dulled into a kind of stunned bewilderment, we settled into our new life, embracing it together like a language only the two of us spoke. I took over the shopping, the cooking, I did the laundry. And after a while it began to seem a comfort, all the things I was doing for us. But over time Henry developed some alarming symptoms. In addition to washing every dish immediately after using it and tidying the house each day until it looked so clean and brittle that the slightest thing out of place might have cracked it, he occasionally became dizzy. He would slow to a halt, his cheeks turning pale and a gleam of moisture condensing on his face. And once, his left arm went numb for almost twenty minutes one afternoon in the store. Just numb, for no reason. I came upon him, in the home appliance aisle, staring down at it, slowly moving his fingers as if by remote control.

        "The funniest thing just happened," he whispered.

        We drove to the emergency room.

        It was stress, the doctor said. That's all. Henry just needed to relax. Take some sensible precautions. Cut out caffeine. Try to keep that blood pressure down.

        But now he sat sipping his coffee as if he'd never heard of hypertension or sadness or Postum. "I was thinking about an omelet," he said cheerfully.

        "What about the yoghurt and wheatgerm?"

        "We've even got a little bacon."

        "No, we don't."

        "I bought it yesterday. And some mushrooms. What do you say? If we play our cards right we may even have some cheese here somewhere."

        I sat very still. I watched as if at any moment my father might tear off his clothes, or collapse, or go running outside making noises like a locomotive, but all he did was walk to the fridge and take out the eggs, the bacon, the mushrooms, and a chunk of cheddar cheese. Then he drew out the frying pan and set it on the stove.

        The bacon sizzled going in. "Too hot," I called. “Pan’s too hot!”

        But he didn't seem to hear. He shook his head, marvelling. "When was the last time we had bacon?"

        "When was the last time you went to the doctor?"

        "A little bacon won't kill me."

        "Who says?"

        But he just smiled. Standing by the stove he poked at the bacon, arranging it with the shy, overeager gestures that come out between old friends who haven't seen each other for a while, as the house filled with an aroma too cozy and appetizing to be real. He started whistling something jazzy and syncopated under his breath.

        "What's that you're whistling?"

        "Was I whistling? Sorry."

        "It's okay," I said. "It’s nice. So. How was your evening?"

        He glanced up, a suddenly shy study in blandness. "Oh. It was okay."

        "Just an average night at home?"

        "More or less." He fussed over the bacon, lining it up in the pan. Then, very casually, "What time'd you get in? I didn't hear you."

        "Pretty late."

        He considered that. "I just watched a little tv. You know me. Went to bed early."

        "Was there anything good on?"

        "Just the usual. Pretty much just the news. How about you?"

        "And then you went to bed early?"

        "You like cheese, right?"

        "That's my cheese. I'm the one who bought it."

        He picked it up and started grating it. "Just a little too much cheese, and a little too much salt," my father was saying. "That's the secret." He reached for the eggs.

        "Henry? Is there anything we should talk about?"

        He hesitated, and a small, embarrassed grin stole across his face. He looked like a little kid. "I suppose you mean Mona."

        "Her name's Mona?"

        "Yeah. Isn't that great?"

        "Who is she?" I asked.

        "Just a friend."

        "How'd you meet?"

        "Oh… through a friend of a friend of a friend. You know how it is."

        But I realized that after all these years I had no idea at all how it was.

        And then he was whistling again as he picked up a fork and beat the eggs into a froth. He was smiling to himself, almost laughing. When had I last heard him laugh? "Mona," he muttered with evident satisfaction. "You don't hear names like that any more." And he dumped the eggs into the too-hot pan with a rush and a rising hiss.

3.

        We drove to work, the truck rattling over potholes like a coffee can full of old screws, and parked in the alley under the faded sign my grandfather had painted sixty-five years ago. The B in Bailey's had flaked off into an inverted R, and the words Hardware and Other Dried Goods looked faded and old-fashioned against the brick. The sign had been there a long time, but instead of a sense of permanence it managed to give only an impression of grim stubbornness, like the scuffed and narrow farmhouses that still remained, wedged between the strip malls on Route 6 west of town. Each time I saw it, it struck me as a kind of warning: the dangers of remaining behind after everyone else has left. But Henry didn't notice. Powered by a hearty breakfast and real caffeinated coffee, he hopped out of the truck and unlocked the heavy steel door. He was whistling under his breath as he flicked on the lights.

        It's hard not to see the hardware business as a kind of judgement on my family. As a young man my great-grandfather Benjamin uprooted his wife and infant son and dragged them twelve hundred awkward miles west from Connecticut, drawn by the promise of rich land just beyond the Mississippi and by the certainty that the one thing he didn't want to be in this life was a farmer. Most of his friends and family wondered why they had to come so far. There must be easier, less inconvenient places not to farm. But Benjamin had a plan. Whatever else their faults, the Baileys have always been big on plans that escaped the straightforward. If you wanted to make a place for yourself in a job that didn't involve farming, you needed to find a place where all those jobs weren't already taken. A place, in fact, where everybody else was so busy farming, they needed the sort of services only a determined non-farmer could provide. Benjamin  went to work in a blacksmith shop, then a feed shop, then a dry-goods store. His son, when it came his turn, blundered into hardware, and that's where we've stayed, in a store in the center of town, as far as possible from the rolling ocean of farmland that vanished to the horizon in all directions. A family of castaways living on an island and determined to ignore the sea.

        The store became a Rorschach Test for the Bailey unconscious. For Henry, despite everything, it remained a sanctuary, an arena of promises waiting to be kept. A tiny thermo-couple might hang on its hook for years gathering nothing but dust until someone came in with a broken furnace, and it became the only crucial thing in the store. A small, curved piece of steel, hanging in its own little baggie, had no use at all until you broke the cotterpin on the blade of your lawnmower. Under Henry's watchful eye the whole store remained a symbol of hope and repair. Contractors, students, home fix-it screw-ups—each one looking for that single solution: a roll of sealing tape, thirty-three inches of three-eighths copper pipe, fifteen feet of telephone wire, a new deadbolt, a pair of wire-cutters. They all went away happy with the only answer they needed cradled in their hands.

        But as for me, I'd never liked the store. It made me uneasy. All the different bits and fragments gathered together in drawers, as if a roomful of complex machinery had simply fallen to bits. Where Henry saw order and plenitude—five hundred countersunk #6 wood screws, a thousand rubber washers sorted by size—I saw all the separate pieces, revealing nothing so much as the tendency of every object in the world to come apart.

        This morning I took my place at the cash register, and between customers I watched my father. After last night I don't know what I expected to see... something stranger, maybe, or more familiar. But it was only Henry, just Henry, in a worn blue workshirt, khakis, and an ancient carpenter's apron. But it was Henry with a brand new skip in his step. Despite the mind-numbing boredom of the monthly inventory, he was nodding and smiling with a clipboard in his hand, trailing short whistled snippets of Benny Goodman like a thin string of eighth-notes hanging in the air.

        Happiness is a funny thing. It's so light and insubstantial, like a sparkler bouncing its little stars off everything, while sadness has all the complexity, all the weight and accumulating importance, of snow to the Eskimos. I don't know how long it had been since I'd seen Henry happy. I couldn't remember a time. It was like a fish remembering the world before water. And though, watching him now, I could see he was enjoying it, I didn’t know what to do. The only time there had been something even remotely similar, he hadn’t looked anything like this. It had been five years ago, and it had involved a woman named Edith Mullins.

        She worked at the Hallmark store at the mall in town, and she was maybe five years older than Henry. She was a widow, a little heavy-set, with sandy hair that she washed and set every week and a closetful of pantsuits in a rainbow of colors. She was perfectly nice, and even a year after Elizabeth's departure she was very sympathetic to my father's loss. She brought casseroles. She brought the occasional apple pie. Then one evening I left them sitting in our kitchen discussing the recent increase in city water bills and whether the new water plant was a terrible waste of money, and the next morning her car was still in our driveway.

        I was shocked. And outraged. It had only been a year since Elizabeth had left. What was he thinking? He was lonely, I knew. Of course he was lonely. We were both lonely. But at least we were lonely together. We had each other. Wasn't that enough?  Two broken halves making a whole? But that was like saying you could make a good pair of loafers out of two left shoes.

        The next day I'd watched Henry at the store, unpacking boxes, arranging a new shipment of housepaint on the shelves. I was looking for some difference in his behavior, some evidence that he was putting our joint tragedy behind him, some sign that he was leaving me behind. But instead he worked through the day with the same trudging thoroughness he'd managed for the last year, and that evening, though he announced he was going out for dinner, and put on a clean shirt and a fresh pair of khakis, he was back by seven-thirty for the news, and in bed and asleep by eight.

        And that's how it went. Edith continued to stop by, dropping off a plate of cookies or a small pile of neatly folded laundry, which she carried without hesitation in through the back door and up to Henry's room. And one particularly warm Sunday afternoon I came home to find my father sitting on the sofa absorbed in The New York Times while Edith, looking solid and matronly in a white slip and bra, was standing at the ironing board working her way through a pile of his shirts. Among all the things Elizabeth Bailey had never done, standing around the living room ironing in her underwear stood near the top of the list.

        Maybe Henry realized that, or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was just the added loneliness of realizing you were lonely in a stranger’s company. But whatever the reason, within a month the magic must have faded because so did Edith. Henry was back in his garden after work, or reading his catalogues or watching the news by himself. And once again, worriedly, I tried to gauge the effect. But there seemed none at all. If he was depressed or relieved or disappointed at Edith's departure he gave no sign. He seemed no happier, but at least no sadder than before. And when I finally worked up the courage to ask about her, long after the fact, all Henry said was that Edith was very comforting and a very good friend. And I told myself that despite the sadness and the loneliness, at least we had each other, and I tried not to be relieved.

        But I was. Because the problem with happiness is that it's nothing you can share. I don't care what people say. Laughter is contagious. Smile and the world smiles with you. It's not like grief. Shared sadness lends a kind of solid comfort, a common foundation that makes you both a little steadier. But happiness. . . I don't know. Maybe I've just forgotten how it works.

        By three-thirty I had sold two packs of batteries, a hot glue gun, a box of fluorescent bulbs, an extension cord, and three sets of blades for an electric saber saw, and I was standing at the counter building a wobbly tower of small, rubber Stress-o Dolls when, with a cheery jingle, the door opened. I glanced up. It was a woman of about my age, looking as if she'd gotten dressed in the dark out of some stranger's closet. She wore a loose orange t-shirt that didn't quite reach the baggy, lime-green pants hanging on her hips, and a black biker jacket so large and stiff it made her look like a turtle too thin for its shell.

        "Can I help you?"

        She was less than medium height, and a little less than pretty, with a nose broader than it needed to be and a stubborn chin. She wore heavy, black-framed glasses that sat like a roadblock on her nose, and in her left nostril, gleaming like a thin shred of shrapnel, curved a tiny silver ring. She stood, gazing around at the crowded shelves of the store as if already disappointed. "Is this Bailey's Hardware?" Her voice was low, with an edge of irritation running like a vein of silver through it.

        "We like to think so."

        "You should have a sign out front."

        "We do."

        "Then you should put it someplace people can see." Her lips were thin. They gave her an air of measured consideration, as if even in this brief time she'd formed a reasoned opinion of all of my short-comings.

        "So, you're what?" I said. "Some kind of sign consultant?"

        "I'm looking for the owner."

        "That would be me, in a manner of speaking. What can I do for you?"

        She lifted one of the little Stresso Dolls from the pile on the counter. When you clutched it the eyes, nose, and tongue bugged out as if its whole little rubber head might explode. She gave the bulbous nose a contemplative flick, then she turned it to face me and squeezed hard. Eyes, nose, and tongue bulged out obscenely. "Henry Bailey," she said, speaking clearly so that even the slowest members of the audience could follow along. "Is he in?"

        "Can I tell him what this is about?"

        "No."

        It isn't that I'm not a pretty smooth customer. You can't be a bartender for five years without developing certain conversational skills. And late at night, after everyone had been drinking for a couple of hours, I was generally considered to have a fully functioning sense of humor. But I knew when I was out of my league. I said, "Why don't you take a seat in the waiting room. I'll see if I can find him."

        But just at that moment, following his inventory of paint, polyurethane, and mineral spirits to the end of aisle seven, Henry moseyed into view.

        "You're in luck,” I said. “Mr. Bailey can see you now."

        "Thank you." She dropped the doll into its box and strode toward the back of the store. I was thinking, Let Henry handle her. He needs a little aggravation. But then he glanced up, raising the clipboard by way of greeting, and gave her a big, welcoming smile, as if she were exactly the person he had just been thinking of.

        I picked up the doll she had dropped and squeezed. Then I turned the bulging face, and together we watched her go. She wasn't exactly pretty. But at the same time she wasn't exactly Edith Mullins, either. She was way too thin, all awkward angles and baggy clothes, and a personality that would dull a hacksaw. But as she turned, the curve of her stomach, surprised between waistband and shirt, offered just the hint of a body less angular than I'd imagined. It made me think of that short, pink dress in the candlelight, and I was suddenly aware of the slippery blade of some sudden feeling, beyond irritation though not entirely unrelated, that I couldn't put a name to.

        She looked pleased to see Henry, though they didn't kiss. He looked unfazed by the bright assault of her clothes. She half-stood, half-perched on a shelf of coffee-makers, and my father held his clipboard in both hands as if suddenly moved to conduct a public opinion poll right there in his own store. He seemed happy with her answers.

        My mother wore beautiful clothes, elegant clothes, that she would buy at consignment shops and vintage clothing stores and the summer sales, coming out of the shabby chaos of cast-offs and remainders with that one, perfect outfit that must surely have been there by accident. She wore a shade of lipstick that they no longer make; or at least, they no longer call it the same thing. Summer Rose, it was called. And for a while, after she left, I would linger in the cosmetic aisle of the local drugstore just to make sure it was still there. But I never thought to buy it. And when Revlon came out with their new spring colors, it was gone, and I could no longer remember whether it was closer to Antique Pink or Dusty Fuschia.

        I read once that nothing is ever forgotten. Even the briefest and most transitory memory is stored in the chemicals of your brain so that, although you can't retrieve it, it's there somewhere, lurking in your cells. I try to think of that as a comfort: that memory outlasts even your own power to recall. But it's an empty sort of comfort. Over the years I've held onto the idea of my mother, though I can no longer remember exactly what she looked like. Almost from the moment she left I began to have trouble conjuring up the individual aspects of her, as if she'd left an outline behind, but had taken the details with her. One morning I couldn't remember how she wore her hair, or what shape her nose was. I couldn't remember her chin. I held on as tightly as I could, but I could feel her slipping away. Her perfume, her voice, the way she walked, the way she laughed. Every detail slipped away so that all that now remains is some large and vague approximation of everything that has vanished.

        Yet, even if I can’t remember, I can still measure the space she took up by the sudden weight of sadness that rushes in to fill it. More than her appearance, her absence has been the shape I've built my life around. I've preserved her the way a sculptor preserves the shape of a wax statue in a hardened mold. The statue melts and slips away, but the mold retains the image in reverse. A kind of lost wax process of the heart. At least I had that much. I thought we both did.

        But in that moment looking at Henry, I could no longer tell what he remembered, or what he'd forgotten. He was nodding and smiling. Then Mona whispered something, and he laughed out loud, a sudden, startled sound that might have surprised him as much as me, because he glanced up a little sheepishly. Then he held up his open hand to me—back in five—and before I could say a word he and Mona were hurrying up the aisle. At the door he turned with a little wave, and just in case there were any doubt where he was headed he mouthed the word "lunch" like a secret he didn't want anyone else in the empty store to hear.

        I checked my watch. Lunch? At a quarter to four?

        But he was already opening the heavy door and ushering her out. I stood there, stunned. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened, like one of those audience members in a magic show who discovers the missing card pinned to his back. But then I was around the counter and hurrying toward the door. I cracked it open. In the alley beside the truck there was a red Mustang with the top down and a parking ticket bent under the wiper. Mona plucked up the paper and crumpled it, then settled into the driver's seat. Henry closed her door, then scampered around to the passenger side and climbed in beside her just as the car started moving, backing out, turning. I had a last glimpse of him, laughing and hurrying to get his seat belt buckled, as the car roared past.

4.

        When I say “lunch” what I usually mean is a sandwich or a slice of pizza or a burger. On special occasions maybe a little chinese. Often I take a book or a magazine and read with my meal, so I come back to the store refreshed. When Henry left I spent far too much of the rest of the afternoon wondering what exactly he meant by lunch, and waiting for him to come back so I could make a point of not asking.

        In retrospect, maybe I should have just minded my own business. Let Henry lead his life while I led mine. But in a sense that was part of the problem, part of what made it so hard. All those years of sad and lonely casseroles, of long, silent evenings with Henry asleep upstairs, of somehow ensuring we both made it through each ragged day... it blurred the boundaries. So it wasn’t simply that I couldn’t tell Henry’s business from mine. It was worse than that. He had somehow become just about all the business I had.

        When he still wasn't back at ten after six I left his clipboard leaning against the end of aisle seven, in case he had trouble remembering where he'd left off, and doused the lights. I drove home through the center of town, not searching exactly—that would have been ridiculous—but keeping my eyes open, just in case. There was no real possibility of spotting him; it wasn't that small a town. Just small enough that I could think I might. So I drove as slowly as traffic allowed and paused at every intersection to look up and down without any real hope or expectation, and in the process I managed to spread my attention so thin I missed my final turn and had to go all the way down Bloomington, bouncing over the uneven bricks, and come back on Linn Street past the laundromat, the fire station, and Rusty's Blue Diner.

        The Blue Diner was, technically speaking, neither a diner nor blue. It had begun life as an old airstream trailer perched on cinderblocks and painted a dark, flat color which, in the old black and white photographs, had to be taken on faith. Then the 1974 tornado came and wrapped it like a model train halfway around a neighboring oak, leaving the tree more or less undamaged and the trailer anything but. Now the diner took up the ground floor of a three-story yellow brick building, and the only thing less blue was the bright red Mustang convertible parked by the curb in front….