The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (13 page)

Around eight, Nelson takes his third drink. Then, passing from the kitchen through Allie’s cluttered office, he goes into the cold, dark barn, where his ten cords of wood are stacked in neat, head-high rows along the near wall from the front to the back of the large building. When he returns, chilled, with an armload of wood, he sees his wife at the range, boiling water for tea. Her short, blue-gray hair is wet from her shower and slicked back like a boy’s, and she’s dressed in her usual western clothes, jeans too tight around her big hips and legs and a red-and-white-checked shirt with pearl buttons. Her clothing annoys him, though he never says so directly. “You dress like you want people to think you keep horses,” Nelson has told her. With most people (though no longer with him), Allie affects a manliness that Nelson finds disturbing—a hearty, jocular way of speaking. She’s a back slapper, a shoulder puncher, characteristics that, when he first took up with Allie, attracted Nelson. Long before that, he’d come to despise Adele’s whine, her insecurity and depression, so that Allie’s good-natured teasing, her tough talk, released him from guilt for a while, maybe a year, maybe two, until he began to see through the bravado to the strangely fragile woman inside, and when he hurt her with his hard, unexpected words and once in a while with his hands, too, he began to feel guilty again, just as with Adele. You think a woman’s strong, that she can take it, so you treat her as an equal, and before you know it she can’t take it, and suddenly you’re forced to tiptoe around her as if a single hard step would break her into a thousand weeping pieces. More and more, Nelson believes that being alone is the only clear route to his happiness. It’s coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you. Look at Georgie, his son. The boy has a power over Nelson that comes from his belief that he was hurt by Nelson over twenty years earlier, when the boy was only ten. Earl, now—he’s different. Earl’s made of tougher stuff. You can’t really hurt him; he’s like his dad that way. He won’t let you close enough to hurt him, and consequently he never obtains any power over you, either. That’s the kind of love Nelson both understands and respects. It’s what he had with his second wife in the first year or two of their marriage and what he misses in her now.

“You’re up, eh,” he says to Allie’s back and dumps the wood into the woodbox, startling the dog awake.

“Yep.” The dog gets to her feet and crosses to Allie, shoves her head against the woman’s hand until she strokes it between the long, floppy ears. “Ah, you big baby,” Allie says. The dog leans her weight against Allie’s thigh, and she goes on patting the tall, ungainly animal. It’s Allie’s dog, not Nelson’s—he insists that he doesn’t like animals. He’s been this way for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t know why he is this way, and he doesn’t care anymore, if he ever did. It’s too late to care. It’s how he’s survived, and thus it’s who he is. Let other people adjust to him—Allie, Earl, Georgie, everyone. If, like Georgie, they aren’t willing to adjust, then fine, go away, leave him alone. Alone to think.

“Paper come yet?” Allie asks him.

“You feel like going out to get it, it’s there.” Nelson has sat back at the table and faces the woodstove, rubbing his hands before it, to get rid of the chill. He’s a large, fleshy man, and he looks like a bear cleaning its paws after eating.

“You gonna get dressed?” she asks.

“Eventually. It’s Sunday.”

“I know. I just—”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She walks to the refrigerator, pulls a tube of frozen orange juice from the freezer, and goes to the sink to prepare it.

“Earl’s coming by,” he says. “He can bring the paper in from the mailbox.”

“Oh? He coming for the wood? It’s snowing.”

“That’s the point. He don’t get it now, it’ll be there in April.” Suddenly, he stands up, and the dog clatters away from the sink, and Allie looks over at him.

“What?” she says.

Nelson is looking intently out the window next to the stove, staring at the driveway and yard, where his son’s wood is heaped up.

“What?” she repeats. “Who is it?”

“Leave me alone. For God’s sake, leave me alone. I’m trying to think.” He moves closer to the window and peers out, as if searching for someone in the snowy distance.

Allie goes back to breaking the frozen orange juice into a green plastic pitcher, and the dog sits on rickety haunches and watches Nelson at the window. “Maybe I should get dressed,” he says in a low voice. “So I can help Earl crack that wood loose and load it. Stuff’s frozen into the ground, most of it.”

Allie says nothing.

“Maybe I’ll call him again. See if he’s left yet.”

“It takes a half hour in good weather. He’ll be an hour today,” Allie says without looking at him. “You got no hurry.” She speaks carefully, slowly, in a deliberately quiet voice.

Nelson dials his son’s number, sits down, and lets it ring. On the fourth ring, Earl answers. “Hello?”

“Good morning,” Nelson says.

“Oh, hi, Dad.”

“I was just wondering…”

“Yeah, look, I’m sorry. I got sidetracked here, some people came by and we got talking. Listen, you gonna be there all day today? I can come by later more easily, if that’s okay?”

“Well, the snow…”

“Yeah, I know. You’re right. That is good wood. Be nice to get it home here, before it gets buried and all.”

They are silent for a few seconds, then Earl says to his father, “How about I come out there next Sunday? Or maybe an afternoon this week after school. Yeah, that’d be better all around for me. Though you won’t be there then—but we can get together some other time, right?”

“It don’t matter much to me one way or the other how you do it—it’s your wood, not mine.”

“Right.”

“All right, then,” Nelson says in a voice that’s almost a whisper.

“You okay, Dad?”

Nelson hesitates a second, ten seconds, twenty. He opens his mouth to speak.

“Dad? You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m… I’m fine.” His thoughts are burning and whirling, as if there were a fire inside his head. “I… I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

“Sure. What about?”

“I guess about your brother. About Georgie. You. Your mother. Your sister.”

“Fine,” Earl says. “Shoot.”

“No. I mean, not— Well, maybe we oughta talk about this stuff over a few beers or something, you know?”

Earl says, “Hey, fine with me. Anything you say, Dad.”

“Well, I was wondering, see, about Georgie. About why he’s so mad with me,” Nelson blurts, and the fire inside his head roars in his ears, stings his eyes, fills his nostrils and mouth with smoke and ash.

His son says, “You should be asking him that. Not me.”

“Yes. Right, of course. You,” he says, “you’re not mad at me like that, are you? For leaving your mother and all? You know … you know what I mean. All that.”

Earl inhales deeply, then slowly exhales. “This is weird. This is a weird conversation for us to be having, Dad. I mean, you— Look, I made my peace with all that years ago, and Georgie hasn’t, that’s all. From his point of view, you ruined his life or something. But that’s only how he sees it.”

“I didn’t, though. I didn’t ruin anybody’s life. You can’t ruin a person’s life. I just left, that’s all.”

“Yeah. It’s only a figure of speech.”

“I didn’t ruin anybody’s life.”

“Yeah.”

“Not your mother’s. Not Louise’s. Not yours, Earl. Not Georgie’s, either.”

“No, Dad, not mine. You can be sure of that. Listen, I got to get off, okay? There’s people here. I’ll be over to dig that wood out sometime this week, some afternoon this week, okay?”

Nelson says fine, that’s fine with him, but Earl will have to do it alone, because he is home only on weekends, now that winter’s here. “I been staying the week down at Seabrook lately,” he says.

“No kidding. Where?”

“I got a room in a motel over in Hampton. It’s nice. Color TV. You know. Kitchenette.”

“Nice,” Earl says.

Nelson says, “I… I’m sorry, about that other business, Georgie and all.”

“Hey, no sweat, Dad. Look, I gotta go,” he says. “Talk to you later, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Love to Allie,” he says, and then good-bye, and the phone is dead, buzzing in Nelson’s hand.

He looks up and sees that his wife is staring at him. He places the receiver on the hook and walks to the sink, pours himself another vodka, only a few ounces, half the glass, and drinks it down with a single swallow. This time he leaves the glass in the sink and the bottle on the drainboard.

“How many’s that?” Allie asks in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, as if asking him the date. She sips at her tea and over the rim of her cup watches him ignore her. Then she says, “Earl’s off in his own world. Don’t let him bother you.”

“He doesn’t bother me. That damn wood bothers me. That’s what bothers me.”

“Earl doesn’t really need it, you know. He lives in town, he just has that little bitty fireplace of his—”

“That’s not the
point
!” The point, he tells himself, is that the pile of wood looks like hell out there in the yard, and under the snow it looks somehow worse, because it’s no longer clearly firewood but may as well be merely trash or sand or brush or landfill, the dumb, shapeless residue of a job halted when winter came on. Abruptly, Nelson unlatches the gate, passes into the cool, dim living room, and walks upstairs to the bedroom. In a short while, he is dressed in heavy, green twill pants and wool shirt and snow boots and has returned to the kitchen, where he pulls his mackinaw on, then his black watch cap and thick work gloves.

“You getting the paper?” Allie asks from the table. The dog has settled at her feet.

“Yeah,” Nelson grunts. Quickly, he walks out to the barn, where, with the door to Allie’s office closed tightly behind him, he shoves open the large, sliding door at the front, flooding the darkness with sudden white light and swirls of blowing snow. For a moment he stands, hands sunk in his pockets, staring down the driveway to the road, his back to the green rear deck of his Pontiac station wagon and the gloomy darkness of the cavernous barn beyond. He moves around the car to the front door on the driver’s side and opens it, reaches under the seat, and draws out a half-full pint of vodka. Unscrewing the cap, he tips the bottle up and drinks. It makes no difference—he feels no better or worse after having taken the drink. All he has done is avoid feeling as bad as he would have felt without it. When he has replaced the bottle under the car seat, he turns and bumps against the chopping block, a stump with a steel splitting wedge and single-edged ax driven into its corrugated top. He laughs at himself, and his voice sounds strange to him, an old man’s voice—Ho, ho, ho!—mixed with a drunkard’s voice—Har, har, har! Hesitating a second at the door, he turns back again, retrieves the bottle from under the car seat, and slides it into his mackinaw pocket. He leaves the barn and, like an Arctic explorer setting out for the North Pole, plunges into the snow.

It’s deeper than he expected, eight or ten inches already and drifting, a heavy, wet snow driven by a hard northeast wind and sticking to every surface that faces it, trees, houses, barns, chimneys, and now Nelson Painter, working his way down his driveway from the huge open door of the barn, a man turning white, so that by the time he reaches the woodpile he’s completely white, even his face, though he’s pulled his head down into his coat as far as he can and can barely see through the waves of wind-driven snow before him.

He leans over and with one gloved hand grabs at a chunk of wood, yanks at it, but it won’t come. He brushes snow away, grabs at another, but it, too, won’t give. Standing, he kicks at the first log, and it breaks free of the pile and rolls over in the snow. He picks it up, lays it against his chest, and kicks at the second log. He kicks twice, three times, but it won’t come loose, so he takes the first stick, and holding it by one end, whacks it against the second, until it breaks free. He’s out of breath, sweating inside his coat, cursing the wood. He picks up the two sticks and goes to work on a third, which he eventually kicks loose of the pile and picks up and stacks in his arms, and then, when he kicks at a fourth piece of wood, he loses his balance, slips, and falls, and the pieces roll into the snow. Slowly, on his hands and knees, puffing laboriously now, he gathers up the three logs and stands, his left hip burning in pain where he fell against it, and starts back toward the barn.

Halfway there, retracing his nearly filled tracks, he sees on his left the door to the house push slowly open against the blowing snow, and Allie steps onto the sill and waves an arm at him, indicating that she wants him to come inside, to the kitchen. He can’t make out her face, but he knows her look, he’s seen it lots of times before, a mixture of anger, hurt, and concern, and he can’t hear her because of the wind, and his cap pulled down over his ears, but he knows what she is shouting to him: “Come inside, for God’s sake, Nelson! You’re drunk! You’re going to hurt yourself!” The dog appears beside her and, not recognizing Nelson, bounds outside, barking ferociously at him, leaping eagerly through the snow toward him, barking with great force at the snow-covered stranger in the yard, and when Nelson turns to avoid the animal’s rush, he slips on the wet snow and falls again, dropping the wood and scattering it. Suddenly, the dog recognizes him and retreats swiftly to the kitchen. Nelson reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out the bottle, works the cap off, and takes a long drink. Recapping the bottle, he places it in his pocket and looks back toward the door, but it’s closed. He’s alone again. Good. Slowly, he retrieves his three sticks of wood one by one and stands and resumes his trek to the barn. It seems so far away, that dark opening in the white world, miles and years away from him, that he wonders if he will ever get there, if he will spend years, an entire lifetime, out here in the snow slogging his way toward the silent, dark, ice-cold barn, where he can set his three pieces of firewood down, lay one piece of wood on the floor snugly against the other, the start of a new row.

Quality Time

Tires crunch against the crushed stone driveway, and a flash of headlights crosses Kent’s bedroom window, waking him from a light sleep. But he wasn’t asleep, he tells himself. Merely resting, eyes closed. Listening. Just as, when Rose was still in high school, he lay in bed after midnight and listened for the sound of a car—his, or the current boyfriend’s, her girlfriend’s father’s car, sometimes even his ex-wife’s car—bringing Rose home to his house, where she spent the weekend, Kent’s every-other-weekend, or her spring-break week, or her two-week midsummer visit. In his house in his town, his turn to be the custodial parent.

Quality time, they called it. He would greet her at the door and make sure she wasn’t drunk or high or sad, and when she was suffering from any of those conditions, he tried to treat her condition rationally, calmly, realistically. Kent was a physician, a trained scientist, as he thought of it, and also a man of the world. He knew what kids were dealing with out there. He sympathized. Even today, a decade later and more of an administrator now than a physician, Kent still sympathizes.

He hears the thump of Rose’s clunky Doc Martens against the front deck, the jingle of the house key, and the slammed door. In three months Rose will be thirty, and she still slams the door when she comes in, no matter how late the hour. And Kent still checks the car for scratches and dents the morning after she borrows it. Especially this car, his brand-new Audi, silver and sleek—his sixtieth birthday present to himself. He’s already reminding himself to examine the car in the morning before he leaves for the office, so he won’t discover the ding in the fender or the broken taillight late in the afternoon in the clinic parking lot, which is where she’ll insist it must have happened, since she has absolutely zero recollection of any fender-bender occurring on her watch. He’ll accept that. He’ll have to. He turns on the bedside lamp, gets out of bed, and walks to the closet. But she’ll be lying. Or worse, she won’t really know one way or the other how it happened, and won’t care, either. He pulls his bathrobe over his pajamas and pads barefoot down the hall to the kitchen.

“Hey, babe. Nice time?” he says and plucks a bunch of purple grapes from the fruit bowl on the breakfast table. She’s sprawled at the table, thoughtfully drinking milk from a half-gallon container. Kent likes this kitchen, the only truly up-to-date, architect-designed room in the house. It’s an orderly arrangement of stainless steel, ceramic tile, overhead pot racks, and butcher-block islands. He had it renovated top to bottom back when he first got serious about gourmet cooking and enjoys telling people that the kitchen is state-of-the-art. The rest of the house is more or less the way it was when he bought it fifteen years ago, the year after the divorce. Since then, though he’s enjoyed several long-term romances with women, good women his own age, marriageable women, he’s not shared his house with anyone—except his daughter. Hasn’t wanted to. A nineteen-fifties, midlevel mafia capo’s suburban ranch, is how Kent likes to describe the house to strangers.

He pops the grapes one by one into his mouth. He’s been unmarried now for nearly as long as he was married, and the fact freshly surprises him. He drops the grape stem into the trash compactor.

“I wish you’d use a glass,” he says evenly. Julia, his ex-wife, gave her that habit—drinking orange juice, milk, whatever, straight from the carton.

“Sorry, Pops, I forgot. It’s been a while,” Rose says. She shrugs and smiles up at him, sheepishly, or maybe mockingly, he’s not sure which. It hasn’t been that long since she last visited him, has it? Barely half a year.

She stands and crosses to the glassware cabinet, where she takes out a tumbler and fills it, leaving the carton on the counter. Rose is a tall, large-boned woman with burgundy-colored, shoulder-length hair. Her skin comes from her mother—skin so smooth and strikingly pale it seems washed in a hazy blue light. When Julia was Rose’s age, he remembers, she tied her hair back the same way and in summer favored sleeveless, V-neck blouses. Julia then, like her daughter now, showed as much face, throat, and arms as possible. If you’ve got it, she used to say, show it.

Kent doesn’t know how Julia does her hair now or if her skin is still as beautiful—he hasn’t seen her close-up in over seven years. He imagines that she’s changed in that time as much as he and in most of the same ways. In seven years your whole body replaces itself, cell by cell.

He picks up the milk carton and returns it to the refrigerator. “So how was it tonight, with your old pals?”

“Okay,” she says. “It was fun.” Then, “
Not
, actually. Not okay. Not fun.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Eddie and Jeanette and Tucker and Sandy? They’re not my old pals. Not really. And they’re married, they’re couples, et cetera. And they’re definitely on the boring side. Tep-id.”

“They are?” he says in a low, sad voice. He wants to let his disappointment show without having to say it.

“Yeah. I didn’t even know them, you know, till after the divorce. I mean, I
knew
them, we hung out a lot when we were teenagers, but it was mostly summers, Dad. A few weeks at a time.”

He understands. It has to be hard for her, five hours on a Trailways bus to visit the old man every six months or so for a long weekend or maybe a week. Then being alone with him at his house (her house once, as he often points out, but, as she insists, not hers anymore), until he fears he’s holding her against her will, so he starts pushing her to go out on her own, go ahead, borrow the Audi, visit some of her old pals. Most of the local people her age, because they’ve not left this small, upstate town for more promising climes, have married one another and have settled for much less than Rose wants for herself. She’s right. They
are
boring.

Rose is an artist, a sculptor who has already had two one-person shows of her work, the first at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, where she went to college, and the other at a small gallery in Litchfield, Connecticut, where Julia lives. Julia and her second husband, Thatcher Clarke, the executive director of the clock and watch museum there, helped arrange it. When Julia first met Thatcher, a few months before her divorce from Kent became final, he was the director of the Adirondack Arts Council and had already been hired to run the clock and watch museum down in Litchfield, one hundred twenty miles to the south. Within weeks of the divorce, Julia followed him there. Rose went with her. Because of the schools. That’s when the need for quality time arrived.

Kent honestly believes that Ol’ Thatch, as he calls him, is perfect for Julia, and he’s been a good stepfather for Rose. He’s a hale fellow well-met, in Kent’s words, and a liberal New England Republican. Kent, on the other hand, is proud to be neither. He spoke with Ol’ Thatch briefly at Rose’s high school graduation, renewed their slight acquaintance when she graduated from Skidmore, and saw him a third time last fall at the Skidmore show.

Julia didn’t attend the opening. She was at a health spa in New Mexico, Rose explained. Was she okay? Health-wise? “Oh, sure,” Rose assured him. “It’s about weight. As usual.” Julia had mailed the spa her fifteen-hundred-dollar deposit months earlier and didn’t want to lose it, so Rose told her to go, for heaven’s sake. She could see Rose’s new work on her own anytime. Two months later, Rose had the show in Litchfield.

Rose kisses her father on the cheek, says good night, and saunters down the hall toward her room, flipping off lights as she goes. Her bedroom is situated on the opposite end of the house from Kent’s master bedroom. It was originally meant to be guest quarters, but the first weekend Rose spent with him in his new house, when she was fifteen, Kent turned the guest bedroom, dressing room, and bath over to her. He did it casually, as if it were something that occurred to him only when it was happening, but it was long-planned and for him a memorable event. It was his first chance to feel like a father, a real father with a house large enough to give his teenage daughter her own bedroom suite, where she could play her music and watch TV and talk on her own phone without interfering with his music, TV, and phone. He was no longer a middle-aged single guy subletting a semifurnished garden apartment in a complex filled with young professionals. He’d hated that. He was a proper family man now. His house, his daughter’s rooms, and her regular, ongoing presence at his house proved it.

He needed that visible evidence of paternity, and he believed that Rose did, too. The divorce was harder on her, he feels, than either Julia or Rose herself is willing to acknowledge—Julia because she still feels guilty for the several careless little love affairs that led up to the divorce and ostensibly caused it, and, too, because she was the one who afterwards moved away; and Rose because she doesn’t want her parents to worry about her any more than they already do.

It wasn’t Julia’s dalliances, though, that caused the divorce, or her removal to Litchfield that heightened the pain of it for Rose. And Kent knows it. As the years pass, some things in life do get simpler, and Kent’s divorce from Julia was becoming one of those things. No, it all came down to the simple fact that he grew up, and she didn’t, and then wouldn’t. And because she had plenty of inherited money, she’s never had to. She didn’t need Kent’s money or proximity to raise their child, she could do it on her own, and, mostly, that’s what she did. There’s no way, of course, that he can tell this to Rose or Julia. Not now. They’d think he was criticizing them, and he wasn’t.

Kent washes Rose’s milk glass in the sink, places it into the dish rack, and switches off the overhead light. He steps into the darkened sitting porch just off the kitchen—he can’t remember if he locked the door to the backyard. The flagstone floor is cold against his bare feet, when suddenly it’s as if he’s walking on gravel or broken peanut shells. Popcorn, maybe. Beads from a broken necklace? He gropes beside him in the dark, until his hand finds a floor lamp.

It’s birdseed! A wide trail of sunflower and wildflower seeds and cracked corn spills from the pantry behind him, where he stores a hundred-pound bag of mixed birdseed in a large galvanized trash can. The trail crosses the porch to the door leading outside. Mornings over his second cup of coffee and evenings over his first Scotch and soda, Kent often sits out here on the glider and watches the birds flutter greedily over the three large bird feeders hanging from the maple tree. There are finches, both purple and gold, pine siskins and grosbeaks, cardinals and phoebes. Once he saw an indigo bunting and was so excited he shouted, “Look!” but he was alone. His shout, even through the glass, scared the bunting, and it flew away and didn’t return.

He stares down at the birdseed scattered over the slate floor, and he feels his neck and ears redden. She must have refilled the feeders sometime earlier tonight, and instead of bringing the feeders into the pantry and filling them there, which is how he does it and has demonstrated for her any number of times, she carried the seeds, scoop by scoop, across the porch and out the door, spilling as she went. That’s so damned typical! And, of course, since she never sees disorder anyway and didn’t see the stuff scattered across the floors of the porch and pantry, she didn’t think to clean it up. Never crossed her mind. He strides down the hall to Rose’s end of the house, snapping on lights as he goes.

He knocks firmly on her door. Not with anger, for while he is exasperated, he’s not angry. He’s confused. He can admit that much. After all these years, he still doesn’t understand why she can’t or won’t remember what he tells her to do, what he asks her to do, what he wants her to do, when she’s in his house. When she’s in his
life
, for heaven’s sake. She acts as if, for her, his life doesn’t exist, or if it exists at all, it doesn’t have any meaning. He can’t bear that.

She opens the door. She’s wearing green-and-blue-plaid flannel pajamas and has her toothbrush and toothpaste in hand. “You haven’t gone to sleep yet, have you?” he asks evenly.

“I haven’t made my evening ablutions yet,” she says, smiling. Then she sees his expression. “What’s the matter?”

“The birdseed, Rose. You spilled it all over the porch floor.”

She wrinkles her brow and stares at her father’s face, not quite getting what he’s after. “I did?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry. I… I wasn’t aware…,” she trails off. “The bird feeders were almost empty. You want me to clean it up … now?”

“If you don’t mind.”

She sighs audibly. “O-kay.”

Kent turns and walks purposefully back to his side of the house, not stopping until he’s inside his bedroom and has closed the door, extinguished the light, and has got himself under the covers in bed. He’s breathing rapidly, as if he’s just climbed three flights of stairs. His heart is pounding, and adrenaline is rushing through his body. He knows what’s happening to his body, he’s a doctor, after all. But
why
is it happening? Why is he fuming over such a trivial offense? Why even view it as an offense in the first place? Must he take
personally
everything his daughter does wrong?

In the morning, Kent leaves for the office before Rose wakes. There are no dents or scratches on his Audi. He feels guilty for last night, not because he did or said anything to hurt her, but because he
was
angry, when clearly something else was called for. He’s not sure what, but he knows that anger was useless to them both. Useless and therefore offensive somehow. Around ten, he telephones the house, and she picks up. “I wondered if you’d like to meet me for lunch downtown,” he says, a little shy and stiff.

“Sounds great!” She’s chewing food, he can tell, and is probably still in bed in her pajamas, flopped in front of the TV, working her way through the lox and bagels he bought especially for her visit.

“Want me to come by the house and pick you up?”

“No, I’ll ride the bike! It’s gorgeous out, and I need the exercise. I’ve been a lump all week.”

They agree to meet at his office at one. At a quarter to one, Kent walks out the door of the clinic, leans against the railing of the front steps, and looks along the street uphill to his right, where he knows that Rose in a few moments will come into view pedaling her old bike, the blue Raleigh three-speed that he bought for her the summer she turned fourteen. She already owned a bike, a present on her twelfth birthday from both Mom and Dad, but he bought her the Raleigh himself so that, after the divorce, she could ride from her mother’s house to his whenever she wanted. Then Julia moved. Or from his house to the office, he assured her, where they could meet for lunch on Saturdays when he had to work. She rode from his house on Ash Street to Main and then cruised ten blocks along Main to the long, curving hill that flattened and straightened where it passed in front of the clinic. He remembers October leaves skidding across the sidewalks and streets, and the sky was deep blue. He liked to wait on the steps outside, just as he is doing today, and every time he saw her pedal around that far curve with a wide, excited grin on her face and her auburn hair flying behind her in the rippling sunlight, his chest filled with joy and with an inescapable sadness, and he could barely keep his eyes from flooding with tears. He knew what gave him the joy—she did; he loved her, and the joy proved it—but he did not know what caused the sadness.