Featured Prose | December 05, 2025

Alone in the living room, his mother having finally made her way to bed, Lidia said, “Cousin, you got to stop looking at me that way, with the big sneaky eyes.”

He looked up from the mustard stain on her thigh. “Hey—healthy, red-blooded American boy here. Can’t blame me for looking.”

She frowned. Patted the sofa beside her. “Come here a minute, sit.” He did. She said, “First, we related. You my cousin, for Pete sake.”

“Yes, but distant. Very distant.”

“Second thing, Henry, is you got to quit looking that way at any womens. Things are different now from when you were young guy. Womens got minds too, you know, not just bodies for you to google at.”

It felt like a slap. “I know that.” He’d heard it all before, though he’d never really believed it. He would never be convinced that looking could hurt, that it was anything other than a compliment, that a beautiful woman should feel anything but flattered when a man heaped his attention upon her. He was miffed. Who did she think she was?

He channel surfed, sulking, skimming past Monica Lewinsky, Clinton, hockey, a volcano eruption, baseball, Pope John Paul, galloping horses, a Black child starving, lingering a little longer on a bearded Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. They stared at the pulse of the blinking images. Lidia said, “Do not be mad with me.”

He stopped on a commercial, ReUnion America . . . find old friends, classmates, family, lost loves . . . An 800 number and a price, seventy-five dollars. He watched the actors hugging joyfully in reunion after reunion, the happy smiles. Seventy-five dollars was too damn much. He resumed surfing.

“Let me guess,” Lydia said. “Old girlfriend?”

He looked at her. “You pretty sharp for a Polack there.”

She shrugged. “Good guess.”

“Old girlfriend,” he said. “Real old.”

She touched his shoulder. “Tell you what. Here. I give you back rub.”

Her fingers dug into the muscles of his upper back. “Oh wow,” he said.

“Get on stomach. I give you real massage.”

Trying to straddle him, she kneed his ribs. “Ow!”

“Oops,” she said. He pictured her smile, the sweet, shy one.

The massage was mesmerizing, impossibly pleasant. “God,” he said. “Where’d you learn how to do this?”

“My partner and I, we practice on each others. Every night almost.”

“Your ‘partner’?”

“Partner. You know. Boyfriend. Teddy.”

Henry grunted. “Is he big?”

She thought about it. He could hear her catch her breath. “He got big nose,” she said. He closed his eyes. She kept working. After a while she said, “What is her name?”

“Irene,” he said into the cushion. “Irene McBride. At least it was.”

***

He came home early. He was an inspector for the Insurance Rating Association, and when he was in the field inspecting risks, his hours were his own. Normally, he never stinted. He had his integrity. He had his integrity and normally no reason to go home early, to only his mother, another heavy meal, television. Now it was different.

Lidia brought a whole new perspective to going home. Going home now was mystery and suspense, not unlike a first date. She’d taken over.

Henry hadn’t noticed the creeping neglect—his mother’s decline had been so gradual—but when Lidia waxed the kitchen floor, it looked like new. She made the beds and did the laundry, eschewing the dryer for the airiness of the backyard clothesline. She did the dishes, vacuumed and dusted with a polish that smelled like pine, masking the unappealing cooking odors. She washed the windows, and the fresh view of the green outside was a rebirth. She helped her Aunt Klara in the kitchen—an area where Aunt Klara was reluctant to accept help—and monitored their meds, both Henry’s and his mother’s, dispensing a week’s worth at a time into the plastic pillboxes she purchased at the drugstore. His mother was delighted to have someone to chatter with, mostly in Polish, relieving Henry of another task.

But what impressed him most was not what Lidia did but what Lidia was, the physical presence of her: Lidia sitting on the sofa, standing at the kitchen counter, flipping through the pages of a magazine, climbing the stairs, her hand gracing the banister, her light summer clothing clinging, the hints and glimpses of her splendid femininity. He seldom fantasized explicitly about making love to her, for there was no need. That fantasy was with him always, latent and living, a dormant sense of magic.

He came home one day when his mother was still at work. At eighty-three, she was still serving food in the Saints Cyril and Methodius School cafeteria, still heaping extra portions upon the plate of any child whom she remotely suspected of ever having been hungry at any moment in his or her life on the planet.

Lidia was at the kitchen sink, her hands immersed in a pail of water. “You home early,” she said. The floor was wet.

“What happened?”

Lidia shrugged her sweet smile. “Little spill. Water slippy, you know?”

He watched her hands, listening to the slosh and swish. “What are you washing?”

“Aunt Klara’s bloomers. She have accidents. Happen when you old.”

By her smile, he’d have thought her hands were immersed in rose petals. Now he noticed the scant suds, the brown tint. She saw the look on his face. “Hey, you lucky maybe, huh? Never get old, poop pants.”

“Yeah, lucky. Counting my blessings here.”

Her face darkened. “Henry, I do not mean it that way, okay? Maybe live long time. Who know? Trick is not to quit living when you still alive.”

“You bet. And you know what makes you feel more alive than anything?”

“I can guess what you say.”

“Okay. Guess.” He grinned his naughty grin.

“Henry, here you go again with that stuff,” she said. “Tell you what. How bout back rub instead?” She took her hands from the bucket. He looked at them. “I wash hands first.”

“Not exactly what I had in mind.”

“Okay then, how bout this? How bout we call Irene up?” She smiled at the look on his face. “No dollars, nobody on the television. I do it myself. Few phone calls is all it cost to find old Irene McBride.”

He nodded approvingly. “You pretty sharp for a Polack there.”

She smiled. “Pretty good idea, huh?”

His nod winding down, Henry warmed to the idea. Irene McBride—the idea of Irene McBride—took on an irresistible warmth and magnetism. Irene McBride represented his youth and his health, his first meaningful sexual experience, intertwined now with the youth and beauty of Lidia. He watched his cousin smiling down at the poopy drawers, pleased with herself, her flesh quivering delectably beneath her thin blue T-shirt as she scrubbed.

***

He sat alone in the waiting room. He hadn’t called Irene yet, a bit apprehensive about exactly what he would say, wanting to make sure he got it right. He picked through words in his mind as he absently leafed through a magazine.

An article caught his eye, a statistic: in the United States alone, eighteen people die from lung cancer every hour. What was this statistic, this article, this magazine doing in the waiting room of an oncologist?

He did the math: eighteen people every hour; about one every three minutes. He looked at his watch. He’d been waiting for twenty minutes. Seven people dead. Seven souls, one after the other, like lemmings over a cliff, like soldiers picked off by a sniper. Of course, it wouldn’t be regular. It was a statistical average. Maybe no one had died for an hour. And maybe in the next moment, all eighteen would die at once, at the same time. Like a suicide bomber in an Israeli café. Or a small plane going down. Or a mine disaster. All those people existing one instant, gone the next. His fist clenched, heart rising in anger, seething at whoever had written the article, whoever had published it, whoever had done the research in the first place, and especially whoever thought it was a good idea to leave it here, in plain view, in this place.

“Mr. Kaspar?” The nurse was a pear-shaped woman with a blue smock and hair the color of sauerkraut, her smile perfunctory and guarded. “This way,” she said.

“Hello, Henry,” Dr. Smizek said. “How are we doing today?”

“Pretty good, I guess, Doc, considering one of us got lung cancer.”

Smizek’s cool blue eyes never wavered. There was much for Henry to admire, starting with the practiced, confident way the doctor shook hands, firm but not too firm, brief but not too brief. He admired the cuff links, gold, the high thread count of his starched blue shirt, the perfect pucker below the knot of his silk tie. He admired the practiced, confident manner with which he slapped the celluloid slide with a clap of miniature thunder to the box on the wall and flicked on the light behind it to show the black and gray shadows, the dark clouds inside Henry, and the practiced, confident manner in which he said, “Not so good, I’m afraid.”

***

He called Irene when he got home, while he was still angry and afraid. He was more angry than afraid, but the anger and the fear combined made calling Irene a walk in the park.

From the sofa, Lidia sat watching.

“Irene,” he said. “Long time no see.” This he’d rehearsed quite a while.

“Henry? Henry Kaspar? I don’t believe it.”

“She doesn’t believe it,” he said aside to Lidia.

“Well, it’s been—how long?” Irene said. “Years.”

“Longer than that, I’m thinking. How you doing?”

“You’re not married? I can’t believe you’re not married.”

“After you broke my heart, I could never look at another woman.” He winked at Lidia.

“Oh, here we go,” said Irene.

She was anxious to see him. They made a date. When he hung up, he looked at Lidia and they said nothing, one silly smile mirroring the other.

It wasn’t until he was getting ready the next evening that a tiny flutter invaded his stomach. Then his knee dipped and his legs went weak. He’d showered, shaved, dressed, and was buckling his belt in front of the mirror, careful to tuck in his shirt just so. A hint of an ache invaded his chest. A blackness, an intimation of oblivion, passed involuntarily like a shadow through his mind, and he began to sink. He was suddenly aware of the enormity of what he was undertaking, the gravity of Irene McBride and twenty-five years of history, and the ache became a creeping dread. But then in the mirror, beyond his own pale self, he saw Lidia in the doorway, bright as a lily in the sun. “Handsome man Henry. Irene go wow.”

You know what? Henry took a closer look in the mirror. A little drawn and gray, maybe, a little older, but not too bad, not too bad at all, all things considered.

Lidia just might be right.

***

Irene McBride was disorientingly real after existing only in his mind for a quarter century. Her hand was warm, soft, and actual. He picked her up at her place in Manchester—a new colonial on a manicured lot with trees and boulders—where she was waiting in the doorway with a smile far exceeding any he could summon from memory, a smile that immediately put him at ease. She met him on the flagstone walk. “Hank. It’s so good to see you again.”

He reached to shake her hand, but she gathered him in for a hug. “You look good,” he said. She did. Slightly heavier, but healthy, well-toned, tan. She wore a green flowered skirt and a silky, sheer green blouse with something lacy underneath. Her eyes seemed greener, more alive, her hair a darker red than he remembered.

“So do you,” she said, then hesitated as though catching herself in a lie. She touched his cuff link, gold and onyx. “I love these cuff links—you always had such good taste.”

“Why you talking about me in the past tense?”

She laughed. “You still have good taste.”

“I do. Especially in beautiful women.”

“See?” she said.

They’d been to the Polish National Home on Charter Oak Avenue before, Henry many times, Irene once, with him, for lunch in March of 1973. He remembered. Not a board had changed, not a tile. Austere and institutional on the outside, homey and intimate within, despite its hallish size. An elaborate old mahogany bar ran the length of the room. They sat in one of the wooden booths along the wall, and Henry wondered if it was the same booth they’d sat in before, when he’d had the kapusta, and she the liverwurst. They reminisced, catching up, laughing often. Irene had been successful, moving up from hairdresser at Sexy Sally’s to ownership of her own salon, Fresh Hair, in Manchester. Her boy, Danny, was a senior at Boston University, and her girl, Marissa, had her own place and was working at Aetna.

When she wanted to know what he’d been doing for the last twenty-five years, Henry had little to say. He was doing exactly the same thing now that he’d been doing then.

“Eh,” he said, “a little this, a little that,” hoping to veil the monotony in mystery.

They were in no hurry to order, lingering over menus, Irene sipping a gin and tonic, he a vodka martini. She asked about everyone they’d known at work, who was still there, who wasn’t, who was still alive, who wasn’t, and they laughed about the time Grogan’s desk caught fire, his cigarette falling unnoticed from his ashtray, Mr. Erwin wrestling with the fire extinguisher, and how the men in the field never lived it down, the fire in the New England Fire Insurance Rating Association. She commented on how everyone smoked back then, the office always thick with smoke, how lucky they were to have survived, and now he knew for sure Lidia hadn’t told her.

He reached for her hand, squeezed it, and felt a welling in his eyes, out of nowhere, for he was suddenly, utterly, completely in love again with Irene McBride. Being with her seemed so unlikely that he had to doubt it for a moment, doubt that he was really awake, holding the hand of an actual, touchable, breathing woman, staring at him from across the table with living green eyes and a warm beating heart.

A couple dancing caught their eye, and they stared for a moment.

“You were a terrific dancer,” he said.

“Why are you talking about me in the past tense?”

“I haven’t seen you dance in years. Maybe you got, whataya call it, two left feet now.”

The dancing couple danced away. On the wall by their table was a framed photograph of a women’s basketball team, Greater Hartford Champions ’38–’39, healthy, dark-haired young women with smiling eyes, Bojko, Kiezuk, Kaminski, Kostek, Shipka . . . He wondered if any of them were still alive. He imagined them, maybe every third one, doddering old ladies, their names on nursing home doorways, Kiezuk, Nowak . . . Then he imagined the others, their names carved into headstones.

Irene squeezed his hand to say look at me. Henry did. Her face wore the question: What are we waiting for? She smiled. “Let’s go home.”

***

“You home early.” Lidia was on the sofa in her silky blue pajamas, her feet curled beneath her, looking up from a Cosmopolitan. “Not good time?”

“Yeah, good time. Real good time.”

“Too early for real good time.” Her face narrowed suspiciously.

“Good time. She’s still a terrific kid.”

“Terrific kid do not invite you home with her after?”

“It got too late. I’m beat.” All the way home he’d been unable to erase the image of Irene standing on her flagstone walk, unmoving, unbelieving, watching him pull away after he’d declined her invitation to come inside. All the way home he’d felt like crying.

“I give you back rub, you sleep better.”

“I’m beat,” he said. “I’m going on up.”

The way she watched him walk up the stairs, watched him pause on the landing to catch his breath, reminded him of Irene standing alone watching him leave. He lingered on the landing for a moment, taking in the concerned, questioning look on Lidia’s face, taking in the sad loveliness of her curled there in her silky blue pajamas.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. How could she? He didn’t understand.

He put on his own pajamas—bland white cotton—got into bed, and stared at the faint glow across his ceiling from the streetlight outside. His muscles were tense, far too tense for sleep. He wondered why he’d left Irene standing alone on the walk. Why had he refused to go in? What had made him change his mind at the last moment? The niggling fear in the back of his mind that he would disappoint her, that he wouldn’t be able to meet her needs, had been clawing its way to the forefront.

The truth was he didn’t know why. It had been almost instinctual. Whatever it was that had made him turn away from the chance for love was beyond his knowing, and it frightened him. It angered him. It was part of a mysterious grand plan he wasn’t privy to, and another part of that plan, somehow, was the black cloud growing in his lungs, the short breaths and wheezes, and the frightful scrambling of his heart.

***

He didn’t call Irene. She didn’t call him. He imagined her in her Manchester home, behind the desk at Fresh Hair, ignoring the telephone, a look of indifference on her face, looking at the phone, wrinkling her nose.

As he lay in bed one night, watching the glow on his ceiling, a song came to his mind: “Little Things Mean a Lot.” It was from his first years in the country, a song that had helped him learn English, and he still remembered most of the words, which had seemed to him at the time, in the freshness of his youth and the newness of the language, impossibly poignant and beautiful. It was a sad song. Its uninvited arrival pissed him off. He got up, went down the stairs.

The living room was dark, the only light coming from the television and the window, illuminated softly from the streetlight outside. Lidia sat curled in his recliner. “TV too loud?”

He sat on the sofa, drummed his fingers. “I was thinking,” he said. “I was wondering if I should have told Irene—you know, about my, whataya call it, condition.”

Lidia sat up. “You do not tell her?”

“No, I didn’t tell her. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me.”

“You Americans. You strange habit of trying to pretend like life it do not end.”

“Easy for you to say, with what, another fifty, sixty years ahead of you.”

“One, two, fifty, sixty, what is difference? All end up same way. Come,” she said.

“Come where? I’m not going anywhere.”

“You come now with me. You need cool down.”

“No. I don’t need no cool down.” The thickening of his Polish accent pissed him off. Give me your hand when I’ve lost my way—the song lyric popping into his mind pissed him off. Lidia opened the front door, waiting there in her silky blue pajamas. Her face, half in shadows, half lighted, was serene, almost smiling. Give me your shoulder to cry on. Henry followed in his bland cotton pajamas. Outside air was hotter, thick and still. She walked across the yard, electric blue motion, through the shadow of the dogwood to the sidewalk, across the street toward the Harrisons’, their neighbors. He couldn’t keep up. Five feet behind her, he whispered, “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

She walked across the yard, down alongside the Harrisons’ house. The windows were dark, the hedges high. Henry hesitated in front, frightened, excited, grass caressing his bare feet, a hint of dew, scarcely a sound, no cars, no birds, a distant horn on a Hartford street in the middle of this night he was living. He followed her around the house, through a small gate, found her standing by the swimming pool, staring at the black, glittering surface of the water. He glanced nervously at the Harrisons’ sleeping windows. “What the hell you doing?” he whispered.

She turned, her eyes gleaming like the surface of the pool. She touched his cheek, then his shoulder, said, “Oops,” as she pushed.

His garbled exclamation was mostly lost in the splash. He bobbed to the surface, spitting, paddling, gasping at Lidia smiling down, her head cocked sweetly.

“Relax, cousin,” she said. “Harrisons not at home.”

His anger was stopped in its tracks when she began to unbutton her pajamas. “How do you know?”

“I know.” Pajamas slithered to her feet. She stood for a moment in her bra and panties, radiant and ephemeral in the ambient light, stark against the blackness of the yard. She dived into the water, coming up inches from his nose, black hair glistening on her scalp. She gripped his arms, pulled him close. “Okay, cousin. Now get off your chest.”

“I got water up my nose.”

“That ain’t all where you got water.” Reaching down, she goosed him.

“This feels good. The water.” They clung together, floating in the pool, sinking to their chins, bobbing up again when their feet touched bottom.

“You think God give you raw deal, huh? You pissed off, huh? You think you only person ever get raw deal like this one? So what you going to do?”

He listened to the panting water, to their heavy breathing, chest to chest, face to face. He couldn’t get into her eyes, so he quit trying, looking down toward the blackness at the bottom of the pool. “I don’t know.”

“You pissed off,” she said. “You mad.”

“You’re right.” He tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him.

“Good.”

“No,” he said, spitting the taste of chlorine from his mouth. “Let go.”

A moon had emerged in the sky overhead, illuminating layers of striated clouds like sand raked across a beach.

She pulled him closer, her chin on his shoulder, her legs locking behind his. Give me your shoulder to cry on. Goddamn lyric. She clung, and he was the strongest man in the world, holding her there as they bobbed and floated. “You alive now,” she said, patting his back, rubbing it. A calmness crept in, anger and fear seeping out, water lapping in time to their quiet breathing. The buoyant weight of her, the touch and feel, the nearness of the mysteries of her body redirected the blood swirling in his head. Halfway down their bodies, a little nudge of redirection brushed against her. “You really alive now,” she said. “Tomorrow you call up old Irene again.”

They floated together for a while, the perfect suspension between hot and cold beginning to cool, but he didn’t want to move. Finally, she pulled away and climbed out, and he saw her sad and lovely face in the moonlight for only an instant, her cheeks streaked with what he took to be water from the pool.

***

Dinner with Irene McBride at Farnam’s Steak House was comfortable and natural, the chemistry still there, and gradually he opened up, letting it pour out—I been diagnosed with that, whataya call it, lung cancer. Irene’s concern was genuine. She was alarmed, reaching for him, touching him, and afterwards, after he’d accepted this time her invitation to come into her home, she was genuinely concerned again—genuinely reassuring as well.

“It’s all right, Hank. Believe me, I understand.”

“I don’t,” he said, and he didn’t. He was miserable. It was all there: Irene in a negligee, soft music, candlelight, desire—lust by its gentler name—the vision of her so willing and giving and gorgeous, the sensation of her kissing, nibbling lips, the softness and firmness and smoothness and moistness of her. It was all there but the part that needed to be. She was his for the having, and he couldn’t have her.

“To have that awful thing always on your mind. I’m surprised you can even tie your shoes. I don’t see how you could concentrate on this at all.”

Henry shook his head. The flickering light of the candles on the mantel reflected off the stones of the fireplace and off the darkened glass of the windows across the room. “Half the time it’s all I can think about,” he said.

“I put too much pressure on you,” she said, touching the hem of her negligee. “I wanted it to be special.” He took her hand off his chest and moved it, holding it nearer his stomach, and she said, “I’m sorry—are you all right?”

“Little wheezy is all.”

“We can just cuddle,” she said, burrowing closer. “It feels so good just to be held. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen—if not tonight, some other time.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. I’m so damned, whataya call it. . . .”

“Horny?” She rubbed his back, a light, gentle touch, not at all like Lidia’s.

“Yeah. Exactly. Good word, horny.”

“I’ve been working on my vocabulary,” she said. “Has it been a long time?”

“I had a girlfriend. Broke up what, two, three years ago. How about you?”

Irene sat up beside him. “Nothing to speak of since my husband left me. Paul. Must be, God, almost ten years now.”

“Another woman?”

“Another man.”

Henry raised his brow. “You’re kidding me—he was, whataya call it, gay?”

Irene nodded. “Danny still won’t speak to him. Marissa’s gotten over it.”

“And you?”

Irene shrugged in her black negligee. “I’m horny too.”

He leaned back into the sofa, pulling her with him. “Great,” he said. “Just great.” He held her. She was right. It did feel good just to hold her.

“Here we are,” Irene said. “Horny and helpless.”

***

On a cool and gloomy afternoon a week or so later, he came home from work, early again—early was becoming the norm, as was the fatigue that caused it—to a quiet house, suspended in midsummer doldrums. Even the birds were quiet. His mother was napping. Where Lidia was he could only guess. Maybe jogging, maybe shopping with a new friend, maybe doing God-only-knew-what with God-only-knew-who. Or maybe off on a new adventure altogether, leaving him further behind, in the dust.

He climbed the stairs, slowly, pausing on the landing. In his room he changed, sat on the bed to catch his breath, easing back to the pillows. He heard a sniffle. He couldn’t tell where it came from. Then he heard another, distinctly overhead.

He made his way up the narrow stairway to the attic, catching his breath at the top, breathing in the musty odor. Boxes, trunks, cast-off furniture, the glint of a dusty mirror tilted atop an old dresser, abandoned garments hanging lifelessly beneath the eaves. The overcast day allowed little light through the oval windows in the peaks at either end, little more through the window of the dormer in the middle, where Lidia sat on the floor. She was close to the window, looking out, leaning against a mattress covered with a tufted throw the color of dust. Hearing him, she wiped her cheeks with her hand, wiped her hand on her yellow T-shirt. Her legs were long and bare, awkward as a foal’s, the brightest thing in the room by far.

He crossed the creaky floorboards, reclining beside her with an easy grunt. She tried to smile, glancing at him for only a second, then back toward the window that was open, cool air coming through the screen.

He said, “You found my place.”

“Good to be alone sometime.”

“You want me to leave?”

“No.”

Below them was the backyard, the little shed where he kept the mower, the weathered fence, the trees, the back of the brick apartment building one street over. Shingles were missing from the roof of the shed. He knew they’d never be replaced, but it was only a passing notion, nothing more. He felt happy, lucky, the same feeling he’d had once as a kid when he’d found a dollar bill on the sidewalk. He’d bought ice cream, blueberry, cold and delicious.

“I haven’t been up here in years.”

“I clean it up some,” Lidia said.

“Me and Eddie used to come up here and read dirty magazines. When we were kids.”

“Kids, I bet.” She nearly chuckled.

“Matter of fact,” he said. He climbed over the mattress, blew away dust, moved a box, rummaged through another, retrieving a stack of Playboys. “These might be worth something now.” He pointed at the date on the cover, December 1956.

“Might be. Wow.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Me? No thing the matter.”

“You come up here to read dirty magazines?”

A better chuckle this time. “Little, what you call it, sick for home is all.”

“Homesick?”

“Yes, that is it.”

“You miss Teddy?” Now she looked at him, tears filling her eyes. “There is no Teddy, is there?” he said.

“Was,” she said. “Teddy die, though.”

A frown, a shadow across his mind. “How?”

She looked out the window again. “Accident. Teddy run off cliff.”

“He drove off a cliff?”

“No, not car. All the time we run. Run—jog, you call it, jog, funny word. Teddy good runner guy, he get way ahead of me always, he run ahead. And when he run, he go away, like, what do you call it, hypnotize.”

“You mean like zoned out?”

“What zone? I do not know zone, but Teddy he run like in trance, run right off end of cliff. Down thirty meters anyway to rock, dead.”

“Let me get this straight. Teddy’s out for a jog, and he runs off a cliff?”

She nodded, looking at the backyard. “We jump out of airplane, we—what do you say here, skydive—hundred times, all fun, no trouble, then he go and run off end of cliff.”

“You skydive?” he said, impressed.

She nodded. “Learn in army. Fun. Do all the time, till . . .”

“Till Teddy forgot his chute.”

“Something like I do, not Teddy. Teddy is full of graceful, athlete-type. I am clumsy one. Teddy always say I got two left thumbs, tease me like that, I bump into table, run into hole, knock head on branch of tree. Then Teddy go and do that. I think he catch it from me.”

He reached for her, put his arm around her, pulled her close. She allowed herself to be held, her hands in her lap.

It was perhaps the wrong moment to hold her. He was as sensitive as the next guy, didn’t consider himself a callous man, but he didn’t know Teddy, and the image of Teddy and his big nose, his fancy running togs, running off the edge of a cliff struck him funny—an image of Wile E. Coyote bubbled up—and he found himself squelching a giggle.

“What?” she said.

“What what?”

“You laugh?”

“No, I’m not laughing.” She was staring into his face, inches away, damp eyes flaring. He bit the inside of his lip, chin quivering.

“You cry?”

He found himself nodding. “Maybe a little bit.” Lidia’s face melted, and she nestled into his shoulder.

They sat like that for a while. A starling landed on the windowsill, fluttered off in a fuss, surprised by the presence of life. Henry became aware again of his breathing—a growing habit—going deeper, in time with Lidia’s breathing beside him. He was as sensitive as the next guy, didn’t consider himself a callous man, but Lidia’s long, lovely legs filled his field of vision. The death of her lover, a revelation. How lonely she must be. How needy.

How—horny. Irene’s word.

“So,” he said, “it must be a long time since you, whataya call it, since you and Teddy, you know—”

Lidia sighed, patted his knee, pulled away, shook her head. “Don’t worry bout me, cousin,” she said. “Worry bout Henry. How bout Irene? Don’t Irene take care of Henry?”

“Well . . . it’s kind of a long story. She’d like to.” Lidia looked puzzled. “But so far, it hasn’t worked out so good.”

It clicked into place. “Ah,” she said.

“I got too much on my mind. This damn dying thing, for example.”

Lidia nodded. “Trouble with old noodle.”

“I don’t know if I’d put it that way.”

“How else you put it?” She smiled. “Put it—get it?” She laughed. “Put it.”

“You know, you’re kind of taking all the, whataya call it, romance out of this.”

“Ain’t got no time for romance, cousin.”

They heard his mother calling from the yard below. “Henry! Henry? Where you at? Chciałbyś coś zjeść?”

“Nie, dziȩkujȩ, Ma,” he called, leaning toward the window. “I’m not hungry.”

“What you doing up there?”

He rolled his eyes for Lidia. “Nothing, Ma. Just came up to look at the view. You can see the whole way to San Francisco from up here.” For Lidia he smiled smugly.

A moment of silence below. “You go up to look at dirty magazines, is what you go up to look at,” was an entirely audible mumble.

***

He awoke in the dark, lost. A touch of panic, until gradually it dawned on him that he was in Irene’s bed, in her bedroom, in Manchester. He mined the silence for the sound of her breathing. She was there, in the darkness beside him.

In the darkness, the history was gone. Nothing except him and her, her body so lovingly present, so willing and eager to join his. To allow him to actually enter her, to be with her, inside her. His erection was all but bursting at the seams. He reached for her breast, the abundance of flesh beneath her thin cotton nightie, nipple rearing up, and she came awake with a sleepy gasp.

“Oh my God, Hank,” a husky whisper.

They hadn’t made love. They’d gone to bed to hold each other, to cuddle. She reached down, her hand warm and shockingly foreign, his hand moving down her body, down the back of her thigh, then up, beneath her nightie. Her hand came up to his chin and she kissed his cheek.

“Hold that thought,” she whispered. “I just have to go to the bathroom real fast.”

She rolled away, the bed recoiling. He heard her footsteps, saw her shadow cross the room, the door squeaked, the light clicked, and she was gone. With the room dimly lit, everything came into view—the dresser, the chest, the nightstands, the curtains pleated on the window, the pictures of Danny and Marissa on the wall. The history. He listened to the distant trickle.

He tried to hold on. Just this once, just this once. Please. But it was slipping away. His breathing was invaded by a wheeze. The cancer.

The toilet flushed, the door opened with another burst of light, then clicked off, and everything was dark again, her footsteps coming toward him in the darkness, the bed moving, her hands reaching. Abandon hope.

“Where were we?”

“Someplace else,” he said.

***

Inevitability arrived on a Monday in September. That morning, he was supposed to inspect Roscoe, Harding, Inc., a venerable three-story brick factory where picture frames were manufactured, a complex risk. Instead, he headed home. Roscoe, Harding, Inc., was not going to be inspected this day by the most senior inspector in the Improved Risk Department of the New England Fire Insurance Rating Association. Not that day or any other day, he began to think. Nor any other risk.

Only recently he’d begun to fear he might have only a couple of years. Now that seemed wildly, childishly optimistic. Now, suddenly, the sounds in the nighttime jungle were just beyond the campfire.

***

Irene held on for as long as she could. When she finally let him down, let him go, she tried to do so gently. She told him she’d met another man. Henry hoped she really had. [End Page 28]

This night, sleep wouldn’t come. He stared at the faint white glow across his ceiling from the streetlight beyond the window. The cannula troubled his face, his nose and lips dry and sore. He wasn’t used to it yet. The concentrator was noisy, pumping once every second or so in cycles of ten. His chest ached, and nearly every muscle in his arms and legs was tense. His mind teemed with a sour concoction of memories and dreams, of tedious dread.

The door opened. Lidia silhouetted by the hallway light. “Henry?”

“No,” he said. “It’s Roscoe the Cat.” The non sequitur, at the time, seemed perfectly sensible.

“My cousin the wise guy,” she said, closing the door. In the darkness he heard her step toward him, then a sharp thump, Lidia’s exclamation, “Ow!” and a heavy, hopping sound. “Stub toe,” she said. “What is that?” He heard her limp to the side of his bed, made her out in the darkness beneath the glow of the ceiling, a silky blue shadow.

She sat, the edge of the bed sinking. A rustle of lifting leg, then a foot warm near his face. “Kiss toe?”

Henry wasn’t sure what to make of it—was he dreaming after all?—but the sour concoction was gone. A kiss of a wounded toe seemed the next logical thing to do. He kissed toward her toe but missed.

“Cannot sleep,” Lidia said.

“I was, almost,” he said.

“Do not think so. You need back rub, so here I come.”

“Is that what I need?” he said. “Will that do the trick?”

She considered the question, her hands lightly on his chest. “Roll over. On stomach.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

He could. She helped him. When she began to massage the muscles of his upper back, a sensation of pleasure overwhelmed him, flowing out in waves. He groaned.

She said, “See?”

The longer she worked her magic, the more relaxed he became, as though he were melting. His mind was soothed every bit as much as his body. He was not dead today. He would not be dead tomorrow. From his upper back she moved slowly down, his lower back, his sides, his buttocks, then beyond, down his hamstrings to his calves and feet. She massaged with her fingers, the palms of her hands, sometimes with her forearm. “Roll over,” she said. He managed. Starting on his feet, she moved inch by inch up his shins to his thighs, then his sides, chest and arms. He opened his eyes to see her dark silhouette above him, highlights gleaming in the blackness of her hair. She seemed to be at ease. He couldn’t hear her breathing, could sense no strain, no laboring.

“Lift,” she said, pulling his pajama bottoms off. “There. More better.” Methodically she worked his thighs, his hips. His erection was magnificent, independent, living proof.

“See?” she whispered to the silky rustle of falling pajamas. “There.”

For a while there was no disease, not in him, nor anywhere. For a while his mind and his body were wholesome and pure, filled with the wonder of life.

And afterwards, after she’d kissed his cheek and slipped away, silently, without stub of toe, after she was gone, sleep came to him instantly, the deepest, soundest sleep he’d slept in years, probably in all of his fifty-eight years. There were no dreams, none at all, not of his childhood nor anything else, no dreams of any kind, nothing but rich, black, deep sleep, like the most fertile, loamy soil of the earth.

And when he awoke, he was invigorated, renewed, a newborn, and the thought was there waiting, fully formed in his mind, simply waiting for him to open his eyes and take it in:

See? That wasn’t so bad now, was it?