‘The sandwich kind,’ he said, ‘with cheese in the middle.’ He stood there at the door, dressed as he had been before, and asked if we had any crackers. At the time, though, when he knocked, I didn’t know anything. I wondered if she’d been leaving notes too, but she said no, only food. My wife told me later – I forced this – that she’d seen him out in the yard a few times. I think it was two weeks later when he came back. All through the night, I kept startling, thinking I heard something. After he was gone, I kept scanning the treeline. Then she went inside and I waited, watching the driveway. His hair was like brown fur, short and thick.įinally, he said, ‘Thank you.’ When he turned to walk away we saw that his back was filthy, his shirt, like he’d been lying in mud. Slow down, she told him, drink slowly, don’t choke. We gave him water, Marcy did, in a large, insulated cup. He just kept staring, not at my face, but at the air beside me. I asked if he needed help, but he wouldn’t answer.
She says we were coming home – she was driving – and when we pulled up at the house, Simon was there waiting, on the porch.įor a minute or two, he chewed on his lip. We were out on the porch, Marcy and I, drinking tea, not talking, but we were together, and then there he was. I remember seeing him step out from the trees, the grass nearly reaching his shorts. I hadn’t cut the grass in weeks when Simon appeared. Instead, Marcy bought for me a large straw hat. If I knew how to weld, I would rig a sun shade over the seat. Marcy’s father bought the tractor too, and the mower I tow behind it. In the middle of it all, surrounding the house, are four acres of open grass. We’ve considered selling them, but then we’d have all these stumps. And the trees keep growing, larger already than they were ever intended to be, the branches tangling into each other in places. I’ve thought about hiring a pilot to see what it looks like from above, but I haven’t done more than think about it. He bought it, and then he died, but not before insisting that we live here – he was dying even as he said this, he was medicated. It used to be a tree farm – spruce, white pine, cedar, all organized by type, in what feels like a sort of checkerboard arrangement. The house is closer to the highway than we’d like it to be, but with the trees all around you can sometimes forget it’s there. For some reason she was living in Kansas. She was married once before, when she was twenty-three.
What happened was we continued to not have any children. We decided, I think, to just see what happened, which is to say we quit with the usual precautions. At some point we stopped talking about it. Or suddenly one of us would become hungry, and so the conversation would pause. When she cries, it seems less about emotion and more like drainage.įor years we talked about having children. Still, I have trouble imagining that she is truly unhappy.
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