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By Root 690 0

night. ‘Alice, dear,’ she says so sweetly, ‘how are you?’ ‘Fine,’ I say. Bear in mind that I haven’t talked to her in almost three months. Three tumultuous months. She says, ‘Could I speak to Howard?’ He’s been in a sweat for weeks because he hasn’t heard from her since he wrote her about the farm. We owe her so much money. The failure to pay your mother back is one of those primal failures. I listened while they talked and he kept saying things like, ‘That’s great, Mom. It sounds like you did a good job over there, Mom. We’re fine, yep, the girls are terrific.’ When he hung up he looked as if he’d been run over, back and forth; I was sure he’d pull up his shirt and there’d be these great tire marks going every which way.” I used my arms to demonstrate the random course of the four-wheel drive that had flattened my husband.

She covered her mouth in that delicious familiar way of hers and laughed in spite of herself.

“Nellie is relieved that our ‘farm adventure,’—that’s what she calls it—she’s relieved that our farm adventure is over, and that now Howard can get a real job. Isn’t it fantastic how little she knows him? She knows nothing about him! Maybe I’m the only one who can really know that he’ll never be as happy again as he was with his barn, his barn with the beautiful, clean, four-paned windows up in the dusty haymow, and down below the Golden Guernseys chewing away on their cuds.”

Theresa turned her head and I went on quickly to spare her the embarrassment of her tears. She had always been one to cry easily, an ability I had at times envied. “But back to obligation,” I said. “I would have thought that Howard was obligated to tell me that our children were being interviewed by the police. He mentioned it recently—as if it was nothing. He told me after dinner, ‘Ah by the way …’ I was incensed. I couldn’t get him to say more than a few monosyllables about it. ‘No big deal.’ The girls could have been put into foster care! ‘No sweat.’ I asked him if he was trying to punish me, by not talking about it. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘It was short,’ he said. ‘The girls were fine. It lasted five minutes. It turned out to be nothing.’ ”

“I think he was wanting to keep you from worry,” Theresa said.

“I suppose. But it feels like, well, like something on the order of betrayal.”

We didn’t talk too much longer after that. She said we should get together more often. I said I was pretty busy, with the trial coming up. I didn’t have transportation either, so it was hard to plan for anything more than five blocks from home.

“I’m so busy too,” she said. “It’s just terrible.” When she was buckling Audrey into her car seat she asked—maybe to prove that we actually did have more to talk about, that we hadn’t exhausted our subject matter—

“How is your place? Is it all right?”

“It’s—incredible,” I said.

“That’s great.”

We made the obligatory embrace and she leaped into the van, turned it on, and promptly backed into the dumpster. She smacked her palm to her forehead and laughed. I watched her go, wondering why she had called in the first place, if she needed to see me because she had been well brought up, because she felt it was the nice thing, the proper thing to do. We had survived the breakfast, and we had found, after the slow start, that there was enough to say. But standing on the curb, watching her fly off, I felt the oddness of it. The compulsory meeting had taken place. It had felt stylized, like a Kabuki version of a women’s breakfast. There wouldn’t, in the future, be much reason to see each other.

I bought tubes of paint with money from the change pot, and to Howard’s horror, I painted flowers at waist level all around the living room. Perhaps the Pheasant Glade life was what I was secretly yearning for back in the old days when I used to get mad at Howard for dragging us into the dairy business. He didn’t look like himself in his dark blue dress pants, his light blue shirt, his crimson and blue tie, and his dark blue jacket, the official uniform of the Motor Vehicle Registration Worker. Sometimes it seemed