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By Root 1844 0

thoughtful—on whom the sturdy world depended, and although her little secret was that she was fatigued with him and felt almost no passion for him, she still needed to have his calm presence around. He was like a preservative, and she would fight to keep him if she had to. He played poker once a week with his chums; he drank one beer per evening; he was semi-retired from his veterinarian practice; he never raised his voice. He was even a graceful and attentive lover. What a paragon of virtue Randall was! Nothing to excess, this husband. But he had never been wild, and Estelle couldn’t help herself: she was bored by people like him. Secretly, men who started fistfights attracted her. They had sap. But it was boredom that had the staying power.

“Here,” Randall said, handing her a lemonade in a Dixie cup.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning forward into him again. His skin had a kind of slippery silkiness, an odd texture for the exterior of a middle-aged man. Her first husband, the dreaded Matthew, whose nickname had been Squirrel—winsome womanizer, alcoholic, self-centered bum, gate crasher, liar, charmer, deadbeat, and cheat—had felt like hair and sandpaper. Sex with him had always been burningly raw and fecund. Children came from it, three of them. Where was Squirrel Van Dusen now? Pittsburgh? Or was it Tucson he had recently called from, yes, somewhere in the Southwest, that sunny haven for bums, asking for a tide-over loan for his newest harebrained scheme? It was hard to keep track of him: Randall had taken the most recent call and kept her from whatever Squirrel had asked for. She still had a soft spot for the guy. The flame could not quite be extinguished. Human wreckage had always attracted her. “The Bad Samaritan,” Randall had called her once, in that not-quite-teasing way of his.

“It’s a stage he’s going through,” Randall said, sitting down at the dinette. “Frederick’s going through a stage. All boys go through a stage. They have to practice at being bad before they become men.”

“You were never bad.”

“Well, okay. I guess I never was,” Randall said thoughtfully, nodding his head once and turning away from her. “Not like that.”

“You always got up at five o’clock. To pray. With the birds. Like Saint Francis. You were a boy scout,” she said, knowing she was being petty. “You still are.”

“That’s unkind. And I never prayed, not like that. I prayed to someday meet someone like you. Actually, Estelle,” he said, fixing her with a look, “what are we talking about? This isn’t about me, is it? Or Frederick?”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“Well, my dear, what is it about?”

She looked at him. Behind her, she could hear the leaves of the ash tree stirring in the dry summer wind. She could even hear the electric clock in the stove, which gave off a dull but thoughtful hum, as if it were planning something.

“It’s about the usual,” she said. Of course he knew what it was about. He always knew.

They’d run off together as teenagers forty-five years ago, Estelle and Squirrel, and when their kids were still toddlers, they’d crisscrossed the country in the Haunted Buick. What fun it was, being young, rootless, those hours of driving when music would start up for no apparent reason underneath the car’s dashboard and then stop a few minutes later. There was a short in the radio, but Squirrel liked to say that the Buick was haunted. An announcer would begin speaking in midsentence from that same place under the dashboard, and Squirrel would say, “Where did he come from?” You couldn’t switch the radio off: the dial didn’t work. The Buick was beyond all that.

In those days, Estelle and Squirrel never stopped anywhere for longer than a few months. They would cross the border into yet another state they hadn’t yet ravaged looking for opportunities, surefire moneymaking projects to put them on the map, as Squirrel liked to say. That was the expression he used after dark in bed with Estelle in one motel or another, whispering to her about what and where they would be, someday. They’d be settled; and happy; and rich. They’d be on the map. The