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By Root 1637 0

she now rented a “mother-in-law apartment” from a woman she had gone to school with back in the days when she and Keller were courting. Sue Anne joked that she herself had become a sort of ideal mother-in-law, gardening and taking care of the pets when her friends went away. She was happy to have returned to gardening. During the almost twenty years that she and Keller had been together, their little house in the Boston suburbs, shaded by trees, had allowed for the growth of almost nothing but springtime bulbs, and even those had to be planted in raised beds because the soil was of such poor quality. Eventually, the squirrels discovered the beds. Sue Anne’s breakdown had had to do with the squirrels.

So: call his daughter, or do the more important thing and call his neighbor and travel agent, Sigrid, at Pleasure Travel, to apologize for their recent, rather uneventful dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, which had been interrupted by a thunderstorm grand enough to announce the presence of Charlton Heston, which had reminded Keller that he’d left his windows open. He probably should not have refused to have the food packed to go. But when he’d thought of having her to his house to eat the dinner—his house was a complete mess—or of going to her house and having to deal with her son’s sour disdain, it had seemed easier just to bolt down his food.

A few days after the ill-fated dinner, he had bought six raffle tickets and sent them to her, in the hope that a winning number would provide a bicycle for her son, though he obviously hadn’t given her a winning ticket, or she would have called. Her son’s expensive bicycle had been taken at knifepoint, in a neighborhood he had promised his mother he would not ride through.

Two or three weeks before, Sigrid and Keller had driven into Boston to see a show at the MFA and afterward had gone to a coffee shop where he had clumsily, stupidly, splashed a cup of tea onto her when he was jostled by a mother with a stroller the size of an infantry vehicle. He had brought dish towels to the door of the ladies’ room for Sigrid to dry herself off with, and he had even—rather gallantly, some might have said—thought to bite the end off his daily vitamin-E capsule from the little packet of multivitamins he carried in his shirt pocket and urged her to scrape the goop from the tip of his finger and spread it on the burn. She maintained that she had not been burned. Later, on the way to the car, they had got into a tiff when he said that it wasn’t necessary for her to pretend that everything was fine, that he liked women who spoke honestly. “It could not have been all right that I scalded you, Sigrid,” he’d told her.

“Well, I just don’t see the need to criticize you over an accident, Keller,” she had replied. Everyone called him by his last name. He had been born Joseph Francis, but neither Joe nor Joseph nor Frank nor Francis fit.

“It was clumsy of me, and I wasn’t quick enough to help,” he said.

“You were fine,” she said. “It would have brought you more pleasure if I’d cried, or if I’d become irrational, wouldn’t it? There’s some part of you that’s always on guard, because the other person is sure to become irrational.”

“You know a little something about my wife’s personality,” he said.

Sigrid had lived next door before, during, and after Sue Anne’s departure. “So everyone’s your wife?” she said. “Is that what you think?”

“No,” he said. “I’m apologizing. I didn’t do enough for my wife, either. Apparently I didn’t act soon enough or effectively enough or—”

“You’re always looking for forgiveness!” she said. “I don’t forgive you or not forgive you. How about that? I don’t know enough about the situation, but I doubt that you’re entirely to blame for the way things turned out.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Some people say I’m too closemouthed and I don’t give anyone a chance to know me, and others—such as you or my daughter—maintain that I’m self-critical as a ploy to keep their attention focused on me.”

“I didn’t say any such thing! Don’t put words in my mouth. I said that my getting tea dumped