You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [16]
“Certainly no Arcadia,” she said. “Nothing lush about it, not the kind of painting I fell in love with. I’ve looked at it a lot since he’s been gone. My professors taught me Brueghel was a moralizer, his paintings full of parables. But that’s not what I see anymore. I just see how much there is, how much life.”
She looked at Frank. “The woman over in Tilden, she teaches Michael the violin now, and she won’t let me pay her. He’s not as good as his brother was, but he’s good.”
She bowed her head. “You seem like a kind man, and you’re kind to offer what you did. But I don’t want you to come back here. And I don’t want to come to your office. A few days a week I use those pills to get by, but there are days when I manage without them. Those are the better days. When I don’t look back, when I’m not afraid—better for my kids too. If you feel like you can’t write me a prescription, I understand. I’ll survive without it.”
The boy could be heard at the top of the front stairs. Frank rose from his chair and took a step toward Mrs. Buckholdt. She turned to watch her son enter the room, carrying his violin case. Quietly, he took a seat in the wicker chair by the door.
“Go and get your father,” she said. “Tell him it’s time to leave.” He ran along the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door.
Frank’s stomach tightened, the panic beginning before his mind could form the thought: he didn’t want to lose her, he didn’t want the telling to end.
Mrs. Buckholdt took her handbag from the front table.
“It really is recommended in almost all cases such as this that a patient undergo some kind of therapy, and given the extremity—”
“Dr. Briggs,” she interrupted, opening the front door to the view out over the yard and beyond to the empty road, “didn’t you hear what I said?”
THE BEGINNINGS
OF GRIEF
A YEAR AFTER my mother’s suicide I broke a promise to myself not to burden my father with worries of my own. I told him how unhappy I was at school, how lonely I felt. From the wing chair where he crouched in the evenings he asked, “What can I do?” The following afternoon, coming home from work the back way, he missed a stop sign. A van full of sheet glass going forty miles an hour hit the driver’s side of the Taurus. According to the policeman who knocked on the front door in tears, my father died with the first shattering impact. An aunt from Little Rock stayed for a week, cooking stews and Danish pastry. She said I could come and live with her in Arkansas. I told her I didn’t want to. As I had only a year and a half left of high school, we decided I could finish up where I was, and she arranged for me to live with a neighbor.
Mrs. Polk was sixty, her mother eighty-five. They had between them a closet of fourteen blue flowered dresses, which the maid laundered on Tuesdays. They watched a considerable amount of public television and spoke in hushed tones of relatives in Pittsburgh. I was given dead Mr. Polk’s study with a cot in the corner. The ladies paid no attention to my coming and going and I spent as little time at their house as I could.
In industrial arts that fall, Mr. Raffello gave us a choice of projects: bookcase, spice rack, or a chest about the size of a child’s coffin. I picked the last of these, and because we had to pay for our own wood, I used pine. I took exact measurements and sanded each board with three grades of paper. All the equipment was there in the shop: hammers and vises, finishing nails and glue, planers and table saws. The machines had shiny metal casings and