The Lenten rose looked hale enough, but the tulips weren’t much that year. The hydrangea Bev bought flourishing from Lowe’s had petered, and that pissed her off—eleven dollars down. Clay money. “I commend you to the Gates,” she said, whacking the wilted mess with her garden hoe and strewing the driveway with indigo panicles.

       In the eaves of her she-shed, a gray squirrel sat its haunches, boggling.

       “I’m sorry you had to see that.” Bev pointed to her AirPods. “It’s something Lord Duckworth says before he slays the unworthy. ‘I commend you to the Gates.’ It’s stupid. What does it mean?”

       Something in the way the squirrel returned her gaze, the momentary curiosity, made her ask, “Megan?”

       It considered.

       Bev didn’t know she believed in reincarnation—interesting. “You could be. She died…let’s see, is it Friday?”

       The squirrel scratched its ear, noncommittal.

       “Four months ago tomorrow. How old are you?”

       Was it going to tell her, sing a song? She sounded like Megan—her oldest, gone, and only friend.

       “I commend gardening to the Gates.” She chucked the hoe at the other implemental crap standing in the corner where shed abutted garage. It all went wobbly, and the squirrel was gone. Afternoon clouds diffused a low light like a fugue over the yard, the house, which needed power washing. She went to her Volvo without changing shirts and headed to her happy place.

​

​

Not much on sale at Michael’s. Bev was disappointed in him. She wanted to tell him to do better, or tell Carol at customer service as much, but Carol already thought Bev was crazy. Carol had been a student, fifteen, twenty years ago.

       Anyway, Bev had everything she needed.  Registration to the summer’s ArtProwl Community Competition ended tonight, and nothing on the paltry shelves of the Michael’s would change the fact that Lillian Madison-Rader never ever lost. Winning, losing—those are conditions actualized somewhere outside of wishing, wanting. Somewhere outside of Bev. The muses had decreed that in their perfect rendering of wistful Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, Lillian Madison-Rader’s oil paintings stood for everything this town wished to project upon the wider world: strength, dogs, humility, dogs, old money, genealogy, Land’s End, dogs.  

       “Dogs,” Bev said to no one in the fabric aisle. She chuckled. “That’s pretty good. I’m going crazy.”

​

​

“Hey, Mrs. Weber,” said Carol at customer service.

       “I haven’t gone by ‘Mrs.’ since 1989.”

       “I wasn’t born then.”

       “I know that, Carol.”

       “My name’s Callie, Mrs. Weber.”

       Bev held up a bolt of textured cotton. “Do you have this, but in burgundy? Cranberry?”

       “Let me look.” Carol led Bev confidently back to precisely where Bev had found the garnet cloth. She pointed to it on the shelf. “That one’s red.”

       “Sure. I’ll take it.” 

 

 

Back home, someone had parked in the good spot in her driveway. It was Megan’s Camry, same beige, same license plate. This would not compute for Bev, whose mind kept shouting, Ta-da! She’s here! She’s brought you flutters of angina and little spasms in your throat. Bev’s eyes watered, nothing major, and she sighed and went to see.

       The front door stood open. “I’m a poor old lady,” she yelled in through the foyer.

       No answer.

       “Don’t scratch any of the antiques,” she called again and took a reedy cane from by the bentwood hall tree, swished once to test it, and took the coat rack instead. “I’m coming in.”

       The living room was empty, but something rustled in the kitchen beyond, and she leaped, or tried to leap, around the corner. Her knees were bad; she hopped.

       Standing with his back to her before the bay window by the table was a large man, head bowed, shoulders slumped. Before Bev could mount a charge, he turned and was Paul, Megan’s son, holding a box in shoddy wrapping.

       “I knocked,” he said. “I heard voices. I thought someone told me to come in.” He began—continued?—weeping.

       Bev replaced the coat rack by the front door. She thought about going back to Michael’s, but poor Paul had followed her through the living room, taking shuddering breaths behind her. He still held out the present. Whatever it was, she didn’t want it. “Thanks,” she said. They held the box between them. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to want to let it go.

 

 

They sat and tried small talk until the sun climbed down through the picture windows and cast the room in shadows. Bev wanted to work on her exhibit, not entertain this big-eyed Bartleby who seemed only able to say “that’s fine.”

       “I can make tea.” “I’ve got some pictures you might want.” “I think it’s time for Jeopardy.”

       “That’s fine.” “That’s fine.” That’s fine.”

       He needed a shave and a change of clothes. The gift in its pitiful pink and seafoam wrappings sat unopened on the Irish wake drop leaf between their knees. As Paul seemed fixated on the table, Bev said, “My father made that. Lots of stuff in here, really.” She looked around, as if he might understand which pieces by telepathy.

       “Was he a carpenter?”

       “Yes.”

       He nodded. “You know who else was a carpenter?”

       She assumed the answer would be Jesus. “Who?”

       “Harrison Ford.” Paul spoke to the coffee table, his hands on his cheeks.

       “I thought you were going to say ‘Jesus.’”

       “Are you still a Buddhist?” He gave her a quick, hopeful look.

       “For the most part.” She flashed back on slashing her hydrangea with her garden hoe.

       “Do you know how to stop feeling sad all the time?”

       “Follow me,” she said.

       They took their tea out through the kitchen and Bev paused at the door out to the garage. She’d never permitted another person inside her studio. “I don’t usually let people in here.”

       “That’s fine.”

       “Come on.” She clicked on the lights and shuffled down the steps. On the worktable by the kiln was the Sapphic urn, a 6th century-styled terracotta vase in the shape of a sheep, its handle the sheep’s head facing backward, a tail appending the opposite side in a sort of elongated trapezoid. Counterpoint friezes along the upper and lower body showed, in turn, young women with crowns of peony leaping in a dance above, and a ram pursued by a lion below. Bev had distressed these, effacing fragments from the figures and spots from the geometric patterns in ruby and cerulean acrylics around the body, neck, the throat of the sheep, and tail.

       “Wow,” said Paul, who walked past the urn without noticing and stood before the four easels beyond. One displayed a humdrum sunset over a field; the other three were clumsy attempts at reddish dogs, the watercolors faded to obscure their expressions, which were neither strong, humble, nor stately, but certainly dog, with stupid wagging tongues.

       “These are great,” Paul said, his hands on his hips, his shoulders back.

       They were not great. “Glad you like them.”

       He turned to her, that boyish pleading look back on his long face. “Painting…it helps?”

       “Sure. When everything happened. Or, when it ended. With your mother.”

       He nodded, as if to say, go on.

       “For a couple days, I couldn’t get out of bed. My whole body hurt. And then, I did get up, and I came out here and worked and worked. I’ve lost ten pounds. I’m out here all day, now. I think I’m doing my best work.”

       Paul looked again at the bulbous, Clifford-looking dogs. He smiled. “Absolutely, I can see that.”

       “I’m more partial to my pottery,” she said.

       Paul regarded her pristine yellow Brent C ¾ HP wheel, raising an eyebrow. “That looks pretty cool.”

       “Painting’s great!” Bev tore away the drippy sunset to a fresh canvas and mixed some paints for Paul, feeling eerily like she’d returned to the classroom

       Paul watched her in silence, kneading his red hands. “I’m going to clean up,” he said.

       He spent several minutes washing at her basin sink, his sleeves rolled up, counting out loud to himself, shaking his head, repeating the process.

       When he finished, Bev offered him a palette and some cheap brushes. “Why don’t you give it a shot? I need to take this vase to the community center before they close.”

       He followed her gaze to the vase and nodded. “Is that a goat?”

       “Sure.”

       “You don’t mind me staying here by myself?”

       Bev took a long breath, working her stiff jaw with her hand. “Sure. Just, be careful if you go inside. I’m a little weird about my stuff.” She shrugged in apology. He saluted like “Roger that.”

       “Have fun,” she said, and repeated that to herself, shaking her head, all the way down the driveway. 

 

 

Moving through town in light traffic, Bev watched her rearview, nervous Paul might be following. She wondered again if heaven was a voyeurism, if she was watched by Megan, who’d hunched and smiled and smoked too many Doral Menthol Lights and never said or did anything unkind to anyone, some minor incarnation of the Buddha who loved old Nintendo games she’d played with Paul and mysteries and Beverly, stark and frank and unalike—Beverly the majorette; Megan marching with her clarinet, years by thousands folding down. A fading face.

       Bev tapped her fingernails on the dash. All she recalled clearly of her friend was her raspy voice sharing private fears for the man Paul might become. And then she’d left, and the world did not unpin, the implication making Bev turn up the light rock radio, though she’d long since lost her taste for music.

 

 

Bev took her time arranging her exhibit, station 17B at the back of the Duck River Room, larger of the center’s two ballrooms and home of the ArtProwl Summer Showcase. Setup was this evening. Contest in the morning. She laid the garnet cloth carefully and set the urn at its center, turned it, turned it again.

       She’d looked forward to this for months, but now she couldn’t focus. How long would Paul want to stay?

       Did she have enough to make dinner? Were the linens clean?

       Sometimes, in these newfound moments of indecision, Bev found herself talking to Megan. What do I do with your kid, huh? Sometimes, there came an answer, but nothing now.

       “I’ll kick him out in the morning,” Bev resolved. A woman setting up an easel at 16A turned her head, gave her a nod in solidarity.

       With that settled, Bev grudgingly handed in the six dollars entrance fee and almost made it out of the ballroom. But then she heard it, the lilting laughter of Lillian Madison-Rader and her entourage, and that siren call pulled her back to spot 4A, front and center of the ballroom with the best light, where Lillian, wearing a cinnamon Ann Taylor pantsuit, unveiled an oil portrait of her grandson, Howard, cherubic and a little addle-eyed, riding a magnificent Chesapeake Bay Retriever. “Whimsy: Howard and his Steed” read the placard. 

       “Hello, Beverly,” said Lillian, the thundering gravitas in her voice seeming to cue up spectral strings.

       Nearly to the door, Bev called back, “I’ve left the oven on.”

 

 

She came in through the garage and found it empty. Paul had painted himself on the canvas—that is, a heavy-set man in cargo shorts and a baggy t-shirt with tufts of red curls and stubble—standing slump-shouldered atop a pale green hill, thrust up into a pale blue sky. Around his shoulders were two thin arms, meeting at clasped hands at the center of Paul’s breast. Daubs of peach, the hands were mottled with magenta swelling, plum bruises like his mother’s. Above and behind Paul shone a honey-colored sun like a sort of halo. The palette lay face-down in its muck, the brushes cast into the corner.

       Inside, she yelled for him, but he didn’t answer. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room, leaving only upstairs or the dining room. She checked the dining room, where she found him slumped at her favorite of her father’s pieces, a mahogany dining table complete with chairs, one of which lay broken beside Paul.

       Dangling from the ceiling in a cascade of plaster, chain, and wire was the French bronze and crystal chandelier, most of its bulbs and sconces burst upon the tabletop.

       Bev howled. Paul jumped.

       “Paul, what have you done?”

       He darted out through the front door, leaving it standing open, as seemed to be his habit.

       The minutiae of the scene began to cohere: Paul’s shoes sat in a corner. His belt hung on the back of another of the chairs.

       She left the mess, found him sitting with head in hands on her front porch. “I’m thinking now that I should not have left you alone.”

       “Maybe,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He gave a shuddering moan and fingered the band of red flesh across his throat. He looked down at his lap. “I think I peed in my pants.”

       “Paul, who do we need to call here?” Bev had no idea where she’d left her cell phone.

       “Can you call my mom?”

       “She’s gone, Paul.”

       He blinked at her, and before he could ask where to, Bev told him, “She died. You need to come inside. You need a blanket.”

       He began to hyperventilate, and she knelt in front of him and made him count to ten, then back down, and put his finger to his nose, then his ear, then his nose, his bloodshot eyes following his fingertip. She’d seen Megan do this with Paul several times, but he took the instructions each one like it was new.

 

In the living room, wrapped in a blanket, Paul said, “I’m just so embarrassed. I’ll pay to have that all fixed.”

       “I can’t replace the table, Paul. My father made that.” She did not intend the heat in her voice. Paul erupted from the couch and threw away the blanket.

       “At least you have something. What do I have? Mom’s checkbook? Some pictures?” He clapped his hands over his mouth. “I’m so sorry, Bev. I keep doing that. I yelled at a stranger at Kroger two days ago. I’ve been awful to my wife.” He gave her the beseeching look again as he had earlier in the workshop. “She’s pregnant.”

       Bev finished counting ten, counted backward down to zero. “It’s OK. You’ve always had a temper. You would hold your breath until you passed out, blue, right on the floor. I told your mother to spank you more.” Bev winced. “That was before I was a Buddhist.”

       “Let me clean up, and then I’ll go home.”

       “Don’t be stupid, Paul. You’ll stay tonight. Now, fix my ceiling.”

 

 

Paul tried. He offered to plaster over the damage, but Bev didn’t want him up there again. They gathered up the broken chandelier and when Bev dumped it in the trash she told it, “I commend you to the gates.”

       Paul perked at this. “Which book are you on? They really fall off after Princess Everly dies in the Gray Staycation.”

       Bev stared at the shards glinting in the kitchen trash. “Everly is the princess?”

       Paul whacked his forehead. “Sorry. I’ll make dinner.”

       “I should hope.”

       “You have canned plum tomatoes?”

       “Yes.”

       “Garlic or onion? Oil?”

       “Yes.”

       “Spaghetti?”

       “You’re going to make your famous wiener schnitzel?”

       Paul stood blinking for a moment, tracing and retracing in the dust on the refrigerator. “I don’t remember you making jokes.”

       “I don’t remember you tearing up my house. What else goes in the schnitzel?”

 

 

After dinner, Bev rinsed and put away their plates. “It’s 11 o’clock. I’m either going to meditate or watch Xena: Warrior Princess.”

       “Xena.”

       They sat opposite ends of the couch with popcorn in a wooden bowl between them, both timid taking turns to reach. Bev wanted to ask about his life, but each time she turned to speak, he smiled at her or laughed at the show with popcorn in his mouth. Once, gritting her teeth, she reached and patted him twice on the arm. If he noticed, he made no show.

 

 

Bev dreamed as ever of a small girl and calico kitten hiding in a room like a cellar sweet with the scent of wood shavings, then of Xena and Lord Duckworth crushed back against the black waters by a skeletal army that never ceased. She woke to a big man looming in the doorway, and her face locked into a long silent scream.

       “Sorry,” said Paul. “I have something I wanted to show you.”

       “What time is it?”

       “Six or so.”

       “There’s a whole day ruined.” Bev clicked on her light, though the sun had started already through her bedside window.

Paul held out his iPhone and she took it and found her glasses on the nightstand. “It’s something I’ve been working on.”

       It seemed to be a poem written in the Notes app. She read aloud, “Delight in my body / here’s margarine—”

       “No! God, sorry. Here.” He took the phone away. “My wife and I write erotic…here.”

       He gave it back, Bev too stunned not to take it, opened on another poem with lines like:

​

       “Invisible on a hill you

       wrapped your arms around me tightly

       and laughed in my ear and there was music,

       Mom, and you said, if you feel me here again

       please hold on, there’s not enough time

       for us to hug each other, and we laughed

       for a moment, it was funny”

 

       So, it was a good poem, she guessed, if a good poem makes you want to drink a can of paint thinner.

       “I thought...” He cleared his throat. “You said there was an art contest?”

       “It’s too late to enter. Mostly it’s paintings and pottery. I’ve never seen a poem.”

       “Sure, sure.” He took back the phone. “Anyway, I’ll clear out. Thanks for the spaghetti.”

       “Wait, Paul.” She put one foot down onto the hardwood, then the other. “Let me see if my printer works.”

        

 

They presided together in the last row of exhibits at the Duck River Room, Bev in her

best patterned blouse and Paul in a clean shirt and khakis bought at JCPenney on the way. “Judging’s at ten thirty,” she told Paul, again.

       Around the urn she’d set a garland of her Lenten rose and rue anemone. Paul’s poem was pinned up in a laminated sleeve. The placard now read, “Grecian Urn and Poem after Sappho.”

       The judges entered as a triumvirate. At the head was Mr. Simmons, president of the local Leisure Services, a tall, prim man of seventy, his pallid skin and scant tonsure almost the same wan shade of silver sand.

       “He looks like a serious customer,” said Paul, sweating despite the coursing AC.

       Mr. Simmons paused to embrace Lillian Madison-Rader, shouting one another down with laughter that rang around the room. Most of the other contestants averted their eyes in embarrassment, but Paul glowered. “That’s not right,” he said. “He’s friends with the dog lady.”

       “They’re second cousins.”

       “That’s not right. I’m going to speak to someone.”

       Bev took Paul’s elbow. “Listen to me, please. Take your finger and put it to the tip of your nose. Go ahead.” As he followed her instructions, they counted to ten, back down to zero, Paul touching his nose, his ear, his nose again, following his fingertip.

       Some watched Bev tend to Paul; mostly they watched the judges, who now turned the corner to the last row. Bev held Paul’s elbow. “Steady, please.”

       Another judge, a woman in her thirties with auburn hair and a smart charcoal blazer, made a simpering show of reading Paul’s poem. “This is a sad one,” she said, and then laughed to cut what she must have perceived as tension. Even Mr. Simmons frowned at her.

       “The last thing my mother said to me was, ‘Help!’”  Paul stepped toward this younger judge and shouted “Help!” again and she jumped.

       “Sir.” Mr. Simmons held up a hand for Paul to stand aside. He sighed and took a long look at Bev’s exhibit, still frowning. “I’m not seeing the connection between the verse and the imagery here.” He wiggled his long fingers at the upper frieze.

       Bev smiled, holding tight to Paul’s elbow. “It’s all for the viewer to interpret.”

       “Mmm.” He made a note on his clipboard, leaned in to inspect the trapezoidal tail, said, “That’s cute,” and headed down the line. With the gaze of the other contestants following the judges, Bev dabbed her eyes, once each. No biggie—same thing every year. She counted down from ten.

       “This isn’t right,” Paul whispered to her. He ground his jaw. “Your vase is the best thing in here. It looks like it should be in a real museum.”

       She let her hand fall to his, squeezed it once, mouthed, “Thank you.” And had he not looked like he meant to hurt someone, she might have kissed his cheek.

       A round man in suspenders leaned over from 16A and said, “I really loved your poem.”

       The anger vanished from Paul’s face. “Wow, really? Thanks. Say, I’ve got another one here about margarine.”

       Bev elbowed him, just as Megan might have, and they laughed together. She told him, “Don’t you dare.”

        

​

“Well,” said Paul in the parking lot. “Can I buy you lunch? Something fit for a champion?”

       “A runner-up, you mean.” But Bev held tight to the second-place ribbon, as if someone might come and take it back.

       He waved her off. “Everyone there knew yours was the best.” For him, the matter was clearly settled. And that, she thought, is why you’re weak, Paul, and I’m strong. It hurt her to think it, and she apologized to Megan with an upward glance.

       “Paul, I want to take you to my happy place.”

       He grimaced. “Is it Panera Bread?”

 

 

Home, Paul insisted on carrying in the several loads of Michael’s bags, new supplies for Bev’s next shot at triumph. They shared a piece of coffee cake in the shade of her she-shed.

       “I thought that after your mom died, I wouldn’t see you all anymore. How’s your dad?”

       “There’s something with his inner ear. We’re trying to get him out of the house.”

       A woodpecker tapped somewhere high in the stand of bald cypress behind the shed. Heat of midafternoon made sweat stand on Paul’s lip. He searched among the treetops.

       “Go home and apologize, Paul. She’ll take you back. Then, get yourself some help.”

       “There’s something odd about that squirrel.” He pointed where it careened along a sugar maple branch and leaped onto the shed’s roof, sprawling and peering down at them, head bobbing in a twitch.

       “I think so, too.” Blushing, Bev said softly, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

       “I think it might have rabies. Sorry—do I believe in what now?”

        

 

Before Paul left, they attempted a sort of hug in the driveway. They’d hugged once before, the last afternoon at hospice. It didn’t feel much better now.

       “I didn’t want to see you, and then I did,” Paul said over her shoulder. “You’re a lot like her, but it also hurts that you’re not her.”

       Bev wanted to say she understood, but the moment passed, and he was getting into the passenger’s side of his car, shaking his head, walking round to the driver’s side, waving once without looking back.

       Watching Megan’s Camry back out onto her street, Bev said to her, “He’s going to be OK,” and waited for a shift in the wind, a dip of the temperature, but the woodpecker rattled along and the squirrel watched from the roof. Then, with a kind of shriek, it kamikazed down onto the driveway, snatched a crumb of coffee cake, and made for shrubs.

 

 

Inside, Bev found the shoddily wrapped box where she’d stashed it in a pie safe with Paul’s blank check for dining room repairs. At the scratched dining room table, she peeled away the paper and opened the box. It was a coffee mug inscribed with “I’m a great aunt.”

       Rolled up in the mug was a sonogram print of what might have been a baby in utero, or an inflamed pancreas. She turned it several ways. “Is that a pancreas?” Her voice echoed in the empty room.

       In pencil, in a light hand, the back read, “Beverly Jane, 6/11/22.” Underneath, an addendum: “Mom’s suggestion—hope you don’t mind. Love, Paul and Gracie.”

 

 

For half an hour Bev refreshed the Leisure Services website until the story popped up and she stood from her chair and gave her best “Alalaes!” and banged her fist onto her father’s table. She scrolled down the page until she found the picture of her and the urn.

       “You look old,” she said to herself. She felt old. And she told herself not to, but clicked over to Facebook, to the picture from last spring of Megan after her diagnosis but before the hospice, where the light in her electric blue eyes burned brightest, the one that always scared her out of her chair.

 

 

Sketching at her workbench, she now planned an entire gallery of urns depicting battles of the Iliad with women doing the fighting and men wailing along the Trojan walls, the kind of project that just might commend Lillian Madison-Rader to the Gates. She flipped pages and crossed out work, the same as ever bubbles in her stomach saying, “Don’t you screw this up.”

 

 

Evening come, while the electric kiln preheated, she took the sonogram and a piece of cake out to the shed, intent to show that stupid squirrel. And inside pinned above the workbench remained the fragment she’d copied over from her book of Sappho: “But when you die you will lie there and there will be no memory / of you nor longing for you after, for you have no share in the roses / of Pieria.” She kept it there by habit, as though things could be otherwise, as if she might forget.