by Rachel Simon
“Duty still wins?”
“Please,” Mrs. Winterborne wailed. “Lilly!”
He faced the hole. But then he paused, my break-the-rules husband, and turned back around. “Come with me,” he said.
“What?”
“Climb into the hole with me.”
I could hear her on the slate walk.
“We’ll have fun,” he said, reachin’ out his hand.
I looked at that hand, so large and real, his wedding band a ring of sun in the dusk. Then I looked at my own hand, so work-scarred and naked. And I remembered this new way I felt inside. Or the old way, really. I’d lost it once, and now it’d been found. And I wasn’t goin’ to stand for losin’ it again.
As if in a dream — no, a realness more real than I’d ever known before — I went up to the shadow door, and stood at the edge, and listened. The sounds of a million worlds echoed inside. The breeze of a million worlds ruffled my hair. Crazy dream worlds, maybe, I thought, closin’ my eyes, but none of them as crazy as this.
Behind us, the pool door unlatched.
I whipped around, and Verl winked at me. I smiled back, and he took my hand. We turned toward the dark, and walked ourselves in.
Later, floatin’ between then and now, we heard that Mrs. Winterborne thought she burned me up in the fire. Her regret got her movin’ in life. She opened trust funds for my grands, threw out her ex’s junk, and married Master You. They live in a cottage on a lake, where they have no maid and he writes her bad rock tunes and they don’t need no white upholstered back seat to do their own version of hanky-panky.
As for us, most nights we visit our grands. We go to their dreams. Sometimes they need help with schoolwork or friends, and we set them straight. But usually they’re lookin’ for a different kind of help. Something they don’t know how to ask for. Something you can’t put on a shopping list. When that happens, we hold out our arms and give them our best hugs and talk to them about meaning. And then, after we get them back on their feet, if Verl has his say, we dance.
Acknowledgments
This book was supported jointly by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. I am very grateful for their timely and generous assistance.
I would also like to thank the following institutions and individuals for their guidance, encouragement, and friendship: the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; the students and faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and Sarah Lawrence College, especially Diana Cavallo, Romulus Linney, Chuck Wachtel, and Linsey Abrams; Philomena Baylor, Margaret Broucek, Mitchell A. Cohn, Patricia Hamill, Marshall Hill, Mark Kramer, Deborah Lincoln Lear, Ellen Michaelson, Dani Shapiro, and Woody; my agent, Irene Skolnick, my publisher, Seymour Lawrence, and his associate Camille Hykes, and, most importantly, my editor, Fran Kiernan.
It was only with you that I did it.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Some of the stories in this collection have appeared elsewhere, in slightly different form: “Little Nightmares, Little Dreams” in Story, “Breath of This Night” in Missouri Review Online and College Magazine, “Skirts” in Quarterly West, “Paint” in The North American Review, “Grandma Death” in North Dakota Review, “Magnet Hill” in The Antietam Review, and “Afterglow” in Witness.
Copyright © 1990 by Rachel Simon
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9335-7
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