My Silver Bowl

I saw right away why they needed me, what with Meredith a professor at the university and three little girls needing someone to look after them after school and such. I knew that her husband got killed in a car wreck less than a year ago because one of my friends works in her building, which is Environmental Sciences, and she explained the situation to me when I told her that I was going to pick up a new house to keep.
She has a nice face to look at, but you could tell she still suffered because she had a sad expression even when she smiled. When I handed her my resume, she spells out my last name and says is that Sigh-eed? At first I didn’t get what she was talking about.
“No, it’s SAID as in, that’s what I said.”
She laughed, and I added getting her to smile to my job description. I always wanted to have teeth like that, where you could run your finger smooth and easy along them, not the up and down of mine like one of those roads they had in the olden days, made of logs stuck side by side in the mud. At the first rain they’d be budging up against each other every time a wagon passed over.
That’s what you call a simile, which is at the top of my vocabulary list in Introduction to Literature. I’m a junior now, after twelve years. William, which is my husband, says it’s time to declare my major (which I already did, he just never remembers, it’s called General Studies). He thinks it’s high time I decided what work I’m going to do, because with a college degree you can do better than mopping floors and emptying trash cans and cleaning people’s houses on the side.
I had Nutshell in my pocket, a sweet brown kitten that almost died of dehydration after she was found walking crazy outside my building and someone brought her to me. The little one, Molly, heard her mewing and came running. While Meredith and I talked, Nutshell poked her nose out and got snatched away. The girls begged their mother to let them have her, but she said no, that their grandmother is allergic.
I could see early on that Meredith let them get away with a lot. Except the oldest one named Diana who didn’t do anything bad. She told the others to behave and not act like heathens, that was her word for them. Molly was like a little boy except for the long braid. Always in torn jeans and a t-shirt, running in from outside and letting the door slam. She’d holler, “Sorry,” but never let it close easy. And Cecily was the moody one. I’d catch her looking at me out of the corner of her eye whenever we were in the same room for any length of time, like when she was sitting at the kitchen table coloring or watching TV while I was making dinner. Once I said, “What are you looking at?” and she just rolled her eyes.
One day Cecily was moping about how boring summer was, so I says, “I’ve got an ideal. Let’s make a trifle.” Molly was drawing one of her pictures of horses. She pauses a moment and says, “Don’t you mean idea, Mary?” I tell her that’s what I said, but she claims I said ideal and that’s a different word. I started thinking about those two words and how I thought they were the same. I never paid attention till then. So at home I caught myself saying ideal but pinching off the L and feeling like the word wasn’t finished. But that’s what happens when you step into a house like that, where a six-year-old can tell you how to pronounce a word and then run over and stand between your legs, leaning her back against you so you can both look at her picture together, her holding one corner and you the other.
This was a house in mourning. Three girls on edge. Feelings hurt and getting mad, yelling or slamming doors, or in Diana’s case, setting her mouth in a firm line and jutting her chin out. How many tears I dabbed with a Kleenex I couldn’t begin to guess. I never saw their mother cry, but for the first year or so, she was always at wits end. When Cecily locked Molly in the trunk of the car one day and then got absorbed in afternoon reruns, she didn’t notice that all of us were calling for Molly. Like she was in her own world. Then Meredith goes out to the car because she’s going to the grandmother’s place to look for her, which is only a ways down the road, and she hears Molly banging on the trunk hood. Luckily, it was October and not the dead of summer. She fell asleep and then woke up mad as a nest of hornets. Up she marches to the house, into the TV room, taps Cecily on the shoulder, and when she doesn’t turn around, socks her right in the side of the face. That woke her up, and the next thing they’re rolling on the floor and Meredith is pulling Cecily away and I’ve got Molly and I’m saying, “Shame on you girls,” and Meredith goes, “What on earth were you thinking, Cecily?”
“Molly,” she says, turning to her youngest and pulling her close, “use your words, not your fists.” Molly says, “She’s a selfish little bish.” It’s not the first time I’ve heard her use that kind of language, but with the gap from missing front teeth, it comes out “bish,” which brings a laugh up from my gut, which I have to pinch back. I look to Meredith to see what she will say. But she is in calm-down mode and just pulls both girls close and looks at them at eye level.
“Molly, there’s no need to call names. The point is, Cecily, Molly could have been hurt and you need to look out for her better than that. Now both of you, go clean up. Cecily, you use my bathroom. You’ve got extra chores tonight.”
And that’s it for the moment, though there was a couple more shoves on down the hall that Meredith pretends not to notice. Molly sticks her tongue out and Cecily flips her the bird. That was the way those two were, something always sticking up or poking out, like a foot when the other walks past.
But they were loyal too. The only way you could get one to tell what the other was up to was if they were fighting. Close, in love and war. I think because they were born the same day three years apart, Cecily thought Molly was hers and when Molly got too independent it riled her. But no one could say a bad word about Molly without Cecily comes back with a snotty remark that shut you up good. I speak from experience.
One time after I was going there for a few months, I found Molly sticking an entire bag of baby carrots under her shirt and making for the door. This was soon after their grandmother got them each a horse, so I knew where she was headed. I said, “No you don’t Miss Molly,” and up snaps Cecily’s head. I notice but don’t pay her any heed and say to Molly, “You get back in here with them carrots ’for I tan your hide. I need those for the pot roast tonight.”
“Mary Said, ‘You know how my mother disapproves of violence.’ If you can’t set an example you’d best keep your mouth shut.”
I turned around to give her a piece of my mind, and that’s all Molly needed to scoot out the door. “I would appreciate if you’d show a little more respect,” I tell her, and she’s right back with, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, tell you what it means to me,” dancing with her fanny out and her finger stirring the air. I suppose it was funny but I was mad for a good two hours and wouldn’t look at her or answer her, even when she took a phone call that was William. I waited till she set the phone down with a “suit yourself,” before I picked it up and told my husband I had a good ideal to share with him later. (I think you could call that irony, which is when you say something that you don’t mean so everyone knows you don’t mean it, or when it refers back to something earlier and sheds a new, maybe funny or chin-rubbing light on it.)
That has been my life with this family for better than two years. I get off work at 11:00, go to whatever class I can schedule during the lunch hour, then head to their house till 5:00, except when Meredith goes to a conference, and then their grandmother stays there all the time and that gives me a few days off. It makes for a 12-hour day and then home to dinner that William fixes because he’s not like most men. I always spend a couple of hours with whatever cats and dogs I’m taking care of till a home is found. I’ve never needed more than six hours sleep a night, and that’s what I get, in bed by 9:00, up by 4:00, when I make Will’s lunch and mine and share a cup of coffee before we go our separate ways.
For a couple of hours the house is quiet, and I can catch Days of Our Lives and The Young and Restless while I clean and get dinner started before the girls get home and things get lively (as in the above examples). Gradually they got to where they would come and hang out with me in the kitchen. Cecily especially likes to hear about my people. That’s how she says it, “Tell me about your people when you were little.” She likes to hear about the times I ran away and how I’d get the switch when I came back, and she likes to hear me talking in my mama’s voice, “You like to scared me to death. How I gointer get everything done around heah ifn you leave for parts unknown?” She likes to hear about my seven brothers, the last two of which were my job to care for after Mama got sick. They get sad when they hear how her death was long and how she cried out for God to take her home. I didn’t like to talk to them about death, but they were morbid. I prefer to tell them about Little Will’s job as a roughneck working on an oil rig in Alaska. I tell them Will doesn’t call too often and doesn’t write at all, but I do know he can’t get the smell of oil out of his skin even if he showers three times. Molly’s mouth is round like a quarter. I push the tip of the iron into darts and fit the sleeve around the curved top of the board. Then it’s time to set the table.
Sometimes when I first get there, after I deposit my coat in the kitchen, I like to go stand in the center of the house. It’s a beautiful old open house, not like any house I ever lived in. With my back to the front door, I can look to my right and see the sun shining in through the windows of the big living room (also called TV room). Between the two big windows is a fireplace and beside it a big geode that Meredith says came from somewhere out west. It must weigh 300 pounds and is impossible to dust, what with all the pointy crystals, but it’s pretty. I always look at it first. Then I look to my left and see the kitchen, with the big table and the breakfast bar separating the coloring room from the cooking part. Straight ahead is a hallway and stairs going up to the girls’ rooms. If you go past the stairs and straight down the hallway you come to Meredith’s room on the right and her study on the left, where she’s got eight tables of rocks and minerals laid out in rows with neat little signs. Each one says what the rock is and where it came from. There’s an order to them, but it’s not color or size. I try to figure it out sometimes and think it’s shape till something rears up in the middle of a row of flat pieces and there goes that theory. I do not dust in that room, but it’s okay to vacuum.
Every day I do a different cleaning chore, though some more than once a week (like sweeping the kitchen). Dusting is a once-a-week job, fortunately, and one day while I was dusting her bedside table, I accidentally pulled out the drawer and there it was, her personal diary. Curiosity got the better of me. Once I started reading I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t that day but maybe the next when Diana came home early with cramps, and I realized how easy it would be to get caught. It turned out that Meredith was going to a caving conference that weekend, and on Friday after she left I checked to see if she’d taken it with her, and she didn’t, so I took it home with me and made a copy and brought hers back and put it away. That way I could read it at home and no one need know. Her writing is little and neat, and she’d been writing in it almost every day since she found herself a widow.
I wait till William goes to bed to start reading. Poof Papa is the oldest, and he gets first lap choice. Little Will named him for being big daddy of a long line of champion mouse catchers. Skitter and Puppet make a place in the cave along my side, and Chewy the King of Lazy comes over and lies at my feet. In my Intro to Lit class, we filled out a little card that said what kind of reading we like to do. She read what I said out loud (anon). “I like to read so I forget where I am and who I am and become someone in the book for a little while.” I decide to read just the first entry or two, but it turns out this is hard to do, as she doesn’t start each day out with the date. I can only tell it’s a new entry because she skips some space and usually the writing is a little different, like she was tired when she finished.

Today in class we read a short story by William Carlos Williams about a doctor who uses a wooden spoon to force open this sick girl’s mouth. When Dr. P says that this was a sexual allusion, and that the wooden spoon was a metaphor for a man’s thing, the class goes berserk. “You’re reading too much into it,” says one boy. “He’s just trying to save her life, and if that’s a violation (that was Dr. P’s word) then it’s sometimes necessary to use force when people are too stubborn to know what’s good for them.” So I said, “Then why does the doctor feel shame?” and Dr. P looked at me approvingly. So now I’m adding allusion and symbol to my list of terms. When you allude to something you’re beating around the bush, not saying it exactly, but close enough so that if they’re paying attention, your reader will know the words refer to something that was already done (in a totally different book). This is similar to symbol, because a symbol is also more than what it looks like. It takes on other meanings and becomes more powerful than it would be otherwise. Like the American flag. Or a rose. Or even a rock, maybe. Like, my cup runneth over.
I feel good about myself asking that question in class, because usually I’m real quiet, but that doctor gets me mad, and I can just see him straddling that little girl and thrusting that spoon (if you know what I’m alluding to) down her throat. Then before class is out she tells us that our final project, which is coming up in about three weeks, should be our own poem or short story, but no more than five pages. “Write about something you know,” says Dr. P, but I’m tired of what I know and would like to try my hand at something I don’t know. Maybe a story about an astronaut who gets stranded on the moon with only thirty days supply of food and air, which would allow me to say anything I want, because no one in this class has been to the moon. Or maybe tell a story from the point of view (which is not opinion but where you stand) of a fat, lazy cat. This entertains me all the afternoon as I’m cleaning. I could call him Malice of Foresight, which I always liked the sound of (and which could make this an allegory).
Today the girls have sniffles and just want to watch TV when they get home. I make some orange juice and chicken soup, which is what Meredith asked me to do, in a note she left for me: “The recipe you used last time would be great. See you a little early tonight. –M”
I have Miss Piggy with me because the shelter is full and they needed me to take care of her and her litter of four kittens. I get the girls to help me feed them, and I’m not surprised to see that it’s Molly who stays with it, all afternoon, even though I can tell she’s feeling bad. By the time I get home I’m feeling a little stretched myself, but I have some of the soup (which Meredith lets me bring home when I make a big pot of something). It is so good that William has seconds and then he goes to his armchair to watch a game and I go sit down at our first ever computer and start my story. The problem is that after I write for a long time and then read back over it, it sounds so stupid I hold down the delete button till it’s all gone, which takes about five minutes. Meanwhile I watch Miss Piggy licking her babies. She looks up at me and opens her mouth to make little meow sounds that I can’t even hear. While she’s inside all the other animals have to stay out or the fur will fly. And that is not figurative language. Being excluded in this way makes them unhappy, so I always lock up Miss Piggy and her kittens in Little Will’s room when I go to bed, and let the others back in.
The next day I’m too sick to go to work, and my supervisor says, “Get plenty of rest and drink lots of fluids,” just like she’s a doctor or something, but I appreciate her not getting on to me, which would be pretty ridiculous considering I haven’t taken a sick day in three years. I call Meredith and say I’d better not come in, and she says, “Rest and drink lots of water.” I take everyone’s advice (plus Mama’s hot toddy) and go to bed with the diary, which I read till I fall asleep, then wake up and read some more.
It makes me sad to think of Meredith, haunted by things that happened and didn’t happen alike. I read the part about him dissolving when she saw him wavering in the distance. When I lifted my eyes, I could see myself in the recliner looking around, and at the same time I could feel the hair rising on my neck. I quick shoved the diary where I always do, under a stack of coffee table books that we never look at anymore.
Maybe I could write my story about a woman who gets amnesia and then can’t tell whether what’s going on in her head are echoes of the past or fantasies of what she’d like to happen. I wake up at 3:00 still in my chair with the alarm going off in the bedroom.
One week later my story is thirteen pages long. I notice that I am having trouble bringing it to a close. How does she get her memory back? Who is she really? These questions are not so easy to answer. I think I’ll have a deus ex machina come along, but Dr. P seems not to have much respect for them, so I delete the big pick-up that’s driving towards her. But something goes wrong and the whole story disappears. It’s gone! As if it never happened, and since I didn’t get around to making a back-up copy, I’m sunk, and this week a busy one. It’s William’s 50th birthday and his mother is coming over from Paducah and I’ll be putting her up at the house, and that means trying to keep her from doing our laundry or reorganizing the bathroom cabinets and probably climbing up on the stool and falling and breaking a hip and ending up staying here for three months. I say screw it to this story because I’m beginning to see why Dr. P says we should write about something we know.
Cleaning floors, emptying trash, dusting, separating recycling from left-over Subway sandwiches and pizza crusts. All of the sudden I’m dividing the piece of paper in front of me into two columns. At the top of one, it says Meredith, and at the top of the other it says Mary. And here’s how the words line up: successful…failure, beautiful…plain, nice legs…fat legs, nice teeth…bad teeth, educated…ignorant, all men want to sleep with…only one man will sleep with. A person that the past has overlooked and the future isn’t going to smile on.
I turn the paper over and at the top write: Thoughts about My Short Story. Maybe I could make it about a housekeeper at WKU who discovers that someone is trying to poison the head of the English department. She finds a container of arsenic in the recycling and is muttering about how inconsiderate some people can be when she notices the skull and crossbones (which are a symbol) on the cover. She holds it by her fingertips, knowing the police will want to lift prints off of it, and then deposits it in a trashcan liner and drops it in her smock pocket.

My week from hell is over . . . I shouldn’t say that. William was real sweet on his birthday and surprised too. Little Will called and talked to William because I was outside feeding the dogs, and William told me later he was coming home, that he has had enough. Mother Said was better than usual, helping me peel vegetables and measure and sift flour, and only once tried to clean up the laundry room. Fortunately, the box of detergent I just bought knocked over and made a big spill in the middle of the floor, and four cats darted away and then came back to investigate, which got her and the cats to sneezing, so I cleaned it up and she felt bad and said she’d stay away from that room. One room at a time, I almost said. (Which is mean.)
Finally, the night before my story is due, I decide to write a story about a housekeeper at Western, but leave out the part about the rat poison. I decide there will be a frame, which means a story that has another story inside it, and the inside story is her secret identity as a novelist, and the novel she’s writing is about a woman whose husband has died and left her to pick up the pieces. The denouement (day-knew-maw) comes when the housekeeper’s husband really does get killed and she’s going to end up living the life of her character. I don’t know what you call that, but there’s probably a name for it.
So I type like mad and save every five minutes and have everything done but the part inside the character’s head, which I can’t figure what to say about, then it hits me, that Meredith’s diary might help me out. I need to find a passage that doesn’t give up who wrote it, and here’s what I pick out: I need an explanation that will allow me to face the days ahead with something that will lighten this ton of rocks I carry in my heart. It aches and aches. It pulls my posture down in front and makes my back a shaft of barbed wire. What’s inside is outside, what’s out is in. The only way to put things back is to know why.

Today I make a beautiful apple pie. It’s fall and Diana and Molly and Cecily are all trying to take the peels off the apples in one piece. Diana is the best. Molly eats the peels that break off so she can say hers came off in one piece. Cecily gives up and asks to roll out the dough instead. By the time Meredith comes home, the smell of pie is everywhere. She sets down her book bag and before I get a look at her, she says, “Can we talk a moment, Mary? Girls, go watch TV for a few minutes.”
“Sure,” I say, wiping my hands on a towel and turning around. I can tell right away that something is wrong.
“Today I had lunch with Dr. P, and she was very complimentary about a story you turned in. She even read a little bit of it to me.” She’s got this look, but it’s nothing like what I’m feeling, because my heart is up my throat and I’m having trouble breathing.
“Where did you get the idea?”
“Well, I don’t know, I guess I had a lot of ideas and tried two or three different stories and each one kept getting lost or I couldn’t figure out how to end and each one sort of had pieces of the other ones and it was the night before so I just wrote something.” I’m babbling like a blooming idiot, which is what Mama used to say when she caught me lying.
“Have you read my journal, Mary?”
Three thoughts go through my head so fast it takes no time at all. I can say no and how it must be a coincidence. I can act confused and ask if it was in a red binder or a blue one and throw her off that way. Or maybe I could get a coughing fit and have to leave the room, or maybe a heart attack and just die right now.
“Yes,” I finally say, and my voice is so low she has to lean toward me.
“Why?” she cries out, her voice cracking and tears filling her eyes. “It was private!” She’s gripping the back of her head. I’m frozen at the counter, my hands twisted in the dish towel. I have not seen her cry in all the time that I’ve been here, and now it’s because of me.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out, “I didn’t mean any offense. I’ll get my things.”
Because I’m not going to make her have to say the words You’re fired. She has left anyway, gone to her bedroom and closed the door. I stop in the TV room and take my last look at the girls. “Good-bye,” I say. Diana waves her fingers without turning to see me, so my last image is of her hair pulled back in a ponytail and curled like a question mark. Cecily gives me a little look like she can tell something’s going on and says, “Good-bye, Mary Said,” all formal. “Molly?” I say, and she says, “I know, I know,” then grabs the drawing she’s been working on and brings it to me. “I want you to have this. My horses are getting much better, aren’t they? It’s for making us the apple pie and stuff.” She pauses, then adds, “But if you think Little Will would like it, you can send it to him.” Then I get a hug and she wiggles her finger for me to lean down, and I get a kiss. “See you tomorrow,” she says. I leave then and cry all the way home, where I think I will never face another person except William.

It’s been a month. I have three years of sick leave which I take. Maybe I’ll take this year’s vacation time too, and maybe I’ll just crawl in a cave and die, because that’s what I feel like I’m in: the darkest, loneliest cave you can imagine, and what’s worse is I’m in the cave that’s in me. William has stopped chewing me out and telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself and is now starting to look worried and giving me backrubs and patting me on the shoulder till I tell him to go take a hike. What’s worse than William is not being able to escape People’s Court and Judge Joseph Wapner in my head. It goes like this:
What’s the big deal! I disguised my story so well Dr. P didn’t know. If no one knows and no one is hurt, why does it matter? All this time, Meredith has been happy with me, and she had nothing but praises and hugs for me. I’m still the same, the same person. Why does she act like I’m someone else? Maybe I just needed to know what it’s like to lose your husband because if William was to die, I’d be left alone, except for my animals. Maybe I did it without malice.
And then Judge Joseph says how stupid it was to put something private, even if you disguised it, into a story you were going to turn into a professor. So what if you didn’t expect Dr. P to share it with her? You’re a silly woman who has no business trying to get a degree. You can’t even do your own work because it takes BRAINS to be educated.
William asks, “Does she know you made a copy of it?”
I give him a look and he puts his hands up and backs off.

When I go back to work, everyone is full of questions, but I know how nosy they are so I just say I was sick with a rare form of hypertension. I have to take another cleaning position because that’s the only way I can afford to pay for food and shots for my babies. Finally, it turns to summer, and I stop looking back at that ugly winter. One day when we had just finished giving the dogs their yearly shots, I was gathering up the needles and William started horsing around. I threatened to jab him and pretty soon I had him on the run and we were laughing like a couple of fools, and then Little Will pulled in. When he stepped out of his truck, I ran to hug him and he saw me coming with the needles in my fist and jumped back in the car and made a show of locking the doors. We laughed, but I was crying.
“This here is Wolf. I liberated him from a dog fight,” he says, after we hug and I point to the big dog standing at the door of the truck. He’s a wolf-husky cross with long, coarse gray and brown fur. In the late afternoon, after Will has rested up with a nap, we all have a beer. Wolf and Poof eye each other, and Poof goes over and sniffs. I can see his whiskers curving forward. He must decide Wolf’s okay, because he rubs his back against him and jiggles his tail in Wolf’s face. Wolf looks at Will like he’s sorry and won’t do it again.
“They’da killed me if they caught me,” Will says. “I was going to grab whatever dog I could, I was so pissed off. They were in a big hangar next to the shed where the actual fights was going on, and I wandered over there and stuck my head in, and this big dude grabs my arm and tells me to get out. It was the second day of this marathon fight and over his shoulder I could see a pen full of dogs from the night before, too wounded or dead to bother each other. I saw the whole thing like a photograph, cages lined up in groups and these big apes watching over them. I left and that’s when I saw it . . .”
I cover my ears, but I hear anyway.
“I walked out and headed away, like I was leaving, then circled around, and off to one side I seen a pile of dead dogs. I thought I was gonna to be sick. Eyes torn out, legs ripped, guts spilling out, blood dried in a big frozen puddle. I step on something and then see it’s a long black leg, probably from a part-wolf. I did get sick then. I seen men fighting, people starving to death, birds and seals coated with oil. I never want to see nothing like what I saw that night.”
I have to get up and go to the bathroom. How can people be that way? For money! I press toilet paper into my eyes. Will calls out, “Sorry, Mom, I won’t say anymore.” I splash my face. Of all the people in the world, my husband and my son know how I get. I go back because I want to hear how he found Wolf.
“I went back to the fight barn and drank some beer and waited till the first fight was getting started. I saw more Huskies, Pits, some Dobermans, I don’t know what all else. Just a stinking mess of dogs and men who’d sooner cut your throat as look at you. I headed back outside. I don’t know why I didn’t see him when I went by before. Maybe he was a special attraction. I didn’t look to see if anyone was watching, just unhooked the chain and walked like he was mine back to the truck. Drove like hell outta there. I figured you’d be able to bring him back, if anyone could.”
“I can’t have him fighting with the others.”
“He’s more scared than anything. I think he’s confused.”
Will says he’s thinking about seeing what work there is in welding, which he’s real good at, and maybe find a place in the country to buy. He says he saved most of what he made and has a good down payment. It’s good to hear him wanting to live here in Kentucky. “Most boring place on earth.”

Wolf is skittish, but I work with him every day after work and on weekends, even let him sleep by my side of the bed, so he gets attached to me. Then I take him through the little training ring I’ve set up. I’m teaching him to jump and crawl in addition to the usual commands that any cared for dog knows. The more tricks a dog learns, the happier they are. Dogs’ number one goal in life is to please people (unless they’re starved, beaten, or neglected). Maybe Wolf has some dog in him. If he goes after one of the other dogs, I make him go to his doghouse. He puts his head between his paws and all he has to stare at is a brown field and row of trees. But where some dogs have to be kept in the fenced yard, Wolf doesn’t run. Unlike Chewy the Sly One, he doesn’t sneak to the front and then act as if everything is normal. One time I forgot him and it wasn’t till I was getting ready for bed that I looked out and saw him watching me in the lighted window. He stays close, too close half the time, tripping me and knocking against me every other step. I realize I’m crazy about that dog, his coarse fur, his one blue eye that shades over into gray at night, his curly tail and his straight up pointing ears, each one a fist full.
Over time, we settle into our usual pattern of life. Up before dawn, early to bed, lots of animals, endless work. Will comes by every couple of weeks, but I can call him any time and he’ll come by and give us a hand. I work for three or four people, sometimes six months, sometimes a year, and finally find a situation that looks like it will last. Same set-up as I had with Meredith and the girls, only this time it’s boys and they live in town.
One spring day I build a series of tunnels with bales of hay, so I can teach Wolf to crawl through them, something he used to know how to do but has forgotten, as I’ve been too busy to keep up with his lessons. A car pulls up in the driveway and some girl I’ve never seen before waves at me and then walks over.
“You don’t recognize me, do you, Mary Said.”
It’s Diana, I see, though her hair is short now. I tell her I would never forget her face, even after four years, or is it five, and she hands me an envelope and says it’s an invitation to her graduation party.
“That’s an amazing looking dog you’ve got there.”
“His name’s Wolf, my son brought him back with him from Alaska.”
“Is he a wolf?”
“Part . . . trouble is, I don’t know which part,” I say, a little joke I’ve developed.
By now Wolf knows we’re talking about him so he trots over to get his ears rubbed. I tell Diana to tell him to roll over and slip her a dog treat to give him.
“You always have the neatest pets. I remember the kitten you had in your pocket the first day you started working for us. . . . So will you come?”
I’m looking down at the card and getting ready to answer, when she says, “You know we missed you a lot after you left. Cecily and Molly want you to come too.” She pauses a moment, then says, “And Mom, too, of course.”
I’ve got three days to think about it and it seems like that’s all I do, which gets on my nerves, especially when it’s midnight and I have to get up in three hours.

When I pull into the driveway, my hands are shaking, but I tuck my packages into my big bag and step out of the car. There’s young people everywhere but they just look through me as I head into the house. As soon as I step into the kitchen, I feel faint. I’m trying not to look too hard and hoping I see them before they see me. But it doesn’t happen that way. Molly sees me and I just can’t help crying when she walks over to me, so tall and sure, and gives me a hug. Then she tucks her arm under mine and leads me over to Cecily, who is hanging around a table they’ve got set up at the foot of the stairs for champagne. “May I see your ID?” she says. Her face is flushed, and she sways when she hands me a glass. I see that it’s Cecily who is the real beauty of the three. Why didn’t I ever notice that before?
My bag has slipped off my shoulder and the champagne jumps a little out of the glass. “I guess I’d better drink this before it spills,” I say, and Cecily fills the glass again.
“Bottoms up!” she says, and when I say, “My, Cecily, you’re so grown up,” I can see that she is proud of herself.
“Mom!” Molly calls out and I look up at Meredith coming toward us, her brown hair a cloud around her face. I go to set my glass down and my bag falls off my shoulder again and makes the champagne jump. There’s an awkward moment while I’m rubbing the champagne off my fingers.
“Hello, Mary, I’m glad you could come.” She sounds like she means it and her smile is enough to steady me. Then someone else pulls her away and I catch my breath. I give Diana my gift. It’s only $20, but I tucked it into some WKU running pants, and tell her I hope that’s where she’s going to college next year.
I sit with Cecily awhile and see the kitchen is pretty much as I left it. Molly takes me out to the barn to see Babe, who is in the stall next to Cecily’s horse Iago.
“She’s a beautiful horse,” I tell Molly. “And fast too?”
“Like the wind,” she says.
“Well, that’s plenty fast.”
“Yep, especially on a windy day.”
We both laugh and then I decide it’s time to head back, so she walks me in and I go to use the bathroom. But when I pass the study I stop. Her rocks are in cases along the walls now, fancy ones that pull out and are lit up by hidden track lights.
“It’s different, isn’t it,” she says, to my left, as I turn from the doorway. “I got a grant to do some research.”
“I’m glad for you.”
“And I’m glad for you!” she says, taking my hand to shake it. “Congratulations on the award. I never knew you were such a rescuer of animals!”
She’s referring to the university award I just got for service, because of the work I’ve done over the years with the Humane Society and the rescue leagues for different breeds. I can feel myself blushing, and then, as if no time has passed, I’m blustering again.
“You know, I used to make lists comparing me to you and I always came out looking worse. You know, like you’re educated and I’m not, and you’re beautiful and I’m homely as a mud fence.”
She shakes her head. “No. No. No. You are not plain and I am certainly not beautiful. I remember the day you came to interview. I had already interviewed two women who would have been good, and then you came, and I could tell you were the right one. I told my mom, ‘She has a good and gentle face,’ and then you won the girls over.”
She takes my arm and we start to walk out. Then she stops and says, “Now you have a new item for your list.” She holds her hand up and writes in the air, “Saver of lives over here under this column and saver of rocks over here.”

That night as I’m falling asleep, I think about something my history professor Dr. Cabott said during the last course I took before I graduated: “For me, the word discover is never innocent.” My hand is writing in the air, in cursive, like a grade school teacher showing the class how to make the letters: e-n-v-y. I hadn’t realized how it had took hold of me, how I was going through the motions of my life while my thoughts were caught up in someone else’s life that I wanted for myself. Even when I told those childhood stories, it was to let the girls see another world, one they thought was mine.
I don’t think I looked in a mirror for two years. I dreamed of drowning. I could see the shore come close, something beautiful and known, and then before my feet could touch the sand, my weight would pull the waves around me. My award came as a surprise. It’s a silver bowl, which I have set between my pillow and William’s. In it, a teacup poodle named Big’nuff is breathing heavily through her tiny nose. She has asthma, so if she has a fit in the middle of the night, I need to be where I can hear. Sometimes all she needs is reassurance. Last night when William turned off the light, I told him I was hopeful she would make it through the night. Tonight will be no different.

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