Darren and his boy work in the shed: one aims to fill space and the other to create it. His boy, who is too old to play with blocks and too young to notice, assembles a house by leaning rectangles against each other, balanced on their corners. He has his father's sense for distance and forces. The house in the boy's mind, the house coming through his hands, is mysterious and angular, nothing like his Cape Cod two towns over, which is burning, while his mother sleeps inside it, as he builds.
The boy is quiet against the sound of his father's lathe. They both like the sound, trust it, let it set their minds free to think out what their hands can do.
Darren holds tight to a gouge, touching it to the wood that rotates on the lathe. Shards of wood strike like sparks. A mask protects his face and bounds his vision, directing it to the wood that pulls his tool. He resists the force; his hands sweat. He deforms the block, roughing out a circular center. There is heat in the shed.
Now Darren uses a different gouge. This one also looks like a sickle. He points it at a right angle, so that it scrapes at the wood made soft and malleable by the rotation of the machine, but doesn't leave burns. When he is finished with the gouge, it will be warm on both ends from the fight between the orbiting wood and the stationary man.
The bowl he makes is not just a bowl, but, he thinks, also a belly that has carried a child eight long months. It, like the five before it, is a gift to his wife and unborn daughter. Rather than pointing to photos or marks on a wall, he'll say, "I remember when you were this big," and furnish a bowl, made by his hands, his son's patience, and swamp wood that's older than the words they use to describe the beauty in its discoloration and unusual knots.
The shed is on his parents' land beside their farmhouse though it has always been Darren's, ever since he was a boy and needed a place to be. His bedroom was more Bradley's than his own. His brother, two years his senior, was popular in the way competitive, winning boys are, and respected, but not liked, by the boy who slept on the bunk beneath his. Darren shared his brother's will to win but none of his skill or success. In his quiet way, Darren developed a drive to know the way things are—how materials compete and combine—and applied his hands to their manipulation. Even after he married Betsy and bought a house a few miles over, the shed remained his workspace filled with his tools and inventions—wooden goblets, blown vases, welded stools. Now it contains Betsy's things also, and his son's.
Gerald watches the clock and sees that it's time to go. He moves to the usual place beside the oak chest and the goofy frog made of wrought iron, and waves his hands to break his father's focus. At first he waves at the wrist, then the arm takes part, his elbow swinging wildly. He giggles. His other arm joins the first. They jiggle up in the air, and the jiggle spreads through his belly and across his legs, which then karate-kick the space between them. He's dancing his dance, a flame fueled by the lathe that fans his body into motion until he hears its sound fading, and both boy and machine slow in their rotation.
"Time?" asks Darren, who's waking from a deep concentration and feeling at first disoriented, then relieved by the easy pleasure in his boy. Darren smiles as the boy wipes the heat from his forehead. "Thanks for getting me."
Darren's covered in a layer of sawdust that, like ash, colors his hair, his arms, his t-shirt, and his jeans, and collects in a mound at his feet. The dust articulates the hairs on his arms. He looks to his watch. "It's getting late, Gerald. Leave what's unfinished and clean up the rest."
The boy looks at his house and train tracks. He designed the house for his dog Alfred, who likes to climb even though he doesn't look like he would. Gerald lets the house stay and begins instead at the train tracks that trace a circular route with no start or finish, just countless gravity-defying loops that wouldn't carry a real train, but work just fine for the one Gerald thinks up. Darren watches the way his son destroys a thing he's given love to and how even though he's regretful and slow, he's able to do it. It has to do with his age, Darren thinks, and he understands how the tracks are made precious because they carry a train only Gerald sees. Without the tracks there would be no train. Darren thinks how the best inventions are compilations—half yours and half someone else's. He feels a weighted pleasure in his chest because he has a boy who reflects his own peculiarities, a boy who makes Darren almost lovable to himself.
In his memory of this moment, his son able to bear his loss because of a belief in creativity and invention, Darren will misremember, and think he saw a loneliness in it and a danger. Their intimacy, he'll think, puts them out of balance; it is something gained that will provoke a loss. He will avoid these moments because when he doesn't, he'll fear that something else he loves is caught in a violence and charring.
 * |
When they approach the house, it is black everywhere, as though the siding, the roof, the swing set out back, were black underneath and the fire has released them from their outer skin. The house has a noise about it, a noise of people reacting: water made to splash at the blackened walls by firemen, EMTs negotiating with administrators, and familiar neighbors making unfamiliar expressions, arms crossed at their chests as though to keep their pounding hearts in. There is an ambulance. A fair-haired woman is in charge and she directs her staff patiently, diligently, without the fury of rescue. The fire is out. The house sits at the center of the activity, black and wet and shattered.
"Dad?" They are in the car, and Gerald's hands are against the window, pressing. "Is that our house?"
Darren does not want to leave the car. There is too much motion.
"Is Mom inside? Alfred?"
The car is still in drive, and Darren's foot is on the brake. His body feels as if his joints are soldered together. He sees the people see him.
"Don't cry, Dad."
No one wants to disturb Gerald and Darren. They stay this way in the car until Darren's parents arrive and open the door. His grandmother lifts Gerald and takes him in her arms, where he begins to cry out. The smell of the fire is strong and angry and it brings Darren into the street. It is a smell that burns his nose from the inside out. His eyes are dry and red.
| * |
That night, Darren's mother Janice drives Darren and Gerald to her house, while his father follows in Darren's car. Janice fills the silence in the car with talk. Darren doesn't listen to his mother and appreciates that her chatter gives him something he can actively ignore. She interrupts herself with her finger. "The sky!" she says, and points at the pink and orange wisps as though they've only suddenly appeared. All three take it in. Gerald bites his nails, then bites at the dry skin around them.
When they arrive at her home, Darren and Gerald see the lasagna half gutted on the dinner table. It was dinnertime when Janice and Richard received the call. "Are you hungry, honey? There's plenty. Heat the bread, Richard."
Darren and Gerald sit at the table like guests and begin to pick at the congealed cheese and noodles. Darren's throat is dry. He watches his mother and father whisper to each other, making preparations.
"Your mother's going to buy you a few things to wear," Richard says to Darren as he flicks on the oven light. The oven window is fogged by drops of moisture, like steam, like trapped breath, and Darren rushes to the bathroom and vomits. This is how he experiences shock—as confused thoughts and nausea.
Although Richard offers to make a bed for Gerald in his office, Darren insists that he and his boy sleep together in the room that was once part his. It was a room he always shared, and he doesn't want to be alone in it now. In bed, Darren holds Gerald to his chest.
"Tell a story, son," he says, hopeful that the sound of his son's voice will keep him in the present. Even though it is now a sewing room with yellow-flowered wallpaper and large furniture, he has slept enough nights in this room to know its bones. It is easy to mistake the sluggish hollowness he feels now as the residue of the grief and loneliness he felt as a child. The feeling of loss is so strong now, he's afraid he'll lose the past ten years to it. Its familiarity and persistence disorient him, and he feels no other emotions are his but these. He strains to hear the boy's earnest whisper and in listening to it, Darren tries to remember that he is grown.
| * |
The next morning his mother has made the fruit salad that is her specialty for family barbecues because it’s Darren’s favorite. For Gerald, there’s a sugar cereal filled with joyous colors and animated animal forms. He bobs pieces in his bowl and watches as their color dirties the milk. Then he makes his mouth into a tunnel and slurps them up, one at a time.
“How did you sleep?” Janice asks Darren as she takes a pot from the cupboard.
“Fine.”
“I got you some clothes from Target last night. Nothing great, but nothing too bad. You’re not picky.” She’s beginning to boil water for an egg, and Darren takes this in the gut. His breathing deepens and quickens, the air being forced from his body in giant heaves. He must get out. Darren goes to his room.
He hears his mom say, “Gerald, you’re off from school today. Why don’t you come with me to the market?”
A cell phone. A menu for a Chinese restaurant. A local map. A box of tissues. These are the items in the car and, along with the clothes they wore the night before and the discarded objects in the shed, all of the evidence of their family. There is so much lost, it is hard to know what remains.
As he leaves the house, Darren calls to his mom. “Going for a walk, I’ll be back later.” He walks down the driveway in new clothes – a bright blue shirt and off white shorts – that retain the shapeless, starched quality of clothes that have nothing to do yet with people who will stretch and damage and humanize them with wear.
As a child, Darren liked to know how machines worked; he liked to take things apart. His parents didn’t understand that before he pushed the button to turn on the lawnmower, he had to know where that button led to and what it would do. He helped his parents design cabinets for their new kitchen because he knew the things they owned and how they were used. He recommended the cabinet materials they chose.
His parents encouraged his early interest in computers, in playing games at first, then in writing languages that directed their inventions. He was an engineer before he knew what that was.
His skill is also a deficiency. He needs to know the parts and the process in order to understand the whole. He’s accustomed to finding his way, but when he doesn’t, when one piece is missing, he stalls. He is blind. This is how Darren feels this morning, walking in long strides around his parents’ planned community. He can’t see the architecture of his situation, so he doesn’t believe it.
He is living and his son is living, but his wife is not here and his daughter is not coming. He needs to start from the ground up, from the smallest most tangible truth, and that is his wife’s body. He knows too many things about her body, like the veins that twist just beneath her skin, a reminder of the system that moves life inside her, and her face, which is small-featured and unremarkable except for her nose with a slight, ironic upturn that undercuts the simplicity, making her face astonishing. He can taste the softness of the skin on her back with his tongue. She has a smell all her own, one that is pleasant because it is her smell, hers, the smell of the woman he loves. He can’t divorce the smell from the body. When he thinks of it now, he can’t recall it exactly, because his senses are filling with the memory of the burnt house that contained his wife’s body, which was itself a burnt house containing his unborn daughter.
He can’t place her body in that house on that night. He can see her small, athletic body enormous with child, as it was when he left her napping on the sofa, nose in a cushion, but he can’t imagine her dead. He is caught on the loss of her and can’t see how the fluid and moisture of her body could turn to carbon, then to ash. Her body compels and repels him, and he feels desperately that he must see it.
When he returns, it is late afternoon and his parents’ home blossoms with delivered bouquets. There are flowers from his church, from his neighbors, from his softball league, from his mom’s cooking club, from the school where Betsy taught art to kids, and from the software company where Darren works. He does not read the cards and to him these flowers in woven baskets and cheap vases are a reminder of the season. This has happened in the spring, he thinks. His mother has arranged the flowers festively around the living room and kitchen, and Darren wonders if he might wake the next morning thinking it is Easter, not that this is spring and his wife’s body is not a body but something else.
It is good for him to remember the season because it reminds him that a day has a morning and a night and that time works its way through a day to change it. He can feel time and place working against each other and can’t resolve their synchronicity. He has eaten many pleasant, unmemorable dinners with his son and wife in his parents’ home, yet here he is, in the same place, recalling their baked chicken and roasted potatoes mediocrity, but his wife is not here. The place is steady and unchanged, but that is not enough. He tries not to will back the memories, but the days themselves.
| * |
Darren’s parents worry about him. It has been two days since the fire and still he cannot watch his mother turn on the stove for tea or cook oatmeal in the microwave. He showers in cold water. They care for their son in the way they would want to be cared for: Richard tends to the investigation and the insurance. The cause of the fire is unclear. Richard hires a shady insurance lawyer to handle the undesirable negotiations with the insurance company. Janice takes it on herself to call Betsy’s parents and her sister. She alerts Gerald’s school and Darren’s office. She takes care of the aftermath and finds comfort in Gerald.
Gerald regresses into taking naps during the day. Sometimes he wakes from sleeping, his body burning up, but there are no lingering nightmares. He likes to go into the shed and see his mother’s art work – the jewelry, the pottery, the medal welded into tables. He asks questions about the funeral, but he doesn’t ask about death, about being dead.
Every day Janice takes him to a park where he plays with kids who don’t know him and won’t be bashful around his gaping loss. In the sandbox, he digs and digs, piling the sand high up in a corner. He asks other kids to cover his body and he puts straws in his nose so he can breathe beneath it. Sometimes he runs along with kids who are playing tag, not because he wants to play too, but because he wants to run in a whirlwind of bodies, like a tornado, turning out of control.
Time moves slowly for them. People visit, dropping off over-baked food and stale cookies and sit beside Darren trying to comfort him. He is quiet. Darren appreciates his mother’s gift of speech now more than ever as she diverts the conversation to topics they can all talk about. Betsy’s parents, Grady and June, have come twice. They do not know where to be or what to do so they come and cry. Seeing Darren brings them relief, but for Darren, seeing them cuts him down. He likes them too much. He feels the weight of their collective loss, his responsibility in it. He thinks about Betsy’s body and craves the funeral.
| * |
The morning of the funeral, Darren dresses himself and is agitated by the prospect of relief. He hopes the funeral will be a focal point, an explosion of Betsy from which he can emerge and find his way back to what he knows and knows he can believe. He knows she is dead, but he feels the funeral has the power to make her a little less dead for a few hours. His mind has turned against him.
Once he’s in the church, he sees the casket and wants to touch it; he wants to look inside. He holds his son’s hand, takes his seat beside his parents, and resists the urge to see. It burns his chest. The people in the pews behind him feel to him as though they themselves are a sturdy pew, a force that keeps him from falling on his back to the floor. The best he can do is turn to look the people in the eye, giving an expression of solid fear, which is his attempt at gratitude.
It is his wife’s childhood preacher, the man who married them ten years ago, who conducts the service. Betsy’s mother June sits beside him, pulling at her ear to prevent tears. She is next to her husband, who cries solemnly, and sweats as though moisture leaks from all his seams. Darren wishes they were not beside him.
Gerald crawls into his father’s lap, and Darren leans his mouth on his son’s head, not to kiss him, but to take in the boy’s smell. He holds his son around the middle, as though his son were in his pregnant belly. For Gerald, Darren thinks, he must remember the service, the hymn sung by Betsy’s sister, the sun burning a hole through the window, but Darren’s mind is full of static and he can’t hold onto the day before him.
He wants to see her body. He won’t need to touch her, he thinks, even though his lips can imagine it. Seeing her will put his future into perspective, he will see what has happened and where she is now and he will be able to imagine a life after he knew her.
He starts to sweat. It is the only thing he wants, but he simply can’t have it. Only just this once, he wants time to stop to let him have his moment. He doesn’t care what the people would think or the preacher or his parents, but his boy – going to her casket now and opening it – would ruin the boy. She feels so near, but he must fight his body from finding her.
When the preacher calls him to the pulpit, he says his first spoken words about her death. They come quick and quiet:
“Thank you, all of you, for coming to be with us. I don’t know what you’re supposed to say, but what you already know. Betsy was my wife, my son’s mom. I loved her ten years long and don’t know how to love anything more.”
Then he sits. Gerald whispers, “Can we have a funeral for Alfred, too?”
Darren nods to his son, who has not only lost his mother, but also the animal he mothers. There’s guilt for Gerald, Darren sees for the first time, and responsibility. The boy holds his father’s arm, pressing his fingers deeply into the muscle.
| * |
The funeral has not done for him what he wanted. At the reception in his parents’ home, Darren watches people eat mayonnaisey salads and sandwiches from deli platters. He wants to be away from them, but he stays to do what’s expected, what Betsy would have wanted. Gina Ellis is piling up three plates of deli - one for herself and each of her kids. It was Gina, he supposed, who called his folks that night. He ought to speak to her, he thinks, but she is balancing multiple plates in her two hands and someone is holding the door to the porch for her. Then he sees Grady by the coffee pot.
“Think I should brew another?” Grady asks. They look at the pot. It is nearly empty. Darren doesn’t want him to; he doesn’t want to hear heat at work. He tries to think of what he can say that won’t make him sound off-balance. His mind is stuck on “don’t, please don’t.”
“I think I will,” Grady says.
The necessary materials are beside the machine – filters, grinds, trashcan. Grady tosses out the old filter, replaces it, and measures out the coffee.
“You holding up, son?”
Darren nods.
Grady looks at Darren, closes the lid, then looks again and begins to soften, his eyes filling with tears. “I’m sorry if we keep making you talk and you don’t want to.” Grady says this by way of introduction; this is the first time he’s spoken with Darren about their shared grief. “I don’t know who I am if I’m not talking about her. But you’re different.”
He sets the machine to go, and Darren tries to ignore the coffee pot, which begins to gurgle. He thinks about his breath, listens for it, and tries to control his intake.
“To lose everything at once.” Grady wipes the tears settling into the creases beneath his eyes, creases carved by years of crying. “I don’t know how a man picks up the pieces. I don’t know how you feel,” he says as a statement though he intends it as a question.
Darren hears the water warming from the heating element. Soon the bubbles will rise and the water will move through the coffee, taking its flavor – its life – and leaving smoldering grinds. He bites his lip and looks outside.
Over the sound of the coffee pot, Darren hears Grady say, “We love you son, and we want to help you.”
Darren sees his brother Bradley talking to Gerald outside. Bradley lost his hair before his college graduation and Darren continues to take pleasure in the ragged remnants that outline the back of his head. Darren can’t hear what they are saying, but he sees the discomfort in his son.
“Emily,” Bradley calls to his daughter, “you remember your cousin Gerald?” The girl, who was playing cards with her sisters, takes her time walking over. “How long has it been? Must have been before she got braces and started painting her nails.” Grady pushes out a dry laugh.
The two kids look at each other. Emily taps her prized nails together, flashing orange at Gerald. She considers not talking to Gerald as upholding her promise to her parents that she’d be nice.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” Gerald says back. He is embarrassed by her irritation; he doesn’t like being a burden.
“Emily here just got a collie pup.”
“Her name is Flannery,” Emily says.
“Do you have any pets, Gerald?”
The boy looks to his feet and feels his eyes filling. Bradley notices and kicks at the dirt. Darren was always overly concerned with neatness, Bradley thinks, and presumes his brother refused Gerald a pet. “You could come by and see Flannery. Emily is a good mom. She could show you how it’s done. If you proved yourself, maybe your dad would give it a shot.”
Gerald doesn’t want to cry, not in front of the girl who already has reasons for not liking him or his uncle whose head is covered in large ugly freckles, but the hurt burns down his throat and into his sternum.
Darren sees his son breaking and calls out, “Gerald? Gerald!” His voice carries through the screen door. Gerald looks at his dad, then takes off. “Sorry, Grady. The boy.” The steam has escaped from the maker and now the brown liquid fills the pitcher, clearing it of air.
Darren runs after his son, giving an appearance of effort. Darren knows when a person needs his quiet, and he feels deeply envious of the boy who can need something and take it. He stops when he sees Gerald open the shed door.
“Darren.” It is Lila, Betsy’s sister. She touches his arm like it’s something she’s done before. In her other hand she holds a sampler plate of desserts. She removes her hand to begin on the cheesecake. “We’re worried.”
“The boy just needs his time, is all.”
Lila takes a bite and swallows. “What’s going on? Why don’t you talk?” She eats her cake like it is the air that she breathes between words. “You won’t talk. Not to us or anyone.” She swallows another mouthful, not tasting it, but deriving pleasure in its bulk and texture.
“Jesus, Lila, I don’t like it either. But that’s what it’s like for me.”
She sighs, then moves onto a brownie with too much frosting. “It’s selfish. I know you don’t mean it to be but it is. We need to help each other. It helps my parents to help people. Why won’t you let them?” She picks up the rest of the brownie with her finger and drops it into her mouth. She licks her fingers as though that’s a comfort. She’s engaged in her own revolt against the laws of food and calories and energy and life that, if unacknowledged, can be defied. This is how Lila mourns her sister.
“I’m worried about them. I’m worried about you. You’ve got to do something, like get a diary. Try writing.”
Darren sees Gerald emerge from the shed and feels it best to keep his distance.
| * |
The next day, June and Grady take Gerald to their vacation home in Florida. It is a lonely day for Darren. He needs a structure to his days, a way to control his mind and a thing for his mind to control. It is time to return to work.
During his first morning back, there is a status meeting. It is nice to sit still and listen, Darren thinks as he hears his boss describe the product roadmap. Darren likes his company of colleagues who look like someone’s dad – comfortable and kind, each with his share of unusual characteristics: a mullet haircut; overgrown eyebrows beneath a bald head; a hammer for a nose; and a friendly smile on a man who uses a dishrag to towel the sweat from his brow.
These men acknowledge their faults and anticipate faults in others. The outcast among them is a large-muscled, classically good-looking man, who sits back in his chair, his legs spread wide and confident. He proves himself smart, capable, and not unkind, but still, they regard him with caution: they recognize a bully, even a recovered one.
Nigel lays out the plans for the next year: what needs to be built and why. They, the engineers, are to determine how they’ll build it, and how long it will take. Nigel ends the meeting, by saying, “Welcome back, Darren. We’re glad to see you.” The others nod toward him.
No one asks about his absence; they don’t pretend not to know about his loss or pretend to know a way to make it better. Here, Darren can be with his emptiness and not feel he needs to defend it. They fill him in on what he’s missed, speaking patiently as though his grief makes it difficult for him to take in progress, accept change.
Back at his desk, he resumes an old project. He likes that his job is to bridge a gap, making two disparate systems comprehensible to each other. He also likes that he supports users of his application secretly, that they don’t even know that his vital computations exist.
In his room that night, he tries to take Lila’s advice. He finds a yellow pad of paper and a pen. He writes the day’s date on the top right hand corner. His handwriting is the careful print drilled into him years ago in drafting class. This is his first line: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
He reads it to himself. He reads it aloud and feels how weightless it is: a sentence that holds a truth, but no analysis – nothing to come before and nothing to come after. It is an orphan.
He adds this: “I don’t know how to write.” Then: “I don’t know how to think this through.” His page looks like a dancer without rhythm or music, a skilled body without impetus. Then: “I don’t know how to begin.” He can’t organize his thoughts in a useful way. What he needs is a roadmap and language all his own.
He turns the page and begins again:
package galvinfamily.betsysPassing
import java.util.*;
public String Aversion to Wine
Each night he writes more of their story in code. He takes the structure from a computer language he knows so well he can type it faster than he can explain it. With it, he writes classes and interfaces – the pages of code that make up a program, designed to turn their story into a thing that has a use. But he isn’t typing, he writes by hand. His hands feel the curves of his letters, turning the impersonal language into his language, his voice.
He describes their first meeting as college students at a wine tasting.
public class First Date
if (AversionToWine != null)
System.out.println("Error”);
He represents programmatically what it was that he liked about her immediately: her kindness. It was simple. She didn’t have anything to prove or hide or overcome or defend. She liked talking to him and didn’t hold that back. She was a woman unafraid of herself.
else if (AversionToWine = null)
System.out.println("Darren asks Betsy out for Italian.”);
He writes about his anger in learning that she afforded college by working as a nude art model. He felt betrayed by her choice, her public generosity. It was not the eyes on her body, eyes seeing his private pleasure that bothered him, but the millions of replicas in clay and paint and wood and stone multiplying and spreading her all over New England. These strangers were creating her, and he didn’t like the balance of power.
She took him to the potter’s studio. “None of them are me.”
They were brightly-colored sculptures – some long and lean, others clumpy and geometric – all clay replicas of her naked body.
“They’re terrible,” Darren said, relieved.
She was an art teacher even then, explaining how the students were experimenting. Those who tried for realism created bodies that looked more like their own than hers. Others let her body represent something they could react to and create against. She was an artist creating artists out of students.
| * |
Each night, he works through their years, recreating them in his invented language. He tends to the birth of their son; here his code is like structured poetry, giving the sounds and smells of the cracking of their family, making room for one more. He writes this of the night she died:
grief = love + infinite distance
He plays with the algebraic equation. It is not right. He puts down his pencil and thinks. Then he writes:
grief = love + constant distance
He doesn’t like it, but he knows that time is the variable that changes grief. He wants it to be less, but is afraid of its departure. At some point, he will look back to this time and miss it because of its proximity to her dying and her living.
He writes what the human body is and how time works to change it. He writes how as a boy grows out of his body, he resents it for being too much a boy’s and how a man resents his body because it is not boyish enough. Then, he writes out fear and loss: he hates them, but wouldn’t know who he is without them. He writes about Betsy as a wife and a mother and a sister. Having outlived her, he writes to outlive himself.
In his coding, he discovers the thing that hurts the most: he’s lost his co-creator. He has lost their house, their things, their life. He has lost the daughter that was more hers than his.
Each night he writes, code structures his emotions. With this program he processes grief, communicates it, makes it into a legacy that no one reads and yet, it is made of words in a pattern that is decipherable. His program has a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if that end is an infinite loop, an uncertainty, a restatement of the beginning as well as a beginning to a new program.
Through the window, Darren sees Gerald leave the shed, walking toward the house. Darren looks at the pages of his writing, then feels the weight of them together – a half dozen notebooks in his hand. They feel substantial.
Gerald is often in the shed. For him, being in the shed is like watching old movies of his family. He is surrounded by his parents’ jagged objects and failed furniture that blend beauty and utility. Sometimes, he wears his father’s bowls as a hat and holds his mom’s earrings against his ears.
“Dad, I want to show you something.” Gerald pulls at his dad’s arm. Darren follows his boy into the building that feels like a grave. It is the first time that he enters it since the night when they worked side by side, like flint, while their home caught fire and burned.
“You’ve got to see this.” Darren sees the curtains his wife’s made and her sculptures and earrings half-finished. Then his son points to the blocks and train tracks and legos and wood and pieces of iron on the floor that he’s used to assemble a sculpture of Alfred. He had been a fat, awkward hound with stubby legs that fooled you into thinking he couldn’t jump up on the kitchen table even if it had a pie on it. The sculpture is a fair tribute, an equally awkward compilation of materials – Gerald’s, Darren’s, Betsy’s – that approximate a face and a barrel of a body that looks like it’s about to fall to pieces. Darren can see the energy of the dog approaching motion, ready for play.
© 2006 Jenn Scheck-Kahn
