Nell Zink: Mislaid

As one, they rose and walked together out of the café to take possession of their new abode, the sky over Capri, which just then was glowing dark blue over Cary Street.

The press had wheedled the gist of the story out of various onlookers, so it wasn’t long before Karen got a letter from The University saying her minority scholarship and financial aid package were in jeopardy.

“Quand même,” she said, tucking it under a placemat. She and Temple were transferring together to NYU on the best scholarship of all: Daddy’s Money. It turned out Lee’s parents had not spent everything. There was still plenty left over, plus the land, and he had forgotten all about his one great-grandfather who was alive somewhere in a home. Until suddenly he wasn’t. He left a huge estate in Albemarle County to so many people it had to be sold for cash. A great deal of trickling occurred. Lee could even get the Corps of Engineers to come in and stabilize the level of Stillwater Lake. He was landscaping the banks with poet habitat — clematis arbors, espaliered fruit. Slowly, the poets were coming back.

Conveniently, certain people who taught at CUNY owned a studio apartment in the Village and were planning to pool their money with Meg’s to buy a loft in Chinatown. Karen and Temple didn’t even have to apartment hunt.

Meg had confessed to all manner of wrongdoing. Luke’s response had been to become sexually aroused and steer the conversation around to Meg’s body, which she compared to a Stradivarius. Meg knew then that she was in the presence of something inconceivably precious: a woman literally crazy about her. She began to subscribe to Luke’s belief that she had never made a mistake in her life. Luke was her destiny, and her life was the road leading to Luke.

Absolved of her guilt, she got up the courage to visit her parents. They were unchanged. She was floored. Here she was, a woman with grown children and a story to tell, and her mother was still putting peonies and irises in exactly the same places. Her hair had gone gray, but it was still in the same symmetrical little perm. Her dad had no new hobbies or opinions. Between them lay an unbridgeable emotional gulf. It had been there ever since the day she told them she would grow up to be a man. Her mother had stopped expecting any joy from her that day. Her father had never started. As far as she could tell, her role in their plan for producing descendants had been to bear Byrdie.

Karen was collateral damage. They refused to let her visit. They said they would see her if and when she left Temple, but not before. “That will put a crimp in Thanksgiving,” Meg said. “You’re alienating your only granddaughter, and I don’t think your grandson really goes for this kind of thing either.”

“You’ll all face facts soon and come to your senses,” her father said. “Until then, we can look after ourselves.”

“We’re retiring to Vermont,” her mother added.

Meg drove out past the Browns’ house, where she saw Leon out in the yard, trimming a hedge. Her borrowing of his dead daughter seemed to have caused no ill effects. A little son or grandson was helping him out by squashing a nest of gypsy moth caterpillars one by one with a brickbat. A contented child.

That is not to say that Lee immediately kept his promise to be nice all the time. But his redeemer Karen disapproved of meanness, so he had to stop making fun of people, even sitting ducks like Temple and Meg, and then he got out of the habit. He had never meant to be cold. All his life he had been out of his depth. Sexual abuse, domestic violence, a transparently evil social order, poets, academia, etc., had taught him to respect people’s boundaries. In a world where people have fixed limits, it’s safest to be an arrogant bastard and push yourself and others to come out on top. But Karen was larger on the inside than on the outside. She had no boundaries. Anything might affect her. She was significant everywhere, like one of those atom bombs that fits in a suitcase. He began to speak and listen and care about the world, and it made him a different person.

He did not mention life goals again. Life has a goal, he noted, and harping on it is counterproductive.

Given Lee’s love, Karen started paying somewhat less attention to Temple — which was not a bad thing! She was sixteen! Does a sixteen-year-old really need nonstop trysts with a wild-eyed fiancé? Wouldn’t she be better off benefiting from the sophistication and knowledge of a supportive, attentive parent? What if it was your daughter, assuming you were that kind of parent?

Still, she insisted on living with Temple, explaining to Lee that with him around she could always be assured of finding leftover pizza in the refrigerator. She would never have to cook. Lee admitted it was a strong argument.

Photograph by Fred Filkorn

NELL ZINKgrew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1 . Her debut novel, The Wallcreeper , was published in 2014. She lives near Berlin, Germany.

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