Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

On those nights, Lew taught Richard the proper way to light a cigar, how to tamp its fat end and how much of the tip to cut. In that great haze of smoke, his father promised that next summer they’d make the drive up to Baltimore together and see the O’s and their crazy manager, who was so fond of the three-run home run. The next summer, Richard’s mother sat at the dining room table studying for her real-estate licensure exam, right up until the day that a man from the General Services Administration showed up with a settlement offer from the government, and Lew was dead.

When the alarm sounded, Richard experienced a momentary dislocation, not knowing much of the situation beyond the time, 5:27 a.m., displayed in the bright-green digits of the clock. In the early days of his career, and again in the first furious months after his divorce, there were weeks of eighty-plus hours and bar nights that went on until three in the morning, and going back to work meant a quick shower, a change of underwear, a new shirt and tie. The era of guest beds, foldout couches, strange apartments, temporary women. He knew this clock. Cadence.

She stirred, rolled to one side, and he clicked on the television, which faded in during the local forecast; the confluence of low-pressure systems was moving out into the Atlantic. Rising temperatures overnight had changed the precipitation to a steady rain. But on the heels of this system came another, pushing cold air down from the north. Temperatures were expected to dive later in the morning, leaving the city encased in a thick shell of blue-black ice. He had to get out now. This morning.

The weatherman began to narrate some footage of last night’s snow, and Richard recognized the intersection as the same one where he and Cadence had come to the rescue of the Metrobus driver, fended off the snowballing marauders. He tapped Cadence on the shoulder, and she rolled to see the television, pulled her down comforter up and tucked it beneath her chin.

“If I’m going to drive you to the airport—” she began, then stopped to point at the screen. “Hey. Hey! That’s us,” she said, hitting Richard on the shoulder for emphasis.

The camera zoomed in and followed Cadence as she packed a snowball, then unleashed it in the direction of the teenagers. “We look like we’re having fun,” Richard said. “Excellent form you’ve got there.”

Cadence shimmied out from under the covers and headed to the bathroom, then glanced back over her shoulder. “Turns out you knew how to have fun the whole time.”

Just a few hours ago, Richard had told someone he was a firm believer in happy endings, and now he couldn’t see any reason for that to change. If that was naive, so be it, but he’d seen the possibilities of his happiness in that televised clip, the two of them frolicking in the snow. He’d stop thinking about whether or not he was going to be okay and start working toward a specific goal. Happiness. This was revolutionary thinking. Happiness meant a family and a home, and it was hard not to notice how those feelings had returned after only a few hours back in Cadence’s company. Even her apartment felt like a home, he thought, with all its telltales: a welcome mat in the hall, a place by the door to leave the keys, actual curtains on every window.

The pleasing chime of her shower rang out, the water echoing off the porcelain tile, the ancient tub. Richard heard the sound of the curtain being pulled back, the barely discernible change in pitch as Cadence moved her body under the water.

The sound of the running water jogged his memory. He hadn’t thought all that specifically about his sister in the intervening few hours. The intervening few years, he corrected himself. She’d made it clear that she wanted to handle the challenge of raising Gabriel as her own cross to bear, didn’t want Richard’s money or counsel, hadn’t brought the boy back east to visit what little family he had left. That meant that Richard had adopted a kind of defense mechanism; he waited for his sister to call, or to write, and often she did neither. It wasn’t unusual to hear from her only at the holidays, for the conversation even then to be all about how she wouldn’t see Richard at Christmas, the functional greetings of the emotionally distant.

Richard’s new life was going to require honesty, most of all honesty with himself. Still, he found it difficult at times to trust his memory. His memories usually behaved like a blue-and-white afterimage, as if someone had taken his picture with a flash too close to the eyes. But on this he was clear: he had helped his sister into a shower in the delivery room of the hospital where Gabriel was born. They wanted her to relax, stretch; she wasn’t dilating fast enough, and it had been eleven hours since her water had broken. Though Richard suspected the shower had little medical value, he was grateful for the memory. Mary Beth used his arm and shoulder for support as she slipped off her dressing gown and eased under the stream of water. She took his hand and put it on her belly near a spidery distension of red marks, and he felt an insistent and rhythmic tapping coming back at him. He was the second person to hold Gabriel; he had cut the cord.

The news was in that last dead thirty seconds before a station break, and the weatherman was riffing on about January blizzards when the anchorman stopped him midsentence. The anchor pressed his right hand to his earpiece, and Richard expected an update on the aftermath of the crash, maybe the discovery of the black boxes.

The anchor said, “We are getting word out of Chicago this morning of a train accident, on the city’s famous El, the Orange Line. Early indications are there are injuries, some serious, and for more details, we’re going to listen in to our local affiliate for live coverage on this breaking story.”

He turned the television off, moved to the kitchen, and took out a carton of orange juice and a honey-wheat English muffin from the refrigerator. On the top shelf of the fridge, there was a glass dish containing what he could identify only as a salad, with unrecognizable greens, cherry tomatoes, chunks of cucumber, crumbles of a moldy and odiferous cheese. Next to that, two Cornish hens, identical, golden-skinned. The door shelves held exotic mustards, prepared horseradish. Ketchup with no sugar added. A dozen brown eggs. Sweet creamery butter made on a mom-and-pop organic farm. Organic skim milk in a wide-mouthed glass bottle. A pitcher of filtered water. The shelves were filled too, a bowl with apples, lemons and limes, grapefruits. A jar of egg whites. Peach-mango salsa. The produce drawer held unlabeled plastic containers of four different kinds of herbs, and Richard opened one, six-inch stalks of green-black, and breathed deeply and thought, Tarragon . He hadn’t bought fresh herbs in years, could not remember when cooking had not meant something as mundane as heating spaghetti from a can. A bulb of fennel. Green beans. Almond butter. There was nothing in his refrigerator and everything in hers. It was the refrigerator of a mother, he thought hopefully.

He didn’t realize Cadence had come into the kitchen until she announced herself. “Why don’t you put on some coffee?” She wore a lush terry-cloth robe that looked as if it had been stolen from a resort, and her hair was turbaned in a towel.

Richard took out the coffee, the filters. “When are they expecting you back in the office?” He knew Cadence essentially made her own schedule; in a typical week, Tuesday through Thursday was reserved for client visits, checking on the machines she’d sold last year. When they were dating, they’d had standing dates for Thursday through Sunday nights.

“Not until next Friday. I’m headed to Houston on Tuesday to oversee the install of a new machine,” she said.