Judy’s drill team outfit’s still tumbling in the dryer at 7:15. Somewhere in the house, Judy’s beside herself. The boys roll curds of scrambled eggs over the lips of their plates and stare at me. I say to my husband, Herb, we need some things at the market. Herb has a tear of Kleenex stamped to his chin. I tell him I’ll go. Take the Volvo, he says. It’s out of the garage. I’ll walk, I tell him. Bring back the paper, he says.

I don’t know why the man across the street is hosing down this bulky orange neoprene suit that he’s got spread-eagled on the hood of his Blazer or why his white poodle is leaping in circles. I do know that he takes his morning coffee at Langevin’s with half-and-half and two sugars, that he buys the Portland Press-Herald, has a nephew in the seminary, and used to work a lobster boat on Saco Bay. And I know his wife is dying of Huntington’s chorea in a Biddeford hospital.  

At Langevin’s, I take a corner booth, order tea with lemon, try to read the Globe, and stare at the green backs of three workmen quietly stirring their coffees at the counter.  I buy a lottery ticket, play the children’s birthdays. If I win, I’ll sail away from the four at home who’ve given me amnesia with their scouting things and band things and nights-out-with-the-boys things.

They don’t know, my gang of four, that I once sang “Mary Hamilton” for my grandmother Agnes as she lay on her bed, swaddled in a white chenille robe, in that dark room with drawn blinds, and fingered her amber beads and cried, or that I once read all of Keats, knew the odes by heart, and for one long summer thought I was Caddy Compson. In those Aprils, I would watch for the first painted trillium to poke through the pine debris and wait for the first blue-winged teal to settle on the pond.