notice and raked her skin. The child was distracted and dense as sludge. We took the summer off, and when we started again in September, August had moved out and a divorce was in the works. The wife was oddly solicitous of me then, but she was more than I wanted to take on, and I ended the tutoring. I couldn’t take their money anymore, and couldn’t stomach the unhappiness that hung in the air like the smell of a bad meal. From time to time, I thought about that family and what might have happened to them, and how I’d come into and out of their lives like a painting brought in to distract from a room with crumbling walls.
I saw August a couple of years later in a diner where I was having breakfast with my boyfriend. He and Molly sat at the counter. Her legs had grown long and improbably smooth in the way of pubescent girls and she was wearing pink shorts even in October. She swiveled on her stool and chattered on while August was silent, elbows ground into the formica, his back hunched, hands around a cup of coffee. An asshole, I decided. After breakfast, my boyfriend and I went apple picking at a place just beyond the diner. We were forcing a last good time on each other until we could end what we had going, and then, there was August and his daughter again at another line of trees, and I thought, what are the chances of this happening? Not for years, and then twice in a morning? August stayed in one place and held a bag open while Molly ran around collecting fruit and dropping it in. But he wasn’t disengaged or bored as I’d thought he’d been back at the diner, but rather some emotion he had no idea how to express had overcome and frozen him.
He turned to me and waved me over—he would not come to me, that wasn’t the way it worked with him—and we talked. My boyfriend had wandered off and Molly flitted between the trees. When August looked at me, I could tell he was trying to remember something, maybe his earlier impressions and if they matched up with what he saw now. I was vibrant and talkative, my cheeks rouged with the morning and his attention. It was the only time I’d ever felt more powerful than August. I looked over my shoulder at Molly who we’d been talking about.
“Is she having any more reading issues?” I asked.
“Issues?” he laughed. “Jesus, is that how you people really talk?” He glanced at my boyfriend and measured his own want against the other man’s. “I’d like to go out with you sometime. Give me your number.” It was only after we were married that he told me he’d followed me to the orchard that morning.
Now the fall down the town hall steps had set him back—or forward—and he rarely got out of bed anymore. One late afternoon, Molly, who’d moved to Houston with her mother soon after I’d seen her apple picking thirteen years earlier, finally phoned her father. This was after I’d emailed too many times to tell her how sick he was, and how she should think about coming to see him, and to remind her that she hadn’t responded, not even once. She’d grown brooding and unforgiving of Aug after the divorce, and they rarely saw each other or spoke. She was Aug’s deepest regret, one he kept to himself, as if to let it run in the open space might kill him. He’d asked me to shut the door when she called, and when it was over, he began to not so much cry as bleat. It was a shocking, hollow sound—an animal on the edge of a cliff. When I went in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers, his sunken stomach pulsing in and out, his hands behind his neck.
“What did she say?” I asked. I had to look away from his glass of water that had grown too cloudy on the nightstand. There was nothing benign to focus on anymore. The television was on to a baseball game without the sound. “Tell me, Aug.”
He shook his head; he wouldn’t talk about it. Tears pooled in his defeated cheeks and he touched my face. “Why aren’t I feeling better? It was just a fall, a missed step,” he said. “This isn’t right. It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
But I wanted to say, it’s because you’re dying, Aug, and because you’re never going to feel better than this, and because it wasn’t just a fall or a single step; it was a plummet. I wanted to say how awful it was that his only child had deserted him, that she could make him cry when nothing else could, and how we should have had a child of our own when we’d had the chance. Our union was simple math; what he loved about me was that I loved him back. Neither of us had had much of that in our lives, and we knew its worth. I saw him again as that dust-poor child, the picked-on, the neglected. His daughter’s grabbed-up love had been the deepest deprivation of all.
“They’re doing this to me, Alice,” he said, after a few minutes. “They’re going to kill me with this.”
I rested my head on his rocky knee and smelled his body in foul decline. For the first time, I didn’t want to breathe him in; I was afraid now it would kill me, too, and I sat back, ashamed. I replayed his fall down the town hall stairs, but this time I pictured myself going back there a hundred times in the dark, kneeling in the spot where he’d curled up, looking for a dead man’s glasses. No one was there to help me, and no one would come, but they’d watch from a distance, or stay hidden in the trees. I was my own cautionary tale.
I didn’t want to live like that. I might have a house on the water, a victory of sorts, but Aug would be gone by then and I’d be alone in the place, with all that scorn burning at my back. If he and I had shared during our marriage, a notion that it was us against them, I couldn’t sustain that alone. I’d seen that fearsome isolation the night he’d fallen and didn’t want to see it again. It was my life I was protecting now.
“This fight is poisonous,” I said, and sat back on my heels. “Let’s not build the house. We’ll stay right here, in this one. This is perfect, it always has been. This is where we live. I don’t want another house.”
His mouth moved as if he were working at a hard candy. “I wasn’t talking about the house,” he said, with strange calm. “I was talking about the doctors.” He lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up. “But now I see. I understand.”
“I only want you. I don’t care where we live.”
“There’s no ‘we,’ sweetheart, don’t you see? I’m doing this for you so you’ll have it later on. So I can picture you someplace when I’m dead. But it’s okay, Alice, it really is. It’s okay.” He closed his eyes as if I’d left the room already. “It’s okay,” he said again, this time soothing himself. “We’ll stop.”
If desire was life, then I’d just killed his.
I watched the sheet rise and fall on his fading form. I asked him to open his eyes, but he wasn’t stirred when I undressed, or when I lay next to him, careful to keep my weight off him. He was pale bones, and while the scar on his forehead reddened like a traitor, his penis remained motionless, a betrayed, lilac curl, even when I put my mouth to it. He sighed and pushed me away. Aug slept most days until midday, then woke restless and uncomfortable, trying to stretch his joints back into place. In the afternoons, he often trawled the house in his sagging boxers as though he’d lost something—which he had in giving up the fight. And if he came upon me, he’d ask what I was doing, or what I’d done earlier, what I’d eaten, who I’d seen, as if I’d gone away and seen the sights. But I hadn’t gone anywhere, and was captive everywhere, pursued by him if I stayed home, pursued by neighbors if I left. Women approached me at the pond and the post office. They said Aug hadn’t been seen around town; had he finally changed his mind? They forced me to hold my breath too long in the water to avoid them, until I saw the mulchy bottom and the white blooms of underwater flowers, and in the post office until my hand went numb clutching the inconsequential mail.
One afternoon, a man Aug used to play backgammon with on summer afternoons, wept as he talked to me about how Aug was going to destroy his favorite place on earth. What about me? I stood there, unmoving, but stirred to the core, until he was too embarrassed to go on. I got some absurd satisfaction out of not telling him that we were giving up the fight. I understood that for him, what remained untouched remained ageless. Everyone was just trying to hold on forever, including Aug, including me.
When I got home, Aug was waiting for me in the front room. I told him about running into his former friend.
“Old crybaby,” Aug said, fondly.
I