considered the men. One day the lot was covered with grass; the next: a foundation; the day after: crowded with tan men listening to Mexican radio and hoisting a frame. Patricia joked, “If we’d been gone a week, we might have come back to a new house and never seen it built. It just would have been there. Like magic.” Walt listened to his breath and the punch of a power hammer. And then Patricia did go away, to visit her sister in Columbus. He tried to say, “Ha.” Ha would have been a nice punctuation, but he couldn’t. He’d seen the open door, cursed, remembered—and slammed his forehead against the plaster. The pain spread out over his skull like so much acidic Silly String caught in his hair, wadded behind his ears. The coffee splashed his hand—it would have been lukewarm a week earlier, but he’d gone out and bought a pot for his study the day Patricia went to visit her sister in Columbus. She never wanted a pot upstairs. Said he’d burn the house down. She’d seen on TV—one of those news programs—and they told her coffee pots spontaneously burst into flames. Just like that. She’d snapped her fingers. He said nothing spontaneously burst into flame. There was a reason for everything. Morons left the pot turned on. Morons used frayed cords. He wasn’t a moron. He would turn the pot off. He would inspect the cord. On. A. Regular. Basis. He bought the pot not an hour after he found her note. She’d used his favorite pen, his Waterman, and she’d written: “Walt. Went to Columbus to visit my sister. Be back Wednesday.” Be back Wednesday sounded like an imperative: (silent you) be back Wednesday. He wasn’t one in Columbus (Maui? Napa? Gary?). He was at the bottom of the steps. His forehead throbbed. His hand bubbled. The fresh coffee was fastfood hot, a steaming river over his thumb and wrist and forearm. He was going to lose skin. Yep, no doubt about it. And his knee was gone—the knee he’d ripped out playing hoops in college a million years ago (really just fifteen; before he met Patricia, before he drank a lot of coffee, before fucking Columbus meant fucking Bob). So—the knee was gone; what was left of the cartilage shredded somewhere between the fifth step, the third step, and the floor. And then there was the pen.
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