CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Day Ends
The next morning, we pull three chairs outside and sit and watch the day develop. Periodically I stand to shake out my limbs, to fling feeling back into the extremities. Imagine one of those fullbody diagrams of the circulatory system in which each wrist, each ankle contains a tangle of veins and the hands and feet are empty, white. This is how it is; this is what you have to look forward to. The bellies of the clouds, broad and white. The fresh air blowing clusters of children down the street while their mothers sweep stoops to prepare a place for the jack-o’-lanterns. Footballs falling from the sky, blue smoke hovering over the fences and that peculiar sunlight in which your first day of school and your funeral intermingle. Do you ever feel this in autumn? The presence of all the places where your cells have been spent, all in one place, all at once? You don’t yet, probably, but one day you will. It’s a beautiful day, but in the end that doesn’t matter. The story of that day ends the same as the story of every other day: In the end, the day ends. By the time night falls we have moved inside to watch the orange light slide across the carpet and vanish. We eat supper in silence, the TV off. I keep waiting for her to say something, to burst into tears, to forbid it. She never does, and I know that part of me is more hoping than waiting.