Glenn lifts her glass to sip from it but puts it back down without drinking from it. “You’re at a moment when everything has stopped, right before it starts again. Like T. S. Eliot’s poem: At the still point of the turning world. / Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards. This will be like pushing the reset button. Gary will deal. He’s a brave bear.”
She is the only person who knows him well enough to say that, and for me to believe it—how sometimes if you push back against his anxiety and challenge it, he can rise to the occasion. Like the time at work all those years ago when we only had two hours to put up our booth at a major trade show because all the boxes had been shipped to the wrong place and how Gary, sputtering comically on the verge of panic, was somehow calmed and spurred on by Glenn’s pushy encouragement. Deep breaths, Gary. You can do it. You’re a brave bear. A mantra he repeated constantly as he worked tirelessly to get the job done.
Or when we dragged him with us and Teddy to Story Land in New Hampshire—a small adventure park for toddlers where he had initially refused to go because it was full of people in costume, but he didn’t want to miss out on it for Teddy’s sake. While I went on the tiny rides with Teddy—sitting in the rotating teacups and in the flying Dutch shoes and on the little pirate sailboat—Glenn took Gary by the hand to each area that had storybook characters physically built into them, her own version of tough-love exposure therapy. They sat on either side of a creepy clown on a white wooden bench and next to a giant Humpty Dumpty on a fake stone wall, even pressing the button to make it talk, though apparently Gary drew the line at allowing a traveling pack of Barney characters to hug him. I’d had to drive home that night—Gary was too drowsy from all the extra Klonopin he’d taken—but every time Glenn smacked him affectionately on the head from the backseat and called him a “brave bear” for what he had accomplished that day, he’d beamed. I’m a brave bear, he’d whispered. I’m a very brave bear.
Glenn reaches over and sticks her hand inside the sling to pet the dog. “Now, take me home.” Her face is pale, but there’s a spark in her eyes that wasn’t there a minute ago: the promise of future entertainment that she knows will come in the form of texted photos with descriptive captions of a farce about to unfold, fun—possibly disastrous—at our expense. “I’m exhausted and nauseated and I miss my Lucy.”
* * *
Later that night, much later, my phone will ring. It will be Glenn, and at first I’ll assume she’s checking in about my visit tomorrow—I always do a weekly grocery shop and Gary always helps with the heavy things—the water and ginger ale and dog food—but instead she’ll ask me if I ever think about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the way those Harvard types had been that afternoon at Shepherd when she’d chased them away.
“Because that’s all I think about,” she’ll say. “My body. All my cells. Everything in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is that what life comes down to? Luck?”
I won’t know what to say, so I won’t say anything.
“If I had kids I would just die,” she’ll whisper. “I know you don’t want to hear that because you have one, but if I had one and if I knew I was dying like this, I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I couldn’t take the heartbreak.” She’ll sigh, but now that she’s started she won’t be able to stop talking. “Parents get sick and die all the time. How do they stand it? Knowing they’re leaving too soon and not being able to fix it?” There’ll be a long pause and then the words that come next will be thin and full of air. “As it is, I can hardly bear the idea of leaving Lucy.” Her little corgi, her constant companion.
“Lucy will be fine.”
“But what will happen when I’m gone? Who will take her when I’m gone?” She’ll cry then, and the sound of it will be so crushing that I’ll wish I could throw the phone across the room to make it stop. It’s excruciating to watch someone disappear, slowly at first, and then quickly. Having done it twice, I can’t fathom having to do it again.
“I will,” I’ll say. “I’ll take her.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Of course I will.”
“But how could you handle another dog? You can’t wear two slings.”
“Maybe by then I’ll be better,” I say, thinking of a day in the future that neither of us believes will actually come, “and I won’t be wearing any slings.”
Part Two
Cabin Fever
Host Family
In the kitchen, with the autumn sun going down fast and a sharp chill in the air, since like all self-respecting long-suffering New Englanders we refuse to turn the heat on until well into October, Gary and I make dinner. I’ve been tempted over the years to try one of those meal-box delivery services, to spare us the hassle of figuring out what to cook and then doing all the shopping and chopping—and mostly to collect those colorful laminated recipe cards that, according to all the social media ads and posts, you get to keep—but Gary won’t do it. He feels sorry for people who get those boxes, like the young couple next door, a doctor and a professor, who, in my opinion, are legitimately too busy to shop and chop. He’s embarrassed for them and their infantilized style of noncooking, and he hates that he knows something so intimate about them—that every week they open a big box with wonder and excitement and play at cooking like oversize children. He wishes he could unsee it on their stoop every week, full of tiny wasteful little plastic baggies of ingredients they should already have—one garlic clove, a teaspoon of cumin, two wedges of lemon—that they will use to re-create the meal pictured on the laminated card.
More than anything, he’s annoyed by the box itself, which often sits for days after they’ve emptied its contents, waiting, with all its recyclable packing innards, for a return pickup by the company. It makes him anxious seeing it day after day, waiting in the rain or chilly wind to be rescued. Once, on a particularly cold and snowy February day, he put a small fleece doggie blanket over the box, hoping they’d get the message that we all see the poor eyesore of a box, freezing its ass off on the bench in front of their house, but instead they were moved by what they interpreted as compassion. With the returned blanket came a bottle of wine and a thank-you note—which included the news that they’d signed us up for a free-trial box from the meal-box company, too. Thanks for being such a thoughtful neighbor! If they only knew. When our box came, Gary opened it in the kitchen but as expected was too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of items in the box and too annoyed by all the wasteful packaging to actually consider using it to cook the meals. Instead, he dropped it off at Morningside Montessori’s after-school program so they could use it as a teaching tool: this is how to cook using premeasured ingredients, and this is what stupid wasteful packaging looks like.
Tonight Gary has already started the salad when I take out salmon and broccoli from the refrigerator, which, when finished, will look nothing like the perfectly plated dishes on the meal-box-delivery cards that I’ve seen on Instagram. “So remember when I did that Bring-Your-Parent-or-Grandparent-or-Beloved-Guardian-to-School Day recently?” I wait for him to nod before I tell him the rest. “Well, Mr. Noah announced that they’ve invited some People Puppets from Vermont for this year’s Autumn Inhabitancy who are going to need housing.”