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Andy watched the cars around them puff vapor as his grandfather’s Cadillac slid through the Sunday church traffic on Cheltenham Ave. Pop flicked cigarette ash out the driver’s window. “Lock your doors when you drive through Olney,” he said. “You were born in Olney.”

Andy held his breath to keep the smoke out of his lungs and closed his eyes. His temples throbbed; the backs of his eyes ached. He’d had seven shots of airplane gin the night before, on a flight that landed late in Philly thanks to driving sleet. Four hours of sleep had done nothing to ease the pain.

Pop swung the Caddy through a gap in the wrought-iron fencing. The car plowed through a puddle and passed a low stone building with green landscaping trucks parked outside. A bronze crucifix stood by the door.

“Holy Sepulchre. Remember that. Lots of graveyards in Philadelphia,” Pop said, turning to Andy, eyebrows arching above his fishbowl glasses. The road branched into a network of smaller lanes marked with letters. “Lane D,” Pop said. They approached a fork and Pop pointed to a tomb with brass doors gone green from age. “Turn left at Felix Hanlon. Remember that name – left at Felix Hanlon.”

Andy knew he was only telling him all of this because Pop thought he was going to die soon. Andy had been doing the same thing since his mother died three months earlier, covering all of his bases, even though he was forty years younger than Pop. He’d even had the estate lawyer draw up his will. But Pop could have saved himself the trouble: Andy wouldn’t remember the way to his mother’s grave. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to.

They passed a line of limestone mausoleums strung along a side hill. A thin man stood in the middle of a plot by the side of the road, hands stretching the pockets of his jacket. Pop pulled over behind a silver Buick and parked.

“There’s Eddie,” Pop said, and Andy realized that the man standing among the graves was his great-uncle.

They slid off the leather seats and closed the doors softly. The grass was slick underfoot. When they reached Eddie, he nodded; his great-uncle was the tallest person in the family, and he looked down on everybody.

“How you been, Andy?” Eddie shook Andy’s hand.

“Still living,” Andy said, shrugging. He was surprised that Eddie had called him by the right name; most of the family confused him with his older brother, Josh.

Eddie said hello to Pop and the brothers hugged awkwardly, as if they were trying to lift each other but couldn’t find the proper hold.

“Your brother couldn’t make it?” Eddie asked Andy, frowning.

“He had to work,” Andy said. It was a lame excuse, but the one Josh had given. Andy knew his brother had stayed home in an attempt to move on; he was rejecting the family’s protracted mourning. Andy had considered doing the same, but felt obligated to see this through to the end: he wanted to watch his mother’s ashes lowered into the earth. He’d toss the dirt over her himself, if it meant it would finally be over.

Andy’s eyes drifted to the crest of the hill, where angels and crosses shared the gray skyline with apartment buildings and the parapets of Beaver College, the unfortunately named all-girls school a block over. At least the weather’s right, he thought. The storm had passed in the night, and now a dirty fog lingered at the bottom of the hill, erasing the gravestones. The December cold had already begun to stiffen his fingers. Living in Arizona hadn’t prepared him for this.

“He’s late,” Pop said, glancing at the tarnished watch on his wrist.

“The priest?” Andy asked.

Pop nodded. “He’s going to do a ceremony.” Pop spread his hands in front of him, as if to illustrate.

Eddie muttered something under his breath. He was probably still upset that the funeral hadn’t happened in Philly, where the family had lived for four generations. It was her birthplace, Andy’s birthplace, everybody’s birthplace. But Andy knew she’d moved to Arizona for a reason, raised them there, died there. He didn’t know what reason, but it had taken a crematorium and a box to get her back.

Andy tried to read the names inscribed behind the filthy windows of the family mausoleum. Pop and Eddie wandered the gravestones that lay flat and black in the grass of the family plot, like windows into the underworld. Pop began to read the names aloud. It took Andy a moment to realize that it was for his benefit. Pop pointed to the grave that held his parents. “Cancer,” he said. “Both of ’em.” He stopped at another and introduced Andy to the great-great uncle he would never meet. “Japs got him,” he said. “Sank his boat and let the sharks do the rest.” At the next stone, Pop didn’t say anything. Andy read the inscription:

BENNETT

John M., Jr.

February 15, 1938 –

Miriam A.

May 13, 1938 – December 29, 2000

Together in life, together at rest.

Pop had already had his name put on, right above his wife’s. A few years earlier, Grandma Mary had started to forget things. Then Pop woke up at midnight to an empty bed and the whine of a vacuum. He found her in the living room, dressed in an evening gown and slippers, vacuuming the drapes. She’d died soon after of a brain disease the doctors couldn’t identify. The last time Pop saw her, she didn’t know who he was. Andy had heard the story from his mother before she died. He’d never talked to Pop about anything other than Philadelphia sports.

“What’s your middle name?” Andy asked.

“Moylan.”

Andy chuckled, despite himself. “Seriously?”

Pop’s lips moved silently, then words came out. “This is where I’ll be soon, Josh.”

“Andy. I’m Andy.” It sounded angrier than he meant it to, and his grandfather looked up with hurt in his eyes. Andy felt bad for saying it, but he was sick of making arrangements, sick of spending perfectly good and vital days of his life making order out of death: who inherited what, where to have the funeral, where to bury the ashes. It struck him that he still didn’t know exactly where they were burying her – he hadn’t yet seen her grave. He asked and Pop pointed to a plot in the back corner, next to a pathway for lawnmowers, where a canvas tarp stretched across a hole in the ground. Andy felt a surge of resentment toward those strange dead relatives who had taken all the good spots.

Pop’s face flickered. “And then you can go above her,” he said, shuffling his hands in a stacking motion. Andy looked at Pop in disbelief. They stack caskets, he thought, like cars at parking lots in Newark. Pop squatted and began to rub the letters of his own name.

Brakes creaked behind him and Andy turned to see a landscaping truck pull up next to the Caddy. A priest in a black parka got out and walked toward them. He introduced himself and apologized for his lateness.

“I’ll go get her,” Pop said, and walked to the car. As Pop reached into the trunk, the priest looked to the sky, as if afraid of rain. Pop walked over holding the urn, a small pewter-colored box with an inscription Andy knew by heart:

Deborah Ann Bennett

August 10, 1957 — September 19, 2001

A loving daughter, a loving mother.

Andy had chosen the words himself, because his brother didn’t want to, and neither of them trusted anybody else. He’d agonized over how to best describe his mother; he wanted to give speeches, loud long eulogies to crowds full of everyone who’d ever known her, and everyone who hadn’t, to tell them all what she was – retired Army, a small-business owner, a single mother of two from a bad part of a bad city who got by on her smarts and her sweat instead of a welfare check. How remarkable she had been, how much better than all the useless people still breathing everywhere he went. He soon realized he couldn’t sum that up, so he went with relativity: who she was to those who loved her. A daughter, a mother. His mother.

Pop set the urn in the dirt next to the tarp. The priest pulled a prayer card from his jacket pocket and read the prayer of committal. Andy followed along in his head: We commend to Almighty God our sister Deborah… Ashes to ashes, and all that.

The priest finished. Andy waited for him to move the tarp and put her into the grave. The priest stood there for a moment, expressed his regrets, and shook hands with Pop and Eddie. He reached for Andy’s hand, and it extended mechanically, but Andy didn’t let go.

“That’s it?”

The priest nodded. “The prayers of committal have been read. Now she can be interred.” He tugged against Andy’s grip, and Andy relented. He looked to his grandfather and pointed at the tarp, then at the urn nestled in the grass.

“They take care of that later,” Eddie said. He clenched Andy’s shoulder. “It’s okay, son. You don’t want to see that, anyway.”

# # #

Andy read the Lee’s Hoagie House menu while his grandfather and Eddie ordered their usuals. Pop got a pizza steak, Eddie a cheesesteak. The man behind the counter stared at Andy from below a dirty Phillies hat. Andy ordered a turkey hoagie.

They stood by the pickup counter tapping their feet.

“You sure you ought to have a pizza steak, Pop?” He’d had a heart attack a decade ago, and he was six months removed from triple-bypass surgery. The whole family had been praying that his heart would hold up, that he could survive the death of his only child five years after the death of his wife, that they wouldn’t have to have another funeral, for him.

Pop shrugged and said he only had one every blue moon. Andy saw Eddie glaring at him and dropped the subject. They slid into a green vinyl booth.

“What was she like?” Andy asked. “As a kid, I mean.”

Pop’s jowls fell, then a wan smile creased his cheeks. He cleared his throat.

“How you like that new Cadillac?” Eddie asked. He nodded toward the parking lot, where the Caddy squatted alone among the weeds poking through the cracked asphalt.

Pop’s head turned from Andy to Eddie, then back again. “Good car,” he said. “Rides real nice. Lots of power.” He rubbed his nose where the glasses pinched his skin, then put his sandwich down and excused himself. As Pop disappeared into the bathroom, Eddie flicked onion bits from his lips and spoke directly to Andy. “Jesus, kid, don’t you know what he’s been through?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

Eddie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why don’t you two do something to take his mind off it? Go see a game.”

“You know how hard it is to get Eagles tickets, Eddie?” Andy glanced at the yellowed Yuengling signboard on the wall.

Eddie leaned across the table. “You ain’t got to tell me. I been here all my life, remember. Sixty-eight years I been watching that sorry-ass team.” That didn’t keep him from telling Andy about the old Eagle greats – Van Buren, Bednarik, Jaworski – until Pop came back to the table. They made small talk while they finished their lunch. Andy left most of his hoagie sitting on the grease-spotted wrapper.

In the parking lot, Eddie snuck a few bills into Andy’s goodbye handshake, shooting him a wink.

“You kids go have yourselves some fun,” he said, slamming the door of his new Buick. Andy watched his brake lights plunge as he drove down the steep curb. They got into the Cadillac. Andy reached into the center console for a breath mint to kill the taste of onions.

“So what do you want to do?” Pop asked. He cranked the key and the Caddy rumbled. Go home, Andy thought. I’d like to go home. But he couldn’t say that any more than he could do it. He turned on the radio:

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty…

He’d know Springsteen anywhere; he’d heard his voice so many times, crackling on Mom’s record player, wailing through the house every time she broke up with one of her boyfriends, or one of her husbands. The harmonica came in, screaming, as if somebody were sobbing into the mouthpiece.

“ Atlantic City,” Andy said.

“Good song.” Pop reached for the volume knob.

“We should go,” Andy said, and the moment he heard his own words inside his head, he knew that it was right. He saw Pop’s face settling and knew what he would say: too far; he hadn’t been in years; it would all be different now.

“C’mon, Pop. It’s, what, an hour away? It’ll be fun. You can show me around.” They needed to do something besides sit and eat and mourn; it had been too long, three months that felt like his entire lifetime, one long learning curve of grief. They had to do something to remind themselves that they were still alive. Their luck had to change.

Pop took off his glasses and wiped them. His eyes were red around the edges.

“Okay, pal,” Pop said. “What the hell, right?”

# # #

Andy watched Pop behind the wheel. One of his grandfather’s hands held his cigarette up to the cracked window; the heel of the other rested on the steering wheel, when he wasn’t gesturing. Pop was telling jokes.

“What do you call a white man in Camden?”

Andy winced.

“Officer!” Pop chuckled.

Andy forced a grin while he wondered how it was ever normal to talk like that. It was another reminder of the generation gap between them, the one his mother used to bridge. Now it was just them, two men who shared blood and nothing else, who hardly knew each other at all. There’s still time, he thought. They were young enough: Pop was sixty-five, but he could have passed for sixty easily, and besides, Andy was twenty-three and he felt fifty and sixty and seven hundred, ancient, like he was carved in rock. Together, he thought, they could burn up the blackjack banks. They could take Atlantic City; make a memory or two that didn’t involve death or long-distance phone charges.

He was dreaming stacks of green when the car shuddered. Pop had let it drift onto the rumble strips on the side of the highway. He whipped the wheel, crossing the dotted line, nearly side-swiping a Volkswagen. Andy gripped his chest with one hand and shoved the other against the dash. He closed his eyes and considered saying a prayer.

“Don’t worry,” Pop said, slapping Andy’s hand away from the dashboard with his own, which should have been steering the car. “Safest road in America, right here. They did a survey.”

The road was the least of Andy’s worries. He had spent most of the trip envisioning the Caddy blowing a tire, them veering across the median into oncoming traffic. Their caskets lowering into the family plot, one on top of the other. Strips of rubber, lug nuts, Pop’s surgically repaired arteries: their lives relied on so many things.

Pop pointed to the horizon, where angular casinos reared above the treeline. They passed a sign announcing the end of the expressway, rounded a corner, and Andy got his first glimpse of Atlantic City. It was not what he expected: no lights or marquees or bright casino entrances beckoning. Bars covered the windows and graffiti covered everything else. Gas stations and liquor stores fought for space with fast-food restaurants and check-cashing centers. A homeless old woman in a little girl’s coat staggered down the sidewalk pushing a shopping cart half-full of clothes stained with dark blotches. They drove down the street in silence, like observers in a war, until they could see the ocean peeking out between the high-rises on the boardwalk. Their brief sense of dread dissipated in the winter breeze blowing in off the beach.

# # #

The table was hot. Pop flicked chips from the Technicolor puddle in front of his ashtray. Andy plucked his carefully from neat stacks.

“You gamble a lot back home?” Pop asked.

“Nope, not much,” Andy said. The woman dealing shot him a look; for the last hour, he’d been splitting eights and aces, doubling every eleven. There was no reason to lie. “I go to Vegas a few times a year.” Actually, there was a reason to lie – Andy wasn’t going to tell him that he’d donated most of his mother’s modest life insurance money to tip jars and chip racks.

“No kidding? We used to go, Mary and me.”

The dealer flipped her hole card, a king, then dropped a nine next to the six already showing. Bust. Easy money.

“Always stayed at the Flamingo,” Pop continued. “Ever been there? That’s a classy joint.”

“Sure is,” Andy said. It once was, judging by the pictures in the lobby. When he had gone, the bedspreads smelled like pipe tobacco and the flamingos were molting.

Pop squirmed in his seat and stretched. “How about we make things interesting before we head to the boardwalk?” he said, sliding his whole stack into the circle: four blacks and a ten-stack of green. Andy had less; a glance told him about three-fifty. He’d bought in with the three hundred Eddie had given him, taken a dive right away, then climbed back up during the hot shoe they’d just finished.

The dealer tapped a long red fingernail against the felt in front of Andy. “Bet?” she asked, in a shrill foreign accent that irritated him.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t gamble anymore. The money in his hand could delay the collection calls for a month, buy him another two weeks without an eviction notice. Now that he’d dropped out, the banks were sending letters about his student loans. He refused to ask Pop for money, because he didn’t want him to think he was after an inheritance. That wasn’t why he was there. He had come to settle things. He had come to start anew.

Andy slid his whole stack into the circle. They were still young.

The cards came quickly: an ace each. Andy’s chest stretched tight across his ribs as the deal came around to fill them up: Pop caught a seven, Andy another ace. The dealer flipped a queen.

“Jeez,” Pop said. “This ought to be good.” He winked at Andy and tapped his finger. She dealt him a ten that made his soft eighteen hard. She turned to Andy.

“Twelve,” she said, her accent butchering the word.

Andy considered for another moment. Always split aces. Always. He turned to Pop.

“How much cash you got?”

Pop pulled out his money clip and counted twenties. “ Two forty,” he said.

“Twelve,” the dealer said again. Twerve, he thought, feeling a sneer start and scolding himself. It was a ten-dollar table on a Tuesday afternoon in December, and if they lost they wouldn’t have anything left to tip her. They were being assholes, but he didn’t give a shit. The world owed them that much. More.

He looked at her name tag. “Where’s the fire, Fong?”

The woman scowled as he counted the money in his wallet: five twenties, a five, four crumpled ones. He checked his pockets: three quarters and three dimes. He had a nickel to spare.

“Split ’em,” he said, taking Pop’s offering and slapping it all down on the table. “You can keep the change.” He winked at Fong and felt his blood rising for the first time in forever.

She flipped an eight and smirked; it widened into a smile when she turned another ace. Nineteen and twelve against a face card showing. Pop had eighteen. They were going to lose everything.

She pointed her fiery fingernail at the leftmost hand, the pair of aces. “Split again, Bugsy?”

Andy leaned against the back of his chair and exhaled. He saw that a small crowd of degenerates had gathered behind them. That kind of hand didn’t happen every day. The pit boss appeared behind the dealer, arms folded. Andy doubted he’d give them a marker for three-fifty after the way he’d been acting. He had resigned himself to another loss when Pop spoke.

“ Three fifty now, I’ll pay you five or a Rolex in thirty seconds,” Pop said to the handful of onlookers. He slid his watch off his wrist and dangled it between his fingers. It had diamonds on the face and, Andy knew, an inscription on the back: Thanks for the best twenty years of my life. Love, Mary.

“Pop, what are you—.”

Pop extended a palm. His face was flushed. A tattooed man in a tank top took the watch and looked it over. The diamonds did their job; old as it was, the watch was worth a few large, easy.

“My kind of guy,” said tank top. He dug a handful of chips from his jeans. The pit boss moved toward Pop.

“You got a problem?” Pop spat. The pit boss blinked to a stop, surveyed the empty casino floor, and shook his head before stepping back. Pop was old, but he wasn’t one to back down. He swept the chips from tank top’s hand into his own and then dropped them into Andy’s cupped palms like an offering. Tank top put the watch on the table, and Andy saw Pop’s eyes linger on it.

“You don’t have to,” Andy said.

Pop shot him a smile that showed he wasn’t sure about it, either. “All I’ve got is time, pal.”

Fong’s fingernails massaged the deck as Andy counted how much was at stake. In his head, Springsteen again: I got debts no honest man can pay. He held his breath as the cards came down.

King of diamonds.

Suicide Jack.

He let it out. He was buying dinner, no matter what she had. Fong let the slot machines jingle for a long second before she showed her hand.

Deuce. Twelve, the dealer’s ace, Andy thought.

Then a Queen fell, and the table erupted. A grandmother slapped Andy’s hand. He looked over and saw tank top put his arm around Pop. They’d pay him back, keep the watch, and clear more than fifteen hundred in profit.

“Color us up,” he said to Fong, but she was watching Pop with widened eyes. Andy turned to see his grandfather clutching at his chest. Sweat beaded above his glasses.

“Pop?” Andy said. He shot out of his stool, knocking it over. He slapped tank top’s arm away from Pop’s shoulders and replaced it with his own. He felt the group crushing in around him. The stale smoked clogged his nose and the slot machines rang in his ears. Should I tell him I love him? Is this my last chance?

“I’m … okay,” Pop said, wiping his forehead. “Just … out of breath … is all.”

Andy put his fingers against Pop’s damp neck, trying to remember the CPR class he’d taken in high school. He felt a pulse pushing back against his skin and said a silent prayer of thanks, to God, to his mother, to whoever was watching over them.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said, helping Pop out of his chair.

Two steps from the table, Pop wheezed: “The money.” Andy turned and stuffed the stack of black and gold chips into his pockets. He cleared a path for them with a glare and they walked to the door, the soft red carpet sucking at their shoes.

# # #

The waves crashed along the boardwalk and the wind cut through their clothes. Pop leaned back against the marble wall and blinked slowly.

“Scared you, didn’t I?”

Andy giggled, even though he didn’t find it funny. His head felt light and airy, and his skin prickled from the cold and the relief. He looked down the boardwalk, past the T-shirt shops and food booths, to the palatial Taj Mahal at the far end.

“You ever played a hand like that?” Pop asked.

“Nope. You?”

Pop shook his head. “Mary didn’t like to gamble. She was real classy, you know, and even back then A.C. was going to hell in a bucket.” They watched a homeless man walk by. “I used to bring your mom down here, when she was just a kid.”

At the mention of his mother, Andy blinked, then smiled, as his mind reacted in its usual way: picturing her alive, pushing brown curls behind her ear, and then picturing the urn with her name engraved on it.

“We were both kids, really.” Pop had his only child at nineteen; Andy knew that much. He imagined himself with a four-year-old child. What a disaster that would be. “She loved the water, that girl. Couldn’t get her to come out until her fingers were all shriveled up–” Pop clenched his hands “–and her skin looked like a stop sign.” He sighed. “She just wouldn’t listen.”

Andy wondered whether Pop had pulled the watch stunt so that he’d have a similar story to tell about them. I used to take him down the shore to A.C. Kid had brass balls – split aces three times once, almost cost me my watch. Or was it for Andy’s sake, to give him something to remember about his grandfather? Next thing I know Pop’s waving his watch around. He bet a Rolly on me. That’s the kind of faith he had. A funeral anecdote.

“I’m glad we came down here, Pop.”

“Me too, pal.” Pop smiled. “Haven’t been in years. Glad we got a chance to see it —

Andy sensed Pop’s “before” coming and interjected. “You could come down whenever, Pop. It’s not far.”

Pop shrugged his shoulders and looked around. “With who?”

Andy followed his grandfather’s eyes to the waves eating away at the empty beach, the trash blowing down the boardwalk, the lights chasing each other around buildings. Overhead, flags popped in the wind like the knuckles of some giant, closing hand. He realized how terrible it would feel to be here alone, and he wanted to say that they could go together, he and Pop. He could come to visit more often, they could come back to A.C. for a weekend or two. If he could get Pop to fly out, maybe they could even hit Vegas for a weekend. But he didn’t say it, because he thought it might sound too much like a promise, or too much like a dream.

“Hell of a place you picked to rest,” Pop said. Andy looked behind him for the first time. He’d thrown open the doors of the casino and led Pop to the nearest place to sit, a low marble slab that he now saw was part of some monument. A huge bronze plaque of names stretched along a marble wall, and a statue of an officer stood in the middle of the plaza. The officer held his helmet at his side and stared down his arm at a fistful of dog tags, as if he didn’t know what they were.

Pop pushed himself up with one arm, and they walked slowly over to the sign.

“New Jersey Korean War Memorial,” Andy read.

“Wonderful spot for it,” Pop said, looking from the casino entrance on one side to the pizza joint on the other.

“Eight hundred twenty two dead or missing,” Andy said. “And this is what they get.”

# # #

Andy had checked twice on the way back from A.C. to make sure his grandfather was breathing but Pop stopped snoring and stirred as they climbed the rise of the Walt Whitman Bridge. The city unrolled before them, its lights cutting through the dusk. Past twinkling Center City sat the concrete face of the Vet, and behind it lurked the long, dark arms of the cranes brought in to build the two new stadiums that would make it obsolete. Between the Whitman and the Ben Franklin, the dying light curdled the water of the Delaware, and above the swaying masts at the landing, William Penn straddled the gold-lit steeple of City Hall.

“There used to be a law that said you couldn’t build anything taller than the tip of his hat,” Pop said, pointing at the city’s founder, then at the bank buildings dwarfing him. “That was a long time ago.”

It was dark outside by the time they parked outside Pop’s condo. He had fallen asleep again, cheek pressed against the seat, his mouth trailing moisture onto the leather. Andy got out of the car, closed the door softly, and stretched. The lights of the city seemed far away now, hidden behind the buildings of Pop’s complex, so he could only see the halo they cast into the sky. Between the homes, sprinklers threw sheets of water across the grass, and Andy stood watching his breath escape into the cold air, not wanting to wake Pop. They would go inside, and Andy would sleep in his mother’s old room, where the strange metallic wallpaper kept him awake with its reflections. Pop would sleep in his recliner, next to the nightstand he’d moved out into the living room, because his bedroom reminded him of his dead wife, and the other bedroom reminded him of his dead daughter.

Andy would leave in the morning, go back to Arizona with the money that stuffed his pockets. It was enough to make rent, pay the bills for another month. He’d have to find a job, something to do with himself. Maybe he’d enroll in spring classes at the local community college.

And Pop would stay right here, Andy knew, no matter what he said or did or tried to plan to change it. He’d sleep in the same empty condo, drive the same old Caddy, until he moved across Philadelphia to join his wife and daughter. It was just a matter of time, now; the grave had already been marked with his name.

Andy thought of the family plot, where they had been that morning. He wondered if his mother’s ashes had been buried yet, whether the grass had begun to take root in the raw dirt above her. He wondered how long it would take to grow over, for the brown earth to turn green. Justin St. Germain was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Tombstone, Arizona. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona. This is his first published story.

A lifelong fan of the Eagles and Phillies, he was conceived the night the Phils won their last World Series. He’s been waiting for another title ever since.

[img_assist|nid=629|title=Look Who’s Talking by Clara Pfefferkorn|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=150]It was Christmas, the first Christmas after Claire’s wedding, and Deirdre did not seem well. This wasn’t an easy distinction, as Claire’s mother had spent two decades complaining about this pain or that one, her migraines and fevers and swollen feet. But this time she seemed uncharacteristically quiet, weakened on the inside. Every visible feature was frantic, insistent, too bright.

Claire, now a married woman, was capitalizing on the new freedom this allowed. Being half a “we” gave her license to control her comings and goings, to claim “they” were needed elsewhere, part of a tangled, busy married life she was not obligated to divulge. She and Bob had spent Christmas Day with his family and came to Philadelphia two days later. The plan enabled Claire to sidestep the Gallagher Christmas traditions—she was no longer a Gallagher, so she could refer to them this way—like Midnight Mass at St. Cecilia’s, after which Deirdre plucked hay from the crèche to tuck inside their wallets and Father Mike clasped her thick hands in his thin ones, leaning forward to offer holiday wishes that were extra-sincere, his blue-gray eyes wide and unblinking in acknowledgment of Deirdre’s devotion to the church and long history of suffering.

Claire always felt uncomfortable around her mother’s piousness, which seemed such a contradiction to her personality at home. Two days later, Deirdre lay across the couch in one of her new Christmas presents: a silky, eggplant-colored bathrobe, the sash knotted around the bubble of her stomach and purple clashing with her hair. The pocket on the front was probably intended to be decorative but Deirdre had packed it like a purse—a rosary, a wad of Kleenex, an emergency tube of lipstick (just in case, lounging around her own home, she needed to reapply). Gene was wearing his red cable-knit sweater. His “Santa sweater,” Deirdre called it. He occupied his usual spot, in the most uncomfortable chair in the room.

Claire, Bob and Claire’s sister , Noelle , assumed the role of children, sitting on the floor among the strewn ribbons, ripped wrapping, and Deirdre’s swollen, pink-slippered feet.

“Your family celebrates Christmas, right?” Deirdre asked.

The question was directed at Bob, though it lacked its usual sharpness; like everything about Deirdre that day, the words seemed dulled.

“Of course they do,” Claire answered for him. “We were just there. Remember?” She felt a flash of panic, wondering if her mother’s memory might be slipping—“cognitive dysfunction,” it was called, common in the later stages of the disease, though Deirdre had never shown any signs of it. “We just came from there, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Deirdre snapped. “I just thought they might be—what’s it called?”

“ Dee ,” Gene cautioned.

“Agnostic,” Bob said. “But my family’s, ah, Presbyterian.”

Deirdre made a small noise in her throat, condescending but vaguely conciliatory, the combined effect of her deep-seeded Catholic-Protestant one-upmanship and grudging approval that at least the parents weren’t agnostics too.

“My turn,” Noelle said, picking up her next gift. They were rotating, opening presents one at a time. Claire had always hated this system, all the slow pomp and performance, but it was the kind of focused attention Noelle liked, and Deirdre insisted on.

The gift was from Claire and Bob, a thick gray wool scarf Noelle seemed to not hate—or at least, think Paul would not hate. “I can totally see Paul stealing this,” she said. Noelle and Paul hadn’t seen each other since August at the Jersey shore but, to Claire’s surprise, were still going strong. They called and wrote letters; he was coming to visit for New Year’s. Noelle, it seemed, was in love, Paul occupying the front room of her brain like a filter coloring her every thought.

Gene opened next: a wool sweater, solid brown. More dignified, Claire thought, than the red one.

“Thank you, honey,” Gene said.

[img_assist|nid=628|title=Emergence by Gary Koenitzer|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=132]“Made by local craftsmen,” Claire explained. It sounded stupid, but she had taken special care with her gifts that year, chosen them to evoke her new life in New Hampshire . Wool and flannel, hand-dipped candles that smelled like pine and cedar, and all the traditional foods of New England : pancake mixes, clam chowders, maple syrup, maple candies shaped like leaves and rolled in sugar. Her family had never suggested coming to visit, but neither had she. It was just as well. The accoutrements of their life—like the moving announcements and perky, annotated cookbooks—had more charm than the life.

Bob was next. So far, his gift pile amounted to a stack of slippery gift cards: Barnes & Noble, Sam Goody, The Gap. But this last gift, from Deirdre, was large and awkward. Deirdre perked up as he started to tear it open, pushing up on her elbows to get a better look. When he saw what was inside, Bob laughed out loud, something he almost never did—the sound was abrupt, as if his lungs had been caught off-guard.

“What is it?” Noelle asked.

He held it up. It was one of those music-activated dancing salmon, probably purchased at a mall kiosk. The fish was wearing black sunglasses and mounted on a wooden plaque. Claire was suspicious: had her mother deliberately given Bob something tacky to undermine his “smart-shmartness”?

But one look at Deirdre revealed that she was genuinely enamored with the dancing fish. She laughed and laughed as it wiggled and pelvic-thrusted to a throaty Elvis impression of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Bob seemed to enjoy it as much as she did; his eyes were wet, the laughter like a dry whistle in his throat.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Deirdre kept saying. “Isn’t it funny?”

They ran through the salmon’s entire repertoire—“Rock Around the Clock” and “Blue Moon” and “Heartbreak Hotel” again—and Deirdre’s enjoyment never waned. Claire was surprised, even touched, that her mother had bought it. Maybe she was beginning to like Bob more. But as she watched her, Claire felt a sadness build in her chest like swallowed water, filling her until it was a solid, stunning ache. Her mother seemed suddenly old: one of those women who delighted in silly television commercials or moving displays in store windows, who watched other people’s puppies or babies with a joy so disproportionate it only reinforced what their own lives were not.

After the torn wrapping was shoved into garbage bags and hauled to the curb, Bob went to get their suitcases. Claire went upstairs, where she could be alone. Unlike Noelle’s room, which she had lived in off and on in college, Claire’s room had hardly been touched since high school. Her old desk still faced the window, where she’d preferred it. She’d liked being able to tilt her eyes toward the sky when she was writing in her diary, imagining herself one of those girls in the movies who crawled onto her roof to smoke cigarettes or, at the very least, gaze at the stars while thoughtfully tapping a pen against her cheek. Above the desk hung the red bulletin board that had seen all her awards; unlike athletic trophies, most academic prizes were subtle, just a piece of paper destined for a brief life under a thumbtack or a magnet on a refrigerator door. A few still remained: a faded second-place ribbon, some merit certificates, and a dead wrist corsage from her senior prom; in a certain way, a mark of achievement itself.

In the middle of the room sat her bed, mattress sagging where the springs had begun poking through the bottom. The bedside table was empty except for a chubby, spiral notebook with a lightbulb on the cover. Bright Ideas! She had bought it for herself once at a school book fair, enamored with the possibility of scribbling down half-remembered ideas that struck her in the middle of the night. Turned out, she rarely had any. Along the far wall stood her two bookcases: pale, bulging towers made of cheap, assemble-yourself wood, both of them listing slightly to the left. Her books were all still there, organized by size: soft paperbacks on the topmost shelves and heavy books along the bottom—her old sticker collection, the Children’s Illustrated Bible, Acing the SAT, the dictionary she’d received as what seemed a backhanded consolation prize for being runner-up in the spelling bee.

Claire knew the geography of this room by heart, every physical inch of it, but what struck her most every time she returned was the memory of how it felt: a combination of coziness and claustrophobia, like suffocating in a cloud. This room had been her escape, an island of order and comfort, but it was a tense comfort, made necessary by the pressure of the house on the other side of the door.

She heard Bob’s footsteps shuffling up the stairs. When he appeared in the doorway, with a suitcase in each hand and Claire’s purse slung gracelessly around his neck, the sight of him triggered a rush of—was it love? Was it gratitude?

“Hi, darling,” Bob said, and Claire’s love for him exploded in her chest.

It wasn’t fair, but wasn’t uncommon, for Claire’s feelings for Bob to be a product of context. It had been true that first afternoon on the quad; it was true when she was in Bob’s natural habitat, buffeted by his admiring colleagues. Watching him deliver a lecture, his wrinkled clothes and gangly limbs never looked more attractive, evidence of his intellect, his “ahs” no longer a nervous affectation but the necessary punctuation in a long, complicated equation. Sometimes, at home, Claire tried to conjure up those moments, and if she tried hard enough the world’s perception of her husband would infuse, briefly, her own.

Around her family, her feelings for Bob were at their most unpredictable. If he said the wrong thing she winced deeply, knowing the potential damage done. But if he elicited a laugh from her father or a smile from her mother, affection leapt inside her, as it did now, watching him disentangle the bags from his fingers and lower himself to the edge of her childhood bed. This man was the buffer between her old life and her new. Whatever sadness had filled her downstairs with her family, Claire knew her responsibility had shifted: to her own family. She was married now, and wife trumped daughter.

Bob wrapped his hands around his kneecaps. He looked like a blond giant in a dollhouse, trying to take up as little space as possible out of respect for this young girl’s room. Suddenly, Claire could picture Bob a father. How awkwardly gentle he would be holding a baby, how patiently he would explain things, how seriously he would puzzle over algebra problems, butter toast, and bandage knees. How uncomfortable he would be around his daughter’s moods and changes from ages twelve to eighteen.

Claire closed the door and locked it. She slid off Bob’s glasses, placed them on the bedside table, and pressed her finger to his lips. He smiled. This was not unfamiliar; it felt like the old days, hiding in Bob’s office or Claire’s dorm room and struggling to stay quiet. At the Institute, he was far too busy, too visible. And in their own bed, where they could be as loud as they wanted, they rarely made a sound.

Now Claire was biting her lip as Bob pulled off her sweater and unclasped her bra. It was the first time she had ever been alone in her room with a boy. She tugged off his pants, cringing a little at the sound of the belt buckle hitting the floor. When Bob started to peel back the comforter, she pushed him down on top of the covers instead. As she straddled his hips with her knees, the sound of footsteps came bouncing up the stairs. They stopped and stared at each other, with the wide, caught eyes of high school kids in a backseat.

“Dinner,” Noelle called up, sounding bored.

Claire’s response was a too sprightly: “Be right down!”

At dinner Claire felt satisfied, and self-satisfied. She felt a rush of guilty pleasure when she took in Bob’s rumpled appearance, hair still mussed in the back and neck flushed a telltale pink. When she felt his hand brush her leg under the table, she looked at him and smiled.

“Did I tell you what Paul said about Christmas in Ireland?” Noelle was saying. “When he was little it was the one day a year they got to eat American fast food.”

It was their age-old dynamic: Noelle talking, everybody listening. Tonight, though, Deirdre was not her usual captive audience. She was mumbling, the words soft and muddled, mostly indistinguishable, but the undertone was defiant; it sounded as if she was arguing with someone, though it wasn’t clear whom.

“Here we eat McDonalds every day, but over there it was like this big annual road trip,” Noelle went on, a fork piled with mashed potatoes hovering over her plate. “They drove an hour to get a Big Mac. Isn’t that so funny and, like, gross?”

Without her sidekick, Noelle’s words felt too big, too much. Finally she stopped talking and looked at Deirdre. “You feel like shit, huh, Mom?”

In the pause, a few of Deirdre’s words became discernible: hot, foot, chest.

“Your chest?” Gene said. For Deirdre to have chest pains was not unheard of; like every symptom, they flared and faded, but always sounded more ominous than the symptoms they could see. “ Dee, what about your chest?” he said.

Deirdre looked up and enunciated, quite clearly: “I have chest pains.” Then she looked at the spread on the table and with equal firmness said: “I’ll have more meat.”

Claire’s guilty pleasure was eroding, whittled down to guilt alone. It was the guilt she’d felt as a child: knowledge she’d done something she shouldn’t, been somewhere she shouldn’t, and worse, that her family had been right there, oblivious on the other side. Or tonight, in her mother’s case, oblivious and in pain. Sitting between her mother in her garish bathrobe and her husband with his warm hand and his pink neck, Claire felt like screaming, like shrugging off her skin. When Bob touched her knee again, she twitched away, wishing he were more sensitive, more attuned to her feelings—wasn’t that part of being a husband, to hone in on your wife’s foot tapping or vein bulging in her left temple and know exactly what that meant?

After dinner, Claire excused herself and went upstairs. She closed her bedroom door, covered her mouth with one hand and cried. The bedcovers were wrinkled and sliding onto the carpet. Bright Ideas! was knocked upside-down on the floor. This room didn’t belong to her anymore, but to some younger, better her. Claire caught her reflection in the long mirror, the same mirror where she used to survey her outfits and analyze her facial expressions—Exuberance, Studiousness, Thoughtfulness—trying to look at herself objectively, to see what the world saw. Now, she felt like more than an older version of herself; she felt like a separate person.She had been kinder then, she thought, happier. Inclined to love things. She had loved her room and loved her books and loved, Claire thought, herself, the realization so swollen with sadness that it only revealed, like those lonely old women with the babies and puppies, everything she was not now.

Then she heard it: from one staircase , three rooms and one closed door away, the instant her mother’s hand moved toward the kitchen window. As a child, she had memorized the sound of pills tipping from a bottle—it was deceptively gentle, like a rainstick, a sun shower—and the sound of nothingness as pills struck palm. In high school, she had learned the sound of her mother’s cane in motion: intervals of carpet and linoleum, hard tapping and soft silence. But in the mirror, as Claire watched herself listening, her expression was one she hadn’t seen before, didn’t even know she wore: Despair.

Suddenly the room felt small and close and Claire felt huge, filled with this new feeling. It seemed a terribly seasoned, knowing kind of sadness. Despair that her mother took the pills. Despair that she needed them. Despair that she pretended to be thick-skinned and impervious when really she was sick and getting sicker and despair that she made Claire want to leave—though this, at least, was a feeling Claire recognized. And unlike when she was a child, now she could.

“I’m thinking we should go tonight,” Claire said. She had returned to the living room, where everyone was sitting around the TV. Her hands were shaking, her face washed and lipstick reapplied.

Gene looked up. “What, honey?”

“I said, I think we might leave tonight after all,” she said.

“Wow,” Noelle said. “Happy to see us, huh?”

“Tonight?” Gene said. “Why?”

Claire would avoid her father’s eyes. She would pretend not to have seen the makings of tomorrow’s family breakfast in the fridge. “It’s just— .” Her eyes alighted on the TV screen: onyx earrings on a bed of puffy fake snow. “The roads at night are so much emptier. It’s just easier.” She knew how hollow it sounded, and knew they knew it, but the need to leave was almost physical. She could not stay.

Then Deirdre said, “You’re not staying over?”

Claire forced her eyes to meet her mother’s. The combination of her purples and oranges, her rash and her makeup, was at once so comic and tragic that Claire felt like breaking down in tears at her feet, hating and loving her as strongly and simultaneously as she ever had.

“We really need to,” Claire said, but her voice sounded strained. “We need to get back.”

For a moment the room was caught in her pause, waiting to see if she would change her mind. But she didn’t have to, she told herself: it was the royal, marital “we.” She would leave because she could. She wouldn’t look at her father, or her mother, or even Bob, who m she knew would be unable to disguise his confusion. She opted for Noelle, which might have been the worst choice of all: clear-eyed knowing.

“Bob has a meeting tomorrow afternoon,” Claire said, the words tumbling out before she could stop them. “He forgot.”

Upstairs, she apologized. “I don’t know why I said that.”

Bob was collecting their things from the guest bathroom: tiny mouthwash, tiny toothpaste, Claire’s contacts swimming in saline solution. She stood just inside the doorway. The room smelled like the green bricks of Irish Spring soap that anchored the ledges in the sink and shower.

“I just can’t stay tonight,” Claire said. “I can’t explain it. I couldn’t think of a better excuse.”

Bob sealed the toiletry bag with a brisk zip. His hair was still mussed in the back and she resisted the urge to smooth it.

“I can help with the driving,” she offered.

Bob looked up, into the mirror above the sink, and stood perfectly still. Claire stepped between her husband and his reflection. She leaned into his long chest. When she felt his arms encircle her back, she felt relieved, though the gesture could have meant anything; maybe he understood her, maybe he forgave her. Maybe he was just being polite.

When they carried the bags outside, it was windy and bitterly cold. A thin crust of snow crunched under their feet as they moved down the front walk. They made an ungainly procession, the shuffling of five pairs of shoes and dull squeaking of Deirdre’s rubber-tipped cane on the snow. At the curb, when Claire leaned in to kiss her mother, her cheek was freezing. “You shouldn’t be out in this cold,” Claire said, then climbed into the car.

From the passenger seat, she looked at the shadowy figures that were her family. Gene held one palm in the air. Noelle was already hugging her shoulders and heading back inside. Deirdre looked like some kind of suburban sorceress, leaning forward on her cane, her silky purple robe flapping behind her in the wind.

When Bob started the car, Deirdre stepped forward. She pulled a plastic spritzer from the pocket of her robe and doused the windshield with miraculous water, scooped from the ocean and blessed by the priest at the Jersey shore the previous summer. It was an extra dose, probably proportionate to the lateness of the hour and the intensity of her worry. “May the road rise to meet you!” Claire heard her shout, but faintly, the sound flattened by the tight windows and the running engine. When Deirdre stepped back to the curb, and Bob pulled away, the image of her parents looked watery and distorted. As soon as they turned the corner, Bob flicked the windshield wipers on.

“What are you doing?” Claire snapped.

“I couldn’t see,” Bob said, reasonably.

Claire fell silent, rigid. Her eyes filled with tears. When Bob glanced at her, she turned to the window. “What?” he asked.

And again, a block later: “What?”

By two in the morning, Bob was so exhausted he was veering in and out of the lanes on 84. They switched near Worcester , where Claire got a large coffee and drove the last leg herself. She felt almost maniacally alert as she sped along the empty highways, needing to prove this drive had been doable, the foam coffee cup squeaking in and out of the cup holder’s plastic claw. When she got off the highway it was four in the morning. The streets of New Hampshire were quiet, forgiving. When a rare pair of oncoming headlights—a truck usually, or tractor trailer—splashed against the windshield, the reflection of the miraculous water flashed for an instant then receded into dark.

Copyright © 2007 by Elise Juska. Printed by permission. Excerpted from the forthcoming book One for Sorrow, Two for Joy by Elise Juska to be published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. (Available June 5, 2007 at your local bookstore and at www.simonsays.com).

© 2006 Philadelphia Stories December, 2006

Elise Juska is the author of two previous novels and many published stories. Elise teaches fiction writing at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and the New School in New York City .