6
I USED TO LOVE WORKING IN THE YARD IN NOVEMBER, ON SATURDAY afternoons. Even though I mowed and tended other people’s yards during the week, taking care of my own had a different quality. I loved the last fall cleanup, when the trees were bare and I raked up the last of the leaves from the grass and among the bushes. There was something devotional about it. The sun began to set by four o’clock and traffic subsided on the road. The yard had a majestic, planetary feel to it. Groomed, it seemed like a preparatory offering to winter, which was headed toward the village, just over the horizon. Wind swelled through the bare trees and made deep chords I felt in my throat more than I heard. It carried a cardinal’s chipping from the hedge and the neighbor’s sparkly chimes. The brightness and warmth of working evaporated in a sudden chill and I fetched my hooded sweatshirt from the picnic table. I raked all the yellow and scarlet maple leaves and the thatch from the grass and mowed and raked out the flower beds, too, and the yard looked clean and bare. I scooped up a last armful of leaves and twigs and pitched it into the orange wheelbarrow and teased the last dregs of the leaf pile from the grass with the rake and whisked them around, so they would blend into the yard. Except for someone using a chain saw half a mile away, and the occasional approach and passing of a car out on the road in front of the house, there was a sense of solitude. It was the hour when most everyone else in the village had gone inside to prepare dinner.
I missed those final moments of the afternoon, the loamy quality of light that illuminates the last of the day in its true suspension, and that coolness and the freshly scrubbed earth, that clean, satisfied fatigue, that savory anticipation of a hot shower and a steak and, later, a whiskey and a game of cribbage with Kate before she went to bed. I taught her how to play cribbage when she was eight, and she could beat me by the time she was ten. My grandfather had been an exceptional cribbage player, and he and his closest friend, from back when they had been boys in Maine together, Ray Morrell, taught me how to play one summer at Ray’s summer camp on Lake Winnipesaukee. I was never any good, but they always let me play with them, and always gave me grief when I lost, which was almost always, because if they hadn’t let me win sometimes, it would have been harder to be discreet about their charity in agreeing to play me in the first place. I had to relearn the game every summer when we went to Ray’s camp or went fishing up in Maine, for the most part, because I never played it on any other occasion. I have thought many times about what a strange and unlikely game it is, what a strange set of rules it imposes upon a deck of cards. There was something reassuring, and charming, in how good Kate was at it, although when she began to beat me regularly, when she was around twelve, and although she teased me about it in the same gentle way my grandfather and Ray had, I could also see how seriously she took the game, how seriously she took winning and how upset she got when she lost. I wished for her to be more lighthearted about it, but when I said something it only provoked her.
I thought about that on the night of what would have been Kate’s fourteenth birthday, November 25. I sat on the couch in the living room, eating stale cereal dry out of the box, and it occurred to me that the cribbage board was in the buffet in the dining room somewhere, with its pegs still presumably where Kate and I had left them after our last and dramatic best-of-five tournament, which I had won by one point.
I SUPPOSED I COULD dig through the deep drawers in the buffet and find the board, which was made from an old bowling tenpin cut crosswise down the middle. There was a decal of a cartoon skunk at the top of the pin, above where the pegging holes had been drilled, and whenever it looked like Kate was going to beat me by at least a full street, she’d grimace and click her bottom and top front teeth together, tap on the skunk with a forefinger, sniff at the air, and say, “Oh, Fazher! I szeenk I szmell a szgonk!”
Kate had discovered the board at a yard sale we stopped at one Saturday morning, when we’d both gotten up early and had decided to walk together to the next town for coffee and doughnuts instead of driving. The woman selling the board wanted eight dollars for it.
I reached for my wallet, but Kate put a hand out and said, “Wait. Eight bucks for that crazy thing? How about two?”
The woman said, “I’ll let you have it for six.”
Kate said, “Four dollars.”
“Five,” the woman said. Kate looked at me.
I stuck out my lower lip and lifted my eyebrows and nodded my head, to signal that that was pretty good, and Kate said, “Okay, you got a deal,” and I paid the woman.
As we walked away down the sidewalk, me holding the coffee and doughnuts, Kate carrying the board, I said, “You sounded just like your great-grandfather George back there, Kate. You’re a bona fide Yankee skinflint.”
Kate grinned and said, “I love this thing, but eight bucks?”
I washed a mouthful of the stale cereal down with a gulp of tap water from a jelly jar and thought again about how I could find the cribbage board in the buffet and bring it out and clear a space in the mess on the coffee table in front of the couch and look at the peg stuck in the dead man’s hole and think to myself, Kate put that there. That’s a little mark left in the world by Kate. I thought about how I might agonize for a while over whether I should ever remove the peg, or leave it and put it up on the mantel and make a little shrine out of it, maybe set a stick of incense in one of the empty peg holes and burn it and think about the last game we played together, ignoring the trivial, circumstantial annoyance I’d felt at the time. I didn’t want to do any of that, so I left the board buried somewhere in the layers of cloth napkins and trivets and decks of cards and candleholders and empty photograph frames and odd sheets of gift wrapping and silver steak knives, and looked for a moment out the side window in the living room at the light snow drifting in front of the streetlight onto the lawn and the driveway and the station wagon I hadn’t used in months and whose battery I was sure must be dead and wondered about what birthday presents Kate might have asked for.
I WOKE UP ON the living room couch one morning in the middle of December. The autumn had been mostly wet and mild until then. I had been taking long walks through the woods on paths lined with wet, soggy leaves that felt like vellum to step on, and up from the pagelike, pulpy folds of which little white moths innocently spun into the wrong season with nearly every step. But that morning the house was freezing. I sat up, shawled in one of my mother’s afghans, irritated at having been half-wakened repeatedly throughout the night because the afghan was too short and didn’t cover my feet and they were icy and because my dreams were full of endless, foolish arguments and wrestling matches with tireless antagonists. My breath steamed in the cold air. My throat stung and my nose ran and I was certain I must be getting sick. Half of my brain lagged behind my head rising off the couch, and I had to close my eyes and take a couple breaths and wait for it to catch up and refit itself together. The sunlight tracing the borders of the window shades detonated bursts of purple and green hydrangeas in the foreground of my vision, and my head pounded. I reached for the bottle of painkillers. I was too groggy to take any so soon, but the fog from the previous night’s pills and whiskey would burn off in a few hours and, after a long afternoon nap, I’d wake at dusk and want the night’s first dose to soothe myself. I picked up the bottle and put it next to my ear, smiled at the idea of the sight of myself half-playing a burnout, and gave it a little shake. It sounded like there were only two or three pills rattling around. My wry — romantic, even — image of myself evaporated and I shook the bottle again and listened to the rattling and tried to guess the greatest number of pills it could possibly indicate, as if the number in which I could reasonably convince myself to believe before I looked might influence the number of pills I found when I actually opened the bottle. I thought to myself, Be careful, Charlie; this is very tricky business, very fragile stuff you’re playing with here. One false move, one lapse of concentration, and you could be very, very screwed. But that very thought was the lapse itself, I realized.