Dear Paul,

When I’m really getting into procrastinating, I construct these sequences of homely chores. For example, where I live, there’s no garbage pick-up, so most people take their own trash down to the dump. There are a lot of feral cats at the dump, dozens of them. Mainly these cats are tabbies. Or variations thereupon. The guy who oversees the dump has mounted a sign above one dumpster calling our attention to the beauty of his cats, but I don’t think they’re beautiful, because I think the cats prey upon local birds, which is what this letter is about. About how I love birds.

After I go to the dump, which has a beautiful view of Long Island Sound (on a good day you can see the Montauk lighthouse from there), I usually go to see Mary and Lili at the post office. Last time I was in there, Lili was complaining about how the U.S.P.S. is entering into a joint operation with FedEx and UPS, and Lili thinks it means the end of postal service in many rural areas. In my town, for example. But she will be retiring before this happens. That’s what she told me. I don’t think, therefore, that her organizational theories are much more than nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated time. A nostalgia I share, even though I am not old enough to be nostalgic in this way.

Usually, I get gigantic amounts of mail. People send me things. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy about my job, the fact that people send me things. They send me galleys of books, and books, and tapes, and CD’s, and copies of their short stories, and literary magazines, and book review digests, and so forth. There are a lot of bills in my mail, too. And among the many catalogues I receive (which are sort of distracting and which generally go directly into Mary’s recycling bin), is one from Duncraft, a company that specializes in birdseed. They send me catalogues because I buy fifty pound bags of birdseed every couple of months. The reason for this will be clear in a minute.

After the post office, when I’m on a binge of procrastination, I go down to the village market (there’s just the one; it usually has just a couple of green peppers and a cucumber, and that’s about it) and pick up the newspaper. The paper doesn’t come until about 8:15, because it has to be shipped to the island from the mainland, shipped in the literal sense.

Once these preliminary chores are completed, I have to get more creative on procrastination. I have to get creative, that is, if I want to avoid writing all the way until lunch, which is my goal. So usually what I do after these preliminary chores I’ve described is feed the birds. This isn’t really a chore, in my view, this is more like a devotional act. I love the idea that wild animals rely on coming to my yard. I like that they can sustain themselves here all winter long. And I actually believe that the birds are waiting in the trees around my house, some mornings, waiting for me personally to get my shit together and fill the birdfeeders. I can hear them in the trees, squawking. I can hear that pair of blue jays with their harsh braying, I can hear the blackbirds chattering, and therefore it is time to feed them, lest they should have to go up the street somewhere.

There are two birdfeeders. One is small and copper and looks like a gazebo. The problem with this birdfeeder is that it hangs over a branch, and is therefore completely accessible to squirrels, who simply climb up the tree, waltz out to the end of the branch and reach down. Some days I have to come outdoors two or three times in a morning and chase off the squirrels, so that the birds can eat in peace. Also, in winter, crows like to settle there on the feeder and keep off the smaller perching birds. They are easier to drive off than squirrels. They will lift off if I merely wave my arms madly in the kitchen.

The worst day of all, in my struggle to keep birdfeeder #1 available to any chickadee or sparrow or oriole, came this summer when I woke to find A RAT on the birdfeeder. A big motherfucking rat. A country rat. Scared of nothing on this earth. With a tail as long as my forearm. I usually keep a few rocks just outside the screen door to heave at the squirrels on the birdfeeder (I try never to hit them), but I had to pelt this rat several times to get him to desist, and I now believe that it is this rat that empties the birdfeeder overnight, every night, so that I have to refill it in the morning. A pox upon all country rats, I say.

The rat and the squirrels and the crows who skulk around my house ultimately necessitated the acquisition of birdfeeder #2, one of those impervious ones that stands on a metal pole and which has perches that are designed to fall away from the feeder automatically if a bird weighs too much. You know the design, right? It’s fun to watch crows attempt to land on one of these feeders. They fall off the thing and get frustrated and move on. Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a raccoon try to leap onto feeder #2 from the porch. He mangled himself and went wailing off disconsolately toward the harbor. Never to be heard from again.

I love all the birds on my two birdfeeders. I love sparrows and grackles and chickadees even though you see these guys every day and they are nothing special. I love mourning doves, even though my father, who lives only a couple of miles from me, thinks they are mere pigeons. I love red-wing blackbirds, even though they can destroy crops, even though they can empty a birdfeeder in a few hours. I love blue jays, even though they menace other birds. So much do I love the blue jays near my house, that I imagine I have a personal relationship with them and occasionally talk to them. I love robins. I love orioles. But above all I love cardinals. I think the cardinal is among the most beautiful animals of the northeastern United States (only the tiger swallowtail, a regional butterfly, is prettier), and their movements are so gentle and so methodical, and their devotion to their mates is so overpowering that I can watch them for a very long time without wanting to do anything else. I think I would be happier if I were a cardinal. I also love herons (we have one in the harbor), I love even Canada geese (because I don’t give a shit if they ruin the golf course or not) and likewise the lowly herring gull, and all varieties of ducks, but above all, I love the cardinal.

Which is to say: I fill birdfeeders and stare vacantly at birdfeeders to avoid writing, of course, just as I compose e-mail messages late into the morning to avoid writing, but today these aren’t the reasons I’m doing these things at all, Paul. Today I’m doing these things because this time of the year brings the anniversary of a certain death in the family. And while, on other days, I might amass chores like going to the dump and going to the post office and going to the market and filling the birdfeeders to avoid writing, today I am doing these chores to find a way around thinking about a certain person who is no longer here. I’m sure you get a lot of letters about this, and I wish I didn’t have to write letters on this subject, and I wish I didn’t have to keep thinking about this and talking about it, and I wish I had never written all the things I’ve written about grief, and I think the numerological obsessions of the grief-stricken (today would have been her birthday or today was the day when we went rowing on the lake or today is the half-anniversary, etc.) are ridiculous and contribute nothing to our lonely march here, but my heart knows nothing of skepticism, and so I do the same things everybody else does, especially at this time of year. A certain plunge in the temperature, a certain gust of wind bearing upon it a half-dozen yellowed leaves, a carved pumpkin, a child in a Halloween costume, any of these and I’m back in a sequence of memories and impressions that I don’t want to have.

So I go into the shed, where there’s an old beat-up garbage can containing a fifty pound bag of Wild Bird Mix. The shed has my sister’s old mountain bike in it, and the lawn mower belonging to my friend Sylvester, and a Weber barbecue I have never used, and I push these things aside, and I find the highball glass that I use to funnel seed into the birdfeeders, and I drag these things out onto the lawn, the bag of seed, the glass, and then I go get the two birdfeeders. The first of these is easy to fill, but the second one takes some time, because it will take a fair amount of seed, and it’s good that these things take such time. The repetition of household chores ennobles me, I believe, and when the feed is in the birdfeeders, then the chickadees will descend, always first among local birds. The interesting thing about a chickadee is that he or she will always leave a perch after taking A SINGLE SEED. They fly off to a nearby branch, eat the seed, and then return to the feeder. One morsel at a time. They’re the smallest of my birds, but the most impetuous, and it’s only when they have demonstrated that the coast is clear that the others birds of my neighborhood will start to visit. The cardinals get interested when there has been a lot of spillage. Soon I see them rooting around in the underbrush and on the lawn. I think cardinals know nothing but the joy of being a cardinal. Maybe one autumn soon I will know that kind of joy too.

Best wishes for the holidays, etc.,

Rick.

Cheryl:

Whenever I get down – and over the last year, as you well know, I’ve been way down – I go see my dad. The other day I stopped by and he was in his underwear doing laundry. Usually my mom does the laundry but since she broke her foot he’s helping out. He even went to Wal-Mart to buy groceries last week, but it was his first time in a grocery store of any kind in the last twenty years, and he couldn’t find anything and got in a fight with “one a dem $5-ah-hour jokers, the kind who couldn’t find their butts with a pair of deer antlers in each hand.” You know the type, Cheryl. Guys like me.

So the dog and I drove over to find him doing laundry in his underwear – and out of milk. In his BVD’s, white undershirt and long, pale legs Dad looked like a cumulus cloud with feet. He gave me a few bucks to buy milk – a bribe – to go shop for him so he wouldn’t end up fighting with a stock clerk again.

I went to the Good Super Wal-Mart on Highway 98 where all the new developments are going up. Another Super Wal-Mart was built since you last lived here and thus we have the Good Super Wal-Mart as opposed to the Bad Super Wal-Mart. Don’t ask me to describe the differences. All I know is the Bad Super Wal-Mart carries the Sam’s Choice peanut butter-filled pretzel bites and the Good Wal-Mart doesn’t. Yet the Good Wal-Mart has a plethora, by Hattiesburg’s standards, of soy food. So go figure.

I shopped for my dad and bought some milk and, on a whim, a Nice Price Elton John’s Greatest Hits album. I had been toying with the idea of buying it for some time but I didn’t know if I ought to. Would it lower my coolness ratio? Would I become one of these classic-rock dudes whose musical tastes stopped evolving after Three Dog Night broke up?

But, yes, I bought an Elton John record at Wal-Mart. It has “Candle in the Wind,” which might be the ultimate schmaltz crap suckdog song ever written – but it’s also got “Your Song,” and I will fight to the death anyone who disagrees with me that it’s one of the loveliest, sweetest pop songs ever made. I remember being in deadlocked traffic one afternoon in Dallas two years ago and hearing “Your Song” on the radio. I got chills. I had never listened to the lyrics before and I had never been at a place in my life where I had someone who I was glad was in the world. I was proud of myself for telling Sandi, when I got home, how much hearing that song made me think of her and I think she said “Awww…” and kissed me. It was one of those tiny moments in a marriage that no one gets when they’re not in that marriage.

Anyway, I put the E.J. CD into the car’s stereo as one of the “$5-ah-hour” guys rolled a train of shopping carts past me. And was glad that he did it quickly so that he couldn’t see me break down. I was in heaving, weeping sobs by the time the song was in its second verse. When it was over, I thought I had composed myself enough to drive. I left the parking lot, passing through the Home and Garden Center’s parade of wheelbarrows and fertilizers with wet, but not sopping eyes. It wasn’t until I was on the highway headed home that it hit me again – how much I miss her, how much it hurts to go on sometimes, how I’m happy I’m in Hattiesburg but I don’t love it, don’t need it, don’t love or need anything, really, except her. And she’s dead. Not divorced. Not living in Canada. Not remarried. Dead. I pulled off the highway into the nearby parking lot of a strip mall and sat there in the dark, spitting warm tears on the steering wheel. This fit, I thought, is taking care of that ache I had all day. This is what I needed – and I bought it at Wal-Mart.

Here in Hattiesburg, I am, I think, happier than I’ve ever been – sometimes. I like being here, renting a house my father paid $6,000 for, walking the dog when I want to, letting her crawl under the house to chase cats, working nights at the local newspaper, becoming someone that’s new in some places, old in others.

And I’m sadder than I’ve ever been, too, but since Sandi died I guess that goes without saying. I don’t revel in being sad, believe me, and people who do like being sad confuse me. I’m glad that I can cry my eyes out because it’s cathartic and cleansing even though I miss her terribly. I have to remind myself that I’m not the same person any more.

This particular day itself didn’t help either. Gray, overcast days in Mississippi seem interminable. You remember them. It’s not so much the sky as it is all the longleaf pines. They wall you off and with a low, gray sky, you feel like something’s trying to crush you.

And while I can get along in Hattiesburg and enjoy myself – especially compared to the dark months of last winter – I don’t think she would’ve been happy returning here. Because she was sick and wanted to see the world before she died. And life in Hattiesburg (or anywhere) when you can’t go someplace on your own, unassisted, is difficult.

I left my dad’s milk in his refrigerator, left his spare change by the door and locked the kitchen door while my parents slept upstairs.

It’s crossed my mind a few times how when Sandi broke up with Peter, the rich pillhead in Bloomington, Indiana, that she moved home and took her old job at Sears back and put her life back together much like I’m doing. Hattiesburg is a place to recuperate. It’s quiet. It’s slow.

I’ve felt, on more than one occasion, that I have Sandi’s window on the world now that I’m back here and missing someone the way she missed him. I’m missing her in different ways. A part of me sees myself as a sentry, standing watch over her grave and my memories and that I’m at peace with it. But another part thinks that it hasn’t completely sunk in how she isn’t coming back. Once the one-year anniversary of her death arrives, she won’t appear and ask if I missed her.

Somewhere, I hope, she isn’t miserable and complaining about the overcast sky or Wal-Mart. But I hate that she wasn’t healthier when I knew her. I hate that she isn’t here to cry to, instead of crying about.

kw

To whom it may concern:

Dad and Katherine and I begin the drive from Brookline, Massachusetts, to Ocean City, New Jersey, at 12:33 PM, Saturday, 19 August.

The driving is broken into shifts of three hours or one hundred and fifty miles, whichever comes later. We had first planned to stop in New York City and spend the night at Katherine’s and my apartment, but we decide, impetuously, to push through. This means we do not pick up the digital camera from K’s sister in New York as planned. Thus, no record of this journey exists, except for this letter. I have not consulted any notes in composing these facts; they are, to the best of my immediate memory, accurate.

Our route is as follows: 1) The Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) heading west; 2) I-84 West; 3) The Saw Mill Parkway South; 4) The Tappan Zee Bridge; 5) I-287/87 North; 6) The Garden State Parkway South to New Jersey Shore Points.

In Ocean City, we will rendezvous with my mother’s five sisters, her one brother, and their families, who normally live in Philadelphia, where my mother grew up. They will stay at my Aunt Susan’s house at 19th Street and Boardwalk. We will stay at the ground-level apartment my grandmother has rented for the past three summers. It is on St. Charles Place between Atlantic and Corinthian, just down the street from the church where the Mass for my mother will be held in one week: Saint Francis Cabrini.

My grandmother passed away last 26 December. She died due to complications following the surgical removal of what was presumed to be a cancerous tumor from her lung, though we have never received the results of the biopsy. Her husband, my mother’s father, passed away six years ago, of colon cancer.

Rest stops:

We stop first at the Charlton Plaza on the Mass. Turnpike for Taco Bell bean burritos, Katherine’s new favorite. We purchase three: two for K, one for me, and an additional Burrito Supreme for me. Dad has two hot dogs.

Our second stop is at a Texaco station just off of I-84 at exactly mile 150. We purchase beef jerky (brand: “Oh Boy” Oberto) and four bags of rare Snyder’s jalapeno-flavored pretzel pieces. The beef jerky is for me and K, who are attempting to eat fewer carbs and more protein in an effort to shed the many pounds we have gained since quitting smoking. The pretzel pieces are for my aunt Judy, who since that one time has never been able to find them in her local supermarket.

Stop three is a service plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike at about mile 300. Inside, K and Dad both get frozen yogurt: vanilla, with jimmies.

Only about fifty miles left. At this point, K’s and my game of Scrabble is abandoned after a heated dispute over the acceptability of the word “injun.” K claims that, as slang, it is acceptable. I challenge, predicting that it does not appear in the official Scrabble dictionary, as the third edition has cleaned out all shits, fucks, and potentially offensive or insensitive terms. I am correct.

K claims this is poor sportsmanship on my part. Play the words, not the dictionary: that is her Scrabble philosophy. There is no philosophy, is my philosophy. Instead, there are rules. Challenging is within the rules, and I will use the rules to my advantage, however small, and I will do so ruthlessly and un-apologetically. Without rules there is only chaos.

At this point, the New York radio stations we first picked up around Danbury begin to fade.

The New Jersey Parkway is broken up frequently by toll plazas, designed to slow traffic. The price of passage is nominal: thirty-five cents – like last summer, but not like a few years ago, when I swear it was only a quarter. Though my memory may be incorrect here.

8:30 PM: arrival. We drive directly to Susan’s house. In descending order of age, these are my mother’s siblings, with parenthetical notes describing their families:

1. Jim, brother (husband to Anita. Previously married to Kay, whom he divorced, and then Linda, who died of cancer)
2. Janice (widowed, was married to Mike, no children)
3. Susan (widowed, was married to John, who died of cancer, and with whom she had two sons, Matt, 16, and Andrew, 12. Currently married to Tom, who is the dean of discipline at an all-girls’ school)
4. Beth (never married)
5. And the twins: Judy (wife to Ralph, mother of Kyle, 8, Casey, 6, and Connor, 2); and Jane (wife to Joe, mother of Erin, 8, Dan, 6, and Kerrianne, 1).

All of the above are present when we arrive except for Jim, Anita, and Janice, who will be joining us in a few days.

All of the younger children, my cousins, have made wish lists for the summer, which they share with me and K. Hoped-for activities include:

“Jetskiing”
“Cape May Zoo”
“Fly Kites”
“Wonderland Pier with JK” ["JK" refers to John Kellogg, who is me; as opposed to John Francis, who is my dad]
“Mini golf with Katherine”
“Ride trolley with everyone”

The last item on Kyle’s list is: “Say sorry about Aunt Eileen.”

Eileen was my mother. She died on June 9 of this year of lung cancer. An interesting thing is that I could never remember her birthday. I forced myself to recall it last year, thank god, but even to this day I have no idea what I gave her as a present.

11:00 PM: departure from Susan’s. Before heading to my grandmother’s empty apartment, we stock up at the WaWa Market at West Avenue and 18th Street. There we purchase: string cheese, beef jerky (brand: cannot recall, but there is an American Indian on the label), eggs, milk, scrapple, and other staples. Then we buy gas. I offer twenty dollars to Dad for food and gas, and he attempts to refuse it.

My grandmother’s apartment is dark and musty. Before going to sleep, I make eggs and scrapple for K, which we eat in front of the television. Dad goes to bed in the front bedroom. We go to bed in the back bedroom. It is cool and breezy: unseasonably so. Before falling asleep, I read twelve pages of the book BRAIN FITNESS by Dr. Robert Goldman, which is about exceptional super mind power and the benefit of making lists from memory, to train the mind against forgetfulness and stimulate neural growth.

Today it is Sunday, 20 August, 2000. My mother’s birthday is 27 November, 1941. I am training myself against forgetfulness.

John

Hi Stacy –

Hey there, how’re things? We’re back from Maine, which was great, but we decided, following my therapist’s advice (which I think may have been misguided) that it would be better for me to be in New York City today – on July 25 – than up in Maine with my Dad.

Twenty-six years ago today my mother died. She was killed in a freakish car accident here in New York City, in the village, at the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets. There is now a stop sign at the corner. There wasn’t twenty-six years ago. Two taxis came tearing down those streets – the drivers were named Aderinto and Baeradi, the most wonderfully musical names – and collided. One of the cabs spun around and slammed into my mother, who was standing with my brother at the corner. I think my brother and mom were waiting for a friend of hers – or maybe they were walking over to the friend’s house. Earlier in the day, she and my brother had gone bowling. My brother, then eleven, bowled a 168, breaking his previous record of 163. I’m not sure if he’s ever bowled higher than 168 since then. My father and I had gone to the New York Public Library for the day. He had research to do, and I tagged along. I was nine years old and spent most of the day reading a biography of the baseball pitcher Bob Gibson. The only thing I really remember is that Gibson seemed like an unusually angry man. And that he played with the Harlem Globetrotters for a time. And he may have come from Omaha, Nebraska.

Anyway. Back to the taxis. My brother says he can still remember watching the accident – it happened, as all accidents do, in slow-motion – and thinking that it was going to be cool, that they were going to collide. And then as he realized how close they were going to be, he jumped back, and reached for Mom, grabbed at her. (Our neighbor, a man with the name Yudell Kyler who, when I saw him last, about twelve summers ago, when I conspired with the gods to spend the month of July on Charles Street, had an unusually dark little hair growing out of the middle of his nose – Yudell Kyler saw the accident and used the word “clawed” to represent Timmy’s action in jumping back and reaching at the air for my mom.)

But, of course, one of the taxis slammed into Mom and threw her into the air and she landed on her head on a mailbox. I have never been particularly persistent in trying to conjure this part, what it looked like. But Timmy, who had run a few steps down Bleecker, came back, and the taxis had stopped, and a crowd gathered, and somebody put a pillow under Mom’s head, and somebody else got Timmy an ice cream cone, I don’t know what kind.

As Dad and I approached from the Sheridan Square subway station, we became aware of flashing lights and sirens. Some kind of commotion. As we got closer, Dad gripped my hand really tight, and I remember thinking that he was being silly. Then an old woman came up to us and said, “Mr. Davis, are these your wife’s pants? I think these are your wife’s pants.” And she had these folded-up black pants in her hands and I thought she was insane, but Dad started running down the block toward our house, pulling me.

Timmy was upstairs – in Yudell Kyler’s apartment. It strikes me now that I had never before been to his apartment, though he lived right upstairs from us, but at the time I do remember thinking what a soft and nice place he had. Timmy told us about the accident, which didn’t seem too serious to me, and Dad went off to the hospital, and another neighbor, Dick Meryman, a close family friend, came by and took us – walked us – back to his house on Horatio Street.

It was on the walk to Horatio Street that I think I must have first sensed that something serious was going on, because I remember I told my brother one of the worst lies I’ve ever told in my life. We were big Mets fans, all of us were, and as we walked along, silently, the three of us – me, Timmy, and Dick Meryman, stalwart family friend – I became seized with the idea that I had to cheer Timmy up. And so I told him, “Tom Seaver pitched a perfect game today.” As soon as I said it, I realized how transparent it was. There had only been about twelve perfect games in baseball history, what were the odds on something like that happening? And I thought, “Jesus, why didn’t I just make it a shutout?”

We must have been at the Merymans for a few hours. We ate dinner with their two daughters, and they served us hamburgers and baked beans, our favorite. And at some point during dinner, we turned on the TV. And there was a Mets game on. I was mortified. They hadn’t even played yet! I was too horrified to even say anything.

When Dick Meryman came in and said that our father was upstairs, was back from the hospital and wanted to see us, I was already feeling pretty bad. Timmy had said at dinner, “You know, Mommy could die,” and I thought, “No, she’ll come home with a big bandage on her head, but she’ll be fine, and she’ll tell funny stories about the whole thing.” But the feeling was not a good one as we walked up the stairs to the Merymans’ living room – they lived, and still do, in a very nice brownstone – and there was Dad with the news.

So now it’s twenty-six years later, and my therapist is telling me that it’s better to be in New York with these memories on this day than up in Maine under the clear blue sky. Well, my therapist has other reasons – I have other reasons – for not wanting me to be up in Maine on this particular day. But I’m not so sure. I’m awfully glad that we’re headed back there next week.

Because this memory – these memories – well, there’s no getting away from them in New York in the summer. Jane and I live in the Village, and this morning, I took Lily, our eleven-and-a-half-month-old girl, out for a walk. Men don’t get to be pregnant, but we do get to wear our children in those front carriers – mine’s a Baby Bjorn – and without a doubt the closest times I’ve had with Lily are on these early morning walks. So the sun’s just coming up – Lily is, euphemistically speaking, an early riser – and I’m walking down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square park. The city’s looking great, the Washington Arch is glowing proud, the doormen are nodding at the beautiful smiling baby on my belly as we go by. All is right with the world, and I’m reflecting on where I was twenty-six years ago, and how wonderful it is to have a daughter all these years later, what a redemptive kind of place this planet can be –

And then my heart has stopped beating because just as I’m stepping down off the curb of the Washington Mews – that little alley that empties onto Fifth Avenue between Eighth Street and the park – my new shoe, the left one, a fat little wallabee kind of thing with a sole that is way too thick for someone who has basically spent his whole life in sneakers, has buckled under me, turned over, and at the same time a little blue minivan has been pulling into the Mews, and I’m off-balance, and it all passes very quickly, and nothing happens, I should be clear about this – absolutely nothing happened, no one was ever in the remotest kind of danger, not Lily, not me, not the Aderinto Baeradi type who was driving the minivan…

But suddenly the world isn’t looking so good, and the park when we get there feels muggy and dirty, and the kid playground is sticky with old soda and Lily doesn’t really want to be in the swing and before long we’re leaving – retreating – from the park, and scurrying back to the comfort of our home. And at every light and stop sign – the Mews, do I have to tell you, has neither – I’m looking both ways and holding Lily tight as I cross and basically reminding myself of a teacher I had in the seventh grade who was the first and only agoraphobic I ever met, who when I saw her on Broadway one evening looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

So I think maybe it wasn’t the best decision to come home from Maine. Whatever problems I may have up there, I’m rarely assaulted by the kind of fear that routinely grips me in New York in the summer. Especially today.

Lying low till midnight,

Speak to you soon,

Nick

Dear X,

I was watching Frasier and had just gone into the kitchen to get some crackers when the phone rang. The moment I heard Cassidy’s voice, I knew there had always been this small part of me that had been doing nothing in the past four years but sit by the phone, waiting for something out there to bring her back to me. Through all kinds of relationships, there had been late drunken nights where I had punched her name into every search engine on the net trying to turn up any stupid little trace of her I could get.

The last time I had seen Cassidy was about a year after we had broken up. I was sitting in a Second Cup when she walked through the door in a big Joni Mitchell hat. Right behind her was a big blond boy, also in a big hat. The friend I was having coffee with thought it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen, them walking in with their big floppy hats, but all I could think was that it could have been me. I could have been the schmuck in the matching hat trailing behind her.

Her new beau looked like her type, too. Whenever we ran into old boyfriends of hers on the street, inevitably, they were big boys in army shorts and Kodiak boots, the laces undone, and their Ray Ban sunglasses pulled up onto their heads keeping their floppy bangs out of their eyes. They were the kind of guys who loped around swigging from monstrous jugs of milk, jugs bigger than my upper torso.

Cassidy and I looked nothing alike. She was this sparkly-eyed child star all grown-up, and I was someone’s uncle Shecky as a young man. Cassidy had long blond hair, and I had friends who called her Miss Piggy. When she shook their hands they said it was like a little pig had gotten right up on its hind legs and offered them a hoof. Cassidy was a very eccentric dresser, wearing sparkly little gloves and skirts made of neck ties. She wore Superman T-shirts, big British combat boots, and colourful leotards like a little girl. There was something about her that made me feel like she was my sister, my baby-sitter, my daughter, and the bank teller I could never have all rolled up into one. But she was also so oddly beautiful to me and I remember nights where it felt like I could have stared at her face forever.

One time we were sitting in a bar, drinking gin and tonics and not saying much when a very drunk woman came over and said that we really looked interesting together.

“When people say stuff like that,” I said afterwards, “they make the world a less cold place to be.” And for the rest of the night I felt like we were Nico and Lou Reed.

We had met in an intro to Shakespeare class at McGill. After years of dead-end jobs, I had decided to go back to college and I was easily four years older than anyone in any of my classes. She sat beside me and we played hangman. She would choose quotes from Richard the Second, and I would use lines like “I feel like chicken tonight.” Cassidy later told me that she and her friends had nicknamed me “Fonzie.”

“In a good way,” she said.

Cassidy started having me over to her house for study sessions where she’d make me fish sticks. I hadn’t had stuff like that since I was a kid. Pretty soon we started dating.

From the get-go, we never got along. Once as we were leaving a party at her friends, as we were walking down their winding staircase, Cassidy, being the playful drunk kitten she was, ran off ahead of me, and that was how we walked all the way back to her house, with her at least a block and a half ahead of me, and she never looked back once. I tried to be cool. I even lingered over a box of books someone had thrown away. I rooted through it for a while and withdrew a copy of Soul On Ice, but by the time I made it to her house I had wrung it to shreds. There was the time she so thoroughly insulted my artistic vision that I came very close to running her over as she got out of my car to walk through the McGill campus gates; but instead I sat there, revving the engine and honking the horn as though to say: “Look at me! I’m impotent with rage!”

But there was tenderness, too, like how she would greet me at her door in the middle of the night in her Little House on the Prairie flannel night gown and sleepily babble about the dream she had just woken out of involving Theodore Dreiser; how she told me, when we took showers together, that with my hair slicked back I looked like a 1950’s teen idol; how she said I had the perfect penis, and I said that was the kind of compliment that sticks with a person; how she would repeat over and over about how she and her Chinese roommate, living under the same roof together, were every freshman boy’s wet dream; how she said in her little-girl voice that from this time forward she was going to “keep her pie-hole shut”; how she told me that if she had to choose one person to spend the rest of her life with on a desert island, it would be me. There were picnics on Nun’s Island that started off with Camembert cheese and foreign beer and ended in horrible fights about things I can no longer remember. There were so many fights, fights with yelling in the park, fights in pup tents, fights that scared her roommates.

To be honest, much of her anger towards me was justified. I had just gotten over a three and a half year relationship, and was never willing to commit in the way that I should have. Every so often, as we lay in bed she would smilingly ask me if I wanted to “go around” with her. That was what they used to call going steady in her old high school.

“What’s the point of all that?” I said. “What’s so bad about taking things as they come?”

She explained to me that if I was her boyfriend, or even just her friend, she would bake me a cake on my birthday, but as her fuck-buddy, baking me a cake would just somehow be a really cheesy thing to do.

And now here was her voice again. I could hear her eyes, off to the side and uncertain, her leotarded legs twisted around each other like licorice.

One of the first things she said was that she was thinking of becoming a mortician in order to best deal with her death anxiety. I told her that a lot of morticians fuck corpses and she said that I was still the same old asshole. We argued for a while and then she told me that the only reason she had even called me in the first place was to tell me that she was engaged.

If she was looking for some kind of reaction, she certainly got it. My stomach suddenly felt like a sandwich bag filled with sea-monkeys leaking water all over the place. I sat down on the kitchen floor and stared up at the dirty dishes in my sink as she talked about her new life.

“I’m brilliantly happy,” she said.

She described her fiancé as some kind of saint, the kind of guy who spends whole afternoons talking to homeless people and really trying to solve their problems.

“Is he tall? ” I asked.

“He’s shorter than me,” she said.

As we talked, she kept interrupting to get her cats a treat.

“I’ve become a real cat person,” she said. “My cats are my life.”

Of course I was tempted to say a great many things on the subject of her cat-personhood, but I wasn’t going to take the bait.

“That’s great,” I said, and there had to have been a trace of something other in my voice—how could there not have been—but she wasn’t biting either.

She told me that for Y2K, she and Richard, her fiancé, had gone up to his parents’ place in the country with enough food and water to last them a few months, just in case something happened. I imagined her doing the shopping for them the way she did for our picnics, not skimping on anything, getting Dijon instead of regular brown mustard.

As stupid as it was, I sat there listening to her and wondering how she could have failed to fit me into her plan, how she could have been willing to leave me to die in the final reckoning.

Her cats were driving her crazy, being “very bad” so she had to go. I told her Richard was a very lucky man. I was tempted to add, “as long as you manage to keep your pie-hole shut,” but I refrained.

There are some mornings where I wake up and feel like every woman I’ve ever loved is right on my chest, just sitting there, drinking coffee and talking to each other. It’s like a part of you never entirely lets go. I wish I could say I’m going to get up now and toss away the nutty mix tapes Cassidy made me, but I never get around to buying much new music.

I’m going to leave a special request in my will, asking for Cassidy to be my mortician. Look at him, all smug, she’ll probably say.

Jonathan.