They bought her a brooch and went home.
His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.
There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He’d always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he’d never been anything but this one self. Perhaps it was because physically there’d been little change; he’d lost no hair, gained no weight, grown no beard. He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.
Still, on the fifth Tuesday, as Mitchell made dinner during the lesson, the lasagna noodles quivered in his hands as he placed them in the pan. Nervous as a school-girl. He wondered where that expression came from, for he had never seen Paula ever behave this way.
Nervous as a forty-two-year-old bookseller was how the saying should go.
Kate had arrived with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates, which he’d set on a table in the living room. He’d been so startled by the gift he hadn’t taken in the rest of her, and now he couldn’t picture her in Paula’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed where they always sat （he’d often seen the indentation after she’d gone）。 Every now and then, as he went about preparing dinner, Mitchell glanced through the open doorway at the box of chocolates.
He was just putting the lasagna in the oven when Kate flew past.
“Where’re you going?” he said, unable to conceal his horror as she flung her coat over her shoulders without bothering to fit her arms in the sleeves and reached for the door.
“I’ll be right back.” The door slammed shut and he heard her holler from the walkway: “She’ll be fine.”
He went to his daughter’s room. The door was open but she wasn’t in it. On her quilt on the bed was a dark-red stain and a few pale streaks. Her bathroom door was shut. He stood in silence before it.
“I’m okay, Dad.” She sounded like she was hanging upside down.
“You sure?” He couldn’t control the wobble in his voice.
“Kate’s gone to get some stuff.”
He actually already had “stuff” in his bathroom; he’d bought it for her years ago. “That’s good,” he said. Kate’s choices would be better.
He felt pleased that he was not overreacting, that he knew right away what had happened and hadn’t called an ambulance. And then he looked down and saw the blood up close. He was holding the quilt in his arms. He didn’t remember taking it off the bed. It was a quilt his mother had made and he had slept beneath as a child. The stains and streaks seemed like warnings. Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn’t understand her, didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.
“How do you feel?” he ventured.
“All right. Kinda weird.”
“Your mother used to get terrible cramps,” he said into the crack in the door. He waited for the clutch that came with talking about her, like someone had grabbed him by the chest hair. “She got headaches sometimes, too. She took extra iron. We probably still have some. They’re green, in a white bottle.” He waited, but the clutching feeling never came. “And she had a bullet birth when you were born, you know. Thirty-five minutes, I think. We barely made it to the hospital. Not that you want to be thinking of that right now.” Sweat prickled his scalp. Shut up, he told himself. “One time she was wearing these white pants and—”
“Do you miss her, Dad?”
“No.” He was astonished by the truth of it.
“I don’t either anymore. I feel like I should miss her. All I really remember is her walking me to school and holding my hand and giving me big hugs at the door. But I always knew the minute she turned her back I was out of her mind completely. She wasn’t like you. I knew you were thinking about me always.”
She was revising now, creating new memories out of what she was left with, but his eyes stung anyway.
When Kate came back from the pharmacy, he retreated to the kitchen. He could hear her coaching Paula, first in the bathroom and then through the door. At times her voice was serious and precise; other times they were both laughing. After a long while, she came into the kitchen. She caught him standing there in the middle of the room, doing nothing. She touched the quilt in his arms. “If I run cold water on it now, it won’t stain.”