“Just got a call from the state,” he said to Senderovsky. “They might shut me down any day now as nonessential.” Senderovsky sighed and bought an extra case of the Riesling and two bottles of an artisanal gin he had never heard of. He could picture Ed pursing his lips around a glass and pronouncing it “drinkable.” When the final bill, adding up to just over four digits, meandered out of the machine in many long spurts, Senderovsky’s hand could barely slalom through his signature. A special occasion, he consoled himself.
With his trunk now filled with bottles as well as meats, he gunned his car toward yet another village, this one fifteen miles north, to do some more marketing, after which he was due to drop off the meat and pick up Ed from the train station. At the exit for the bridge crossing the river, he ran into a line of cars. Nothing irritated Senderovsky more than the local version of a traffic jam. He brought a city impatience to the rural life. Around here it was considered impolite to honk, but Senderovsky honked. He rolled down his window, thrust out his long bony face, and honked some more with the palm of his hand, the way he had seen men do in films. The car in front of him was not moving. It sat low to the ground, a rusted wheelbarrow jammed into its trunk, a national flag fluttering from the driver’s window, and a partly peeled sticker on the bumper that read I STAND BY MY PRES…Senderovsky realized that at this pace there was no way he could go to the store and drop off the meat before Ed’s train arrived. Ignoring the very clear markings on the road warning against just such a maneuver, he whipsawed his car around, and within minutes was charging up his long driveway, once again cursing the fallen tree branches that ruined the approach to the House on the Hill. As he noisily threw the meat into the industrial-sized freezer in the vast white kitchen （the house had once belonged to a chef）， he dialed the boy from across the river who came round to do the lawn mowing, begging him to get rid of the branches. But the boy had other things to do. “What things?” Senderovsky challenged, threatening to pay double. Out on the covered porch he confronted the handyman who was listening to old music on a handsome red radio, but all he got was “The missus told me I wasn’t to move anything heavy on account of the back.”
Senderovsky’s own missus now stepped onto the porch in her kaftan, arms akimbo, her fingers pressed into the softness of her abdomen. “I can’t work with all this noise,” Masha said in Russian to her husband, mindful of the handyman. “It’s a workday for me. My patients can barely hear me and they’re agitated as it is.”
“What noise?”
“There’s drilling by the bungalows, and you’re throwing meat in the freezer and yelling at the lawn boy.”
“Darling,” Senderovsky answered, using an inflated diminutive of the term: dorogushka. He had known his wife since they were children. Russian was a language built around the exhalation of warmth and pain, but lately Senderovsky had found his declarations of love for his wife stilted, as if he were reading them from a play. “The workers will knock off at three, as they always do,” he said. “And I’ve only to pick up Ed and get the groceries.”
The handyman stared at them for the aliens they were. When he had started working for them three years ago, they were of approximate size, two smallish figures, college professors most likely （a tiny but very active college was within striking range of Senderovsky’s car）， annoying in their requests and frugal in their outlays, but speaking with one slightly accented city voice. Now the woman had become larger, more local-looking around the waist and arms, while the man had done the opposite, had shrunk and emaciated himself and lost most of his hair, his only salient points a sharp nose and the brick of a forehead, to the point that the handyman suspected he was ill. In another reversal, the husband seemed happier today, despite the seeping sibilants of the language they spoke, while she had taken on his former briskness. Whatever this weekend would bring, the handyman thought, it would not be good. Also, he had heard that the Senderovskys’ appliance repairman from across the river had not been paid in months even as the refrigerator in the main house continued to break down in interesting new ways.
The conversation continued, rising in pitch, until the woman turned to the handyman and said, “Would you mind trimming the hedges by the pool? Everyone else is busy.”
“That type of work I’m not really cut out for,” the handyman said. Despite the cold March weather, he was wearing denim shorts of an antiquated sky blue, and one of his legs was covered in iconography neither of the Senderovskys could understand, eagles, snakes, and cryptic symbols, which they hoped was not a sign of a violent affiliation. The first year they had bought the House on the Hill, after they had set out their nondenominational New Year’s tree, the handyman had said to the husband, “I didn’t figure you for Christmas-tree people.” He had smiled as he said it, but they both had lain awake that night, wondering what he meant.