Mary and O’Neil

O’Neil arranged to take incompletes in all his courses and was pla

His discoveries were many-his father, for instance, owned nineteen blue shirts; his mother kept a needle and thread in her glove compartment; on a shelf in the laundry room, behind the boxes of detergent and fabric softener, someone had hidden a pack of Larks-and yet the actual circumstances of his parents’ death, its strange location and hour, seemed unknowable. Then on a day just before Christmas, their father’s Visa bill arrived, including a forty-two-dollar charge for a motel, the Glade View Motor Court, and the mystery was solved. The charge was dated the day they had died, November 12, and O’Neil recognized the name at once: the Glade View was a run-down motel set back from the highway, about an hour south of campus. Its curious existence, so far from anything, had always seemed so sordid and improbable that it had become a familiar landmark; O’Neil and his parents had joked about it often, to fill the final minutes of their long drives together to the college. This was where they had spent the last afternoon of their lives together. O’Neil felt no embarrassment learning this-far worse had been the discovery, in his mother’s dressing table, of her diaphragm, and beneath it a faded pamphlet on “natural birth spacing.” And yet it was still troubling, like opening a door to find, behind it, another door just like it. O’Neil and Kay sat on the sofa, passing the bill back and forth between them, reading it over and over and shaking their heads. A motel. They had visited O’Neil at college, then stopped on the way home at a seedy roadside motor court, and, leaving, had turned themselves around in the storm. It was almost fu

On Friday evening, with no word from Joe, O’Neil asked Kay and Jack to drive him to Patrice’s house to pick up his car, an ancient Buick he had bought out of the classifieds the week he’d returned from Europe. He hoped that the painting had proceeded without him, but when they arrived at her house the scene he found was one of abandonment, as if time had frozen at the moment of his accident. His ladder still lay in the yard behind the yew bushes, and beside it a nearly empty can of hardened paint. Though he hadn’t thought of this before, he had spilled most of a gallon on the porch roof, which was now a total loss-it would have to be reshingled, and this, O’Neil knew, would cost Joe more money.

Patrice answered the door before he could knock, holding Henry on her hip. Henry was wearing only a diaper, his eyes were glassy from a day of tears, and Patrice wore the stu

She tipped her head toward his cast. “Does it hurt?”

“You’re the first person to ask me that,” O’Neil replied. “It did, thank you, for a while.”

She moved her hand through the air toward him, stopping just shy of his face. “There’s paint in your hair,” Patrice said.

The three of them made their way to the front yard, to get a better look at the roof. From where they stood, O’Neil could see a broad splash, marking the spot where he had first made impact, and below it a wide ribbon of paint that traced his course down the sloping roof to the ground below.

“I feel just terrible about this,” O’Neil said. “This is completely my fault. Also, I never thanked you for driving me to the hospital.”

Patrice looked sweetly at Henry, who smiled back into her face. “What else could we do, Henry?” she said. “Leave this poor man in the yard?”

She helped O’Neil cover his crew kit with a tarp and store the rest of the equipment, in case it rained. She seemed to have no expectation at all for when the work on her house would resume, and O’Neil didn’t know what to say about this. Probably it wouldn’t.

“What will you do?” she asked him, when the time had come to go.

“It’s hard to say. I’m thinking maybe law school.”

She smiled at this answer. “I meant about your hair, O’Neil.”

Then, for just a moment, they exchanged a deep regard. Patrice’s eyelashes, O’Neil saw, were long and thick and, though she wore no mascara, seemed braided. Such a small thing, but that was what he saw. His mind took hold of this image, pushing aside all other thoughts, and he imagined what her eyelashes would feel like, brushing against his cheek. He thought it would be nice to kiss her-more than nice. But sad too, and in a way he had not felt before. They held one another’s gaze a second more, and then Patrice looked past him to the Volvo parked at the curb, where Kay and Jack were reading the newspaper.

“Who’s that now?” she said. “You’ve brought someone.”

O’Neil followed her eyes to the car. “That’s my sister and her husband. They’re Kay and Jack.”

Patrice turned with her hip so Henry could see and lifted his little arm to help him wave. “I’m really sorry about your leg, O’Neil,” she said. “It’s not the same without you around here.”

They said their good-byes, and Jack took O’Neil home in the Buick, with Kay following in the Volvo. As they turned the corner onto Post Road, O’Neil lifted his eyes to find Jack looking at him through the rearview mirror.

“Nice-looking woman,” Jack said, and winked knowingly. “What do you say, O’Neil? Maybe I should take up house painting.”

O’Neil said nothing. This was when he realized he’d never seen Patrice’s husband because she didn’t have one. His assumption that this man existed was just that-an assumption. Or perhaps Joe had led him to believe this. Either way, there was no such person. It was just Patrice and Henry, and their big empty house that no one was painting for them.