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  Darius smiled at her politely when they were near each other, left a check in her room every month for the mortgage—always on time—but said almost nothing to her. She tried to think of ways to engage him in a discussion about what he was doing. She wanted to explain things to him, to get through to him, to get him to understand what she knew to be true about the errors of his ways. But he, too, always shifted away from her, making conversation impossible. So she began to avoid the house and its occupants. She worked long hours, ate out, went to the movies, and joined a sportsmen’s club where she took up archery and killed time in the clubhouse. But she couldn’t stay entirely away. Nor, truthfully, did she want to. She felt compelled to come home and watch what was happening from what she considered a safe, noncommittal distance. Some days, she thought what was unfolding was an elaborate comedy. Other days, she feared it was a tragedy.

  Lying in bed one night, staring at the ceiling, wondering why she was still there, Sally finally said to herself, Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m here because I’m curious. I’m here because I want to see what happens. I’m here because I want to watch it all fall apart.

  DARIUS AND MIRANDA

  Miranda met Darius at the farmers’ market. She had been toying with the idea of bringing in some of her own vegetables for resale. Maybe making pies. Or jams. Something. Doing something. She was at the farmers’ market not to buy vegetables—she had her own enormous garden, well tended and overflowing with produce, much of which she ended up giving away—but to see what others were selling. She was trying to find out if there was a niche there she might fill.

  What a metaphor for the rest of my life, she thought.

  She paused at a funny little table in a far corner of the grassy field where the market was held because that particular stand was set slightly apart, and so attracted her attention. Or maybe she stopped simply because it was at the end of the line. Maybe because she was tired. Vaguely frustrated. Unsure if she’d found any answers or direction. This miasma of conflicting emotions was becoming familiar, a feeling that seemed to waft in on an errant breeze and then cling, like the tangy smell of manure. It was hard to shake off. She stopped to try and ground her buzzing nerves as much as to examine the odd assortment of wares.

  “What’s your name?”

  Miranda looked into the azure eyes and intense stare of the man sitting at the table.

  “Miranda,” she replied reflexively, surprised and rattled by the abruptness of his question. “They call me Andy.”

  She regretted adding that last bit. There was no “they” anymore. Only her parents had ever called her Andy. And her brother. She hadn’t even liked the nickname. It had made her feel young, small, vulnerable. She could not articulate, was not fully aware, that the man behind the card table, under the makeshift tent, made her feel the same way.

  “Well, Andy,” he said, drawing out the first vowel, teasing her or maybe taunting her somehow, “can I interest you in some of our wares?” He swept his arm a few inches above a collection of small jars and twists of metal and scraps of wood on his scarred table. “We have homemade jams, totally organic, from berries foraged locally.”

  Miranda made her own jam from berries she gathered herself. The scrawled handwriting on the labels and the lids left askew made her smile. He obviously did not know much about canning. She thought his naïveté charming. There was nothing here that she wanted or needed. But she was reluctant to move on. She felt his eyes on her face as she feigned polite interest, picking things up and setting them down again.

  “Miranda,” he said. “That’s familiar to me somehow. You are familiar to me somehow. Surely we’ve met before.”

  Miranda tried for a light laugh, tried to compress the expansive feeling that was coming over her. “I don’t think so,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve seen your stand.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Well. Perhaps in a past life, then.”

  A past life. Silly, but maybe. Why not? Miranda thought as she picked up a twist of wire.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “This . . .” he said, letting his breath out as a long pause, as if he was about to reveal something mysterious.

  Miranda waited for him to finish his sentence. Instead he stood, reached across the table, lifted her hand from where it hung at her side, and slipped the object onto her finger. She was surprised at how soft his hands were. She was surprised at how warm they were. And at how beautiful the thin strip of matte metal looked on her finger.

  “This is for you,” he said.

  Miranda felt herself flush at the intimacy of the gesture. Then his voice rattled on, the tone changed now, official and practiced. A sales pitch.

  “We make all our jewelry from found objects,” he said. “Everything is upcycled. We even make our own tools.”

  We. Miranda pictured a slightly scowling, unwashed hippie wife, a brightly colored bandanna wrapped around long dreadlocks embedded with stone beads and pieces of silver.

  “The income from these products supports our other efforts,” he continued.

  Miranda’s hand rested in his, a small weight lightly held. She felt rooted to the spot, the moment. His eyes. So clear, so blue, so empty, framed by the ropes of his dark hair falling around his face. Somehow, he had pinned her down by putting the ring on her finger. She wondered, fleetingly, what he meant by the phrase “other efforts.” Then he abruptly dropped her hand, stood back, and scanned her face. It seemed he was looking for something that wasn’t there.

  “Keep it,” he said, wiping his hands together as if they were dirty.

  “No, I couldn’t . . .” she stumbled. “Let me pay for it.”

  “No,” he said, his voice suddenly deeper, authoritative. “Keep it.” His smile was a contortion of his lips. “It will give you something to remember me by.”

  And then he was gone. He was still there, standing in front of her, but he had turned away, and in that instant dismissed her, his attention on someone behind her, someone she had not noticed. A small woman with a scruff of short, stiff hair, her hands full of wares from the table. Or was she adding them to the table? This other woman’s expression, cold and suspicious, spooked Miranda, and she scuttled away, trying to collect thoughts that had become tangled like dead leaves and twigs swirling in an eddy. She went to the next aisle, reminding herself what she had come here to get: some coffee beans from the new guy who roasted them himself in his home. Some tomatoes, as the blight had gotten to hers—they were always hard to grow in this climate, but the wet summer had been brutal. A chicken, or anything to vary the slabs of venison that still filled the freezer from last fall. She hoped the goat cheese had not sold out yet. Perhaps a bouquet of flowers. Yes, that would brighten the table, the room.

  As she walked away she realized, with just a passing thought, that she had not gotten the man’s name. She twisted the ring with her thumb and realized she hadn’t even said thank you.

  Not to worry, she told herself. He’ll be here next weekend. I’ll bring him something in exchange. I’ll make him something. Something special.

  Not Dix. It was not Dix for whom she’d make something special, for whom she was always making something special. This was an odd, uncomfortable, and yet strangely exhilarating idea. It would be for this other man. This man who as yet didn’t even have a name.

  The next weekend, Miranda arrived at the farmers’ market with a pie in hand. She had made two—both blueberry, Dix’s favorite. One for him, and one to give to the stranger who had given her a ring. The pies had used up a large portion of the fruit she had collected, on her knees, from the wild, low bushes full of small, sweet berries. She’d just collect more, she’d told herself as she was arranging the dough in careful strips over the top. Whatever the bears and birds leave behind. And the berry farm. There was always the U-pick berry farm.

  She walked down the rows at the market, the still-warm pie carefully balanced in the palm of her hand. She began to feel lost. No, she told hers
elf, stopping at the far corner of the field, she was in the right place. She stared and stared at the spot where she’d had a ring slipped on her finger the week prior, but there was only an empty area of lightly trampled grass at the end of the tidy line of card tables and identical pop-up tents where his ad hoc display and cotton tapestries on bamboo poles had been.

  What do I do now? she wondered.

  She felt like she’d dressed up and arrived for a party on the wrong date. Silly. Confused. Embarrassed. She couldn’t bring the thing home again. Two pies. Such an extravagance. How would she explain what she’d done? She didn’t know why not, but she knew she could not. Dix would wonder what she’d been thinking. Why she hadn’t just frozen the extra berries. That was, after all, the only thing that made any sense. She’d have no explanation.

  She had just passed a table offering raffle tickets. Raising money for the local volunteer fire department. Or maybe it was the library. A local family hit with unexpected medical bills. A child born with special needs or a man with a large family, no insurance, and now a rare cancer. There was always something, someone, in need around here. It wore her down and bummed her out, all these flyers and appeals for people who were so extremely unprepared for the inevitable disasters of life. She took the pie there, to the fund-raising table, told them she’d made two and her visitors were not coming in for the weekend after all, so they could sell it and keep the proceeds. Or add it to the raffle. She didn’t know why she made up this story. Another extravagance to justify the first extravagance. She didn’t have visitors that weekend, of course. Or any weekend.

  Miranda felt more flustered than seemed warranted by the small mix-up in her intentions, the thwarting of her picture of how this little interaction was supposed to go. She had anticipated pleasure at the strange man’s imagined delight with her gift. She had thought he’d dig into the pie right there in front of her, magically produce a fork, make appreciative noises over her culinary skills and generosity. And now . . . now she didn’t know what to do. So after she freed herself of the pie, she left the market without buying anything at all.

  The next weekend she came with a list she had scribbled with the intention of keeping herself on track. She avoided the aisle that had held the funny table, but then, while fingering some skeins of bulky yarn—she was trying to learn to knit—she saw in her peripheral vision the colorful cotton bedspreads draped over bamboo poles, and the head of thick, dark, wavy hair. Miranda turned to look, and as she did, she knocked a soft ball of wool off its perch and into the grass. She squatted to pick it up and realized that it was not him at the table after all. The wares were the same, but the hair belonged to a woman with brown eyes, dark in a way that had little to do with their color. Suddenly, Miranda felt that she’d imagined him. Not just then, but the other day as well. He was a dream, a fantasy. There were two other women at the table. One with graying hair falling in corrugations down her back and another with blonde hair roughly cut to just below her chin. It looked, Miranda thought, as if someone had gathered the woman’s hair into a ponytail and chopped it off with pruning shears.

  She twisted the ring on her finger. He had to have been real, she thought. She had the ring to prove it.

  She bought two large boxes of imperfect tomatoes and a bag of onions. They’d been grown in hoop houses, she figured, so they’d be less flavorful than what she’d get later in the season, once the summer was in its full hot-and-humid swing, but these would be fine for making salsa and sauce. She’d can a bunch for the winter. The task would keep her busy for a few days with chopping, cooking, boiling. She loved listening to the satisfying pops of the metal lids sealing themselves as the jars cooled. The sauce would be delicious with those thick, almost-obscene ropes of venison sausage.

  The market was winding down for the day. The tourist season had been slow this year, the weather uncooperative, the blackflies brutal. The locals didn’t come much. They couldn’t afford to buy organic produce. Most people around here gardened organically by default—not because they cared about pesticides but because they couldn’t afford them. Miranda came back to the market only a few more times that summer. She didn’t really need anything. Picked up some yarn and a variety of squash she didn’t grow herself. More of that coffee that she liked. The stuff Dix called “fancy.” She never set up a stall herself. And the table with the twisted lids on jam jars and jewelry made from scrap did not appear again.

  What Dix noticed was not the ring, not at first, but the new and nervous motion of Miranda’s fingers. Thumb tucked into the palm, pushing, twisting, fluttering as she spun the little metal spiral. He felt that Miranda was both unconsciously challenging him to notice and also counting on his not noticing. She thought he didn’t notice much. Especially when it came to her. This was a new complaint, fresh and sharp as the first cold snap of impending winter.

  “There could be a bear in the living room and you’d walk right by without breaking stride,” Miranda had said recently, apropos of nothing.

  “Not noticing and not minding are two different things,” he’d replied. “Besides, the bears around here find berries a lot more appetizing than me.”

  He had said that hoping to make her smile. Something that seemed harder and harder to do.

  “Anyway, if there was a bear in the living room, it would probably be just looking for one of your delicious pies.”

  She stared at him, hearing his words but not taking them in. There was that sheen of sadness again, a spill that she sometimes blinked back and that other times seeped over the entire surface of her eyes. This was a new sadness. It hadn’t been there that first month, when she lived in the cottage, when he’d have expected it, after all the tragedy had come and gone and left its path of quiet destruction behind. It wasn’t there when she started spending more time with him in the house, sharing the meals she cooked as a thank-you for the cottage. It wasn’t there that first time he’d kissed her, which was the last night she’d slept in the cottage. It wasn’t there when her mother died, in the deepest part of the winter. She’d seemed sad then, of course, but also relieved that the woman was out of her misery. And that Miranda was also out of hers. No, it had come into her eyes a few months ago. A darkening of the light that had once and always seemed to radiate outward from her pale blue orbs. It came on with the spring, an inverse of the season.

  “You mean not caring,” Miranda said, her thoughts lingering back before his joke.

  “What?” he asked, not following her train of thought.

  “It’s not that you don’t notice because you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s that you don’t notice because you don’t care.”

  He wanted to tell her that not caring was not necessarily a bad thing in a lot of situations. Caring about inconsequential things took up time and space and energy that could be used for other, more productive things. Like adjusting the sagging barn door so it would close properly this winter.

  “I care about you,” he said. “I care about you very much.”

  He hoped this statement, true and sincere, would bring her to him, send her into his arms. But instead, she turned her head away, frustrated that he would not argue with her, and left him there at the kitchen counter, alone, where they had been standing side by side, sipping tea.

  Dix wondered if she was mad at him for something. He mentally skimmed over his behavior and their interactions recently, and he could find nothing obvious to point to, nothing tweaked in the companionable rhythm they had eased their way into. He figured, at some level, this moodiness was her understandable, if delayed, melancholy working its way out, a splinter that had dug itself in under the skin and was starting to erupt, carried forward on a small wave of pus. He also thought she was trying to provoke him, punish him somehow for something that was not of his doing. Because who else was there to punish for all she’d been forced to bear? Everyone else was dead. He forgave her. Over and over, he forgave her.

  There was also the pregnancy. Or the lack of a pregnancy. H
e didn’t understand why she was in such a hurry. At first they’d just been careless with birth control. They had been so hungry for each other. It was as if, after all those years of knowing each other from a distance, hired hand and employer’s daughter, they had some kind of catching up to do. They spent hours in bed, exploring each other’s bodies, discovering the parts of each other that had been kept hidden. Miranda started joking that if they weren’t more careful, there’d be little Dixes running around. She had moved very quickly from teasing to disappointment, though. She started wondering if something was wrong with her. She became fearful that she’d never be able to be a mother. He soothed her and made love to her and told her to stop worrying. It didn’t help. She insisted he get tested. She insisted she get tested. There was nothing wrong with either of them. He was excited by the idea of becoming a father but was in no hurry. He kept reminding her that they had plenty of time, that she was so young, just twenty-four years old. The doctor said the same thing. But she was impatient. An impatience Dix felt had to do with more than just waiting for a child to come. He was afraid she wanted a child so badly to replace the family she’d lost. Or, perhaps worse, to give herself something to do. To find a way to fill the emptiness of her days and postpone the more difficult quandaries of deciding what she wanted to make of her life, of figuring out who she wanted to be. She was young, he reminded himself. Again. The same excuse he used for her over and over.

  He didn’t understand her increasing irritation with him. He knew he was somewhat maddeningly un-provoke-able. He tended to walk away from arguments. He didn’t much mind about the twisting tunnels of feelings that so many people got tangled up in. If a person wanted to get lost in the dark passages of her own emotions, well, fine, but he had no time for such things. He also did not know what to say or do to fix other people’s feelings or those sorts of things. His practical experience told him that when you tried to repair something without fully understanding how and why it got broken in the first place, you tended to make things worse. He thought he knew how Miranda had gotten out of true; he’d seen the events that warped her emotions, but he did not know how to help her get realigned.