ON A DRY AFTERNOON in midsummer, with the insects producing a drowsy, throbbing hum in the trees, I opened the side door to the garage and then wrestled with the locks on the automatic door until at last I was finally able to set them free and roll the door up. The air that blew into the concrete-floored room smelled sweetly of fresh-cut grass and my mother’s roses, and I had a happy, quiet afternoon of sweeping and bagging up garbage. I connected my phone to a Bluetooth speaker and played Joan Baez. A strong, sweet, hopeful voice from the past kept me company in the garage, 1965 echoing into the twenty-first century. The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.

I found some boxes I thought I could send on to the library—a crate of my dad’s old Rolling Stones, a box of Danny Dunn young-adult novels I had loved as a boy—and it came to me I ought to grab my mother’s overdue Laurie Colwin and return that, too. Only when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. I tossed the whole house, hunting for it, but it’s not there. It has vanished to elsewhere.

It made me think maybe my mother will return it sometime soon. I am ready to see her. I have a couple books I think she’d like. I have a couple Philip Roths set aside, too, just in case. You never know who will turn up at the Bookmobile. I’m always ready to see Another Marvelous Thing.

Are you?

All I Care About Is You

Limitation makes for power. The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.

—RICHARD WILBUR

1.

She grabs the brake and power-drifts the Monowheel to a stop for a red light, just before the overpass that spans the distance between bad and worse.

Iris doesn’t want to look up at the Spoke and can’t help herself. The habit of longing is hard to quit, and there’s a particularly good view of it from this corner. She knows by now that certain things are out of reach, but her blood doesn’t seem to know it. When she allows herself to remember the promises her father made a year ago, her blood seems to throb inside her with excitement. Pitiful.

She finds herself staring up at it, that jagged scepter of steel and blued chrome lancing the dingy clouds, and hates herself a little. Let that go, she tells herself with a certain contempt, and forces herself to look away from the Spoke, to stare blindly ahead. Her idiot heart is beating too fast.

Iris doesn’t notice the not-alive, not-dead boy watching her from the corner. She never notices him.

He always notices her. He knows where she’s been and where she’s going. He knows better than she knows herself.

2.

“Got you something,” her father says. “Close your eyes.”