* * *

Alice stands in the middle of her kitchen, a room she used to imagine remodeling, with a widened doorway to the dining room, an island counter, and a Mexican tile floor. Some time ago, she stopped thinking about changing anything in her house. Somehow it was better to leave things as they were, do nothing more than clean it and freshen up the paint now and then. A house that seemed too small for years now feels rambling, empty. The clutter and mess of a third inhabitant is relegated to a small bedroom that she dusts once a month. Nothing in that room moves out of place. The bed never needs changing.

Alice fills the teakettle, sets it on the stove, and lights the burner. She busies herself with choosing a cup, pulling a tea bag out of the box, refilling the sugar bowl. The dishwasher needs emptying. The trash is full. Homely tasks she’ll take care of after a cuppa. Ed will come back with the dog, then take the bagged trash to the barrel. Ed said maybe no one will see it, the lost-and-found ad. Maybe Ed is also hoping that the dog will stay. But because he’s already said no to having the dog, he will have to find an acceptable way to make it his idea. Alice pours the water into her cup, bounces the tea bag up and down a few times. She smiles a little. Edward will come around; she just knows it.

21

The dog sits alert and entertained in the front seat of the Cutlass, as if he were Miss Daisy and Ed the Morgan Freeman driver, the dog’s pointy snout acting like a directional aid: Go this way, now that. Suddenly, the dog gets excited, standing in the front seat and staring out the passenger window as Ed drives by the cemetery gates where Alice found him. The dog’s tail wags in a broad sweep, brushing Ed’s arm. Ed doesn’t slow down, doesn’t look in the same direction as the dog, ignoring the dog’s evident desire to stop. Ed won’t stop. Not there.

First to Potter’s to hang a poster. Tim Potter, fourth generation of the general store–owning Potters, is busy stocking shelves. Back when Tim’s dad ran the place, it was filled with useful things like sewing notions and fishhooks. Ed doesn’t fish anymore, so it doesn’t matter so much that young Tim has gentrified the place and no longer carries six varieties of fishing line or bait. Now Potter’s offers specialty foods like mangoes and guava paste, herbed vinegars and extra-extra-virgin olive oils, kalamata olives in fancy jars, costing what he used to spend on a tank of gas in the old days. Bushel baskets are filled with cute replicas of nineteenth-century objects like handmade candles and tin cookie cutters, and old-fashioned and essentially inedible candies like horehound drops. Frankly, Ed thinks, Tim would be better served, in this fairly touristless town, if he provided cell phone chargers and poster board so that people like him wouldn’t have to trek to Wal-Mart. If the leaf peepers ever ventured off the Mohawk Trail this far, then maybe ciabatta bread would sell.