Mabel could have told them all about it. It was a version of death, one in which a person realizes that what they imagined about themselves, however unflattering, was not nearly as awful as how they were, by many other people, seen. She had thought that by making fun of herself she had inoculated herself against derision. Her fainting happened the night of the day she would always remember, the one in which she was standing in the lobby of the paper, the report in the boxes Jonathan Strasser had given her. She was trying to get upstairs to the Room, trying to flirt with the guard, which hadn’t worked; trying to use Don Grady’s name, which hadn’t worked; trying to get Adam to rescue her, which hadn’t worked and had hurt the most. She could have saved the day, but no one, including herself, had taken her as someone who could have anything to contribute. Adam, the nicest guy alive, someone she’d thought had a longtime crush on her, just wanted her to go away.

She couldn’t tell Don what had happened. It wasn’t because he would be upset that she was having an assignation in a bar with Jonathan Strasser in the middle of the day. It wasn’t because it was a betrayal to have gone to the paper with the hope of getting credit for unearthing a report her husband had had all along and she had actually had dumped in her lap. It was because each time she tried to tell Don, really and truly tried, he didn’t understand what she was saying. She had long ago stopped listening carefully to anything he said. To be met with her own attitude, to feel the loneliness of needing to tell something integral to who you were and where your life had been and where it was going, and to receive in return distracted apathy of the kindest sort—it killed her.

9.   REFUSING REASON
ITS REASONS

The church made one of its sounds. It had something to do with a pew, the old wood of it, creaking. Adam was still. Stanley looked around for someone or another, and his eye rested on chrysanthemums, pots of them, at the pulpit. There were harvest colors: ocher, cinnamon, hyperactive yellow. There wasn’t much room in his thinking for the spectral. He did like the echo.

But Adam wasn’t listening. He was thinking about what Stanley was thinking.

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t think it matters who I pick?” Adam was laughing a little, but uneasily. His throat felt dry.