Late Stories. Stephen Dixon

oldest brother in a boating accident a few years ago. Then his mother’s. Next his father’s. After that, his two best friends dying a year apart, both from strokes. But he doesn’t want to think about them. Actually, the second saddest moment of his life had to be when his wife, two years before she died, was in the hospital for pneumonia and her doctors told him she’d have to be intubated and that there was still only a slight chance she’d survive. “One to three percent,” they said, or was it “three to five”? He can’t say, when he was told by them several days later that she’ll survive, that it was one of the happiest moments in his life. He was too sad at the time. He’d just seen her in her ICU room—in fact, he remembers at that moment looking at her on her bed—struggling with the ventilating tube inside her. “Get this thing out of me . . . please, please,” her painful look seemed to say. No, he knew her look; that’s what it was saying. But if he was going to list the saddest moments in his life, those would probably be it, plus a few he missed. His wife first, his wife second, then the rest in the order he gave.

      And, to end it, something like this: He gets off the bench and walks the rest of the way to his house. The cat’s waiting for him by the kitchen door. He wants to be let in and fed. He’ll want to be let out after, but he won’t let him. It’s already getting dark. He gets the opened can of cat food out of the refrigerator, gets the cat’s empty plate off the floor, washes it and spoons the rest of the food in the can on it and puts it back on the floor. The cat starts eating. He’s about to make himself a drink—something with rum tonight, he thinks; he’s been drinking vodka every night for a week—when he realizes he forgot the Gorky book on the bench. Leave it till tomorrow. No, it’ll be gone, or if it rains, wet. Get it now.

      He goes back to the bench. The book’s gone. Who’d want to take it? Nobody was around; no cars were in the lot, so nobody was in the church. And really, no one but a Russian literary scholar or maybe a serious fiction writer would be interested in it. Maybe someone who lives around here was out for a walk and saw it. He wants to look at the good side of things. So it’s possible a passerby got it and will bring it to the church office tomorrow and say he or she found it on one of the benches outside and thought it might belong to someone connected to the church. Ah, just forget it, he thinks. He’s never going to read anymore of it. If his wife were alive, he’d go to the church the next day—midafternoon, though; he’d give the person who might have taken it time to bring it to the church—and ask if anyone turned in a book about the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky. He goes home, carefully opens the kitchen door so the cat doesn’t run out, and gets some ice out of the freezer and puts it in his glass. Rum it is, with a sliver of lime.